Category Archives: List Candidates

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema, List Candidates

BLANCANIEVES (2012)

2 Comments

It has been said the greatest tragedy of silent film is that its era was too brief. It seems Hollywood belatedly agreed with this assessment when they named The Artist (2011, dir. Michael Hazanavicius) only the second silent film to win a Best Picture Oscar (the first was 1927’s Wings, directed by William A. Wellman). The Artist had a somewhat conventionally plotted narrative, clearly patterned after Star is Born (1937, also directed by Wellman), which was perhaps apt, as it borrows silence to portray a silent film. However, its charm and an infectious love of the era won it numerous accolades. Following close on The Artist‘s heels came Blancanieves (2012 dir. Pablo Berger), which did not get nearly the recognition The Artist did, but is the better film. Blancanieves almost feels as indebted to  as it does to the silent era, which may have kept it from attaining the populist status afforded The Artist.

Fifty-year-old NYU film grad Pablo Berger chose a familiar story: the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” This adaptation came on the heels of Hollywood’s pedestrian Snow White And The Huntsman (which predictably made a gazillion dollars) but represents a much darker, idiosyncratic telling of the tale. Berger grasps an important aesthetic of silent film: its sense of otherworldliness. Berger clearly relishes a hallucinatory texture akin to silent artists such as  or . He transplants the story, brimming with humor and tragically latent left-field sexuality, into and around the arena of Spanish bullfights.

The famous toreador Antonio Villalta (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) dispenses of a quintet of bulls, only to be gored by the sixth (the bulls were actually killed, which sparked boycotts by animal rights advocates). Villalta’s pregnant wife Carmen de Triana (Inma Cuesta) witnesses his maiming, which renders him a quadriplegic. This sends Carmen into premature labor, which proves fatal after delivering her namesake. Villalta’s anesthesiologist, Encarna (Maribel Verdú) sees opportunity and maneuvers to marry the tragedy-stricken celebrity, which puts his infant daughter under the care of her grandmother.

Still from Blancanieves (2012)As young Carmen grows, she is never allowed to visit her father. After her grandmother’s death, Carmen is transferred to her father’s estate and sadistic stepmother Encarna. Chopping off Carmen’s hair, butchering her pet rooster, and separating a daughter from her imprisoned, suffering invalid father are the tenets of this quintessentially evil fairy tale mommie dearest.

Reconciliation between father and daughter is managed, albeit briefly, but long enough to tap Carmen’s genetic talents. After her father’s death, Carmen barely escapes being a victim of filicide, and hauntingly evokes as she merges into the grown daughter (played by Macarena Garcia) of both natural parents. Ecarna’s henchman one-ups her Disney counterpart by trying to rape Carmen before plunging the knife, which gets him gored by the feisty daughter of Villalta. Left for dead, Carmen is adopted by seven dwarf matadors.

A career in the ring follows, and, naturally, Carmen and the Los Enanitos Toreros develop a special bond. Blancanieves is equal parts pure joy and delirious darkness (with one of its most perverse scenes being staffers having their photographs taken with a celebrity corpse—shades of a finale to come). Such idiosyncrasy probably does not afford a happily-ever-after option. After learning that her believed-to-be-dead stepdaughter is the new matador taking Spain by storm, Encarna murders her henchman for having failed in his job, and proceeds to the arena with poisoned apple in hand. Blancanieves concludes on a perverse shocker, worthy of .

Like many silent film artists, Berger approaches the seedier elements with good aesthetic taste; the difference being that past artists were required to take such an approach due to period censorship, while Berger chooses to be indirect—and, consequently, gives the film a surprisingly modern vibe.

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD (1973)

2 Comments

La nuit des étoiles filantes; Christina, Princess of Eroticism [alternate director’s cut]

DIRECTED BY: , (additional footage)

FEATURING: Christina von Blanc,  , Britt Nichols, Anne Libert, Jess Franco, Paul Muller

PLOT: A beautiful young girl who has been raised in boarding school in England returns to her fathers’ chateau in France after his death and is introduced to her bizarre (and horny) relatives.

