Category Archives: List Candidates

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: 200 MOTELS (1971)

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200 Motels has been officially added to the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies. Comments are closed on this post; please comment on the official Certified Weird entry.

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Tony Palmer & Frank Zappa

FEATURING: Howard Kaylan, Mark Volman, , , Keith Moon, Jimmy Carl Black

PLOT: 200 Motels is a series of sketches, experiments and concert footage loosely organized as a reflection on the mixture of insanity and tedium experienced by a rock and roll band on tour.

Still from 200 Motels (1971)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  The movie’s wild visuals, absurd jokes and attention deficit disorder pacing are enough to bring it to our attention.  But if anything sets 200 Motels apart from the other psychedelic cinematic noodlings of the hippie era, it’s Frank Zappa’s extraordinarily weird music—a unique mix of jazz-inflected blues/rock, avant-garde 12-tone classical music, and junior high school sex jokes.

COMMENTS:  Ringo Starr plays Larry the Large Dwarf, portraying Frank Zappa.  The Who drummer Keith Moon is a female groupie dressed like Sally Field in “The Flying Nun.”   Theodore Bickel plays an omniscient Master of Ceremonies who brings Zappa’s band, the Mothers of Invention, a cheeseburger, and demands they sign for the delivery—in blood.  Bickel’s character (or at least one of them) also explains the movie’s philosophy to the band: “You must remember that within the conceptual framework of this filmic event, nothing really matters.  It is entirely possible for several subjective realities to coexist.”  Zappa himself is barely in the movie and never speaks (or sings).  He’s only briefly glimpsed in concert footage—although the other band members reference him as a godlike figure who spies on them through an empty beer bottle.  Other than appeasing the great god Frank, the Mothers only care about three things—scoring dope, getting paid, and getting laid.  The characters in this “surrealistic documentary” drift in and out of various skits, animations, and drug trips, and also find time to perform numbers like “Mystery Roach,” “Lonesome Cowboy Burt,” and an oratorio in praise of the penis.  One highlight sees lead singers Kaylan and Volman taking a “trip” to everytown “Centerville,” which is full of churches and liquor stores and bathed in wavy zebra stripes that lysergically distort Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: 200 MOTELS (1971) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: MAXIMUM SHAME (2010)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Marina Gatell, Ana Mayo, Paco Moreno, Ardiana Ferrer, Ignasi Vidal

PLOT: On the night before the world is to be swallowed up by a black hole, a man discovers a world underneath his bed ruled by a chess-obsessed dominatrix queen.

Still from Maximum Shame (2010)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Carlos Atanes is a defiantly, and proudly, surrealistic director, and his brief filmography (three features and dozens of bizarre shorts) already constitutes a body of weird work that could be worthy of recognition on this List. With its wardrobe of black leather and chrome dental restraints along with a powerful musical score that ranges from 40s show tunes to 80s synth pop, Maximum Shame is perhaps Atanes’ most ambitious and polished—not to mention weirdest—feature work.

COMMENTS: You have to love the tagline for Maximum Shame, which describes the movie as “an apocalyptic fetish horror musical chess sci-fi weird feature movie.” The surprising thing is that the film, which plays like a combination of “Alice in Wonderland” and the Orpheus legend staged by refugees from a leather bar in a deserted warehouse, largely lives up to that description. The words “apocalyptic,” fetish,” and “chess” define the three motifs that keep the film (somewhat) grounded.  The story, such as it is, takes place as a black hole is encroaching on earth (or so we are told), and characters mention the total destruction of the world sometimes as an imminent cataclysm, and sometimes as a disaster that’s already come to pass. The film’s s&m/b&d fetishism is obvious from the costuming, most notably the deviant dental equipment used to keep slaves’ mouths perpetually splayed. (Although the Queen plays games of dominance and submission, there is no overt sexuality in the film—which, together with its alienating weirdness, makes it of only marginal interest to the bondage crowd). All of the characters have, or are given, the names of chess pieces, and talk of gambits and sacrificing rooks makes up a large part of the plot. “Horror” and “sci-fi” turn out to be the least accurate of the descriptors. The film does speak of black holes and invokes a theory of infinite parallel universes in a throwaway bid to explain the inexplicable Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: MAXIMUM SHAME (2010) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: PRIMER (2004)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Shane Carruth

