We thought we’d pass on this interesting idea for a contest to our readers. The winner gets their laugh or scream featured in an actual independent horror film, complete with a screen credit. Every Scary Movie Needs At Least One Great Scream!
The producers of The Funny Man want 10,000 of them! We are inviting fans from all over the world to submit their own madcap, blood curdling, maniacal scream or laugh for a chance to be featured and credited in The Funny Man movie.
The Funny Man is a psychological horror thriller in the vein of Psycho, about an attractive young woman named RACHEL who offers a struggling bipolar comedian a ride home. Unfortunately, her simple act of kindness is rewarded with more than just a few harmless jokes. Before the evening ends, RACHEL finds out that the comedian has a psychotic and extremely dangerous “twin brother” who derives pleasure from wearing a creepy sponge-like mask and video-taping his victims.
Participation is easy. Simply upload your best bloodcurdling scream or maniacal laugh to your favorite video sharing platform such as Vimeo or Youtube, then visit The Funny Man fan page on Facebook and post a link to your video on The Funny Man comment wall. The window of opportunity is open from now until June 25th, 2011. The scream or laugh that receives the most appreciation in terms of “likes” and comments by other fans will be featured in our movie. It’s that simple! In addition to seeing your actual scream or disturbed laugh in our movie, the winner will also see their name in the films credits and receive an official IMDB film acting credit.
Post your scream or madcap laugh video on The Funny Man Facebook page here:
A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
The Tree of Life: Terence Malick returns to the screen after a six year absence with this coming-of-age story starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn that’s being described with words like “impressionistic,” “abstract,” and other encouraging (but sub-weird) adjectives. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which is encouraging; also encouraging is the fact that professional troll critic Armond White and professional yahoo critic Rex Reed hate it. The Tree of Life official site.
SPEAKING OF CANNES…:
You may have wondered why we didn’t provide you with a listing of the films playing Cannes this year last week, while the festival was still running. We want to assure you that we were just waiting to hear who the winners were before we weighed in with our weird picks. We didn’t forget about Cannes. We certainly weren’t only reminded of it when we heard about prankster Lars von Trier’s weird and ambiguous comments about his “Nazi heritage.” Without further ado, we rectify our planned oversight (cough) and cover what’s weird at Cannes:
Martha Marcy May Marlene – Psychological thriller about the mental struggles of woman who has escaped from a cult trying to adjust to “real” society. Un Certain Regard.
Melancholia – Lars von Trier‘s latest is apocalyptic sci-fi; a planet (called Melancholia) is set to collide with Earth on a woman’s wedding day. Played in comepetition, and Kirsten Dunst walked away from the fest with Best Actress honors. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Keifer Sutherland, Charlotte (Zardoz) Rampling and John Hurt round out the fine cast.
The Skin I Live In – Pedro Almodovar (who has never gone fully weird, but is certainly always off-center) delivers a mad scientist revenge movie with significant superficial similarities to Eyes Without a Face. Played in competition.
Sleeping Beauty – From Australia comes this modern folktale that sounds like it has more to do with The House of Sleeping Beauties than with the classic fairy tale. We like writer/director Julia Leigh’s quote: “I’m interested in Wonder Cinema…” Played in competition.
Tatsumi – Animated, it combines a biography of Japanese comics artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi with adaptations of five of his dark, sad short stories. Un Certain Regard.
Some previously weird directors have shown up at Cannes this year with more conventional fare: Nicholas Winding Refn trots out the action/character study Drive with Ryan Gosling, while Takashi Miike delivers a second straight samurai epic with Hara-kiri: Death of a Samurai. Here’s hoping these gentlemen find their way back to weirdness soon…
NEW ON DVD:
The Big Bang (2011): Antonio Banderas stars as a hard-boiled private eye encountering seedy LA weirdos while searching for missing diamonds in a case that turns out to be more than it appears. Critics branded it “Lynchian,” but also denounced director Tony Krantz (Sublime) as a surrealist hack. Buy The Big Bang.
The Great Dictator (1940): In the not-weird-but-notable category comes the Criterion Collection’s release of Charlie Chaplin’s satire of Adolph Hitler, in which a Jewish barber and Führer lookalike is mistaken for the great dictator. It features the classic scene of Hitler dancing with an inflatable globe. Buy The Great Dictator [The Criterion Collection].
Solaris (1972): Considered the Soviet answer to 2001, Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction mindblower involves a cosmonaut’s trip to a planet (that may be alive) where his memories begin to materialize. This re-release by Criterion corrects a mistake in their previous edition: some scenes were previously presented in black-and-white that were originally intended to be tinted blue. Buy Solaris [The Criterion Collection].
Sita Sings the Blues (2008): An animated account of the Hindu epic “The Ramayana,” intertwined with director Nina Paley‘s autobiographical account of her relationship with her husband and set to the vintage jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. A very highly regarded debut, made on the director’s laptop and distributed for free. Watch Sita Sings the Blues free on YouTube.
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.