Still from A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The recently deceased (2013) Jesus Franco was a curious artiste: he had an idiosyncratic talent, but he was focused on churning out sex and horror movies so quickly (201 credited features spread over 56 years) that almost all his work inevitably has a half-baked feel about it. His occult obsessions, the value he affords imagery over reason, and the ramshackle nature of his methods tended to produce movies that are at least a little bit weird. Most of these products, however, are also shoddy, boring exercises in exploitation with only a few moments of inspiration. Virgin is, perhaps, his most sustained and atmospheric work, and if a Franco film deserves a place somewhere on the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies ever made, I have yet to come across a better candidate than this one.

COMMENTS: Christina, the titular virgin among the living dead, immediately tells us she “feels like she’s in a strange dream” as a mute chauffeur drives her to her deceased father’s chateau to meet her strange relatives. This is a not-too-subtle hint of what’s to come. Although many of Franco’s movies were incoherent and filled with hallucinatory scenes, Virgin is perhaps his most dreamlike film. It’s filled with strange moments, like a funeral where the family chants a mangled Latin hymn while a cousin paints her toenails and Uncle Howard accompanies them on organ, cigarette dangling from his mouth—the entire bunch is bored, as if this is something they do every Saturday night to pass the time. The other thing they do to pass time is have lots of sadomasochistic sex, including one couple who plays a lesbian-necrophile-vampire sex game with scissors. The female cast is sexy and attractive, but star Christina von Blanc is an absolutely gorgeous creature with big blue-grey eyes and porcelain skin. She’s not a completely vapid actress, either, and it’s a shame that she only has a small handful of appearances in softcore and exploitation films to her name.

There is a running thread about Christina’s relationship to her deceased father, whose ghost she encounters; and there are many vague warnings from others for her to leave this chateau, without anyone directly cluing her in on the fact that everyone inside is dead (that’s not really a spoiler, since it’s pretty much right there in the title). However, while there is a plot, Virgin is mostly a succession of mood pieces and odd scenes (e.g. Christina discovering bats in her bed, Christina wandering in on family members having perverted sex, Christina finding an ebony dildo sitting on her floor) that could almost be played in any order. Distributors took advantage of the episodic nature of the film to splice in extra footage as needed to create variant versions. A (rather lame) outdoor orgy scene was shot to make an even hotter version for the sex-film crowd. More notably, in the early 1980s vampire specialist Jean Rollin was hired to film a ten-minute hallucination with the dead rising from their graves, shot with an obvious stand-in wearing Christina’s white nightgown, to market the movie as a zombie film in order to capitalize on the fad for Dawn of the Dead ripoffs. (The result was retitled Zombie 4: A Virgin Among the Living Dead.) Shot in a similar but distinct occult style, with no dialogue and a much thicker soundtrack, Rollin’s addition literally plays like a dream-within-a-dream, and though purists may hate it, it actually adds to the patchwork surrealism of Franco’s movie. Still, the most unforgettable image comes from Franco himself: the hanged man, who appears to Christina several times, including a mystical moment where he glides backwards along a forest path as she advances towards him, mouth agape and eyes wide with wonder.

Redemption Video’s 2013 release may be titled “A Virgin Among the Living Dead,” but actually the primary version of the film they provide is the Christina, Princess of Eroticism cut. That is the edit that plays by default, and the one that includes a surprisingly serious and in-depth commentary track from Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas. To view the better-known Virgin Among the Living Dead cut (which is substantially identical but includes the Rollin-shot sequences) you must select it from the extras. Also included as extras are the five minutes of “extra erotic footage” appended to early versions of the movie and three featurettes, one of which is an interview with Franco. Most of us old-timers never dreamed a day would come when we’d see a Criterion Collection quality edition of a Jess Franco movie, but here it is.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of Franco’s best, a terrific tone poem that’s reminiscent of a David Lynch crossed with a Hammer film.”–Bill Gibron, DVD Talk (DVD)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: 7 FACES OF DR. LAO (1964)

2 Comments

DIRECTED BY: George Pal

FEATURING: Tony Randall, Arthur O’Connell, Barbara Eden

PLOT: A mysterious “Chinaman fakir” rides into a small western town of Abalone and shows the cartoonish townspeople a variety of colorful wonders to teach them that life is a mystery and a marvel. Still from 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Although a sappy message-movie about the power of imagination, any film that shows you a faun in cutoff shorts drawing out the lust in a priggish school teacher, and then minutes later unveils a mustachioed serpent telling his human likeness that the man is the most imperfect creature he’s ever seen, at least deserves some consideration for the List of the 366 best weird movies.