FEATURING: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan

PLOT: Two engineer/entrepreneurs accidentally discover a box that allows time travel, and

Still from Primer (2004)

soon get themselves into trouble.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Primer‘s baffling story gives you an untethered, free-falling in reality feeling.  But although the dense, complicated, and deliberately obtuse plot produces a level of confusion comparable in effect to the weirdest David Lynch movies, I’ve got the sinking feeling that, if you dissect  it carefully, there’s a perfectly logical explanation for everything that happens.  (That complaint makes the 366 project the only outlet in the world to potentially reject Primer because it makes too much sense).

COMMENTS: If what you most value in a movie is a plot that will inspire you to sit down and create a schematic flowchart—maybe using multiple ink colors to illustrate various contingencies—in order to figure out what’s going on, then have I got a recommendation for you!  Made for an incredible $7,000 on suburban locations with only two major characters and no special effects, Primer relies entirely on it’s smart, knotty script to keep the viewer interested—and succeeds admirably.  After a pre-time travel prologue, joltingly edited and spoken largely in an untranslated engineerese that’s fairly bewildering in itself, Aaron and Abe (A & B?) stumble upon a box that will allow them to travel backwards in time for about a day at a time.  Like any of us would, they initially use the box to play the stock market, investing in the day’s biggest mid-cap mover.  After placing their online orders in the morning, they agree to carefully lock themselves in a hotel room away from the rest of the world so that they won’t accidentally kill their own grandfathers or meet their doubles wandering around on the street.  The plan goes well for a while, but then strange, logic-defying events start happening, and each of the two men wonders if the other is cheating on their agreement, secretly going back a day to change events for personal reasons.  Paranoia mounts as they become suspicious of each other and of reality itself.  That brief synopsis actually makes Primer sound more (initially) coherent than Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: PRIMER (2004) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957)

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Must See

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Max von Sydow, , Nils Poppe, Bengt Ekerot,

PLOT:  A disillusioned knight and his cynical squire return from the Crusades to a 14th century Sweden ravaged by the Black Plague; Death comes for the knight, but he convinces the Reaper to play a game of chess for his soul.

Still from The Seventh Seal (1957)


WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The Seventh Seal is undoubtedly a great movie, but its weirdness is in doubt. In fact, trying to decide if this film is strange enough to make it on the List almost makes me feel like Antonius Block wondering if there’s a God out there.  As an existential allegory, the film has a significant amount of unreality in its corner; although much of the movie is a starkly realistic portrait of medieval life, Bergman often ignores logic in minor ways when necessary to make his larger metaphorical points. He also incorporates the fantastic in one major way, by making Death a literal character in the film, a “living, breathing” character who not only plays chess but also poses as a priest and chops down a tree with his scythe. That’s not much weirdness to go on, though, and the best external support I can find for considering the movie “weird” is the fact that it’s been (inaccurately) tagged with “surrealism” on IMDB. I’m torn; the weird movie community will need to chime in on this one.

COMMENTS: The Seventh Seal has a big, imposing reputation as a masterpiece of world cinema, but if you haven’t seen it yet, you may be surprised to find that most of what you think you know about it is wrong. In the first place, it’s not nearly as gloomy as you may have heard. True, every frame of the film is suffused with the foreknowledge of death—Bergman is very in-your-face with his message that you are going to die, and it’s going to be horrible—but the grim scenes alternate with lighthearted, comic ones. The entire dynamic between the drunken smith Plog, and his unfaithful wife Maria, and her unlucky paramour Scat, for example, has a tone of bawdy Shakespearean comedy. The idyllic scenes where the knight enjoys a meal of milk and wild strawberries with the juggler Jof and his family have a warmth that temporarily drives away the chill—even though there is a skull peering over the Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE GUATEMALAN HANDSHAKE (2006)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Katy Haywood, Sheila Scullin, , Rich Schreiber, Ken Byrnes, Kathleen Kennedy, Ivan Dimitrov,

