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 Box: A couple are given a mysterious box that contains a temptation; push a button on it and you will get a million dollars, but an innocent person somewhere will die. I passed on mentioning this one last week because the theatrical previews made it look like a lame and hokey extended Twilight Zone episode. I disregarded a few reports trickling in that said it was “weird,” assuming they came from the same type of people who find any fantasy weird. Then, I discovered that it was directed by Richard Kelly, which makes it noteworthy for this site. We probably should give it a shot despite the underwhelming reviews and uninspiring trailer. The Box official site (much like the Donnie Darko website, there’s no clear navigation and you’re forced to click around randomly to find stuff).

Fantastic Mr. Fox:  This animated fable about talking animals is clearly not weird, but it does represent a collaboration between two borderline weird figures: ultra-quirky director Wes (I Heart Huckabees) Anderson and mordant children’s book author Roald (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) Dahl.  Featuring the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Bill Murray.  Fantastic Mr. Fox official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Uncertainty: An experiment in conflicting storylines from two different directors, Uncertainty deals with a young couple whose day follows one of two paths, depending on the flip of a coin: one route leads to a family drama, the other to a murder thriller.  Uncertainty official site.

NEW ON DVD:

Ink (2009): Critics compared this visionary thriller about a father entering the nightmares of his daughter to the work of Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet; its own press release compares it to Brazil, Dark City and Donnie Darko, among others. We’re cautiously optimistic; that’s some awfully lofty company. Expect a review in the coming weeks. Buy from Amazon.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut (2009): Read our Watchmen capsule. Hopefully, this four disc (!) Blu-ray release will be the ultimate edition of Watchmen, but would you truly be shocked if Warner came out with a 6-disc Watchmen: The Even Ultimater Cut in three months? At any rate, this new version integrates the fanboy demanded story-within-a-story “Tales of the Black Freighter” into the Director’s Cut. There’s also a disc of featurettes, a digital copy of the theatrical release, and a disc of “Complete Motion Comics” (whatever that means). Buy from Amazon.

NOTICE – POSSIBLE DOWNTIME:  Our webhost tells us they will be upgrading the servers on Monday, Nov. 9 and Tuesday, Nov. 10.  This may cause some limited interruptions in the availability of these pages.

Finally, we have an early frontrunner for weirdest movie of 2009! But what is it?  Spike (Adaptation) Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are?  The independent twentysomethings-get-slaughtered-in-the woods horror film I Can See You?  Or are we contrarians who actually liked the widely despised Donnie Darko direct-to-DVD sequel, S. Darko? Check this space in next week to find out the shocking answer!

For our “weirdest search term used to locate the site” pick of the week, we’re dipping back into the overflowing “disturbing” file for “watch free rape nuns movies in the farms.”  We find this request both disquieting and encouraging.  The weird specificity of the search: not only “nuns,” but nuns “in the farms”—sets it apart from the generic sordid “watch free rape movies” garbage we get all the time.

But why in the world would we find a rape search encouraging?  Because it came from the Islamic Republic of Egypt.  I say this more than half-seriously: porn will destroy Islamic fundamentalism.  By pumping free porn behind enemy lines via broadband, we teach them the true value of freedom.  It may be a NeoCon myth that the huddled masses out there all yearn to be free, but they most certainly yearn to masturbate to freaky porn.  Show them a vision of a land overflowing with free rape movies, and they will eventually demand their governments give them the same freedom.  Worldwide democracy and an unprecedented era of global peace will inevitably follow.

On a more pleasant note, we finally have a Miss Weird Movie 2009!  Her name is Lola, and her favorite site is http://366weirdmovies.com!

Much thanks to the anonymous webmaster who spammed our server logs with this autogenerated image in order to promote some service or other, I forgot what it was.

Thanks to our decision to focus on 2009 releases, the reader-suggested review queue is growing quite unruly: Greaser’s Palace (substituted for Institute Benjamenta), Waking Life, Survive Style 5+, The Dark Backward, The Short Films of David Lynch, Santa Sangre, Dead Man, Inland Empire, Monday (assuming I can find an English language version), The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Barton Fink, What? (Diary of Forbidden Dreams), Meatball Machine, Xtro, Basket Case, Suicide Club, O Lucky Man! , Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (if it’s released), Takashi Miike’s Gozu, Tales of Ordinary Madness, The Wayward Cloud, Kwaidan, Six-String Samurai, Andy Warhol’s Trash, Altered States, Memento, Nightmare Before Christmas/Vincent/Frankenweenie, Johnny Got His Gun, and The Science of Sleep.  Although we’re focusing on 2009 release at the moment, Johnny Got His Gun is likely to jump the line due to the fact that this long-unavailable movie finally got a DVD release this year.