COMMENTS: “Ye ever see a catfish ridin’ on a yellow jackass before?”

Although at first glance 7 Faces of Dr. Lao is a contrived, tedious “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”-esque story of the purity and wonder of a young boy befriended by a whimsical fantasy-lander among the hee-hawing bumpkins and self-absorbed dowagers, that message gets lost in the excessive phantasmagoria that suffuses the film. We see a bunch of campy characters in western attire living contentedly in the realm of stereotype: there’s the domineering husband and wife (“No no, dear. I don’t mean to give you the jitters”); there are the bigoted goons (“only good Injun’s a dead Injun!”); then there’s tight-lipped prude of a librarian, Angela Benedict (“the section on courtesy and good manner is over there”), destined to fall in love with the blockheaded newspaperman, Ed Cunningham, who’s found a home among the plastic cacti and tumbleweeds. The solution to shake up these trite archetypes appears to be another one: a comedic white man playing a Chinese mystic, with a painful vehemence lacking in Sidney Toler’s Charlie Chan or ’s Fu Manchu. The sound of Chinese bells and Pipa strings replace the music of banjos and harmonicas. Dr. Lao shows up to awe and confound the Abalonians with a variety of disguises, including an organ-grinding yeti and a Medusa in a stop-motion-animated wig. Inside his circus tent (that’s much bigger on the inside, naturally) Dr. Lao turns women to stone and tells the sad futures of blithering widows. He opens his show with a stock footage barrage of fireworks that represents the colorful but tame cabinet of wonders. A wavering-voiced Merlin makes flowers grow instantly and an inch-long sea serpent swims in fishbowl. But then things get crazy: behind one curtain a seductive faun beguiles the librarian with a dizzying tune on the pan pipes, and behind another, the evil real estate mogul encounters a serpent with his face. After yokels pause their “What in Tom Thunder?!” astonishment or skepticism, we return to the strained message movie when Dr. Lao befriends a torturously acted little boy, Mike, in whom he sees an active imagination and appreciation for life. That sickeningly artificial message encapsulates the film, and dismisses the genuine weirdness of Lao’s creations.  However, stop-motion animator turned director George Pal seems far more interested in the lavish set pieces than teaching kids life lessons. The film most drastically diverges from kiddie-matinee flick with the sexual awakening of the librarian love interest who unbuttons her shirt, panting while the well-oiled faun twirls lasciviously. The film further ignores the corny confines of the message with a climax that includes a rocket-powered rain making machine and some drunk bumpkins fighting an ever-growing Lochness monster in the desert, all underscored by a soundtrack of anarchic bagpipes. When Lao leaves in a plume of smoke, much to the dismay of Mike, we’re left stranded with the Abalone bumpkins wondering: “What in the heck was that all about?”

But who is Doctor Lao anyway? Is he a whimsical Chinese guru capable of transforming into six circus entertainers, or is his “Chinaman” persona a role like all the others? At times he drops the “velly solly” accent when speaking to Mike, explaining that he talks in “whatever dialect the mood requires.” This statement explains his divine talent for manifesting himself in a form specifically attuned to whoever’s observing. It is only to Mike that he drops his cadre of disguises, because he sees no need for artifice in the presence of a boy fertile with imagination. His role as master of deception to the dull-minded Abalonians explains his need for fantastical disguises, but the reason for Dr. Lao’s brief stay in the middle-of-nowhere burg remains a mystery left unsolved, due to his seeming lack of effect on the town. Instead of leaving the Abalonians blessed with ability to see life as a circus despite their mundane lives, he leaves the desert ruffians dazed and spouting the same tiresome exposition as always. The only changes Dr. Lao makes in Abalone are galvanizing the townspeople to vote against selling their land to Stark, and chemically developing a romance between Ed and Angela. Lao has the power to catch fish in dry rivers and render the local bigots senseless (with the help of some twinkling music), so obviously he has some ulterior plan beyond running a fabulous circus. Why did he come? Why does he care about Abalone? Why does a man with supreme power charge five cents for fortune telling? Dr. Lao, false god or just brilliant entertainer, leaves us with only a phony moral and the memory of a phantasmagorical circus.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a curious concoction of superb effects and makeup (William Tuttle won the first ever Oscar for makeup design for his work here) and a schmaltzy, moralising tone that doesn’t immediately speak to all audiences.–Graeme Clark, “The Spinning Image” (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by kengo, who said that the movie “has a lot of weirdness in it.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

