Category Archives: Capsules

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE BIRDS (1963)

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DIRECTED BY: Alfred Hitchcock

FEATURING: , Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, , Veronica Cartwright

PLOT: Without explanation, birds begin attacking the quiet seaside town of Bogeda Bay, interrupting a burgeoning love affair between a socialite and a lawyer.

Still from The Birds (1963)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A great movie, but only the raw inexplicability of the avian attacks makes this Hitchcock worthy of any particular weird notice.

COMMENTS: The crow has long been an omen of death, but never have our fine feathered friends been so conspicuously thantatotic as in Alfred Hitchcock’s first true horror (as opposed to suspense) film. Hitch’s typical plotting trick—beginning with one situation, then springing a twist in the movie’s first half that makes the opening irrelevant—has never worked as well thematically as it does here. Melanie and Mitch’s coy flirtations, cultured as they may be, are rendered ridiculous midway through the film in light of the raw realities of the assault from above. And yet, by the time the first wave of pecking finches swoop through the chimney, we’re invested in the pair. The birds—natural, inexorable, and inexplicable, brooding on their makeshift roosts—are the perfect images of death, looming for all of us. Thoughts of romance may occupy the early reels, but as the story moves on, the birds’ inevitable victory over our heroes becomes clear, and the tale turns to the desperate, if doomed, fight for survival.

Incredibly, you will sometimes hear people complain that the movie is flawed because it does not explain why the birds are attacking. Providing an explanation would have turned The Birds into the silliest type of B-movie fare. How unsatisfying would it be if  it turned out the birds had gone mad from drinking water contaminated with waste from an experimental nuclear reactor? The heart of The Birds‘ horror is the incomprehensibility of the attack, which reflects the incomprehensibility of our own mortality. The inconclusiveness of the scene in the restaurant where the townsfolk debate the cause of the catastrophe is the centerpiece of the film, dramatizing the residents’ utter failure to come to grips with the situation and the futility of their plight. One citizen theorizes that, unmotivated, the birds have suddenly declared war on humanity; a scientist absurdly spends her time explaining why what is happening can’t be happening; the crazy old coot in the corner warns that it’s the end of the world. (That last guess is probably the closest to being correct, though there’s no Biblical element to the story).

One woman assumes that, because there were no bird attacks before Melanie came to town, the disaster is the interloper’s fault. Perhaps; Melanie’s reaction (slapping the woman) suggests guilt. Melanie’s arrival stirs the Freudian pot between Mitch and his widowed mother, and brings schoolteacher Annie’s buried feelings back to the surface—she’s a destabilizing sexual force. (Curious that almost all the major roles in the film go to females, with Mitch alone at the center of a web of women). Besides those psychological teases, there’s also an inevitable Cold War subtext the film. When the birds strike and the family is holed up in their homes, seeking any news of the disaster on the radio, it surely must have struck a cord with American audiences still on edge from 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis. The chilling final shot of a bird-strewn pre-dawn landscape is like a post-apocalyptic world covered in feathered fallout.

Universal’s 2014 Blu-ray release is essentially the single disc version of The Birds disc from the “Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection” 15-disc box set. It’s packed with extra features too numerous to list here; there are actually more minutes devoted to the bonuses than to the two-hour movie itself. Hitch’s blackly ironic trailer where he “lectures” on humanity’s historical relations with his fine feathered friends is typically droll and brilliant.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Few films depict so eerily yet so meticulously the metaphysical and historical sense of a world out of joint.”–Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ROOM (2003)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Tommy Wiseau, Juliette Danielle,

PLOT: A trusting banker’s fiancée cheats on him with his best friend.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Room is certainly… um, unusual (actually, more like delusional). While it’s a qualified “must-see” for seekers of the offbeat, it’s more on-the-surface-stupid than deeply, derangedly weird.

