A warning: all the data used here comes from the IMDb, so it’s user-submitted, and not always that well thought-out. I mean, according to the IMDb, 212 of these movies are dramas. If you call everything drama, does that designation even have any meaning anymore? There’s also some problems with country or origin, because they always list all the countries that have participated in any way. Anyhow, that’s what I have easily and automatically available, so that’s what I’m using. All the data is from January 16th of 2019. Obviously, much of it will change over time.
Note on the methods used: I did the research by using a list of the movies I’ve maintained over on IMDb. IMDb gives you a CSV export of that data, which is good start, but did not contain everything I wanted. For the rest of the data, I used the API provided by the good folks at OMDb, which enabled me to get the countries and languages. On top of that, I used a little bit of coding and some Excel action.
The earliest movie on the list is from 1920 (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and the newest movie is from 2018 (Sorry to Bother You), which covers 99 years. However, 20 of those years failed to provide the List with any movies at all.
Perhaps 1921 has the excuse of not knowing any better, but come on 1930s, your latter half (1935-1939) has a grand total of zero (0) movies. Or maybe the writers on this site have a prejudice against the 1930s.
The last year not to have a single movie on the list was 1956. After that there have been some poor years (like 1978, with only one), but the combination of moviemaking becoming cheaper and distributors finding new sources of income has made making movies for niche audiences possible.
The biggest years were 1968 and 1971, each of which produced 13 Canonized movies. 2006 wasn’t far behind with 12, while 1973 made it all the way to 11, and both 2004 and 2009 were in there with 10.
Personally, I’ve always believed that creativity is in no way dead, despite the influx of recent franchising attempts with sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, and so forth. The list seems to support this belief. There’s still plenty of weird things going on, even if the drug-fueled highs of late 60s and early 70s might be behind us.
Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs and Blu-rays (and hot off the server VODs), and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available at the official site links.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
Lords of Chaos (2018): Read Giles Edwards’ review. Biopic/docudrama, appropriately narrated from beyond the grave, covering the scandalous rise of “True” Norwegian Black Metal, featuring church burning and, eventually, murder. Lords of Chaos official Facebook page.
NEW ON HOME VIDEO:
All the Colors of Giallo (2018): For dedicated giallo fans: this three disc set contains the title documentary on the genre, a second doc (The Case of the Krimi, with film historian Marcus Stiglegger), a trailer collection, and a CD of soundtrack cuts. Via Severin films, it’s a multi-format set (Blu-ray, DVD, and CD). Buy All the Colors of Giallo.
The Cloverfield Paradox (2018): Scientists in a satellite orbiting the Earth accidentally open a portal to another dimension when experimenting with a particle accelerator. While we liked the other two Cloverfield movies (one a monster flick and one a thriller), we skipped this sci-fi themed one on Netflix because nothing about the initial installments led us to suspect there would ever be a weird movie in the bunch; the Internet (not the most reliable source, admittedly) suggests we may be wrong in that assumption. It’s now out on DVD or Blu-ray for those without a Netflix subscription. Also available in a “Cloverfield 3-Movie Collection” DVD or Blu-ray packBuy The Cloverfield Paradox.
The Fifth Cord (1971): Franco Nero stars as an alcoholic reporter tracking a serial killer while simultaneously becoming a suspect. Maybe not 100% weird, but it has the psychedelic visual sensibility and alienated atmosphere of the period. Another neglected giallo exhumed by Arrow Video, now on Blu-ray. Buy The Fifth Cord.
Lu Over the Wall: Little Mermaid variation in which the fish-girl joins a teen rock band. This kids’ movie that carefully describes itself as “joyously hallucinogenic but family-friendly” comes from Masaaki Yuasa—the mind behind the Canonically Weird Mind Game (2004). Blu-ray, DVD, VOD. Buy Lu Over the Wall.
The Possessed (1965): A depressed novelist goes looking for his lost love, a waitress at a remote lakeside resort who has disappeared mysteriously. A “proto-giallo” co-scripted by the curiousGiulio Questi, who would go on to direct a pair of Canonically Weird films. Another Arrow Video Blu-ray release. Buy The Possessed.
