Next week look for a review of the weirdest Academy Award winning documentary of all time (and the only one narrated by a fictional mad scientist), The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971). We’ll also take a look at two (count ’em, two!) titles from the reader-suggested review queue: the post-Tetsuo Japanese cyberpunk cycle entry Rubber’s Lover (1996) and the post-apocalyptic British absurd farce The Bed Sitting Room (1969).
Spring fever has struck and more and more people are choosing to spend their time basking in the warm glow of the Earth’s sun rather than in the dim glow of the LCD monitor. What that translates to, for us, is fewer bizarre Google queries to compete in our Weirdest Search Term of the Week contest. Nonetheless, from the trickle of traffic we’ve received this week, we’ve cobbled together a selection of strange searches we hope you will enjoy. First, from the “horny ESL student of the week” category came this oddity: “bone prone tube watch romance film porno prins train atate.” Even weirder, though, was “girls pregnant pushing child with boys hands and dildo sin”—the searcher here seems to have a much better acquaintance with the English language, and therefore much less of an excuse for stringing together such a bizarre series of unrelated nouns. But, despite the fact that it well could just describe a South Park episode we haven’t yet seen, the scenario posed by “depressed garbage can leaves the city and travels to the wood where he meets some strange hippies” was just too far-out for us to pass on naming as our Weirdest Search Term of the Week. Congratulations, and we hope some enterprising Flash animator will bring this deranged story to life!
A brief clean-up of the reader-suggested review queue: we’re removing “Zombie Jesus!” since it’s not available anywhere, and the filmmakers never responded to our emails regarding it. With another one down, that leaves only several hundred of your suggestions for us to deal with. Here’s how the queue now stands: Rubber’s Lover (next week!); The Bed-Sitting Room (next week!); Even Dwarfs Started Small; “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Freaked; Strings; 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 Hunger Games: In the anarchic future, teenagers are sent to battle to the death in a televised tournament. Nope, it’s not a remake of Battle Royale, and with lovely and talented but decidedly conventional Jennifer Lawrence headlining and a tween-friendly PG-13 rating (it’s actually aimed at Twilight fans), we’re declaring it (site unseen) unweird. It’s still noteworthy because of its similarity to the cult Japanese film (which, perhaps not at all coincidentally, is seeing a DVD release this week). The Hunger Games official site.
IN DEVELOPMENT:
The ABC’s of Death (est. 2012): 26 directors each tell a short story about death based on an assigned letter of the alphabet. Some of the mini-auteurs whose work will be featured include Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Amer), Jason Eisener (Hobo With a Shotgun), Noboru Iguchi (RoboGeisha), Yoshihiro Nishimura (Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl), Marcel Sarmiento (Deadgirl), Srdjan Spasojevic (A Serbian Film), and Yûdai Yamaguchi (Yakuza Weapon). The letter “T” was reserved for a contest winner. Sponsored by the Alamo Drafthouse, fast becoming the world’s coolest theater (like they weren’t before).The ABCs of Death page at Alamo Drafthouse.
NEW ON DVD:
Battle Royale [Batoru Rowaiaru] (2000): Read our capsule review. In the anarchic future, teenagers are sent to battle to the death in a televised tournament. Nope, it’s not Hunger Games. Buy Battle Royale.
Battle Royale: The Complete Collection: True BR fans with deep pockets will want to buy this 4-disc set, which includes the original theatrical cut, the director’s cut, sequel Battle Royale II, and a disc full of supplemental material. Buy Battle Royale: The Complete Collection.
Clown Hunt (2010): In an alternate universe where men hunt clowns in the wild for sport, a rare albino jester turns the tables and stalks them instead. The tagline says, “Clowns, they’re not just for laughing anymore.” Fellini once said, “Today all is temporary, disordered and grotesque. Who can laugh at clowns anymore?” Buy Clown Hunt.
The Devils (1971): Big, big news—but only for those of you living in Europe. Very loosely based on real-life medieval Satanic hysteria in a French nunnery, Ken Russell‘s The Devils is the most insane, pretentious and hallucinatory nunsploitation arthouse feature ever made.The British Film Institute releases a Region 2 DVD this week, but it is not the uncensored version with a pseudo-sex scene between Christ and a nun and Vanessa Redgrave masturbating with a leg bone. Warner Brothers is hopefully saving that complete cut for spectacular Region 1 release any day now—right? Buy The Devils at BFI.
The Dragon Lives Again [AKA Deadly Hands of Kung Fu] (1977): Bruce Lee goes to Hell where he fights James Bond, Zatoichi and Dracula with the help of Popeye the Sailor Man. The box cover advertises, “the strangest martial arts picture you will ever see,” and while Fantasy Mission Force may have something to say about that, we’re willing to give this semi-legendary flick a chance. Buy The Dragon Lives Again.
General Orders No. 9 (2009): An experimental environmental documentary self-described as “one last trip down the rabbit hole before it gets paved over.” It appears intended in the spirit of Koyaanisqatsi; the cinematography looks fantastic, and for unknown the movie poster features a rabbit smoking a corncob pipe. Buy General Orders No. 9.
