Just a reminder: voting for the 2010 Weirdcademy Awards continues until Feb 27th. Make your voice heard here.
The cold and flu season finally caught up with us this week, effectively knocking the entire staff of 366 Weird Movies out of commission for several days. Fortunately, our correspondents are scattered across the globe, and with their help we’re still able to put out a full week of reviews. Kevyn Knox will be chiming in with his take on 2010 Palme D’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives (2010), the second weird movie of last year dealing with a reincarnation theme, and Pamela De Graff will recommend Neil Jordan’s startling and hallucinatory tale about the coming of age of The Butcher Boy (1997). Assuming 366weirdmovies is able to pick himself up off the floor, he’ll offer a second take on the much-requested Dogtooth (2009), and Alfred Eaker will bring us a spooky Hammer horror double feature: The Horror of Dracula (1958) and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968).
Speaking of Ms. De Graff, she features in our weirdest search terms of the past week, as someone came to this site looking for “pam degraff placenta encapsulation.” (Pam says, “Placentas I can handle—it’s the ‘Pam De Graff + measurements + kidnap box’ search term that worries me”). We also like the search term “nazi schoolgirls tubes” (Nazi schoolgirls are an obvious fetish, but looking for their tubes is just weird). But, in our quest to find “something more weird than this” (another search term we encountered), we finally settled on the incomprehensible “carnivorous monkeys and several other pereplegic loony bins” as our weirdest search term of the week.
Here’s the ridiculously long and ever growing reader-suggested review queue (I will keep expanding this list as long as you guys keep adding them): Possession; Wild Zero; 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 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):
The Oscar Nominated Short Films 2011: The title is self-explanatory. Very few of the short films nominated this year hold any weird appeal; two titles caught our interest, though, both in the animation category. One is “The Lost Thing,” an Australian fantasy about a boy who discovers a strange contraption on the beach, but finds that no one cares about it but him. The second film was not actually nominated for an Oscar but was included as a “highly commended” short in order to pad out the running time: it’s sometime-weird animator Bill Plympton’s “The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger,” described as “a children’s fable about the power of advertising.” Playing in scattered cities across the US and Canada and also in London; check the official website for a location near you. The Oscar Nominated Short Films 2011 official website.
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Amarcord (1973): The Criterion Collection upgrades its edition of the Fellini classic (in which the director recalls a highly fictionalized and, well, Felliniesque childhood) to Blu-ray. We believe all the same special features were available on the previous DVD version. Buy Amarcord (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray].
Barb Wire (1996): How can you ensure your sci-fi remake of Casablanca will be a flop? Cast bodacious but scarcely talented Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson as the titular (1000 pardons, gentle reader) character. Some contend this disaster has camp value. If you’ve always wanted to see them in hi-def, here’s your chance. Buy Barb Wire [Blu-ray].
FREE MOVIES ON THE WEB:
“The Marvellous World of the Cucu Bird” (1991): Made in the early nineties and only shown at two or three film festivals, director Carlos Atanes has resurrected this 18 minute short made when he was 19 years old, and considers this Internet premier to be the film’s real debut. Shot in Barcelona, the grainy black and white film has Italian neorealist visuals, but the story is anything but realistic. It concerns a love affair—perhaps—between a prostitute and a butcher’s assistant, and a talking bird trapped under a sewer grate, a mysterious man on crutches dragging a useless leg behind him, and symbolist poetry all feature heavily. There’s also a good dose of tasteful eroticism and violence, and the film has a very disorienting/impossible timeline. Worth seeing. Watch “The Marvellous World of the Cucu Bird.”
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.
Folks, there’s still time to join the Weirdcademy and vote for the weirdest movie, actor, actress and scene of 2010! Currently Enter the Void is leading Black Swan for Weirdest Movie; amateur underdog Zachary Oberzan is cruising comfortably ahead of sentimental favorite Heath Ledger for Weirdest Actor; Weirdest Actress is the closest race, with Natalie Portman and Splice‘s Delphine Chaneac neck and neck; and Enter the Void’s orgy scene is leading Natalie Portman’s transformation for your weirdest scene of the year. Vote for your favorites here!