7 Faces of Dr. Lao [Blu-ray]

7 Faces of Dr. Lao [Blu-ray]

  • Blu-ray

List Price : 27.99 $

Offer: 25.84 $

Go to Amazon
List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: YELLOWBRICKROAD (2010)

4 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY:  Jesse Holland, Andy Mitton

FEATURING:  Cassidy Freeman, Anessa Ramsey, Laura Heisler, Lee Wilkof, Clark Freeman, Michael Laurino, Alex Draper, Tara Giordano, Sam Elmore

PLOT:  A small entourage of pseudo-anthropologists encounters disorientation, bedlam and horror on the trail of a historic mass disappearance.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Yellowbrickroad’s set-up is not so odd—a bunch of 20-somethings lost in the woods. We’ve seen this a thousand times, although some very strange things occur in the woods in Yellowbrickroad. What pushes it over the precipice of weird is the ending, and what it means. The gruesome, ethereal ending changes the entire story into a bizarre horror odyssey, and this, combined with surreal settings and occasional use of blue monochrome cinematography, deliver a viewing experience that morphs from garden variety unusual to full-blown weird.

COMMENTS:  A fortnight ago I discussed the independent puzzler, Resolution (2012).  It’s plodding and pensive, but delivers on its clever high concept with a disturbing climax. The glibly-titled Yellowbrickroad follows a like formula and offers a similar experience. It’s enigmatic, and saves all of its open-ended answers for its lurid finale. While Yellowbrickroad has fewer puzzler paradoxes than Resolution, first time feature film writer/directors Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton do a pretty good job considering their half mil micro-budget, incorporating intriguing and colorful elements of mystery, and a couple of mesmerizing characters, into the script.

In Yellowbrickroad, several young academics set out to re-chart a rural New England zone inexplicably reopened and declassified after an unsolved mass exodus emptied a nearby town 70 years ago. And, you guessed, it, everyone disappeared into them thar hills. Except for their intestines, that is.

OK, not just their intestines. Other parts were found too, but not nearly enough to account for everyone. Some of the emigrants, intestines and all, just…well they just vanished. We get the general idea.

Or do we?

Because, except for several token nods to the 1939 classic The Wizard Of Oz, Yellowbrickroad’s enigma is so perplexing that we mostly forget to question several pretty far-fetched plot holes. Such as why people in the town where everyone disappeared a generation ago are so tight-lipped. If everyone left, presumably today’s residents aren’t the descendents, and so have no stake in the matter.

But that’s OK, because something so unspeakable pervades the locale that just maybe it has a hold on everyone who is afraid to talk about it. One thing’s for sure: when a group of 20-somethings venture into the spooky, spooky hills in search of a macabre mystery, we can predict that…well, let’s just say, “we knew there’d be death!” A lot of it.

To its credit however, Yellowbrickroad avoids typical deep woods “boo!” and splatter clichés, instead building on the atmosphere inherent in being disoriented in a labyrinthine forest. As the team’s equipment fails, so do their minds, and the fact-seeking sleuths succumb to bedlam and violence. Time and space mean something different here, and all the while, period music from the era of the disappearance inexplicably wafts across the landscape. The trekkers can’t determine it’s source—or the way back. The path, nicknamed the “Yellow Brick Road” since its original followers departed from a local theater playing The Wizard Of Oz, held then, as today, some kind of symbolic “way out.”

Or not.

For the woods have swallowed our crew of intrepid explorers, their navigational aids won’t work, and there seems to be no way off the trail. Reminiscent of an old fable about suicide, in which those who killed themselves were presumed to be dissatisfied with reality, and wound up sentenced to increasingly topsy-turvy, contrary worlds each time they attempted escape, the Yellow Brick Road in Yellowbrickroad obviously leads to some much weirder reality, with the grim caveat of “be careful what you wish for.”

Like the aforementioned Resolution, or the engrossing but talky, independent sci-fi thriller Primer (2004), Yellowbrickroad is a niche film. It takes its dialogue-saturated time delivering us to the sensational payoff. All three vehicles would be more effective as half-hour shorts.