“Lexx”: Complete Season 3 (2000): A campy cult sc-fi series that sometimes gets tagged with the label “surreal.” It concerns a security guard, an assassin, a sex slave and a robot head who pilot a stolen giant insect spaceship through a bizarre universe. Buy “Lexx: Complete Season 3”.
Lovelorn (2010): A brother goes to fight Death in a dreamscape to save his sister who’s in a coma but visiting the afterlife searching for her dead boyfriend… sounds trippy. The bad news is this What Dreams May Come-ish British indie holds a pathetic 3.8 rating on IMDB—but maybe it’s “so-bad-it’s-weird”? Buy Lovelorn.
The Museum of Wonders (2010): This is a modern-day Italian remake of Freaks. No word on whether actual deformities were cast in the main roles (we suspect not). Buy Museum Of Wonders.
Season in Hell: Evil Farmhouse Torture (2012?): A farmer who is actually a cult leader with a gateway to Hell in his basement tortures nude women in what the makers call “a surreal psychedelic homage to the 70’s era of horror films.” The (very R-rated) YouTube trailer brags that it was “BANNED from theatres” (it was BANNED from an IMDB listing, too). Buy Season In Hell: Evil Farmhouse Torture.
This Is Not a Movie (2011): Per the ad copy this is a “surreal, psychedelic, apocalyptic quest” undertaken from inside a Las Vegas hotel room. Not to be confused with This Is Not a Film (2010), the celebrated documentary clandestinely made by Iranian director Jafar Panahi while under house arrest. Buy This Is Not a Movie.
What You Don’t See (2009): A teenage boy still coping with his father’s suicide befriends a strange, free-spirited couple while vacationing with his mother and her new boyfriend on the eerie Brittany Coast. This Teutonic psychological thriller did well overseas but failed to find theatrical distribution in the U.S., so it’s basically unknown here. Buy What You Don’t See.
Room 6 (2006): A schoolteacher with a fear of hospitals searches for her boyfriend after he’s carted away in an ambulance and finds bizarre medical horrors instead. The user ratings aren’t great, but it’s got lots of hallucinations and hospital-horror completists may want to check it out. Watch Room 6 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.
64 movies went into our bizarre film elimination tournament, and we’re down to the Strange Sixteen. You’ll have to go vote to see all the winners from last round, but we will mention that the overall #1 seed unexpectedly fell early in a close battle (losing while getting 48% of the vote). Most intriguing 3rd round matchup: Brazil vs. A Clockwork Orange, a battle between two older cult classics that pits Katherine Helmond’s stretched cheeks against Malcolm McDowell’s spread eyelids. Go ahead and vote ( click here if you can’t see the graphic below) and let’s narrow the field down to the Eccentric Eight!
Don’t forget to vote in the second round of our March Mad Movie Madness weird movie elimination tournament (running all March). Will The Wicker Man upset Gummo? Your vote will decide it.
Next week we’ll bring you reviews of Jacques Tati’s 1967 urban nightmare, Play Time; 366 Underground returns with a look at the road-rage gone wrong thriller, Rage (2010); we’ll soak in Veit Helmer‘s semi-silent, semi-surreal 1999 feature Tuvalu, set in a crumbling Turkish bathhouse; and Alfred will cover the sad second half of Ed Wood‘s career, when the tragic transvestite auteur sank into alcoholism and soft-core porn productions.
It’s been an surprisingly impoverished week for strange search terms and we’ve been forced to consider some rather ordinary and obvious queries as honorable mentions in our Weirdest Search Term of the Week contest. To the ordinary person, phrases like “homeless man lactating dog film” and “jesus poop turns to gold movie” are incomprehensibly bizarre, but we know exactly what titles these people are searching for (do you?) That stuff isn’t weird to us; we were much more astonished to learn, from a Google searcher, that “disney doesn’t block teenage lesbian porn.” But as unexpected as that revelation was (Uncle Walt must be turning over in his cryogenic bunker), like most of the rest of the search terms we encountered this week, it wasn’t weird. Thankfully, there was one beacon of insanity in this sea of normality: “sexual activity mem together in their own cowboy boots to milk inside of it.” It’s a formula that’s worked time and time again: fetishized horniness + a passing acquaintance with the English language = our Weirdest Search Term of the Week.
Here’s the ridiculously-long-and-ever-growing-reader-suggested review queue: Tuvalu (next week!); Even Dwarves Started Small; “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Freaked; Strings; Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE→
1300 votes were cast, and the first round of our weird movie elimination tournament is over. Thirty-two weird movies went home in disgrace, and thirty-two remain in the running!
The biggest surprise of the first round was not an upset, but the fact that Gummo, the overall #1 seed, only garnered 54.2% of the votes against unheraldedSkidoo. Does that suggest that the favorite may have trouble in its second round matchup against The Wicker Man (which defeated arthouse fave Belle de Jour rather easily, with 2/3s of the vote)?
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