Shame (1968): Read Alfred Eaker’s review. Ingmar Bergman‘s surreal tale of war coming to Fårö is largely overlooked. The Criterion Collection hopes to change that with this single-disc release including both new and archival interviews. Buy Shame.
Zachariah (1971): Read Pete Trbovich’s review. This hippie comedy-Western-musical billed itself as the “first electric Western”; Kino Lorber grabbed the rights and upgraded the featureless MGM DVD to a sparkling new Blu-ray with a commentary track and everything. Buy Zachariah.
Next week, look for a review from the reader-suggested queue: Simon Hyslop on 2004’s Lovecraftian J-horror, Marebito. We’ll also have Giles Edwards with late-ish coverage of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani‘s latest, last year’s Let The Corpses Tan, and a reader-supplied statistical analysis of the List. And maybe we’ll even have a mystery pop-up review (though if we promised one for certain and told you what it was, it wouldn’t be a mystery… forget we said anything, OK?)
What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.
Time for another giveaway! This one is for true fans only, though all are welcome to try. All you have to do is convince us that you’re 366 Weird Movies’ Biggest Fan, and therefore deserving of this fine prize. We know a couple of you have gone the extra mile to promote this project; now is your chance to show us what you’ve done. Pimp your own creativity while pumping our egos; everyone benefits. (Or just compliment us really, really well). We’ll pick the most impressive submission provided in the comments below. Even if you’re ineligible to win the prize (for example, because you live outside the U.S.), please let us know about your fandom. And even if you think you’re a Pretty Big Fan, but not the Biggest, let us know. Our pride needs it.
Even though, in a way, you’re all winners, the choice of an actual prize winner is solely at the discretion of 366 Weird Movies’ staff.
Eligibility rules: You must comment on this post. To receive the DVD, you must supply us with a mailing address in the United States. (Don’t publish your address in your comment! We’ll contact the winner through email). 366 contributors are not eligible for the prize. You are eligible for this prize even if you have won a contest here in the last six months. We’ll stop accepting entries Wednesday, February 20, at midnight EST. If the winner does not respond to our request for a mailing address within 48 hours we’ll email a runner-up, and so forth, until the prize is given away.
As for the prize: it’s the Criterion 2-disc DVD edition of the Canonically Weird True Stories, David Byrne‘s celebration of eccentricity and “Specialness” set in the fictional town of Virgil, Texas. Note that this DVD edition does not include the film’s soundtrack, which is an exclusive bonus feature of the Blu-ray. But it does include the second disc of bonus features (four documentaries, plus deleted scenes) and the cool tabloid-style booklet with essays by Rebecca Bengal and Joe Nick Patoski.
Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs and Blu-rays (and hot off the server VODs), and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available at the official site links.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
Braid: Two women, in desperate need of cash to pay back a drug dealer, decide to rob their insane but wealthy childhood friend: but figuring out the location of her safe will require them to humor her by playing by the delusional rules of the “game” she’s been stuck in since childhood. Review coming next week. Braid official site.
IN DEVELOPMENT (post-production):
Far From the Apple Tree (2019): An artist discovers she has a doppelgänger: her boss’s missing daughter. The press release calls it an “eclectic mix of ghost story, fairy tale and horror” and compares it to both Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and The Wicker Man. This UK production will be released domestically in March, and the Redemption label (best known to us as deep catalog releasers of Jean Rollin and Alain Robbe-Grillet curios) has already snapped it up for a planned home video release in 2019. Thanks to El Rob Hubbard for bringing it to our attention. Far from the Apple Tree official site.
NEW ON HOME VIDEO:
All the Colors of the Dark [Tutti i colori del buio] (1972): A woman plagued by recurring nightmares decides to try a Black Mass as a means of therapy (!) Severin Films exhumes this ghastly giallo for a new age. Out on DVD or Blu-ray with lots of bonus features. Buy All the Colors of the Night.
Top Knot Detective (2017): Mockumentary (?) about a brief Japanese cult TV series starring a samurai detective. Now available streaming on Amazon (free with Prime); DVDs currently available overseas only. Thanks to Joe Badon for catching this. (Note: the video uploaded to Amazon lacks subtitles and may be in the wrong aspect ratio [see comments]. We’re disabling the Amazon purchase link until we hear that the issue has been fixed.) Stream Top Knot Detective on Vimeo from the distributor.