Yellowbrickroad offers some gruesome, blackly comedic skullduggery along the way, however, and there’s one forceful, enigmatic early hint of what is to come: an unsettling sound effect that everyone will instantly recognize, but absolutely not be able to place. Until the ending, that is, which slaps you with a sickening epitome of recognition. Understanding the sound only adds to the shock value and will have you repeating the tagline from the 1972  The Last House On The Left: “it’s only a movie.”

Yellowbrickroad (2010) 450 2

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…by about the one-hour mark, nothing has really happened, and instead of continuing to slow simmer the tension, they turn the carnage up to 11 and we arrive at something resembling a mid-’90s Marilyn Manson music video. Just bizarre.”–Michael C. Walsh, The Boston Phoenix (contemporaneous)

Yellowbrickroad movie trailer

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: RUSSIAN ARK (2002)

7 Comments

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Aleksandr Sokurov

FEATURING: Sergey Dreyden, Aleksandr Sokurov

PLOT: In one take, a ghostlike figure wanders through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, watching re-enactments of Russian history and debating art and culture with a French aristocrat.

Still from Russian Ark (2002)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: As the longest unbroken take in the history of cinema, Russian Ark is somewhat experimental in form, and with its intermingling of various eras of Russian history inside the Hermitage museum, it is somewhat surreal in content. Viewed simply as tour de force filmmaking, it’s worth seeing for the curious and cultured, and a must-see for film school types. The film’s only drawback is that its high art, highly Russophilic preoccupations make it unavoidably stuffy at times, and risk limiting its appeal to the tea-and-crumpets (er, samovar-and-beluga?) crowd.

COMMENTS: Who is the main character of Russian Ark? Ghost? Amnesiac time traveler? Dreamer? Or just a metaphorical representative of the Russian spirit? The speaker through whose eyes we watch Russian Ark remembers some vague accident, but opens his eyes to see women in furs and feathered headdresses emerging from a carriage; accompanied by men in formal scarlet military uniforms, he judges their fashions to be from the 1800s. He’s swept along with the guests from a snowy courtyard through a wooden door; he eventually deduces he is the Winter Palace section of the Hermitage, the ancient home of the Czars that was turned into the world’s largest art museum. No can see or hear him until he encounters an older man in black, who is equally lost in time and space; this is the Marquis, who will be his companion through the rest of his odyssey through the Hermitage.

That journey involves the pair passing through the various rooms of the museum, some of which are occupied by today’s art patrons, and some by ghosts from prior ages, including Peter the Great, Anastasia, and Catherine the Great (who is looking for a chamberpot). Curiously, there is little focus on the individual works of art; the camera rarely gives the paintings and statuary more than a passing glance, instead maintaining a constant wide-angle view of each sprawling, packed chamber. We watch courtly episodes from history and eavesdrop on some conversations, but the meat of the movie are the conversations between the European Marquis and the modern Russian through whose eyes we see the museum. Some of their dialogue is absurd, but much of it is self-reflective hand-wringing over the state of Russian culture. Russians come off as having a bit of an inferiority complex towards Europe. The Marquis sneers that Russians are great copyists in the fine arts, but produce nothing original; all the great works in the museum come from the French, the Italians, or others. He is disdainful towards the Russian people, yet he is slowly won over by the final scene, a massive Czarist ball where he joins in a mazurka with the ghosts of past maidens. Overcome with nostalgia for the lovely aristocratic past, the Marquis decides to stay behind at the phantasmagorical ballet. His decision validates the Ark’s role in preserving Western culture, but the Russian chooses to go on without him, headed towards an unknown destiny. Although we get a few clues as to the man behind the point-of-view’s identity, it isn’t really important. Russian Ark‘s main character is actually the Hermitage.

Russian Ark was shot in a single 87-minute take with a digital camera that followed the characters through thirty-three rooms of the Winter Palace. The cast included over 2,000 extras, and a full orchestra, all of whom had to be costumed and choreographed. Rehearsals lasted for months before the shot was attempted. Depending on which source you believe, the take was flawlessly executed on either the third or the fourth attempt. (To make things slightly easier, the sound was recorded later). Only one day was allocated to actual filming.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If cinema is sometimes dreamlike, then every edit is an awakening. ‘Russian Ark’ spins a daydream made of centuries.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Jenn, who insightfully suggested that it was “perhaps artsy instead of weird” but added “[i]t is super pretty and certainly unusual and dreamy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)