Next week we’ll feature reviews of the strangeness that is Death Bed: The Bed that Eats (1977); explore the experimental surrealistic animation offered by The Films of Suzan Pitt; take a gander at Zardoz (1974), featuring everyone’s favorite performance-in-a-diaper by Sean Connery; and we’ll continue our survey of Hammer director Terence Fisher’s oeuvre with a peek at Brides of Dracula.
Search terms used to locate the site seem to be getting more and more conventional over the past few weeks. We’re scraping through the server logs looking for something strange enough to nominate as our “weirdest search term of the week.” The long-tail fetishists continue to provide plenty of candidates: this week’s best offering was “touch molasses nylon sex movies.” Although the following term—“brigitte nielsen pouts her wares at today’s make up trials for the loreal melbourne fashion festival”—isn’t really as weird as it might initially seem, the fact that people came here after searching for the phrase is certainly a bit odd. But if we’re looking for the weirdest search term of the week, we have to give the award to the individual looking for “irving thalberg penis.” We’re still trying to figure out whether the person was looking for a picture of the legendary producer’s wang, information about movies into which he inserted phallic references, or maybe searching for a prosthetic model of the late Mr. Thalberg. The possibilities are endless, but none of them make sense.
Here’s the massive review queue (more titles after the break):The Films of Suzan Pitt (next week!); Zardoz (next week!); Possession; Wild Zero; Nothing (2003); The Peanut Butter Solution; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Faust; Sublime; Pink Floyd: The Wall;Toto 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.
There’s nothing debuting in theaters this week to pique the interest of fans of weird cinema. We’re truly in the winter doldrums. We’re so bummed out by the cold temps and long nights, in fact, that we totally forgot about Sundance this year—I mean, it completely slipped our minds. We’re late enough to report the winners, but we won’t: just rest assured that the typical slate of coming-of-age dramas and earnest, liberal minded documentaries swept the major prizes. The big news is that Sundance has instituted a new category, “Park City at Midnight,” that aims to give would-be cult and horror films a fair shake by keeping them away from the normal Sundance crowd. We don’t sense any must-catches in the lineup, though; still, we report on several interesting possibilities to look out for in the coming year below.
FILM FESTIVALS – SUNDANCE (Park City, Utah, Jan 20-30):
All Your Dead Ones – Colombian political allegory about a pile of bodies discovered in a cornfield on election day; it’s “tinged with mordant surrealism.”
The Catechism Cataclysm – A priest who’s recently quit the Church takes a canoe trip with an old high school buddy and things start to get “weird” (in unspecified ways). A “Park City at Midnight” film.
Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same – We hate to stereotype, but cool weird b-movie title usually equals lame predictable parody. “Park City at Midnight.”
Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel – A documentary on Roger Corman is not in itself weird, but a portrait of a film outsider who’s had his fingers in some weird pies is worth noting. “Park City at Midnight.”
The Future – narrated by a stray cat, there are elements of magical realism in this speculative indie drama. Reviews were mixed, though it did get picked up for distribution. The name “Miranda July” is naggingly familiar.
Hobo With a Shotgun – not weird but worth a mention: like last year’s Machete, it’s a feature movie expanded from one of the fake trailers in Grindhouse. “Park City at Midnight.”
Lost Kisses – a satire about a Sicilian girl who claims the Virgin Mary has told her where a missing Madonna head has disappeared to, with “fabulist flourishes.” Extra-worthy of note because it comes from Roberta Torre (To Die for Tano).
Magic Trip – A documentary about Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters” that promises to show the viewer “what it’s like to drop acid.” With actual Merry Prankster footage.
The Oregonian – This horror flick was probably the most disliked film to play Sundance—which could be a good sign, but is probably a bad one. “Park City at Midnight.”
Prairie Love – Dakota-set story of a man who sneaks into the place of another guy going to meet his prison-bound paramour for the first time is self-described as “wonderfully bizarre” and “brazenly idiosyncratic.”
