Our March Mad Movie Madness tournament marches on with part 3 of the round of 256. To us, this set of match-ups don’t look quite as formidable as some from the previous rounds. We’ll be interested in the results of last year’s Sorry to Bother You vs. play-in round favorite Videodrome.
Our March Mad Movie Madness tournament marches on with part 2 of the round of 256. Our semi-random, editorial-free method of seeding the tournament produced at least one bizarre matchup: Sono vs. Sono, as the Japanese master’s Love Exposure faces off against his own Why Don’t You Play in Hell?. Such is the cutthroat nature of the tournament.
With the play-in round completed, it’s time to launch into the tournament proper: 256 weird movies go in, one emerges as the readers’ all-time favorite.
Because of the large number of contestants in this first round, we’ll be staggering the voting, with half of them appearing today, and half tomorrow.
There are already some brutal match-ups in the first round (all of them were determined by the seeding formula, without editorial interference). Some good, weird movies are destined to die early. (We hope that’s a testament to how many great movies we’ve collected.) A couple of matches we’ll be curious to see the outcome of: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World vs. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factorythe character-in-the-title whimsy death match; Mandy vs. Santa Sangre, a killer contest; and Altered States vs. Repo Man, an 80s punks vs. hippies proxy.
So get to voting! You may vote once per day. This half of the bracket closes at midnight EST on March 12. Voting on the other side of the bracket will begin tomorrow and last until the 13th.
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.
FILM FESTIVALS – South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) (Austin, TX, Mar. 8-16):
If you can’t get your indie film into Sundance, the massive SXSW festival in Austin, Texas is your next best bet. With the continued mainstreaming of Sundance, and the increasingly homogenized “indie” product spotlighted there, if your movie’s a bit on the weirder side, SWSX may even be a better fit—in a normal year. 2019, on the other hand, has been a very weird-light year in the early festivals, an unhappy trend that continues at SWSX. Maybe Us, Jordan Peele’s art-horror followup to Get Out, will tip slightly into the weird column, though we’re skeptical. There’s also a reprise of Sundance debuter Greener Grass, the absurdist satire based on a Saturday Short and a screening of the restored True Stories (1986) (see “Screenings,” below). Here’s a couple more to look out for down the road:
The Beach Bum – Harmony Korine‘s first feature film since 2912’s Spring Breakers stars Matthew McConaughey as a comic hippy beach bum sentenced by a judge to finish his novel; looks fairly conventional by Korine standards. Debuts tomorrow, Mar. 9.
J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and The Church of the SubGenius – Conspiracy-funded documentary, made with the participation of the cult itself, on the Church of the Subgenius (Arise!), falsely suggesting that the fake religion is a hoax. Mar. 10.
Greatland (est. 2019): An artificial intelligence (which appears as a blinking toy plastic heart, among other forms) sets the rules in this budget indie described as “a teenage love story in a dystopian future.” The director (a young woman from Kazakhstan) cites The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Un Chien Andalou, A Clockwork Orange and Idiocracy as influences. It’s seeking an additional $16,500 for post-production in the next 24 days. Greatland crowdfunding page at Seed & Spark.
NEW ON HOME VIDEO:
Female Human Animal (2018): The curator of a retrospective of Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington becomes lost in dark psychosexual fantasies. A modern surrealist documentary/thriller mashup shot on VHS tape (!) Streaming exclusively on Mubi (available with a Prime Video Channels Free Trial) until the end of March; perhaps it will be more widely available in the future?
Toronto, Ont. Canada, 3/9 – Zardoz (1974), with a new live score by Castle If and “Zardoz cosplay encouraged” (so break out the red diapers). At the Royal.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE: Next week we’ll be continuing our March Mad Movie Madness tournament to determine the weirdest/best of the 366 Weird Movies. 110 movies have already been eliminated, and the remaining 256 will be pitted against each other in single elimination head-to-head matchups next week. Look for the brackets to be revealed on Saturday and Sunday. With the tournament taking up so much of our attention, it will be a light week of reviews, with Giles Edwards covering Blue Movie, the recently rediscovered Dutch softcore sex comedy, while G. Smalley previews the upcoming weird apocalypse horror-drama, Starfish. Onward and weirdward!
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.
As we suspected, a couple of movies from the 22 groups in the play-in round of our March Mad Movie Madness tournament tied for fifth place (the cut-off to advance to the next round). So, we’ll be having a 24 hour tiebreaking vote for these two sets of movies before advancing the tournament to the next round.
If any of these movies should still be tied by the end of the voting period (noon EST tomorrow, March 8), we’ll break the tie by their original seeding. You may only vote once.
Here are the two play-in overtime matches:
We’re not going to list the results of every one of the 220 movies in the play-in round: you can see the outcome here (keeping in mind that the top 5 vote-getters in each group advanced). We will mention that the top overall movie was Videodrome (voted for 75 times); no other movie got more than 70 votes (Wild at Heartreceived the next highest number of votes, at 67). The two movies that squeaked in with the smallest number of votes were The Fallsand Rubin & Ed. The movie that G. Smalley personally was saddest to see eliminated in the first round was Prospero’s Books. We were encouraged to see the depth of knowledge shown by voters: some pretty obscure movies (1934’s Maniac, 1968’s Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell) made the cut, and people did not simply vote for the most recent and recognizable Hollywood titles (the oldest movie on the list, 1922’s Häxan, won its group handily). Great job, readers! You are probably the most informed group of cult cinephiles on the Net.
Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!