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 (WIDE RELEASE):

Dark Shadows: The accursed vampire Barnabas Collins (from the cult Gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows”) is resurrected in the 1970s and has trouble fitting in to wacky disco culture.  No offense intended to the once-great Tim Burton, but lately, every time you make a movie, it causes a little piece of our collective soul to die. Dark Shadows official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

You Are Here (2010): This Canadian festival eye-opener concerns a woman who discovers various artifacts and disconnected clues hinting at some metaphysical mystery; it’s self-described as a “Borgesian fantasy” and a “meta-detective story.” Opening at ReRun Gastropub in NYC, with late summer dates in Toronto and Edmonton to follow. We’ll look for it on DVD. You Are Here official site.

FILM FESTIVALS: CANNES (Cannes, France May 16 – 27)

Unlike past years, Cannes didn’t sneak up on us in 2012. The slate is fairly manageable this year, with Leos Carax’s Holy Motors the only title we’re truly enamored with (it’s the only weirdish movie playing “in competition,” that is to say, eligible for the Palme D’or). The last two Palme D’or winners (The Tree of Life and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) went on to even greater honors (they were Certified Weird by 366 Weird Movies); we predict that unlikely trend will end this year (though we certainly hope not). We’ll be keeping an eye on a couple of possibly-weird films screening in the “Un Certain Regard” category and movies playing out-of-competition: check below to see what caught our eye this year.

• Antiviral – Here’s a bizarre premise: adventures in an underground trade supplying fans with viruses taken from their favorite celebrities. The debut of Brandon (son of David) Cronenberg. Cronenberg Sr. will also be at Cannes with Cosmopolis, a (non-weird) adaptation of a Don Delilo novel.  Antiviral is playing in the Un Certain Regard category (ironically, his father’s film Crash was the impetus for creating this category, which was invented to keep wickedly weird films from winning the big prize).
• Beasts of the Southern Wild – A six-year old girl named Hushpuppy contracts a fever, which ushers in the apocalypse and a plague of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. This one debuted at Sundance. Un Certain Regard.
• For Love’s Sake [Ai to Makoto] – Judging by the trailer (which is all we have to go on), the latest from extreme provocateur Takashi Miike appears to be a musical comedy based on “West Side Story.” Playing out of competition.

• Holy Motors – A mysterious man named Monsieur Oscar drives through Paris one night, cycling through various personas. From too-infrequently seen director Leos Carax, and with an exciting cast mixing fresh faces with weird movie vets: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Michel Piccoli, Eva Mendes… Playing in competition.
• Meekong Hotel – A surprise entry from “Joe” (Apichatpong Weerasethakul); this movie is still listed as “in production” by IMDB, but is showing up for a “special screening” at 61 minutes. The synopsis is not too much help, but the film “shuffles different realms, fact and fiction” and appears to deal with actors making another movie at the titular hotel.

Cannes Film Festival Official Site (English)

NEW ON DVD:

Ganja and Hess (1973): Professor Hess (Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead) is stabbed by an African knife and becomes an immortal bloodsucker. Playwright Bill Gunn was hired to deliver a black horror movie a la Blacula, but instead created a surreal art film that thrilled French critics at Cannes and bombed in 42nd Street theaters. If nothing else, this seldom-seen film is a major curiosity and gets an appropriate remastering from Kino Classics. Buy Ganja & Hess.

Lady of the Dark: Genesis of the Serpent Vampire (2011): A woman (named “Eve Dark”) is bitten by a snake and turns into a vampire. The director is credited on IMBD with 35 titles in just six years of filmmaking, mostly conspiracy documentaries like Alien from Area 51 and The Murder of Mary Magdalene! We think this will be inevitably odd. Buy Lady of the Dark: Genesis of the Serpent Vampire.

Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012): Read our capsule review. Reviews (including ours) were mediocre for this big-screen comedy version of the absurd TV sketch show, but true T & E completists surely will want to own it anyway. Right? Buy Tim & Erics Billion Dollar Movie.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Ganja and Hess (1973): See description in DVD above. Buy Ganja & Hess [Blu-ray].

Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012): See description in DVD above. This release includes a DVD and digital copy of the film. Buy Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie [Blu-ray].

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Metropolis [Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis] (2001): A detective and his boy sidekick search for a cyborg girl created by a mad scientist in a future world where robot slaves live under a massive city. Not quite an uncredited anime remake of Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis, but pretty darn close to it. Watch Metropolis 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.

In 2009 it was 54 pages and released in March… in 2010 it was 116 pages and released in April… now, it’s May 2012, and coming in at an astoundingly bloated 182 pages it’s the 366 Weird Movies 2011 Yearbook! By far our largest Yearbook ever, and still for the same low price of $6.99!