PLOT: After her boyfriend goes missing a pregnant woman with dozens of sisters (all from

Still from The Guatemalan Handshake (2011)

different mothers) enters a demolition derby against her Guatemalan father… and that’s just one of many plot lines running concurrently in this bizarre rural community.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Although a Guatemalan Handshake sounds like something you’d have to pay extra for at a massage parlor, it’s actually a strange little indie movie that takes the concept of ‘quirky and stretches it way past the breaking point.  Think what would happen if Napoleon Dynamite’s had been hired to remake Gummo as a comedy and you’ll be somewhere in the stylistic neighborhood of this oddly conceived debut.

COMMENTS:  Though things sort themselves out in the end, there’s an excellent chance you’ll be totally lost within the first ten minutes of The Guatemalan Handshake.  The narrator, a spindly young girl named Turkeylegs, explains that her best friend, nerdy turtle-loving Donald, has gone missing, and introduces us to his father (who, like almost everyone else in town, doesn’t much care about his son’s disappearance) and his pregnant girlfriend Sadie, the daughter of a Guatemalan demolition-derby Lothario with dozens of (all-female) illegitimate children he drives around in a school bus.  While you’re still trying to wrap our minds around those details, all of which and more are delivered before the film’s title rolls, you see Donald’s last known appearance, watch a lapdog get electrocuted, and learn of a mysterious power failure whose aftermath is explained in spooky overlapping voiceovers.  More crazy characters appear, including a depressed older woman who wanders around in the background asking if anyone’s seen her missing dog, and Stool, a loser with a bowl haircut and a crustache who can’t hold down a job but nevertheless decides to romance Sadie.  And, as if Handshake‘s capriciously quirky characterizations and the way the story dips in and out of their lives weren’t disorienting enough, the film’s style also changes every few minutes.  Sequences are sped up, and we may suddenly find ourselves inside an unannounced flashback or watching an earnest freak-folk music video or taking in one of the many magical realist digressions, such as TV-personality Spank Williams’ unsuccessful public suicide or the tale of the woman who reads her own obituary in the morning paper.  Even dinner (which for Turkeylegs consists of a chocolate bunny filled with chocolate milk and covered in whipped cream) is an experiment in fast-cutting montage.  It’s winsome, it’s twee, and it annoyed the hell out of a lot of moviegoers who considered it pretentious hipster twaddle with no “real” characters; yet, it’s only fair to point out that all of the indie movie clichés Handshake displays are pushed so far that they become parody, and the film’s detractors may be missing part of the joke.  How seriously can we be intended to take a film that gives its characters with names like Turkeylegs, Stool, Ethel Firecracker and Donald Turnupseed?  Handshake works perfectly in its own conceptual stratosphere, but at ground level things sometimes falter: you can seldom relate to the bizarre characters, and the jokes are more awkward than funny.  And although the film is loosely tied together by the theme of loss—missing persons, lost dogs, and stolen cars—it doesn’t have much to say about its subject.  Handshake‘s only real passions are experimentation and eccentricity.  Whether that’s enough to carry the film is up to the viewer to judge.

The Guatemalan Handshake won the Slamdance special jury prize in 2006.  It didn’t receive theatrical distribution, but the DVD release was surprisingly elaborate: a two disc edition complete with commentary track, numerous behind the scenes features and six short films featuring Handshake‘s cast and crew.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“An understated, surrealist comedy that is more successful at being weird than funny, the film seeks to capture the ‘Napoleon Dynamite’-influenced tone of bizarre small-town quirkiness. It falls short of the mark, but not by much.”–Phil Villareal, Arizona Daily Star (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Funkadelic.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)