Next week, we’ll bring you previews of a couple of new limited releases, as G. Smalley tries to untangle Braids (see trailer above), and Giles Edwards bows to the experimental black metal documentary Lords of Chaos. We’ll also have a DVD giveaway contest. Prize: True Stories Criterion Collection DVD. Theme: convince us you’re 366 Weird Movies’ biggest fan. And don’t forget to vote in the Weirdcademy Awards (and the Shorts) before Feb. 24th. Weirdest Picture and Actor look sewn up, but the other categories are still competitive.
What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.
It’s time for the 2018 edition of the Weirdcademy Awards, the premier (only) awards contest focused on weird films, chosen by weird film fans. That means shorts as well as features. We’ve collected all five nominees for 2018′s Weirdest Short of the Year together in one place, for ease of voting. You can cast a vote for your favorite once every 24 hours. February 24 at 12:00 Noon EST. Cameron Jorgensen, 366 Weird Movies under-appreciated shorts Czar, discovered and selected these unusual films through his own research. This year’s lineup includes revelations from noodle-slurping clowns, pretzel-loving monsters, psychedelic drugs that kick in at the worst possible time, ugly cats, and men who blame women (and Rick) for their personal failings.
“Interface | Episode 11 | Revelation” by u m a m i
Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs and Blu-rays (and hot off the server VODs), and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available at the official site links.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
The Image Book (2018): Jean-Luc Godard takes images from films of the past, digitally alters them, and philosophizes in voiceover. More late Godard for cinema masochists (we’ll probably end up joining them). The Image Book at Kino-Lorber.
FILM FESTIVALS – Sundance Film Festival (Park City, UT, Jan 24-Feb 3):
The 2019 movie season officially kicks off with Sundance, where a hundred hopeful independent movies, including a few off-the-wall ones, come to vie for a handful of distribution contracts. In recent years, Sundance added the “Next” and “Midnight” screening sections to add some weirdness to the otherwise tame lineup of dramas about privileged white people and their problems (alternating with imported dramas about underprivileged brown people and their problems). This year, however, that hasn’t helped much, as there doesn’t appear to be a Sorry to Bother You or a Swiss Army Man lurking in the program. Maybe we missed them, though.
Here’s what we’ll be tracking in the coming months:
“Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared” – The latest installment in this ongoing popular but terrifying puppet show will screen as part of the Indie Episodic Program 1 collection of curated shorts Jan. 29-31.
Greener Grass – Seeing as how this is an extension of a Saturday Short we previously featured on these pages, we’re pretty certain it will be weird; we’re not sure how this idea can expand to fill 100 minutes, but we’re eager to find out. Playing in the Midnight category on Jan. 26, 29, 31, and Feb. 1-2.
Koko-di Koko-da – A Nordic fairy tale ” set within the nightmarish landscape between wakefulness and sleep” about a couple with relationship problems beset by “outlandishly distorted nursery-rhyme antagonists” while camping. Screens Jan. 25-27, 31, and Feb. 1.
“Now Apocalypse” – The first three episodes of a new Starz series from Gregg Araki about (who would have guessed?) oversexed young people in surreal situations début at Sundance on Jamuary 29, with an encore January 30.
Paradise Hills – A young woman wakes up to find she’s been imprisoned in a hoity-toity Victorian finishing school/reform school on an island; the best case scenario is that this “NEXT” feature turns out to be The Love Witch meets “The Prisoner.” Jan. 26-27, 29, 31, or Feb. 1.
FILM FESTIVALS: Slamdance Film Festival (Park City, UT, Jan 25-31):
Slamdance is Sundance’s punkier, sometimes (usually) weirder little brother, a low-budget alternative to the mid-budget institution. We’ll be reviewing a few that caught our eye a few days from now (with a bonus shorts reviews thrown in)…
Dollhouse: The Eradication of Female Subjectivity from American Popular Culture – Despite the imposing subtitle, this is a sometimes tasteless mockumentary showing the rise and fall of Junie Spoons, a child superstar in the mold of Britney Spears or Miley Cyrus, told with dolls. Screens January 25 and 28.
