Next week, look for reviews of Psych 9, a 2010 psychological thriller that basically went straight to DVD, but that Pam thought deserved better; the latest in gory Japanese b-movie weirdness, the silly but energetic Aliens vs. Ninjas; and, from the reader review queue, we’ll take a look at The Peanut Butter Solution, a strange, follicle-based fairy tale, and one that no kid who saw at a matinee in 1985 ever forgot.
And a note about a movie we won’t be reviewing: Nickelodeon’s first animated flick, Rango, was number one at the box office this week and should have Pixar shaking in its boots. Yours truly saw it with some wee ones and can safely say it’s not that weird, despite some reports in Friday’s Weird Horizon column to the contrary. I do want to point out that it’s an excellent thrill ride, though, and it’s filled with references to other movies, from High Noon to Chinatown to Django. More to the point, the weird viewer should be on the lookout for a couple of surreal Johnny Depp-related cameos: one fromFear and Loathing‘s Hunter S. Thompson, and a more obscure appearance by the flying fish from Arizona Dream (I have a feeling I may have been the only one in the theater who got it). All in all, a good, if mainstream, time.
Search terms this week were positively normal; it was tough to pick out the few mildly weird ones. We were amused by “globolinks phone services,” until we followed up on the search and discovered that there was a communications company who actually wanted to associate themselves with the psychedelic music-loathing aliens of the Certified Weird opera. The search “cars is a weird movie” brought us a new reader who’s really not ready for this site quite yet, and “male and girly feelings” made us wonder when “girly” became an acceptable synonym for “female.” For the weirdest search term of the week, however, we dip once more into the fetishist cesspool for “bizzare electro shock sex tube ever.”
Here’s the ridiculously long and ever growing reader-suggested review queue (more titles after the break): The Peanut Butter Solution (next week!); Possession;Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Sublime; Pink Floyd: The Wall;Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]; Paprika; The Holy 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 Adjustment Bureau: A Senatorial candidate accidentally gets a glimpse of what fate has in store for him—separation from the love of his life—and doesn’t like it; fate sends a couple of “adjustment bureau” agents to “persuade” him to go along with the grand plan. Starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt (a -2 for potential weirdness), but from a Phillip K. Dick story (a +1). So who knows? The Adjustment Bureau official site.
Rango: It’s a Pixar-style animated Western starring a lizard cowboy for kiddies; even with the voiceover talents of el muchahco bizarro Johnny Depp, how could it be weird? It’s probably not, by our standards, but mainstream critics found it delightfully odd: the Florida Times-Union called it “willfully weird” and efilmcritic.com went with “defiantly weird.” We weren’t planning to review this one, but we may have to teach these guys a thing or two about what constitutes “weird.” Rango official site.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
I Saw the Devil: When a serial killer whacks his pregnant fiancée, a special agent goes outside the law to get his revenge. Directed by Ji-Woon Kim (The Good, the Bad, the Weird) and starring Min-sik Choi (Oldboy) as the psychopath. Seems more likely to qualify as “extreme” than “weird,” but it has a good pedigree. I Saw the Devil official site.
Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter (scheduled 2011): The title alone’s weird enough to catch our eye. The plot revolves around an LSD-damaged goth-girl serial killer, and the trailer looks like something put together by Harmony Korine working for Troma studios. From the director of Frankenpimp. Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter trailer on MySpace video.
Untitled Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze project: Not exactly a scoop by us, but we wanted to be the first to tell you that postmodern screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and prankster director Spike Jonze—who made the Certified Weird Being John Malkovich and List Candidate Adaptation—are pitching a new project together, said to be a world conspiracy satire (though with these guys involved, who knows what it will really be about?) Kaufman is also working on a separate (autobiographical?) script entitled Frank or Francis, about a director and a blogger with vicious opinions of his work (we’re pretty sure we’re not the model here). Thanks to Being Charlie Kaufman for alerting us to these developments; Deadline.com supplies more info.
NEW ON DVD:
“ReBoot: Seasons One and Two” (1994): Anyone who caught this 1994 computer-animated kiddie show about a society that lives inside a desktop computer on a Saturday morning in 1994 might be forgiven for thinking they hadn’t yet come down from whatever substances they had consumed the night before. It continues the great Saturday morning cartoon tradition of simultaneously appealing to kids and adults who love a little light weirdness. Buy “ReBoot: Seasons One & Two”.
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Daughters of Darkness (1971): Leave it to kinky Harry Kümel (Malpertuis) to make one of the strangest and artiest “lesbian vampire” movies of the 1970s. Daughters stars Delphine Seyrig (Last Year at Marienbad, The Milky Way) as the undead Countess Elizabeth Bathory who, along with vampy gal pal sex slave Danielle Ouimet, focuses her attentions on a honeymooning couple in a deserted Belgian hotel resort. Surprises abound. Buy Daughters of Darkness [Blu-ray].
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
Heavy Metal 2000 (2000): We haven’t seen this sequel to the naughty 1981 animated sci-fi cult classic; it’s weirdness is fairly suspect and reviewers were not kind, but some may be interested nonetheless. Tell us if it’s any good. Watch Heavy Metal 2000 free on YouTube.
