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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: U-TURN (1997)

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PLOT: Bobby Cooper, a man missing two fingers and toting a suitcase full of money, gets stuck in a ramshackle desert community while fleeing mobsters.

Still from U-Turn (1997)

COMMENTS: About half a dozen times over the first third of U Turn, different people ask Bobby (Penn) what happened to his hand and then, upon hearing his repeated refrain of “an accident,” respond with the sage advice: “You should be more careful!” Bobby is indeed living the life of a careless man, as mobsters cut off two of his fingers after growing impatient with his failure to pay his debts. He’s now on the lam with a suitcase full of the mob’s money and a Ford Mustang. When he blows a radiator hose, he lands in the tiny desert town of Superior, Arizona.

Woe betide Bobby, who enters Superior like a mouse tossed into a rattlesnake terrarium. First, he’s ripped off by the town mechanic Darrell (Billy Bob Thornton as a bafflingly self-assured whacko who’s just bright enough to run a scam, but not a watt brighter). Then he loses his case of money in a store robbery. Next he follows local femme fatale Grace McKenna (Lopez) home and gets seduced right out of the shower, only to get punched by her husband, Jake (Nick Nolte), who makes things up to Bobby with a business proposal: help him kill his wife. (No worries, she’ll immediately flip the script.) But are Jake and Grace really lethal rivals trapped in a toxic marriage, or sadomasochist sickos who trick strangers into their badger games? How about the rest of the town, bristling with testy characters who want to start a fight with Bobby, or at least make him miserable? Sheriff Potter (lantern-jawed Boothe, sporting a five-thirty shadow) seems always on the verge of either saving Bobby from peril or locking him up, but one thing’s for sure: he knows more than he lets on.

What unfolds from all this is a pile-up of schemes and counter-schemes with Bobby trying (and mostly failing) to dodge incoming shots. All he wants is to get out of Superior in the worst way, yet an almost supernatural streak of bad luck thwarts him. The plot dutifully veers down a new hairpin twist every twenty minutes or so,  with a pacing that suggests on a Palm Springs vacation. The eccentric characters of Superior prompt Bobby to exclaim, “Is everybody in this town on drugs?” A blind old beggar (Voight) who panhandles on main street becomes Bobby’s personal Jiminy Cricket, offering him half-mad advice culled from a very rugged life. Can Bobby maneuver his way through this thorny desert maze of scheming reptiles and escape?

This is one well-crafted movie with memorable lines and characters, a sure treat for noir fans. Stone occasionally slips into a bit of cartoonish editing, but dwells longingly on the captivating desert scenery. The camera intermittently cuts to shots of vultures, snakes, coyotes, scorpions, and other deadly desert predators, drawing clear comparisons to Superior’s citizens. As a former southwest desert dweller myself, your humble author can verify that U-Turn perfectly gets small-town life there: the run-down businesses, the eccentric oddballs, the harsh environment, and the philosophy that you’d better have a good survival strategy or you have no business being here. The cast does an outstanding job all around. Penn is perfect as Bobby, because he’s a bit of an asshole anyway—so you don’t feel much sympathy for his plight, allowing the film to linger in comedy territory.

U-Turn had a budget of $19 million (clearly going to its all-star cast) and only made $6.6 million, a complete flop. That’s a shame, because it’s well-done and Stone obviously poured love into it. But this is a very lightweight, almost fluffy work, with the whole film amounting to little more than a shaggy dog story (albeit one with a body count). Some fans might compare it to a southwestern version of After Hours. But that’s the one problem with U-Turn: it feels like filler between bigger and better films. It’s good popcorn viewing while it lasts, but hours later it rolls out of your memory like the cinematic tumbleweed that it is.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The first two thirds of U-Turn is a rude, seductive head bender. But around the time it turns from day to night, the film begins to lose its tricky aura of borderline surreal mystery. It becomes another rigged, what-will-happen-next suspense game, and you begin to sense just how arbitrary the twists are. “–Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly (contemporaneous)

U:Turn

U:Turn

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ROCK-A-DOODLE (1991)

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DIRECTED BY: Don Bluth

FEATURING: Voices of Glen Campbell, Phil Harris, Christopher Plummer, Ellen Greene, , , Sorrell Booke, Sandy Duncan, Toby Scott Ganger

PLOT: Chanticleer, the rooster whose morning crow brings daylight, leaves for the big city to become a singing star after the Duke of Owls banishes sunlight.