Traditionally, at this point each year we anticipate the readers complaint, “why should I pay for one of your damn Yearbooks when I can read the website for free?” and offer our five reasons to dig into your pockets and pony up the dough for one of these swell Yearbooks:

1. Unlike the digital version, you can take the paper “Yearbook” into the “can” with you.
2. If you unexpectedly run out of toilet paper in said “can,” the “Yearbook” can do double duty.
3. This site may not always be here in the current form. (That’s not a hint, it’s a scare tactic).
4. It’s distinctly within the realm of possibility that this Yearbook will become a collectible worth thousands/hundreds/a few cents over what you paid for it in five years. Collect them all! In the very near future, anything printed in ink on paper will be a valuable antique! (Don’t believe us? We actually saw a used copy of the 2009 Yearbook offered for $75.78. Don’t pay that, by the way, that link is just for illustration and has nothing to do with us).
5. Each copy sold will contribute a few cents towards paying our hosting/domain registration bills.

This year we can add a reason #6: If you don’t buy a hard copy you’ll never know what’s on the back cover. (Hint: it’s mildly disturbing and involves pasta).

For complicated royalty reasons we’d prefer you buy from the link at the top of the page or by clicking on the cover image, but if you’d feel better you can also order the Yearbook from Amazon.

There may be a Kindle/e-book version to follow, but we promise nothing at this time. We recommend grabbing the analog weirdness while you can.

Next week’s slate of reviews is a little bit up in the air right now (thanks to “real life” scheduling issues), but here’s what we currently expect to feature: we’ll take our first sojourn into the black, black world of Todd Solondz with Palindromes (2004); we’ll gaze at lovely Emily Browning as she sleepwalks her way through 2011’s Sleeping Beauty; we’ll try to wrap our minds around the concept of Everything is Terrible’s Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez! (2012), which, as the title suggests, is a remake of The Holy Mountain composed from found footage featuring man’s best friend; and we’ll check out Busby Berkeley‘s strange and lovely Dames (1934).

When you’re looking for bizarre search strings to nominate for your Weirdest Search Term of the Week rule, there’s a rule of thumb you can always count on: the hornier the Googler, the weirder the search term. We relied on that old chestnut to locate this week’s crazy candidates, and we were not disappointed. We start with an anonymous searcher’s quest to find “free cuching porn movei.com” (do we even want to know what “cuching” is?) The odd fetish requests continued to roll in with the somewhat understandable search for “shirtless pictures of weirdo’s,” but get stranger with the desire to find “hot girls shuffling videos” (like, shuffling cards?)  But we’ll go with “nude porn photo 0f boobs of heroin of hollywood movie underworld” for our Weirdest Search Term of the Week (just take random sub-strings out of that one and you’ll find sub-Weirdest Search Terms of the Week—“boobs of heroin”?) It doesn’t hurt that Google ranks us #1 for that search term—take that, nudeheroinboobunderworldmovie.com!

Here’s how the ridiculously-long-and-ever-growing reader-suggested review queue stands: “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Dellamorte Dellamore [AKA Cemetery Man]; The Hour-glass Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

Next week we venture out to the cinemas to check out a little thing called Cabin in the Woods; we’ll finish off our coverage of Redemption’s 5 film Jean Rollin sexy-vampire drop with 1975’s Lips of Blood; we’ll go off on The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984); and Alfred‘s series on Busby Berkeley continues with Footlight Parade (1933).

The volume of weird search terms used to locate the site continues to drop alarmingly; we’re somewhat concerned about a possible outbreak of sanity on the Internet. Still, when looking for our Weirdest Search Term of the Week we work with what we’re given, and we do still occasionally encounter inscrutable searches like “aflam man and woman nu canival.” There was also a weird Donnie Darko mini-trend this week. First, someone was looking to “rent a donny darko head,” which we suppose is understandable. We found the person asking “is frank the rabbit fro a real case study” far weirder, however. Another trend this week, a recurring one which usually produces humorously strange results, is the old “first person Google search.” Sometimes, these are just people chit-chatting with themselves with the aid of a search engine, like the guy who absentmindedly muses “i saw a weird trailer before a movie i would love to rent.” That’s nice to know, but at other times the conversation turns more confrontational, as it did with the exasperated fellow who wrote “ok i found your website…now how do i purchase dvd of the comedian toto.” To this guy we say: thanks for visiting, we have no idea how you purchase the DVD of the comedian Toto, and congratulations on winning our Weirdest Search Term of the Week award!

Here’s how the ridiculously-long-and-ever-growing-reader-suggested-review queue looks: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (next week!); “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Dellamorte Dellamore [AKA Cemetery Man]; The Hour-glass Sanatorium [Saanatorium Continue 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.

IN THEATERS (WIDE RELEASE):

The Cabin in the Woods: Five college kids find themselves trapped inside an impossibly clichéd horror movie situation at the titular locale; who is the puppetmaster pulling the strings? We passed on mentioning this big time Hollywood horror release last week as too mainstream, too hiply postmodern, but we’ve since changed our minds and now think this could be worth a bit of your weird attention. The Cabin in the Woods official site.

IN DEVELOPMENT:

Bunnyman 2 [est. 2012]: The sole source of potential weirdness in this one is that the serial killer looks like a (far less terrifying) Ice Cream Bunny with a chainsaw. We confess, we weren’t even aware there was a Bunnyman 1. Here’s a link to the not-safe-for-work (NSFW) trailer: Bunnyman 2 trailer.

