Don’t forget that this Wednesday is Leap Day, the weirdest day on the calendar and the reason why this project is called 366 Weird Movies rather than 365 Weird Movies. Why not take a day off work and celebrate by watching Eraserhead? (We have ballot initiatives out there trying to get Leap Day declared a municipal holiday, but so far we have only been successful in the Northwest Territories of Canada. In four years, however, we feel pretty confident that the festivities will be universally recognized, so you can start making your travel plans for Feb. 29, 2016 now).
Here’s what’s on tap for next week: we’ll look at Wim Wenders 3-D avant-garde dance documentary Pina (2011), take a stroll through Steven Sorderbergh’s Schizopolis (1996), and Alfred will remind himself why he hates mainstream Hollywood films when he treks to the theater to see Nic Cage ham it up in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. We’re down to two possibilities for a bonus review: either the Japanese B-import Yakuza Weapon (2011) or 1972’s The Iron Rose [La Rose de Fer], another from Redemption Films’ 2012 Jean Rollin dump.
It wasn’t a great week for weird search terms, but as always there’s some scary craziness out there to pass along to you. We start with “litl people traped in boobis,” which we’re assuming is shorthand for the far more sensible “little people trapped in boobies.” Sticking with the boobie theme, we note the strangeness of search for a “freaky kid who loved the taste of his mother’s boobies in a certain italian zombie film,” despite the fact that this query almost certainly refers to a real movie. More suspect is the question of whether there really is a “beach jesus midget horror” movie (if there were, we’d like to think we knew about it). But nothing we saw this week beats the bemusement generated by our Weirdest Search Term of the Week, “why is festive golden hyperbolic occurrence of black male rapist”? Don’t try to answer that, it’s a rhetorical question.
We’ve cut the reader-suggested review queue down by one more entry (yay!); we noticed we’ve been listing The Quiet as an upcoming review for months when we actually reviewed it way back in May of last year. That subtraction makes things look a little more manageable, doesn’t it? Here’s the corrected queue: Schizopolis (next week!); Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves Started Small; “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Freaked; Strings; Dellamorte Dellamore [AKA 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 (LIMITED RELEASE):
DOGGIEWOGGIEZ! POOCHIEWOOCHIEZ! (2012): A found-footage feature film montage from the guys at Everything is Terrible, consisting entirely of clips featuring dogs (more than 2,000 of them, apparently). According to the advertising, it’s also–in some sense we can’t quite wrap our heads around—a remake of The Holy Mountain. Not really appearing in theaters, but rather on tour screening for one night only in various seedy bars and disreputable nightclubs across the US and Canada, through April. Check the Everything is Terrible website for dates near you, or you can purchase the DVD from them directly.
FILM FESTIVALS: FANTASPORTO (Oporto, Portugal, Feb 24 – Mar 3):
Fantasporto has become one of our favorite film festivals, since three of their grand prize winners (Toto the Hero, Pan’s Labyrinth and Idiots and Angels) have gone on to be Certified Weird (with more to come). With that track record, we consider Fantasporto an excellent predictor of what we’ll be focusing on in the coming months; of all the world’s major festivals, these guys take the offbeat most seriously. Heck, this year’s featured retrospectives are the films of Alain Robbe Grillet, shown alongside the oeuvre of Ed Wood; how much more simpatico with our tastes could they get? Here are some of the flicks we’d make it a point to check out, if we could only get out to Portugal:
The Bunny Game – B&W experimental shocksploitation about a prostitute named “Bunny” picked up and ritualistically tortured and humiliated by a trucker named “Hog.”
Chinese Take-Away [Un Cuento Chino] – Quirky culture clash dramedy about an irritable Argentinian who reluctantly takes a Chinese immigrant under his wing; features a cow falling from the sky.
Gandu – The life of a young man who lives with his mother—a kept woman—becomes increasingly hallucinatory as he experiments with drugs, pornography and rap music in an attempt to find meaning in his life. A rare slice of surrealism from the Indian subcontinent, decidedly un-Bollywood.
Guilty of Romance – Provocateur Shion Sono is back with another might-be-weird transgression: a “true crime” policier that involves three middle-class women playing dangerous sadomasochistic games.
Keyhole – The latest Guy Maddin film stars Jason Patric as Ulysses, a gangster on the run, journeying through his labyrinthine house trying to find his wife (Isabella Rossellini).
Kill List – A psychologically scarred hit man agrees to the proverbial “one last mission” and finds it ironically horrifying.