We haven’t checked in on everyone yet, but we currently believe that none of the 366 Weird Movies staff was raptured yesterday; this means that we can go on with our next week of reviews as scheduled. If you weren’t raptured either, then next week you can check out our reviews of the psychological thriller Dead Awake (2010), about a junior mortician who finds things getting strange after he fakes his own funeral; Inferno (1980), Dario Argento‘s borderline incoherent followup to the Certified Weird Suspiria; Philip Ridely‘s return to film, Heartless (2009), about a man with a heart-shaped birthmark on his face who makes a deal with the devil in a Hellish modern London; and catch up with Alfred as he returns to his series on Tod Browning to inform us about The Show (1927), a tawdry carnival melodrama that could be seen as a dress rehearsal for Freaks (1932).
There were some nice entries in our unofficial “Weirdest Search Term of the Week” contest. A couple of short-but-sweet three-word search phrases deserve at least an honorable mention: “lezbo bridge film” and “chicken part catalogue.” In the category of most random use of a gay slur in a search string, the winner is “janis joplin and homo hendrix songs in across the universe.” And, while we don’t like to pick a Weirdest Search Term of the Week that contains naughty words, we had to make an exception for this beauty: “japanese children of know f**ky movie.” Now, the searcher actually may have been looking for a Japanese funky movie (in which case we have him or her covered), but that still doesn’t explain the children of know…
Here’s how the reader suggested review queue stands (more titles after break as always): Perfume: The Story of a Murderer;Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (this appears to be unavailable at present, actually); The Pillow Book; Final Flesh; Lunacy [Sílení]; InmortelContinue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE→
A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.
There’s nothing weird in theaters this week (not really a surprise there).
NEW ON DVD:
Daydream Nation: A love triangle between a teen girl, an age-appropriate boyfriend, and their English teacher. The press release calls it a “mash-up of the bizarre and the beautiful” and two separate reviewers have compared it to Donnie Darko. Buy Daydream Nation.
Deep Red [Profundo Rosso] (1975): Dario Argento‘s Deep Red, about a jazz pianist caught in a web of murder, is more a standard, suspenseful giallo than a bizarre film, but it shows early traces of the extreme stylization and atmosphere he would expand on to create the Certified Weird Suspiria two years later. This re-issue is reputed to be the director’s preferred cut; at 105 minutes, it’s longer than the 98 minute “R-rated” version that originally played in US theaters, but faster paced than the 126-minute “uncensored” cut. Note that only the director’s cut is on the DVD, but the “full” 126 minute version is also included on the Blu-ray (below). Buy Deep Red.
“Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job: Season 5” (2011): Absurdist sketch comedy from the Cartoon Network. Contains the episode “Lucky,” which had been removed from digital distribution for unstated reasons. An entire season fits on one 110 minute DVD. Buy “Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job: Season 5”.
Year of the Fish (2007): Here’s a movie idea you don’t see everyday: a rotoscoped adult retelling of “Cinderella,” with the lead role taken by a Chinese immigrant woman forced to work in a “happy-ending” massage parlor and befriended by a magical goldfish. Previously available only on DVD-R, Fish is now available in a respectable DVD reissue complete with commentary tracks. Buy Year of the Fish.
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Deep Red [Profundo Rosso] (1975): See entry in DVD above. Note that the Blu-ray contains both the 105 minute director’s cut and the 126 minute “uncensored” version. Buy Deep Red [Blu-ray].
FREE MOVIES ON THE WEB:
Diseaster [Paashat] (2011): Dutch carrot farmers are terrorized by a killer Easter bunny. This 30 minute horror/comedy features Easter eggs filled with blood, a rapping narrator with Down syndrome, crossbows that shoot sharpened carrots, and scary/ridiculous killer bunny puppets; it’s like a more professional, European version of Thankskilling. With blood and guts and mild nudity and sexuality, but the only thing that might offend is that Down syndrome character. Watch Diseaster for free at the official site.
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.
Upcoming reviews for next week: we’ll hit a couple of recent releases with Vanishing on 7th Street (2010), Brad (The Machinist) Anderson’s latest, about a plague of darkness inexplicably sweeping over Detroit, and Rubber (2010), the first and finest film ever made on the subject of tire serial killers with telekinetic powers. We’ll dig into the reader-suggested review queue for a look at the unique mindbender The Nines (2007). And we’ll take a gander at the experimental opus Currently Untitled (2010), which aims to be the no-budget version of 8 1/2.
It’s another tough week for weird search terms. We found “schizophrenic movie spiders” notable to demonstrate how simply changing a singular noun into a plural can transform a quite reasonable search for this into a quest for info on a class of cinema critters that doesn’t exist. We also considered “weird alien tongue movie lady has sex with tongue,” but ultimately passed over it (too obvious) in favor of this week’s inscrutable winner, “movie fast cicatrisation graal.” You have to admire the fact that this search query includes a very obscure word, a non-word, and two common words that add absolutely no sense to the complete phrase. Well done!
Here’s how the reader-suggested review queue currently stacks up (many, many more requested titles after the break): The Nines (coming next week!); Perfume: The Story of a Murderer;Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (this appears to be unavailable at present, actually); The Pillow Book; Final Flesh; Lunacy [Sílení]; Inmortel (2004); Tetsuo; Dead Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE→
Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!
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