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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: DEAD MOUNTAINEER’S HOTEL (1979)

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“Hukkunud Alpinisti” Hotell

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This review includes spoilers.

DIRECTED BY: Grigori Kromanov

FEATURING: Uldis Pūcītis, Jüri Järvet, Lembit Peterson, Mikk Mikiver, Tiit Härm, Nijole Ozelyte

PLOT: Called to an Alpine inn and trapped by an avalanche, a police inspector uncovers a bizarre mix of murder, organized crime, paid assassination, and an unexpected twist that leaves the him in way over his head. 

Still from Dead Mountaineer's Hotel (1979)

COMMENTS: Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction are a handy guide to playing fair with the reader. They are not always scrupulously followed, and shouldn’t be considered  inviolable; some of Agatha Christie’s most popular novels make mincemeat of the rules. But they’re valuable as a guide to what might happen when coloring outside the lines. We turn to this list today because Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel takes a weed whacker to Commandment #2: “All supernatural or prenatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” The result is a mystery that only the most wildly lucky viewer could possibly solve, so reliant is it upon a massive genre swerve. And it’s all exactly as the creators intended.

Brothers Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky (who also wrote the source material for Stalker) adapted their own book, a formal experiment in pulling a switcheroo on the reader. They envisioned a classic locked-room mystery, one in which a smart detective has to choose between a number of suspects at an isolated location, all of whom arouse suspicion in their own way. Think Murder on the Orient Express. Now imagine that the culprit in that classic whodunit was an invisible octopod who entered the train through a transdimensional rift, and you’ll start to get a sense of the sharpness of the left turn in Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel. Because that’s our solution here. It’s aliens. It’s a thoroughly unexpected twist that makes it a failure as a mystery—and a success as something else entirely.

Long before the truth behind the strange goings-on at this remote mountain inn are revealed, there are the strange goings-on themselves. The hotel is decorated in striking 70s modern décor courtesy of set designer Tõnu Virve, with post-space age lines and lots of mirrored surfaces. (The setting is perfectly matched by Sven Grünberg’s groovy synth-based score.) The source of the lodge’s name is peculiarly mundane: a guest disappeared while out climbing and that was that. The unfortunate sportsman left behind his dog, who now works delivering guests’ luggage when he’s not sitting watch beneath a giant portrait of his lost master. And then there are the guests, a motley crew with odd backgrounds and uncertain futures, including a scientist who climbs the walls of the hotel, a beautiful Lothario who seems incapable of making a bad shot on the billiard table, and an older man who curls up on the snow-covered balcony to escape his many allergies.

In every possible respect, our hero does not fit in with these people or in these surroundings. Glebsky, the by-the-book detective, is utterly incapable of drawing outside the lines, and when it appears that there has been a murder, his unswerving dedication to finding a culprit and meting out justice is unshakable. The movie repeatedly tests him: he is asked questions about fanciful theories of the origins of human intelligence, which he sidesteps because they are outside of a cop’s purview. He cannot change his approach to games to meet an unexpectedly strong foe or adjust his dance style to accommodate a freewheeling partner on the floor. When a newcomer arrives at the lodge, Glebsky’s only concern is how this person is connected to the murder. And most crucially, when the plot makes its ultimate transition from mystery to science fiction, and not only are we introduced to aliens but the murder itself is undone, Glebsky is unable to shift his mindset in any way. (Tellingly, actor Pūcītis was a Latvian in a cast of Estonians; he did not speak the same language, and thus was perpetually isolated amidst the production.) He remains utterly committed to his certainty that he’s in a police procedural, and any facts that don’t fit must not be facts at all.