Still from The Room (2003)
COMMENTS: When The Room begins it seems like a normal movie. There is a professional-looking spinning “W” logo for Wiseau-Films, competent establishing shots of the Golden Gate bridge and other Frisco landmarks, and an overture that is not conspicuously awful. Then, in the very first scene Tommy Wiseau strides through the door with his long, stringy black hair framing a face that looks like a cadaver shot up with Botox. “Hai babe,” he says in an unplaceable, lilting mutt-Eurotrash accent that seems vaguely French, vaguely Polish. “I haf sumfink for yoo-ooo.” What follows is a soapy melodrama in which universally-beloved paragon-of-benevolence Johnny (Wiseau) is relentlessly betrayed by manipulative, ungrateful fiancée Lisa. That may seem like a pretty slender storyline to try to hang a ninety-minute feature on, and it is. Wiseau the writer is aware of this fact, and so he stuffs the script full of subplots (not to mention three gauzy slow-jam sex scenes in the first half hour alone, complete with a tasteful shot of Wiseau’s bum for the ladies). Lisa’s mother has breast cancer. Lisa accuses Johnny of beating her. Denny, a teenage orphan Johnny is putting through college, has the hots for Lisa. A couple of friends of the unhappy couple break into their apartment to make out, and are discovered by Lisa and her mother. Denny owes money to a drug dealer named Chris-R. Johnny and his friends put on tuxedos and throw around the football until one of them trips and they call the game off. Lisa lies about being pregnant. The problem with these subplots is that they almost all exist only within the scene their introduced in, and are either completely forgotten or never affect the story in any significant way again.

Still, all of this nonsensicality would have resulted in a forgettably awful movie if not for the odd screen presence of Wiseau, whose incongruous anti-charisma adds a layer of perverse fascination. Wiseau looks two decades older than the twenty-something actors who are supposed to be his friends and contemporaries. His miscellaneous accent and his inability to keep his eyes open past half mast already mark him as an odd leading man, but he is also one of the single worst thespians ever to appear onscreen. While the rest of the cast shows soap opera-level acting skills most of the time—except when whipped into histrionics by the discovery that Denny is involved with drugs—Wiseau struggles to match his facial expression and tone of voice to the situation at hand. He laughs at tragic stories, and barely shows any emotion when he’s fuming mad. When he does manage to overreact—as in his infamous “Lisa, you’re tearing me apart!” line—it’s actually surprising that he has somehow nailed the correct emotion, even if he’s failed to convey it believably.

Wiseau scripted himself as a character with no flaws, except for loving too much. The story is obviously based on post-breakup delusions of victimhood, combined with “she’d be sorry if…” passive/aggressive fantasies. Although I hate to play amateur psychologist, Wiseau appears to suffer from a benign form of narcissistic personality disorder, combined with a touch of high-functioning autism. He portrays himself as a lovable victim, but watching The Room, I only felt embarrassed on his behalf (that is, when not breaking up in peals of laughter at his unintentionally inappropriate reactions). Wiseau’s cluelessness seems sad to me, not endearing like lovable naive auteur like . Perhaps this is merely because Wiseau is still with us, and I’ll be fonder of him once he’s passed on.

Co-star Juliette Danielle was only twenty years old and almost literally right off the bus from Texas when she was cast as Wiseau’s conniving love interest. Wide-eyed and excited to be making a movie, the young girl was so humiliated after the film’s disastrous debut and the subsequent jokes made at her expense that she not only retired from acting, but virtually went into hiding for nine years (she’s only recently emerged as a stand-up comic and actress, finally embracing her notoriety). Making a bad movie is all fun and games, until somebody’s career gets ruined.

On a happier note, co-star Greg Sestero wrote a memoir describing the making of The Room and his relationship with Wiseau (much of whose past, including his nationality and the source of the six million dollars he allegedly spent from his own pocket to produce his trashterpiece, remain cloaked in mystery). Rights to the book, “The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made,” have been purchased by a Hollywood group that includes comedian Seth Rogen and 2014 Weirdcademy Award winner James Franco (who may play Wiseau in the film adaptation).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[Wiseau is] a narcissist nonpareil whose movie makes Vincent Gallo’s ‘The Brown Bunny’ seem the apotheosis of cinematic self-restraint.”–Scott Foundas, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by BLAMbert, who rhapsodized that it was “a disastrous train wreck combining a boring story, ridiculous sets, terrible performances, gratuitous sex scenes, unlikable characters, unresolved subplots, and generally incompetent film-making into a confounding and gooey glob of strange.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