A Great Lamp – An experimental film, with animated and magical realist segments, following three alienated young men as they await a rocket launch. January 27 and 29.
The Color out of Space (end 2019/early 2020?): Nicolas Cage to star in an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft‘s “The Colour out of Space,” directed by Richard Stanley? Yes, we’ll buy a ticket, thanks. “Space,” Lovecraft’s 1927 tale of a meteorite which falls to earth and brings unspeakable horrors with it, has been (largely unsuccessfully) adapted for screen many times, notably as Die, Monster, Die! with Boris Karloff (not to mention all the ripoffs of the basic premise, like The Blob). SciFi4Me has the scoop.
NEW ON HOME VIDEO:
Best F(r)iends Vol.1 + Vol. 2 (2018): The Room‘s Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero reunite; Sestero plays a homeless man rescued by Wiseau’s corpse-robbing multician, and they go on a quirky road trip. The world gets almost four more hours of oddball Wiseau engaging in adventures described as “surreal” and “bizarre.” Blu-ray only. Buy Best F(r)iends Volume 1 + 2.
Next week we’ll bring you a little preview of three feature films (and a short or two or three) from Slamdance (see above), which may or may not be making their way to your screens soon. El Rob Hubbard will also knock another one out of the reader-suggested review queue with 1985s little-seen advertising satire Bliss. We’ll wrap up the week by announcing our nominees for the 9th installment of our annual “Weirdcademy Awards”—and open up voting to members of the Weirdcademy (that’s you, by the way). Stay tuned!
What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.
Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs and Blu-rays (and hot off the server VODs), and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available at the official site links.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
St. Bernard Syndicate (2018): A Danish businessman partners with an investor who’s just been diagnosed with A.L.S. in a scheme to sell St. Bernards to the Chinese. Sounds subtly strange at best, but Brian Orndorf of Blu-ray.com did claim it is “very funny at times, but also chilling and always interested in weirdness…” No official site located.
IN DEVELOPMENT (post-production):
Synchronic (2019?): Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are back to work quickly after finishing 2017’s The Endless with another film in a loose reality-bending series hearkening all the way back to their debut, Resolution. (2014’s romantic fantasy Spring is the only outlier in their oeuvre.) This time the duo play New Orleans paramedics who encounter and investigate victims of a designer drug. Scooped by Dread Central (the article may contain a minor spoiler).
NEW ON HOME VIDEO:
Madeline’s Madeline (2018): Read our review. This arty and dreamlike coming-of-age story features one of the best (and most overlooked) acting debut of the year in Helena Howard, and came in #8 in our list of weirdest movies of 2018. DVD, Blu-ray and VOD. Buy Madeline’s Madeline.
The Plague Dogs (1982): This not-for-kids animated tale follows two hounds who escape from a research lab and are hunted down as potential carriers of the plague. Adapted by Martin Rosen from a novel by Richard Adams (Watership Down), and in our reader-suggested queue. This new Blu-ray release from Shout! Factory includes both the theatrical cut and the director’s cut (previously unavailable in the U.S.) Buy The Plague Dogs.
366 Weird Movies @ List Challenge – “Darko” has created a checklist for the List at the popular “List Challenge” site. An easy way to check off how many movies you’ve seen from the 366 canon. We know of one person who scored 100%; if you like you can tell us your score. 366 Weird Movies FULL LIST.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
Next week we’ll continue to clean out our cupboards of old (but still quality) movie reviews. Shane Wilson brings you a popular one from the reader-suggestion queue in David Cronenberg‘s weirdly fetishistic Crash (1996); Pete Trbovich experiments with form in his “case study” of the Hollywood flop North (1994); and G. Smalley covers the better-late-than-never 2018 DVD debut of Alex Cox‘ wild punk gangster western comedy Straight to Hell (1987). We’ll be taking off Martin Luther King day, so enjoy your three-day weekend (Americans). See you next week!
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920): Read the Canonically Weird entry! In case you missed it last week, here is a free version of the Expressionist horror classic, one of those silent movies loved by people who hate silent movies. The classical score is by Giuseppe Becce and the title cards are in the original German (so be sure to turn on subtitles by hitting the [cc] button).
What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.
Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!
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As for the prize: it’s the Criterion 2-disc DVD edition of the Canonically Weird