Still from Rock-a-Doodle (1991)

COMMENTS: Walt Disney Animation, purveyors of fine animated fairy tales since 1937, tried in three separate decades to build a feature out of the medieval tale of the arrogant Chanticleer, whose call was thought to summon the sun. The rooster boasted a fine pedigree, including an appearance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a starring role in a play by Edmond Rostand of Cyrano de Bergerac fame, so a film showcasing a big singing bird seemed right up the studio’s alley. Alas, despite repeated attempts and the efforts of some of the Disney crew’s greatest storytellers in the studio’s history (including Uncle himself), they never found a way to make the story work, finding the central character too unlikable. Maybe it’s just a point of stubborn pride that Disney apostate Don Bluth, who notoriously ditched the 70s-era Mouse House due to its lethargic approach to animation, concluded he was the man to crack the code.

Bluth’s solution was to deliver story in bulk. In addition to the source tale, we’ve got the addition of a new villain with a plot to block out the sun permanently, a mapped-on telling of the later years of a certain king of rock ‘n’ roll and his manipulative manager, the adventures of a bunch of country animals new to the city, and most oddly, a live-action framing story in which a young boy is reading the very story we have been watching, only to be dragged into it himself by a torrential rainstorm accompanied by a surprise dose of magic. The resulting movie somehow suffers both from a surfeit of plot and an alarming lack of it. There’s an awful lot going on, and it’s well-animated, but there’s not enough time for anything to get the attention it needs. (Subtract the credits, and the film barely squeezes by at an hour.) The movie is an undercooked omelet with too many ingredients.

Rock-a-Doodle reeks of post-production panic. The rapid-fire intro strongly suggests a first act hacked to pieces by studio notes and confused comment cards, and the solution seems to be enlisting Harris (a Disney mainstay making his final film appearance) to ladle more and more narration on top of the hastily edited footage in an effort to knit the disparate elements together. Logic takes a beating; it’s hard to reconcile The Duke’s plan to destroy all sunlight with the fact that Chanticleer is shown that the sun continues to rise without him.

Bizarrely, the movie consistently undercuts its best idea: Chanticleer as Elvis. It’s a cute notion to pair up the cock who heralds the sun with the pelvis stops millions of hearts, and the bird’s coxcomb is an amusing analogy to Elvis’ famed pompadour. Bluth and Co. know this is the twist that sets their version apart, and they almost go all in. Bringing in Glen Campbell to voice the character (his ability to impersonate Presley was so pronounced that songwriters frequently hired him as a stand-in for demo recordings). Enlisting Elvis’ own backing group, the Jordanaires. Lacing the film with choice elements including Vegas glitz, rockabilly tunes, and a Colonel Tom Parker analogue. And then, having gone to such great lengths to rhyme with the legend of The King, the filmmakers proceed to interfere with every single one of Chanticleer’s musical numbers, burying them beneath dialogue, sound effects, or narration. We don’t get to hear a single performance all the way through until the closing credits. Every chance to appreciate the joke is obliterated. It’s a perplexing act of self-sabotage.

Rock-A-Doodle feels like an idea that might possibly have worked if given the chance. It also feels like an idea that was thrown into the meat grinder because it didn’t work at all. It’s hard to know which is right. All we can know for certain is that Disney said no thrice, while Bluth said yes once, and it’s the little guy who probably rues his decision.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…in the end I had to surrender every shred of reason and common sense and just go along for the ride. Everything about it, from the grotesque delirium of the animated city sequences to the cornball artifice of the live action scenes with Edmond and his family, is so bizarre and tonally misjudged that it offers up a perverse kind of pleasure. I’m actually amazed that this film doesn’t have a more robust cult following – it has ‘midnight screening’ written all over it. … I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with a penchant for the weird and inexplicable.” – Scampy, The Spirochaete Trail

(This movie was nominated for review by Suren. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

Rock-A-Doodle

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Capsules

CAPSULE: EXIT 8 (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Genki Kawamura

FEATURING: Kazunari Ninomiya, Yamato Kôchi, Naru Asanuma

PLOT: An expectant father finds himself trapped in a seemingly never-ending subway corridor.

Still from Exit 8 (2025)

COMMENTS: In recent years, an increasing number of movies and TV shows have attempted to adapt video games. At the same time, there is a trend inside the indie gaming landscape of making psychological horror adventures set in liminal spaces, transitional places with an unsettling vibe. The 2023 game “Exit 8” by Kotake Create is an iconic short game of this subgenre. 2 years later, collaborating with the original work’s creator, Genki Kawamura translates this piece for the cinematic medium.