A film made amidst the Cold War in a republic under Soviet domination will inevitably have a political element, and Glebsky is a serviceable stand-in for a state that was so committed to a point of view that stifled dissent in all its forms, even in the shape of contradictory facts. (Thank goodness that’s behind us.) But the extra layer of commentary is not necessary to deliver the tragedy of Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel. Nearly every character demonstrates the ability to perceive new circumstances and adapt to them, even the late alpinist’s dog. But not our hero. He remains shackled to his orders, enables a tragedy because he knows no other way, and ends the film trying to convince himself of the righteousness of his actions. If only he’d been able to roll with the changes when the mystery dropped out from under him.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This is another of those movies that’s not really within just one genre as there are elements of mystery / suspense, crime, science fiction, surrealism and horror all weaved in plus lots of flashbacks, nightmares, hallucinations and oddball characters and even some bizarrely-placed b/w newsreel footage showing real people falling to their deaths trying to escape from a burning high rise apartment building. While it’s well-made, handsomely-shot and keeps you guessing, it’s at its best as a visual piece…” – Justin McKinney, The Bloody Pit of Horror

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

Capsules

CAPSULE: STREET TRASH (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Ryan Kruger

FEATURING: , Donna Cormack-Thomson, Joe Vaz, Warrick Grier,

PLOT: The year is 2050, in the city of Cape Town, and it’s up to Ronald and his posse of paupers to thwart the mayor’s evil plan to liquidate the homeless.

Still from Street Trash (2024)
Street Trash (2024)

COMMENTS: You can’t choose your own dystopian-bum name, but I reckon I’d go by “Cardigan.” I might rub elbows with the likes of Chef, Wors, Pap, or Two-Bit, and meet up with Society whenever I wanted to score some designer drugs. Yessir, a whimsical existence of survival interspersed with skirmishes with police and memorial services for fallen comrades goo-ified by a deadly chemical administered by government drones.

So goes this re-imagining of 1987’s Street Trash, wherein our casually-charismatic heroes do their best amidst poverty and the threat of annihilation, preserving through brotherhood and cunning japes against the well-heeled. In the movie’s world, the middle classes (and, indeed, the working classes) have been eliminated—economically, mind you. You’ve either got more money than you could possibly know what to do with ( I’ve heard good things about “SoyCoin”, the first vegan cryptocurrency), or no money at all. The message sent, again, and again, is that wealth disparity is a grim and growing issue.

Commendably, though, Street Trash doesn’t come across as sermonizing despite its inherent preachiness. The characters are fun—particularly Chef, with his dissections of age-old children’s classics as creepy sex parables. For those hungry for practical effects, they burst from nearly every pore. Some dozen or more characters ooze DayGlo™ liquids, slough skin from hands and head, grow pustulant goiters which pop, and much more. Also to Street Trash ’24’s credit is the presence of Gary Green, unearthly star from Kruger’s feature debut Fried Barry. Green is a fascination in every shot, coming across as half a wavelength removed from his surroundings. Appropriately, Green’s character has an imaginary friend (voiced by Kruger) who is altogether blue and bizarre.

As remakes go, this isn’t quite one. Kruger’s sophomore feature belongs to a genre I’m stumbling across more often these days, in perhaps a sign of the times: a hybrid of post-apocalyptic and cutesy playfulness, taking the edges off the grim reality descending upon humanity like a sack of awful. Or, maybe a sack of offal—considering the vast quantities of sludge to be found in Street Trash.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: “

“It’s a cacophony of fever-dream nonsense that comes together without reason beyond Mayor Mostert’s hatred of the underprivileged. Kruger’s illustrating Cape Town as Tromaville, but even then, obscenities and oddball goofiness are scattershot head-scratchers… It wants to be a pure midnight movie like Mutant Blast, a government-dragging mutation comedy where anything can and does happen, but lacks consistency and command.”–Matt Donato, Daily Dead

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR (1981)

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DIRECTED BY: David Gladwell

FEATURING: Julie Christie, Leonie Mellinger, Christopher Guard, Debbie Hutchings

PLOT: In a United Kingdom ravaged by disorder and want, a solitary woman is forced by the state to take on a mysterious girl as a boarder; the girl grows up quickly, trying to build a new society in cooperation with a charismatic young man, while the older woman discovers a portal to the past that lets her observe an affluent Victorian family.