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 Men Who Stare at Goats:  George Clooney or no George Clooney and loosely based on fact or not, I doubt anyone will claim that a comedy about a classified experimental squad of U.S. marines who are trained to kill using Jedi-mind tricks isn’t coming at us from a left-of-reality place.  Co-starring offbeat icon Jeff (Tideland) Bridges, Ewan (Stay) MacGregor, and Kevin Spacey.  The Men Who Stare at Goats official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Gentlemen Broncos: From Jared Hess (writer/director of Napoleon Dynamite) comes this gross-out satire about a nerdy amateur fantasy writer whose story is stolen by an established author and turned into an awful movie by a small-town director. Critics hated it (“Gentlemen Broncos doesn’t just visit Planet Quirk, it crash lands upon it.”–Peter Howell).  Still, scenes from the film-within-the film, with it’s gay cyclops and flying robotic deer, look at least mildly weird, and it seems anything that almost everyone in the mainstream hates must have something going for it.   On the other hand, Armond White liked it, which may justifiably scare you off.  Gentlemen Broncos official site.

SCREENINGS: NEW YORK CITY (MON, NOV. 9)

Flaherty NYC: Experiments with Animation!:  A program of new experimental animated shorts to be presented at the Anthology Films Archive, with a question and answer session with some of the animators to follow.  Featuring films by Martha Colburn, Jesse Epstein, Kenneth Hung, Jeff Scher, Phil Solomon, Steven Subtonick, and Signe Bauman (The Threatened One). For more information visit The Flaherty Seminar homepage.

NEW ON DVD:

Wings of Desire [Der Himmel über Berlin] (1987): Wim Wender’s beautiful, poetic movie about invisible angels roaming West Berlin who dispassionately hear the fears and desires of humans gets the Criterion Collection treatment. One of the best films of the 1980s.  Buy from Amazon.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Wings of Desire [Der Himmel über Berlin] (1987):  See above.  Buy Blu-ray from Amazon.

NEW FREE (LEGITIMATE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Dracula (1992):  Read our capsule review.  The free viewing expires November 10, so hurry on down!  Watch Dracula (1992) 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.

Expect to see reviews of Brainiac, the magnificent Pan’s Labyrinth [El laberinto del fauno], and more next week.

We’ve been tracking and documenting the weirdest search terms used to locate the site for a while now. However, every now and then something slips by. We looked at Alexa’s web information page the other day, and learned that “weird animal attached to woman’s face” is the top search term people click on to get here. Who knew?

OK, now to that ever-growing reader-suggested review queue (followed by an explanation of why it’s not likely to be cut down significantly any time soon):

Pan’s Labyrinth (next week), Greasers Palace (substituted for Institute Benjamenta), Waking Life, Survive Style 5+, The Dark Backward, The Short Films of David Lynch, Santa Sangre, Dead Man, Inland Empire, Monday (assuming I can find an English language version), The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Barton Fink, What? (Diary of Forbidden Dreams), Meatball Machine, Xtro, Basket Case, Suicide Club, O Lucky Man! , Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (if it’s released), Takashi Miike’s Gozu,  Tales of Ordinary Madness, and The Wayward Cloud, Kwaidan, Six-String Samurai, and Andy Warhol’s Trash.

OK, that’s a long list of titles to cover, and it’s not likely to get much shorter very soon.  When I woke up this morning, I noticed there was a bit of a chill in the air, a chill that spells: November.  And to any dedicated movie-review webmaster, November means one thing and one thing only: “I only have two months left to cover all those 2009 releases I skipped over so that I can create a meaningful Weirdest Movies of 2009 list.”  Just glancing through our weekly Weird Horizons, I noticed that there are at least eight high priority 2009 releases that we never covered because they never made it to a theater near us.  That’s not to mention a dozen or so less interesting movies, and a few intriguing movies that have yet to show up on DVD.

In other words, although we’d like to whittle that reader-review list down, we’re making the primary focus in the next two months to cover Weird 2009.  That doesn’t mean we won’t be throwing in older movies, including reader suggestions, into the mix: we’ll just be tackling them at a slightly slower rate than our usual glacial pace.