The backstory becomes apparent from the beginning, with the setup explaining our main character and his anxieties as an expectant father. The protagonist is then trapped inside a unique one-way subway labyrinth where he needs to spot “anomalies” and then immediately change his direction if he wants to escape. This begins a surreal odyssey not dissimilar from space-bending cinematic tales in the vein of ’s The Incident (2014) or ’s Vivarium (2019).

We can also trace aesthetic influences from video games, and not only from the eponymous game this work is based upon. For starters, there is a segment early on where POV shots recall the first-person perspective of the original game and many other survival horror titles. The “Silent Hill” game franchise is a clear influence. As in that series, the supernatural anomalies our hero encounters are a distorted reflection of his scarred psyche, bringing narrative depth and character development to the table. The original “Exit 8” game had nothing like that.

Another change from the original is the introduction of secondary characters. Our hero encounters other trapped souls inside this endless corridor, each with his or her own identity and backstory. While one person’s journey was enough to sustain the short experience of the original game, more characters are necessary for a meaningful feature-length experience.

From a technical perspective, this work is astonishing. The environments are the perfect recreation of the original game’s virtual spaces, with uncannily vibrant reflected light. There are also great body horror effects that will entertain fans of the weird and grotesque. Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” underlines our protagonist’s inner conflicts and his transformative journey.

In the end, it is better to approach this movie as a stand-alone piece rather than an adaptation. It offers something completely different from the work that inspired it, using its predecessor’s simple formula as a metaphor for insecurities, anxieties, and existential angst, creating a unique narrative in the process.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film mines tension from the absurdity of the Lost Man’s confinement, and in ways that recall Vincenzo Natali’s Cube, perhaps the granddaddy of escape-room horror. To that end, Kawamura at times pushes the original game’s subtle eeriness into full-on scares, introducing spooky apparitions and a horde of mutated creatures that would feel at home in Silent Hill.”–Mark Hanson, Slant (contemporaneous) 

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: HELTER SKELTER (2012)

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Herutâ sukerutâ

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DIRECTED BY: Mika Ninagawa

FEATURING: Erika Sawajiri, , , Kiko Mizuhara, Nao Ômori

PLOT:  The struggle to keep up appearances and growing pressure from younger models pushes supermodel Lilico’s physical and mental well-being to the breaking point.

Still from Helter Skelter (2012)

COMMENTS: A helter skelter is a slide. A lighthouse-shaped structure that you climb up through the inside to then slide down on a curving ramp nailed to the outside. The Beatles’ song of the same name gives it away in its opening lyric: “When I get to the bottom, I go back to the top of the slide.” Regardless of what Charles Manson thought it meant, it’s supposed to be about something that’s fun for a brief moment, but it’s also a reminder that everything that goes up must eventually come back down, and sometimes right quickly at that.

If the higher you go means the faster you fall, then Lilico is about to come crashing down at light speed. She is living her peak life: impossibly beautiful, her face graces countless magazine covers and advertisements. She’s about to branch out into film acting, and every girl in Japan knows her by name. So when she spots a sizeable flaw in her perfect skin, it’s a literal crack in her facade, the augur of an explosive downfall. Helter Skelter is all about that implosion, the slow-motion train wreck of her discovery that perfect beauty has always had an expiration date, and that page on the calendar has finally turned.

It’s hard to work up a lot of pity for someone who is rich, famous, and ridiculously attractive, but Helter Skelter does a solid job in showing how Lilico’s life of luxury is not especially enjoyable. She is monstrous but also desperate, and how her misery expresses itself is the primary source of Helter Skelter’s weirdness. She takes out her rage on her doggedly loyal assistant Hana through sexual abuse and humiliation, and starts to have out-of-control hallucinations at inconvenient moments. The fact that she is being tracked by a pair of detectives who resemble the cast of a Japanese reboot of “The X-Files” is appropriate, because Lilico herself is otherworldly. These moments of panic and cruelty are so outlandish, so extreme, that the biggest surprise is that we are expected to view them realistically. Perhaps tales like The Substance have trained us to expect a supernatural element, but Helter Skelter offers no twist. The film straightforwardly insists that Lilico’s beauty has a scientific (if illegal and amoral) explanation, and that her behavior is all her own. The arrival of her very own Eve Harrington, the naturally stunning Kozue, who achieves success despite expressing apathy toward the  fashion business, reinforces that point. Kozue doesn’t expect to be beautiful forever, and while she knows some regurgitation goes with the job, she plans to give it up someday. By contrast, considering everything Lilico has done to secure her position, her fear of decline and the collapse of her enhanced body utterly short-circuit her.