Still from memoirs of a Survivor (1981)

COMMENTS: Nobel laureate Doris Lessing once told a group of science fiction fans that the closest she ever got to writing an autobiography was her 1974 novel The Memoirs of a Survivor. The narrator goes nameless in that book, but given that the film adaptation of the work dubs Julie Christie’s quiet tenant with the initial “D” in the endcrawl, it’s safe to guess that she’s meant to be the author’s stand-in. Which is the first of this movie’s curiosities, since D ends up playing only a tangential role in the story that unfolds. What, you have to wonder, was Lessing trying to say about herself?

Two storylines do the lion’s share of the work here. We witness the steady decline of a decently sized English city (most of the location work was done in Norwich) as government structures vanish, resources dwindle, and the populace divides into those awaiting support and those trying to hold the community together on their own. But help is not on the way. We see a man standing next to a placard reading “No News Is Good News” telling a small crowd that a bus is coming to take them… somewhere. Meanwhile, a woman holds out food to a group of feral children, she looking like a typical bird lady and they presenting as rejects from a Quest For Fire casting call. (Every scene with the children is artlessly scored to a cloying rendition of Brahms’ “Lullaby.”) For those trying to keep a stiff upper lip, the end is decidedly at hand.

Of more immediate concern is the arrival of Emily (Mellinger), a teenager whose youthful naivete and optimism are challenged by a society too ill-equipped to give her a chance. Beyond the roof over her head and using her as the occasional sounding board for germinating opinions, D provides her little attention. So Emily quickly takes up with Gerald, a naïve young man whose troublemaking tendencies are sublimated into a growing burden to care for the town’s abandoned children. It’s a daunting task, and his compulsion to help even the most damaged puts enormous pressure on those around him, especially Emily and her unsteady transition into adulthood.

While all this is going on, Christie often feels like a guest star in her own movie. Returning to the screen after a three-year absence, her D is very much a distant observer. She watches the suffering of others but rarely seems to want for much, and Christie is simply too beautiful to pull off the dowdy, threadbare look of her character. In fact, boarder and tenant are moving in two different directions: while Emily invests in the future, D literally retreats into the past. She finds she can pass through the walls of her flat into the Victorian era, where she spies on a quietly unhappy family. A tightly-wound father (played without dialogue by Nigel Hawthorne concurrent with his work on “Yes, Minister”) who may be harboring untoward thoughts about his daughter, a small girl also named Emily. It makes for an interesting contrast, as the child Emily desperately wants to attract her father while the teenaged Emily finds herself drawn to and then repelled by a young man with paternal instincts. But we can never be sure how much of this D sees in her forays into the past, and it’s not something that comes up in her own time, until the film’s final scene.

This is where the movie really plays the weird card, with Christie’s discovery of an egg the size of a room, which is evidently all the persuasion she needs to convince Emily, Gerald, and a host of dirty children to follow her into the portal and leave their broken England behind for good. It reeks of deus ex machina to such an extent that it casts the autobiographical elements in a new light. If Lessing is D, and D’s solution is to escape into an imagined past, it’s tempting to view the author’s whole career as a flight from the ugliness and tribulation of her present circumstances. If that interpretation is right, it’s a powerful self-criticism of her ventures into speculative fiction. But it’s also an abrupt and incomplete finish to the compelling circumstances she herself has created. If you don’t like the reality you’re in, find another one? Perhaps, but I suspect this survivor has postponed a reckoning, rather than come out the other side.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Memoirs of a Survivor is the sort of film that would never get made these days. It’s grim, thought-provoking stuff… This is not a film with any answers or a trite Hollywood ending; in fact I’m still scratching my head about the ending… there are many elements within the film that are surreal or just plain weird. “–Justin Richards, Blueprint Review

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

Memoirs Of A Survivor [DVD]

Memoirs Of A Survivor [DVD]
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Capsules

CAPSULE: LOVE LIES BLEEDING (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Rose Glass

FEATURING: , Katy O’Brian, , Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco,

PLOT: In a small Southwestern city, Lou (Stewart) manages a gym and generally keeps her head down, keeping an eye on her sister, Beth (Malone) and her abusive husband, JJ (Franco), while keeping distance from her dad, Lou Sr. (Harris), a major player in the local crime scene. When Lou meets Jackie, who’s temporarily working for her dad while saving money for a body building competition in Vegas, sparks fly, setting off a conflagration which threatens to burn everything to the ground.