Meat – Surreal/absurd Dutch black comedy revolving around a perverted butcher.
The Theater Bizarre – 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.
This Must Be the Place – Here’s a truly odd premise for a comedy: a retired goth-rock star hunts the Nazi who persecuted his father at Auschwitz. Starring Sean Penn, of all people, as the laconic, androgynous angel of vengeance.
Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead – We’d probably skip this scatological zom-com, except that, since it’s from the director of The Machine Girl and RoboGeisha, our readers would demand we report on it.
NEW ON DVD:
Bad Actress (2011): Black satire about a has-been TV actress who finds that personal tragedy leads to career success. It took director Robert Lee King a dozen years to make this follow-up to his minor cult hit Psycho Beach Party. Buy Bad Actress.
Blank City (2011): Documentary on the “no wave” Super-8 experimental film movement in New York City in the late 1970s/early 1980s exemplified by Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch, etc., along with a couple of characters who emerged from the underground into the (relative) mainstream: Jim Jarmusch and Steve Buscemi. With lots of archival footage and the inevitable commentary from John Waters. Buy Blank City.
Track 29 (1988): A woman whose husband is obsessed with model trains starts a relationship with hitchhiker claiming to be her long-lost son. Image Entertainment quietly re-releases this Nicolas Roeg surrealist flop: the star power of Teresa Russell, Christopher Lloyd and a young Gary Oldman couldn’t help something this weird thrive at the box office. Buy Track 29.
Where The Dead Go To Die (2012): A talking dog takes neighborhood children on what’s described as a “surreal hell-ride.” The box cover is surreally appealing, but we have our doubts about any film released by a director working under a ridiculous pseudonym (Jimmy ScreamerClauz?), and Unearthed Films does not exactly have the greatest track record (can we forgive them for Slaughtered Vomit Dolls yet)? Buy Where The Dead Go To Die.
World on a Wire (1973): Originally made for German television, this dystopian Rainer Werner Fassbinder story scooped the virtual reality storyline more than twenty-five years before The Matrix. According to the press release, it’s a “satiric and surreal look at the weird world of tomorrow from one of cinema’s kinkiest geniuses.” A Criterion release. Buy World on a Wire (Criterion Collection).
Blank City (2011): See description in DVD above. It’s a bit strange to consider a hi-def release detailing a movement with such lo-fi aspirations. Buy Blank City [Blu-ray].
Race War: The Remake (2011): Read our capsule review. DWN productions, known more as mask-makers than filmmakers, are offering their politically incorrect Tromaesque blaxploitation comedy as a free download. Buy a DVD (or one of their masks) if you like it, won’t you? Download Race War: The Remake free from DWN productions.
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.
You can still vote for the Weirdcademy Awards for one more week! (Since you can vote once every 24 hours, that gives you 7 chances to swing the vote). The races have turned into popularity polls, with partisans of various obscure films stuffing the ballot boxes for their candidates—but these are cult movies, and that’s probably how it should be. May the movie with the most rabid online fan base win! Amy Groneing (Fathers’ Day) and Steve Little (The Catechism Cataclysm) hold commanding leads in the Weirdest Actress and Actor categories, with The Oregonian‘s “rainbow pee” sequence holding a 6 vote edge over its nearest competitor for “Weirdest Scene.” The race for Weirdest Picture is actually surprisingly close and hard-fought, with Maximum Shame leading Fathers’ Day by 14 votes (164-150) at the time of this writing.
The place your vote can make the most difference is in the Weirdest Short Film competition, where the lead vote getter (Harmony Korine’s “Snowballs”) has only 8 votes total and a slim margin of only 3 votes. Plus, it’s the only category where you can actually watch all the nominees, so get on it!
Next week’s reviews: we’ll tell you whether Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (available On Demand now or in theaters March 2) is worth $7-8 bucks you’ll have to shell out to see it. From the reader-suggested review queue, we’ll tackle Marco Ferreri‘s gluttonous drama La Grande Bouffe (1973), about four middle aged men who decide to eat themselves to death. We’ll also take a look at the second of five recently re-released Jean Rollin erotic vampire films when we cover (hee hee) The Nude Vampire (1970), and Alfred will continue downing “Karloff’s Bizarre and Final Six Pack” with a sip from Cauldron of Blood (1970).