Japanese culture is both fascinated and repelled by celebrity, and Helter Skelter enlists exactly the right people to delve into its darker side. Director Ninagawa was a fashion photographer herself, and she films with the barely controlled energy of a wild photo shoot. Sawajiri also knows the world, having been a successful model before turning to acting. (She gained notoriety for a press conference where she was viewed as disrespectful to reporters and her castmates alike, so audiences in Japan would experience art imitating life in Lilico’s ultimate, disastrous encounter with the media.) Their bona fides are beyond reproach, and there’s no question that the team produces a motion picture with a unique sensibility, bringing their personal experience to the story. The thing is, while Helter Skelter is a beautifully crafted film, a certain sameness creeps in as the story seems to be building toward something cataclysmic, but never quite gets there. Lilico’s fate is inevitable—it is painfully obvious that she is going to crash—but given the many omens of doom and the explosive nature of Ninagawa’s camera and Sawajiri’s volcanic performance, the impact ultimately feels blunted. Lilico’s fate can’t quite live up to the drama of what precedes it.

Helter Skelter is based on a popular manga by Kyoko Okazaki, and it feels like it. It jumps storylines and techniques like a page turning, and the bold and vibrant colors and off-kilter angles feel like they could have jumped straight out of the pages of a comic book. The film’s most striking image, when Lilico faces a room full of popping camera flashes, has the veneer of illustration. But like fashion itself, the movie is successful at delivering style and attitude but quickly moves on to the next new thing without imparting a message beyond the surface. It’s a fun, fast ride, but it’s just a ride. Then I get to the bottom and I see you again.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a feverish character study about fame, vanity, and the terrifying fragility of manufactured perfection… The visuals never settle into a comfortable place. Scenes are filled with exaggerated color palettes and surreal staging, making the environment feel beautiful and suffocating. It’s a world built entirely around image, and Ninagawa constantly reminds the audience how artificial that image really is.” – Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews

(This movie was nominated for review by Scott R. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

Helter Skelter

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Capsules

CAPSULE: PINK LADY’S MOTION PICTURE (1978)

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Pinku redi no katsudo dai shashin

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DIRECTED BY: Tsugunobu Kotani

FEATURING: Keiko Masuda, Mie, Isamu Ago

PLOT: A director, a producer, and a folklorist seek the perfect idea for a movie to promote the pop band “The Pink Lady.”

Still from Pink Lady's Motion Picture (1978)

COMMENTS: How to promote a pop band cinematically? Through a musical, of course, but what kind? This movie takes this question as its starting point, exploring it through three distinct tales that traverse genres and styles.

The subject here is the iconic, albeit obscure, pop musical duo “The Pink Lady,” mad up of two girls singing as one. According to Wikipedia, they were a short-lived, briefly popular act from the late-70s and early-80s, featuring Mie and Keiko Masuda (formerly known as Kei). The movie makes clear from early on—especially through its exaggerated acting—that it will retain a lighthearted comic tone, while at the same time being self-conscious and self-referential.

This aspect of self-parody becomes apparent as we watch a film director, a folklorist, and a producer come together to brainstorm ideas for an upcoming movie about the duo. Each one of them has his own idea of what this movie should be, and chaos ensues. For viewers, this results in a fun romp, a mix of genres, each depicting a different take on the musical they want to create. We have an old-fashioned romantic melodrama, a cheesy sci-fi monster movie, and a western. Mie and Kei are always the protagonists, with playful musical numbers accompanying the story beats.

Pink Lady’s Motion Picture isn’t afraid to embrace absurdism. It doesn’t always makes perfect sense, and it doesn’t need to. But it’s not subversive or transgressive in any serious way; it’s harmless, mindless entertainment for mass consumption by a local, albeit westernized, Japanese audience. The flick is also of sociological interest, depicting, through the juxtaposition of disparate cinematic genres, a society divided between tradition and foreign influence.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[the production] consciously emulated the breezy stream-of-consciousness aesthetic of A HARD DAYS’ NIGHT (1964), and can also be viewed as a forerunner to SPICE WORLD… The film overall is colorful and energetic, but bears the marks of a hasty and ill thought-out production… fans of Mei and Kei will likely be satisfied.  Everyone else, however, is advised to turn their attention elsewhere.”–Adam Groves, The Bedlam Files