Mondo Art [est. 2012]: By coincidence, the day I was writing about “Mondo” movies in the context of Sans Soleil and wondering to myself where the Mondos had gone, I get a notice of a new Mondo in production, this one covering the modern/performance art scene. Fringe movements exploited in the shock-doc include feminazi films, insane asylum art, and an “assault rifle aggression” artist. Another NSFW trailer (this time, for nudity and perversion): Mondo Art trailer.

NEW ON DVD:

“Citizen Welles: The Stranger (1946), The Trial (1962), Hearts of Age (1934)”: Here’s a 2.5 movie set of Orson Welles pictures. The Stranger is a solid, conventional anti-Nazi noir; of more interest (to us) is Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, the story of an average man accused of a crime but never told what he is supposed to be guilty of (this movie is in our reader suggested review queue). Both the feature films were already in print, but what makes this 2-disc set a bit more interesting is the inclusion of “Hearts of Age,” Welles’ rarely seen 8-minute first film, in which a young Orson plays Death and which was actually inspired by Surrealism. Nothing new here, but an interesting collection nonetheless. Buy “Citizen Welles”.

Dirtbags (2009): According to the synopsis, this is a retitled (but identical) re-release of Dirtbags: Evil Never Felt So Good, which itself is supposedly a remake of a probably non-existent movie called Dirtbags: The Armpit of Metal. This “special” edition contains an interview with someone called Peter Steele and behind the scenes footage for extra features totaling about an hour and a half in length. Apparently, the movie is a date-rape comedy. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’d have a lot more confidence in director Bill Zebub if he’d chosen the more elegant pseudonym Bill Z. Bubb. Buy Dirtbags.

“Eclipse Series 32: Pearls of the Czech New Wave”: Although some of these movies are currently in print from other sources, this 4-disc, 6 movie set from the Criterion Collection’s “Eclipse” line still counts as one of our most anticipated releases of the year. Covering the frequently surreal movies of the Czech New Wave from 1966-1969, the star of the set is the “madcap feminist farce” Daisies (already in our review queue). Also of note is the surreal and notoriously banned Report on the Party and the Guests. Other films are the anthology Pearls of the Deep, the eccentric comedy Capricious Summer, the subversive adultery drama The Joke, and Return of the Prodigal Son, a film about which we know absolutely nothing. This set could potential contain multiple movies that we’ll eventually certify as weird (if they live up to their legendary reputations). Buy “Eclipse Series 32: Pearls of the Czech New Wave”.

Girl on a Motorcycle (1968): Marianne Faithful leaves her newlywed husband, gets on a motorcycle, experiments with psychedelic drugs, and has flashbacks inside of flashbacks. This feminist counterculture road-trip film was billed as the European version of Easy Rider. Buy Girl On a Motorcycle.

“A Hollis Frampton Odyssey”: Another compilation of “not for everyone” experimental films from the 1960s avant-garde, of which the frustratingly ambiguous “Zorns Lemma” (1970) comes closest to being famous. Brilliance, or structuralist wankery? Now you can decide. 2 discs. Buy “A Hollis Frampton Odyssey” (Criterion Collection).

The Theater Bizarre (2011): A six-film horror anthology from directors Douglas Buck, Buddy Giovinazzo, David Gregory, Karim Hussain, Jeremy Kasten, Tom Savini, and Richard Stanley.  Apparently Hussain’s segment is surreal. Like any anthology, we expect this to be of mixed quality—but we like the title. Buy The Theater Bizarre.

Thor at the Bus Stop (2009): Ragnarök has arrived, and the Norse god Thor needs to take public transportation for his date to fight the Midgard serpent; his annoyed actions at a Las Vegas bus stop spark mini-dramas in those standing around him. Zero budget or not, you have to take notice of a concept like that. The DVD had been sold independently, but was picked up by VCI for a proper release. Buy Thor at the Bus Stop.

The Wicker Tree (2010): Two missionaries travel to a remote Scottish town where the villagers still worship the old pagan gods in this re-make/boot/hash of the Certified Weird The Wicker Man (1973).  It’s from original director Robin Hardy and brings back star Christopher Lee for a cameo, but reviewers suggested Hardy should have left the Old Gods sleeping.  We’ll probably check it out anyway: could it be worse than the infamous 2006 remake with Nicolas Cage? Buy The Wicker Tree.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Girl on a Motorcycle (1968): See description in DVD above. Buy Girl On a Motorcycle [Blu-ray].

“A Hollis Frampton Odyssey”: See description in DVD above. Buy “A Hollis Frampton Odyssey” [Criterion Collection Blu-ray].

The Wicker Tree (2010): See description in DVD above. Buy The Wicker Tree [Blu-ray].

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Stranger Than Fiction (2006): An IRS agent (Will Ferrel) comes to realize that he is actually a character in a novel being written by a creatively-challenged author (Emma Thompson)—and even worse, he figures out that she’s trying to come up with a plot twist to kill him off. This literate comedy-fantasy with a postmodern premise is one of the biggest hits available for free on YouTube, as well as the only movie starring Will Ferrel that critics actually liked. Watch Stranger Than Fiction 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.