366 UNDERGROUND: A PUBLIC RANSOM (2014)

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DIRECTED BY: Pablo D’Stair

FEATURING: Carlyle Edwards, Helen Bonaparte, Goodloe Byron

PLOT: Steven (Carlyle Edwards) is a self-serving, amoral author of very mediocre talent. When he stumbles across a crayon-scribbled “missing child” poster with a telephone number and the words “HLEPP ME?” scrawled on it, he figures it to be harmless. Deciding to base a story around it, he calls the number. This leads to an encounter with Bryant (Goodloe Byron) who claims to have actually kidnapped a girl, stating she will be released only if Steven pays a $2,000 ransom within two weeks. Steven initially dismisses Bryant as a morbid prankster—until Bryant begins a relationship with his only friend, Rene (Helen Bonaparte) and starts popping up in his life in apparently coincidental, yet increasingly invasive and unsettling ways.

Still from A Public Ransom (2014)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: To give it its due, this isn’t a wholly terrible film, though it is lacking in certain important factors. That said, the compelling aspects do not come from anything markedly weird, and as such it has no place on the List of weird movies.

COMMENTS: The central premise of A Public Ransom is fascinating: the wrong person finds a cry for help, someone who doesn’t have an altruistic bone in his body. The events that follow can’t be faulted. Indeed, the writing overall is excellent, and it’s not D’Stair’s failing with a pen which make this difficult to view. He casts an impressive shadow with his scripting, and the small cast largely live up to the characters D’Stair has written and fleshed out so well. Lead actor Carlyle Edwards is teeth-grittingly unpleasant as the utter and complete prick Steven. His performance seems a little too mannered at first, but his overwrought, overbearing and obnoxious personality truly matches that of someone who has no awareness of their own obvious shortcomings. Awful people really are like this. Helen Bonaparte tries her best as Stevens’ foil, but her performance is stilted and flat by comparison. It’s difficult to believe in the friendship between them when it lacks such chemistry, especially in some of the more pivotal later scenes. Goodloe Byron’s turn as Bryant is purposefully bland, which really makes his character work for the better. He is very mild mannered and unobtrusive, which makes him all the more disturbing given the possible nature of his actions.

All this is well and good, but a smart script and a functional cast can’t save a film if the director and photographer’s auteur vision is so painfully marred by an inability to hold a camera. Paul VanBrocklin is director D’Stair’s head of photography, and between the two of them they seem barely able to frame a shot in any workable way. The film itself looks ugly, and is a major turn off. It’s true that an amateur film maker might not have access to a high quality camera or a steadicam or the like to make tracking shots work. But ugly, dull and unimaginatively presented still scenes permeate the film to such a point that, while you can see the intent behind the director’s approach (his desire to imitate his influences such as ), the whole thing ends up being a poorly shot and poorly lit mess that drags the viewer away from the strength of the writing. It’s a film with a lot of heart and D’stair should be proud of it for what it is, as it’s head and shoulders above a lot of amateur independent film, making but if he was to turn out another feature it would need to show marked technical improvement to earn a general recommendation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… D’Stair’s cinematic selection is artistically interpretive to say the least, and may not be for everyone.”–Amy Handler, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

More information on A Public Ransom, including a link and a password to view the movie for yourself (at the time of publication), can be found at the official A Public Ransom site.

Capsules

CAPSULE: NIGHTDREAMS (1981)

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DIRECTED BY: F.X. Pope

FEATURING: Dorothy LeMay, Jennifer West, Andy Nichols

PLOT: Two scientists observe a woman’s erotic dreams.

Still from Nightdreams (1981)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As the first, and very nearly the only, movie to mix hardcore XXX action with dream logic, Nightdreams is a unique beast. As a curiosity piece it’s something to add to your bucket list, but once the novelty of surrealist porn wears off, Nightdreams is not really a great movie—and it’s worse erotica.