We know why you’re tuning in right about now. With Hollywood set to give out its awards tonight for “Most Conventional Movie,” “Most Conventional Actor,” and so on, you’re interesting in finding out the results of the first annual Weirdcademy Awards. So, without further ado, here are the results:
WEIRDEST MOVIE: Enter the Void, which was the best Buddhist ghost drug trip movie of the year
WEIRDEST ACTRESS: Natalie Portman, Black Swan, for freaking out, growing feathers, and letting Mila Kunis get busy down there
WEIRDEST SCENE: The “Love Hotel” sequence from Enter the Void, which deserves a special achievement award for excellence in backlighting genitalia
Speaking of Enter the Void, next week we’ll be giving it another review (now why would that be?) From the reader-suggested review queue, we’ll also review Vincenzo Natali‘s existential comedy Nothing (2003); Alfred will finish up his series on spooky Terence Fisher with Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell; we’ll take a peek at the obscure indie serial killer flick, M.O.N. (2006); and finally, also we’ll look into restoring the very last of the posts that were lost during the Great Server Crash of 2010.
Search terms used to locate the site seem to be getting more and more normal all the time; it’s getting harder to nominate a truly weird search term of the week. We are seeing perfectly reasonable, even academic requests for information on “phallic symbols in gamera movies.” There are a few strange search terms, however; we were as surprised as anyone to discover that we are Google’s #1 result for a search for “orgasimtobea.” (Eat that, Huffington Post!) We also liked “jenny agutters mim mim”—pending our figuring out what a “mim mim” is. And, while it’s not weird, “thirsty for women booze and art japanese cinema” pretty much describes how I start feeling about 6:00 PM every Friday. But for our weirdest term of the week—well, at least the one that made us chuckle the hardest—we’ll have to go with “i am curious yellow pubic hair.” It’s all in the word order.
Here’s the ludicrously long reader-suggested review queue (more after the break): Nothing (2003) (next week!); Possession;The Peanut Butter Solution; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Sublime; Pink Floyd: The Wall;Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]; Paprika; The Holy Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE→
Reminder: you have one more week to vote in the Weirdcademy Awards poll! Currently, Enter the Void sports a healthy lead over Black Swan for weirdest picture; Zachary Oberzan leads Heath Ledger for weirdest actor; Delphine Chaneac and Natalie Portman are neck and neck for weirdest actress (a surprisingly close race); and Enter the Void‘s orgy sequence leads Black Swan‘s transformation scene for weirdest scene of the year. There’s still time to influence the results!
Next week brings you another full slate of reviews, beginning with Jan Svankmajer‘s second feature film, a predictably weird adaptation of Faust (1994); from the reader suggested review queue, we’ll take a look at the Japanese rock n’ roll zombie movie Wild Zero (2000); we’ll check out Sam Fuller’s insanely over-ambitious melodrama Shock Corridor (1963); and Alfred will continue his survey of Terence Fisher‘s Hammer work by examining the Brit’s version of The Mummy (1959).
Our survey of weird search terms used to locate the site this week brought us a person who apparently believes Luis Buñuel was a pornographer: how else to explain the search for “longest ejaculation shot in bunuel avant garde film”? We were too confused by “miss swan augmentation mamaire” to nominate it for the weirdest search term of the week, and “bizzare section bringis you bizare action and free wei…,” was too obvious (though we like the fact that the searcher bothered to type out the trailing “…”). For our official Weirdest Search Term of the week, we’ll go with “download classic black and white movies free woman on the run suddenly a guest i the house please murder me,” because of the fact that the searcher apparently went insane between the time when he started typing the search term and the point where he finished it.
Here’s that ridiculously long reader-suggested review queue (more after the break): Possession; Wild Zero (next week!); Nothing (2003); The Peanut Butter Solution; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Faust; Sublime; Pink Floyd: The Wall;Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]; Paprika; The Holy Mountain; Brazil; The Casserole Masters; Dark Crystal; Throw Away Your 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):
Vanishing on 7th Street: Darkness takes over the streets of Detroit, literally leaving death in its wake, in this “apocalyptic thriller.” We take note of it because it’s from director Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Session 9). Simultaneously available on some on-demand cable systems. Vanishing on 7th Street official site.
IN DEVELOPMENT:
Hellacious Acres: The Case of John Glass (2011): A minimalist post-apocalyptic comedy about a man who wakes from a cryogenic slumber to discover the world has been devastated by nuclear war followed by an alien invasion. From the demented mind of Pat Tremblay, who gave us the still-unreleased Heads of Control: The Gorul Baheu Brain Expedition, so the scenario is likely to be even weirder than described. This is now apparently completed, although it has not yet debuted.
NEW ON DVD:
Repo Chick (2010): Alex Cox’s long awaited (by us, at least) “spiritual sequel” to the groundbreaking Repo Man is a “kooky” comedy casting what appears to be a modernized “Valley Girl” as the Repo Chick drawn into a kidnapping plot in Los Angeles. Looks deliberately cheap and campy, shot entirely in green screen, and the trailer’s frankly uninspiring. Where has Alex been since turning down the chance to direct Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Buy Repo Chick.
Network (1976): In the reality-TV era, Paddy Chayefsky’s satire about a network that revives sagging ratings by cynically exploiting the on-air mental breakdown of a news anchor no longer seems that weird. Still, up until this week we were mad as hell that this classic black comedy had never been released on Blu-ray before. Buy Network [Blu-ray].
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.
Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!
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