 

Still from love lies bleeding (2024)

COMMENTS: It’s reductive to call Love Lies Bleeding just a queer neo-noir, but that is basically what it is. It hits all the right noir notes: shady characters mired in shady dealings for questionable reasons. The setting (New Mexico, 1989) brings the “neo” to the noir, along with the fact that the star-crossed protagonists are a lesbian couple instead of the usual heterosexual pairing. And at first glance, it seems that, interesting and entertaining as it is—performances are good all around, as well as Glass’ direction—there’s nothing truly “weird” about this, at least not in the way we at 366 Weird Movies define the term.

However, as an A24 release, it’s at least atypical: it ain’t no Bound, for sure. For one thing, the setting allows for Glass and co-writer Weronika Tofilska to make some cultural commentary. There’s a solid background of violence always hovering about, and Lou Sr.’s club/shooting range is always packed with people eagerly exercising their Second Amendment rights, evoking specters of the wild west. There’s also the gym rat culture: intimidating motivational slogans and steroid use, which is a major plot point in the story.

The weird elements aren’t exactly subtle, but they are startling and metaphorical: a massive ravine in the landscape that reads as rather vaginal and several instances of ‘roid rage. At the bodybuidling competition, Jackie vomits up a full-grown Lou. The climatic confrontation between Jackie, Lou, and Lou Sr. has been called “the most A24 ending of A24 endings.” It works well, as long as it’s not taken literally, and it doesn’t detract from the denouement, which isn’t afraid to put the worm in the apple, as noir endings go. It may not be “weird” in the full sense, but there’s enough weird to notice in this hot, queer neo-noir.

Still 2 from Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Currently streaming on several platforms like Max, Hulu, and Sling, the film is also on a Region-free Blu-ray with a commentary by Glass and Tofilska, two featurettes—“In the Land of Guns and Muscles” and “Sex, Steroids and Codependency”—and an image gallery. A 4K UHD will be available in January 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… an exciting, instant classic that will hopefully usher in a new era of unapologetically weird lesbian cinema.”–Jourdain Searles, Autostraddle (contemporaneous)

Love Lies Bleeding | Kristen Stewart | Region Free

Love Lies Bleeding | Kristen Stewart | Region Free
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GOODBYE, 20TH CENTURY! (1998)

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Zbogum na dvaesettiot vek!

DIRECTED BY: Darko Mitrevski, Aleksandar Popovski

FEATURING: Lazar Ristovski, Nikola Ristanovski, Vlado Jovanovski, Toni Mihajlovski, Petar Temelkovski, Sofija Kunovska

PLOT: In a fractured timeline, we encounter a man in a post-apocalyptic world in search of a hidden place where the fate of everyone is foretold on a wall, a turn-of-the-century brother and sister who marry for love over the objections of their family, and a man in a Santa Claus suit on the eve of the new millennium who stumbles into a strange funeral.

Still from Goodbye, 20th Century! (1999)

COMMENTS: You can instinctively know that a thing exists and yet be completely unaware of it until you’re face-to-face with it. Consider “toothpaste tube designer” or “menu photographer.” Their existence is completely logical, yet you’ve never had to consider their existence. So it goes with the surprising subject of today’s review: the cinema of Macedonia. Of course there would be a history, given its place in the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of film, decades as part of Yugoslavia, and running all the way through a naming spat with Greece. It makes perfect sense that there would be such a thing, but, I mean, who knew?