COMMENTS: There’s a reason plotted porn movies never took off. Narrative and intense titillation work against each other; each one is a distraction from the other. Even today, directors like who toy with adding explicit sex to their movies make sure that actual acts of penetration and gynecological detail last only for a few seconds, to keep their stories from drifting into a fap-fest. Surrealism and porn don’t really go well together, either; the weird feeling inspired when a cigarette-smoking fish head pops up in bed next to a lovely lady throws cold water on those sexytime cravings. Written by a young “Hustler” copy writer named Jerry Stahl and that magazine’s “Creative Director” (the two would continue their partnership on the XXX cult film Cafe Flesh and the softcore midnight movie Dr. Caligari), Nightdreams was made by smart people slumming in the gutter, anxious to do something erotically different for two reasons: a), to get themselves noticed, and b) to keep from getting bored in the repetitive and formulaic world of porno. Of course, porn is repetitive and formulaic for a reason—its function is to expand viewers’ pants, not their intellectual horizons—so, while Nightdreams got some favorable notice as some sort of prestige sleaze piece, it didn’t exactly found a subgenre of art-house smut.

Nightdreams stars Dorothy LeMay as the woman whose sexual imagination is so outlandish it’s the subject of a research project by a pair of scientists in lab coats. Strawberry blond LeMay has a real-world, girl-next-door sexiness that’s refreshing compared to the plasticized glamor of today’s porn starlets, but, based on her line readings, an actress she is not. That’s okay, because she appears to enjoy the weird sex (so maybe she is a great actress, after all). Her fantasies involve sex with a Jack-in-the-box (accompanied by creepy anti-erotic laughter), a campfire threesome with two lithe cowgirls (while Wall of Voodoo sings a cool New Wave rendition of “Ring of Fire”), servicing a couple of hookah-smoking sheiks, meeting a man with a fetus in his pants, a pseudo-rape scene over a toilet, and rutting with the Devil in Hell, followed by a romantic coupling with an angelic stud in Paradise. The movie’s most memorable sequence, no doubt, is when Dorothy fellates a living rendition of a Cream of Wheat box while serenaded by a jazz version of “Old Man River.” Her head bobs back and forth to the music, and a piece of toast shows up to accompany the couple on sax. It’s an unusual sight, to say the least. Like most of Nightdreams‘ scenes, it’s too weird to be erotic, but too porn-y to work as an art installation.

The Cream of Wheat scene is a trademark infringement that the Nabisco company would never condone, and I seriously doubt Johnny Cash would license the rights to “Ring of Fire” for a lesbian threesome scene, either. I suspect Nightdreams got away with these infringements because, in 1981, porn was still relatively taboo, and none of the copyright holders would admit to having seen the film.

The IMDB credits “F.X. Pope”  as Nightdreams‘ director, and lists this as an alias for TV and music video director Francis Delia (who has no other porn connections). However, IMDB also lists “F.X. Pope” as one of Sayadian’s pseudonyms—I had always assumed Sayadian was the director because of the style, and also because he indisputably directed the sequel Nightdreams 2.

Others who worked on Nightdreams include Fast Steppin’ Freddie, Zoot Suit and Pez D. Spencer.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…definitely the most unusual and unique porn flick I’ve ever seen… a series of weird, funny, sexy, surreal and twisted dreams.”–Goregirl, Goregirl’s Dungeon (DVD)

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

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CAPSULE: DON PEYOTE (2014)

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DIRECTED BY: Dan Fogler, Michael Canzoniero

FEATURING: Dan Fogler, Kelly Hutchinson, Yang Miller

PLOT: An unemployed pot-smoking graphic novelist takes psychedelic drugs, becomes involved with conspiracy theorists, has a psychotic breakdown, ends up in a mental hospital, and eventually becomes a homeless prophet.