Plenty of weird search terms materialized on our server logs this week, and as always we share our favorites with you guys. Typically, it’s the pr0n searchers who provide the most amusing tidbits, and this week is no exception. What follows is the kind of stuff you might hope to find inside our first highlighted search term, “bizarre african porn attics.” First, here’s evidence of why, to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings, you should always consider word order when typing your Google queries: “favourite movies black cat snatch.” We were a bit confused by the request for “lesbian love and lesbian women and a dog watch free porn movies.” Even stranger, however, was “japanese astronaut puking fetish.” (We know fetishes have been getting awfully specialized lately, but really?) Still, nothing we saw this week topped the strangeness of our Weirdest Search Term of the Week, the schizophrenic search for info on “icy hot sexy women long but lacks a little boots testing lesbian videos the devil by my place.” Nicely done; we’re speechless.
Here’s the rundown of the insanely long reader-suggested review queue: La Grande Bouffe (next week); Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves Started Small; “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Freaked; Schizopolis; Strings; Dellamorte Dellamore [AKA Cemetery Man]; The 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 (LIMITED RELEASE):
Dorothy and the Witches of Oz: A grown up Dorothy Gale discovers that the tales of the wonderful world of Oz she spins into children’s books don’t come from her imagination, but are repressed memories of a real place, and that the Wicked Witch is now coming to New York City to claim a magical artifact in her possession. This aired as a 150 minute miniseries in the UK, but has been cut to 110 minutes for a US theatrical release. Christopher Lloyd plays the Wizard and reviews were generally negative. For some reason, it’s opening this week in four separate cities in Arizona. Dorothy and the Witches of Oz official site.
IN DEVELOPMENT:
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (June 2012 release): We reported on this mashup a few weeks ago, but we thought we’d pass along the recently released first trailer. We find ourselves less interested in seeing the movie now, but you can judge for yourselves.
Birdemic II: The Resurrection 3-D (currently shooting): From the official synopsis: “A platoon of eagles and vultures attack Hollywood, California. Why did the eagles and vultures attacked? Who will survive?” We liked the first one, in it’s way (read our review), but can the sequel possibly soar to the same lows? We can at least confirm that stars Alan Bagh and Whitney Moore return for another go-round on James Ngyuen’s “romantic thriller” carousel. Birdemic II: The Resurrection 3-D official site.
NEW ON DVD:
Modus Operandi (2009): A pair of mysterious briefcases spark a worldwide clandestine killing spree in this grindhouse throwback that promises to end in “an increasingly surreal vision of modern reality, skirting the edge of sanity…” With Danny Trejo, “presented by” Sasha Grey. Buy Modus Operandi.
Fear Chamber (1968): Speak of the devil: we just recently reviewed this crazy movie that “stars” Boris Karloff (in one of his final roles) as a mad scientist torturing sexy girls at the behest of an alien rock, playing opposite actors in a different country (Mexico). Now it shows up on YouTube. Watch Fear Chamber 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.
Don’t forget to vote in the Weirdcademy Awards poll. It’s been invaded by partisans of some of the more obscure films (partly at our request, it’s true). This is the opposite of the problem we expected, that the movies with better distribution would easily win over the lesser known movies. Father’s Day, Maximum Shame and The Catechism Cataclysm have surged to huge leads over The Tree of Life, Melancholia and Uncle Boonmee. Plus, there’s that whole “stripper with a chainsaw” fiasco to consider…
If you’re tired of all the highfalutin film criticism round these parts (what with two Luis Buñuel reviews last week alone), then the upcoming week should represent a welcome return to the gutter as we cover the reprehensible The Bride of Frank (1996) and the revolting Hobo With a Shotgun (2011). Then, we’ll class things up with a lesbian vampire flick, Shiver of the Vampires (1970).
We know why you read this column: for the list of weird search terms. And we have some doozies this week. First off, the noticed a new mini-trend in bizarre Google queries: weird birth searches. To wit, the teen pregnancy/fanfiction crossover is reaching new levels of insanity if there are actually “videos of teen titans giving birth to babies” out there somewhere in cyberspace. Even stranger is the search for “horse gives birth to naked stunner” (although, frankly, it would be weirder if a horse gave birth to a fully clothed stunner). We liked the following search term because the searcher lost focus and switched to another topic completely in the middle of composing his query: “photography show tv old weird i like the boat clown.” (We suspect this guy would like the boat clown a lot less if he took his medication as scheduled). And how could we ignore this classic, “women vagina image on lair of spam”? But, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we’ll go with “love story made by pig bbong movie” as our official Weirdest Search Term of the Week.
Here’s the utterly out-of-control reader-suggested review queue: The Bride of Frank (next week!); La Grande Bouffe; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves Started Small; “My Wrongs 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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