First-time directors Mitrevski and Popovski are clearly cinema aficionados. The first segment, a typical violent futuristic wasteland, immediately conjures up thoughts of Mad Max. The closer is a harsh ian urban nightmare with hints of esque style. There are more familiar references to be found, but the movie I think they were most eager to ape is Pulp Fiction. With its time-jumping thruline and a flashback vignette knotting the two halves together, Goodbye, 20th Century! feels like an attempt to do with a Balkan post-war flair.

We open in the far-off world of 2019, which follows the journey of Kuzman, a post-apocalyptic pariah who seemingly cannot die. His encounters with a band of Road Warrior-style toughs features some intriguing imagery, most notably a pair of designated wailers who carry masks with them to multiply the mourning. Later, after an intended execution fails to do the trick, he has an intriguing encounter with a prophet who tells him that he must defeat a green-haired jokester/maniac (think of a certain archfoe of a particular dark knight) in order to reach a kind of memorial wall. That effort, combined with a sexual assignation with a tattooed lady who is revealed to be Kuzman’s sister, brings him the release from life that he seeks. It’s not exactly logical, but it makes for a tidy tale. In fact, the most surprising thing about it is that it ends, with half-a-movie still to go.

The other major story takes us back in time 20 years, specifically to the last night of the century, when a man dressed as Santa Claus endures the apathy of the public (and the insults of a young Kuzman in particular) before hoping to retire to his apartment for the evening. Instead of his bed, he walks into a surreal funeral taking place in a completely white room, attended by stern figures in black. A dark farce ensues, including a flatulent old woman, a purloined toupee, and a pair of hipsters who completely misread the room by bringing champagne and a boombox and spiking the koliva. Meanwhile, the very same prophet who advised Kuzman on how to die in 2019 is here to help prepare the body in 1999. It’s all very wacky and deliberately unfunny, and since we know from the earlier tale that the apocalypse is at hand and it’s just a matter of time before the funeral itself descends into homicidal mayhem. (Appropriately, the madness is scored by Sid Vicious’ version of “My Way.”)  Naturally, this culminates with the creation of that very same memorial wall, meaning we’ve come full circle.

It all feels very metaphorical, and probably much more meaningful if you had lived through the miseries of Macedonia in the last decade of the millennium. I suspect the key to understanding Goodbye, 20th Century! lies within the interstitial vignette that connects the two halves. Presented as a historic look at the first wedding ever captured on film in Macedonia (the prophet appears here as the cinematographer, making him amusingly but pointlessly immortal), it’s actually the tragically brief tale of a brother and sister whose incestuous love ends promptly with the groom’s immediate murder. “If this is how the 20th century started,” the narrator flatly observes, “who can tell how it will end?” Violence is endemic, the movie says, even genetic, and considering how the former Yugoslav republics were mired in war in the years following the breakup, such a dismal outlook seems understandable. Everyone dies. Hope is a fool’s errand.

And yet.

Seven years after the dissolution of Yugoslavia and four years after the first Macedonian film to earn an Academy Award nomination, the country submitted this strange quasi-anthology as its attempt to repeat the achievement. It did not get the honor, but instead has eked out an afterlife thanks to its unusual structure and snarky attitude. (Consider that the film’s title is revealed after a trip through a toilet.) The movie has survived, the renamed North Macedonia has survived (with its very own cinematic tradition), and indeed all of us continue to muddle our way through a seemingly unending social nightmare. Maybe the apocalypse isn’t inevitable. It’s a nice thought to have as we embark upon a new year that feels like it could be more grim that the last. So raise a glass. Goodbye, 2024. Maybe the future won’t be the end of everything. Maybe instead of destroying the planet and marrying our sister, this time we’ll get it right.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Utterly bizarre, this first feature by Macedonian multimedia bad boys Aleksandar Popovski and Darko Mitrevski weds “Mad Max”–style grunge futurism, silly-mythic solemnity and anarchic humor to ends that make no sense whatsoever — proudly so, one suspects.” – Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

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

Goodbye, 20th Century

Goodbye, 20th Century
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