Still from Don Peyote (2014)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Don Peyote is an unapologetic, full-out drug trip movie—and while it’s hard to make a drug trip movie that’s totally boring, it’s even harder to make one that can sustain interest for a full 90 minutes. Psychonauts may be pleased that someone’s finally telling a story from their perspective, but Don Peyote is too chaotic and not entertaining enough to crossover from that demographic.

COMMENTS: A comedy solidly aimed at those who know their ayahuasca from a hole in the ground, Don Peyote is the rare film (nowadays, at least) that’s unabashedly psychedelic; a movie full of characters for whom chugging down a few buttons of hallucinogenic cactus and touring the universe from the comfort of their own skull constitutes a typical boring Friday night at home. If it’s sheer trippiness you’re after, Peyote delivers, with visions of aquatic goddesses, spontaneous folk-rock dance numbers, and guys in demonic bunny suits waiting around every bend. If it’s structured trippiness and insight into life’s great questions you seek, however, go somewhere else, because the all-over-the-cosmos plot has the attention span of an adult-onset ADD patient who has noshed on too many shrooms. If you don’t like what’s happening in Don Peyote, just wait five minutes and soon it will be doing something completely unrelated: hero Warren goes from planning a wedding to conspiracy theorizing to embarking on a vision quest, all while tripping on various esoteric drugs and suffering from spontaneous hallucinations that just might result from underlying schizophrenia. Although almost a decade has supposedly passed by the end of the story, I think the theory that the whole movie is just Warren’s hallucination from smoking a joint laced with wolfsbane he’s handed in the film’s first ten minutes is still in play when the closing credits roll.

Lack of focus is one of the film’s main issues; the other its wishy-washy infatuation with its unappealing central character. Warren is, frankly, what most people would consider a loser, a burnout, but the script doesn’t see him as an object of ridicule. A satire about an aging druggie struggling with the demands of adulthood could have supplied some great laughs, but we are asked to look at this character instead as an everyman (his last name is even “Allman”) in a world gone mad. But how are we supposed to buy, for example, that this perpetually-high career loafer has an attractive, financially-secure fiancée who’s anxious to start a family with him? I mean, I understand that there are some desperate women in Manhattan, but this is a chubby, unemployed grungoid in his 30s who sponges off her, constantly smokes pot out of an apple, and breaks into a rant about the shadow government during pre-marital counseling. Yet we are encouraged to root for Warren, not laugh at him. In the original “Don Quixote,” Cervantes made merciless cruel fun of his deluded title character, but this story treats its main character too gently, more like the Man of la Munchies.

The running subplot about Warren making a documentary about the Mayan 2012 apocalypse draws a link between psychedelic drugs and conspiracy theorism as alternate (if complementary) methods of avoiding reality. The connection between drug-taking and far-out mind-control weirdness also featured in the recent indie thriller The Banshee Chapter, so the conspiracy/psychedelic alliance may be something that’s brewing in the fringe zeitgeist at the moment.

In a nod to the great psychedelic ensemble movies of the late 1960s, like Casino Royale or The Magic Christian (where a Christopher Lee or a Raquel Welch might pop up in a tiny cameo), Don Peyote features a modest parade of hip bit-players: Jay Baruchel as a pot dealer, Topher Grace in an amusing meta-movie role as headliner Fogler’s two-faced agent, Wallace “My Dinner with Andre” Shawn as a cookie-eating psychiatrist, Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara driving a cab, cult philosopher delivering a gonzo monologue, and, in the biggest coup, Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway as an I.R.S. agent with full Illuminati intelligence clearance.

Stoners who are already salivating over the trippy trailer will likely find Don Peyote hits the psychedelic sweet spot, especially when employing their favorite substance as a booster. The sober-minded are not as likely to be amused by the light-on-laughs, high-on-goofiness script, but may find some curiosity value in the casting and general rambunctiousness.

Don Peyote debuts May 9 on video-on-demand and starts a limited theatrical run the following week.

 WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…feels like a scholarly acid trip mixed with every paranoid druggie’s worst nightmare, but plays like a story your local weed dealer stumbles through helplessly while you try and force him out of your house.”–Matt Donato, We Got This Covered (contemporaneous)