Red State – Another “not weird but notable” entry—Kevin Smith (Clerks) tries his hand at a horror movie (with religious fundamentalists as the psychokiller villains). With Melissa Leo, John Goodman, and politicial baggage.
Septien – This story of an ex-high school athlete returning to live with his two eccentric brothers sounds oddball at the very least. Sundance thought it was weird enough to place in the “Park City at Midnight” category. It’s also contemporaneously available on Video-on-Demand on many US cable systems.
Silent House – Another “young woman descends into madness” movie; it’s all done in one take. Weirdness uncertain. “Park City at Midnight.”
Take Shelter – Michael Shannon plays a crazy guy (daring casting, that) whose dreams of impending tempests storms are so lifelike that he’s convinced to build a storm shelter in real life.
The Troll Hunter [Trolljegeren] – Norwegian “found footage” film about a man who literally hunts trolls, for the government. It’s weirdness is questionable, but it appears to be a crowd-pleaser. “Park City at Midnight.”
The Woman – Horror from Lucky McKee (May) about a feral woman raised, and forcibly civilized, by a family. Another questionably weird one we thought worth a mention. “Park City at Midnight.”
BOOKS:
“Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda”: There have been a lot of books dedicated to kaiju (Japanese monsters), but to our knowledge this is the first book-length treatment of director Honda, who made the original Godzilla [Gojira], the fairly surreal Attack of the Mushroom People, and the campy Destroy All Monsters, among other fondly remembered fantasy treats. Peter H. Brothers, 296 pages, paperback. Buy “Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda”.
NEW ON DVD:
Cold Dog Soup (1990): A black-comedy in the vein of After Hours: the scenario involves Randy Quaid as a taxi driver who drives NYC all night meeting bizarre characters as he tries to rid himself of a dog’s corpse. For whatever reason, a Blu-ray version was released two weeks ago and the DVD follows this week. Buy Cold Dog Soup.
Never Let Me Go (2010): Read our capsule review. Strange mix of speculative fiction and English boardinghouse drama, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed novel. Not that weird but worth a look. Buy Never Let Me Go.
A Woman, A Gun and a Noodle Shop (2009): Maybe not “weird” per se, but definitely a bit out there and strange as hell by mainstream standards: its a remake of the Coen BrothersBlood Simple made by visual stylist Yimou Zhang (House of Flying Daggers, Raise the Red Lantern). Buy A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop.
The Hunter and the Swan Discuss Their Meeting (2010): Speaking of Sundance, they have graciously put many of the shorts playing at this year’s festival up on YouTube for the pleasure of those who can’t make it to Park City, Utah. This one mixes relationship comedy with fairy tales as a swan-woman and a hunter describe how they met to another couple over dinner. Watch The Hunter and the Swan Discuss Their Meeting free on Youtube.
You’ll find out our cynically scientific guesses as to who will win the major prizes 2011 Academy Awards below. But, before we get into that nonsense, we’d like to unveil a more interesting competition—the 2011 Weirdcademy Awards. This is the award given to the weirdest movie, actor, actress and scene of the previous year, as voted by the members of the Weirdcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Weirdness.
Who makes up the Weirdcademy, you ask? Membership is open to all readers of 366 Weird Movies. All you must do to officially join the Weirdcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Weirdness is to say to yourself, out loud, three times, while looking in a mirror, “Man, I’d like to be an official member of that thing on 366 Weird Movies where you vote on the weirdest movies and stuff of the year, I forget what it’s called.” Do not scratch any part of your body within twelve inches of your own (or another’s) genitalia while repeating the formula, or you will be judged “unclean” and forced to repeat the ritual after a five minute purification period. Once you have completed this ceremony, you are officially a member of the Weirdcademy and entitled to vote in the online poll below. (Vote as many times as you like, but only once per day, please. We’ll keep voting open until February 27 at noon, so we can announce our results before the Academy Awards and steal their thunder.)
Without further delay, here are the nominees for the 2011 Weirdcademy awards:
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