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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FROM MORN TO MIDNIGHT (1920)

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Von morgens bis mitternachts

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DIRECTED BY: Karlheinz Martin

FEATURING: Ernst Deutsch, Roma Bahn, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Lotte Stein, Frida Richard

PLOT: A bank cashier is so enchanted by a customer that he steals an enormous amount of money in hopes of persuading her to run away with him, but when he rejects him, he abandons his family, skips town, and reinvents himself, using the money in pursuit of earthly pleasures to diminishing returns.

Still from From Morn to Midnight (1920)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: One of the pre-eminent early examples of German expressionist filmmaking (no discussion of it is complete without mentioning its fellow 1920 release The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), From Morn to Midnight delivers a healthy dose of abstract imagery and proto-surrealism, taking advantage of both the newness of the medium and its silence to tell its cautionary tale.

COMMENTS: The Cashier, the protagonist of From Morn to Midnight, doesn’t walk on to the screen, nor do we cut to him. No, director Karlheinz Martin dissolves in on our central character, summoning him to life in the middle of a bank vault as though he were being added to a holodeck program. We will later learn that this wretched figure has a home and an adoring family waiting for him there, but this first scene provides us with the real scoop: The Cashier exists purely for the purposes of this allegorical tale, and no pesky background or deeper characterization will be needed.

So begins a surprisingly didactic and moralistic story. Once the Cashier decides to break bad, he goes whole hog: ditching his family as callously as he can; making himself over from a bent and wrinkled old man into a spry, slick dandy; and spending all his ill-gotten gains on wine, women, and song. At every turn, he meets with disappointment. The money doesn’t bring him respect or pleasure. Intriguingly, his road-to-Damascus moment doesn’t work out, either; having forsaken his past sins, he is sold out by a gentle Salvation Army worker who turns him in the moment he mentions the reward for his capture. The final image—the Cashier dying in a crucifixion pose with the words “ECCE HOMO” flickering above him like a neon bar sign—is not exactly subtle.

Then again, absolutely nothing in From Morn to Midnight is subtle, because director Martin is  here to sell an art form more than a story. He piles on all the Expressionist touches in his arsenal. He places every scene in a black void, with only the most abstract simplistic props and scenic elements providing hints of location. What little set decoration there is takes the form of mismatched flats lined in hastily applied white paint, turning every setting into a chalk drawing. Even The Cashier’s trudge through a blizzard is charmingly minimalist, as he walks down a tightly curved pathway while confetti is thrown at him. The actors themselves become two-dimensional elements through heavy makeup and wildly outsized emotional displays. Dogville almost a century before Lars von Trier could get around to making it, From Morn to Midnight is fiercely presentational, and makes sure you know it.

Like any self-respecting morality play, The Cashier’s sad fate can be predicted from the outset. For one thing, throughout the course of the film, on-set clocks are counting down the inevitable march to midnight (a touch that might have inspired Peter Greenaway). Even more telling is an image so indelible that it not only repeats, but the same actress is called upon to fill multiple roles just so it can be summoned anew. For each character Roma Bahn portrays, whether it be a homeless waif on the steps of the bank, a floozy in a hotel bar, or that young Salvation Army officer, there comes a moment when her pretty face is transformed into a death skull. Her every appearance is a red flag that The Cashier fails to heed.

The story behind the film is refreshingly optimistic by comparison. Many of the cast, including lead actor Deutsch, were Jews who later escaped Germany to live and work in the United States. Meanwhile, the movie itself had a limited release in Germany and was thought lost for decades until copies were unearthed in Japan, where Expressionism’s similarities to Noh theater made From Morn to Midnight relatable. And today, through the wonders of public domain and the internet, it’s available for all to enjoy, in the original German or translated into English. In this morality play, at least, the love of film is a virtue.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Not a frame of From Morn to Midnight is wasted in creating a surreal atmosphere…  Its sets are so bizarre, so deliberately over the top that it overwhelms its own message. The audience can only take so much. No wonder theater owners balked at it.” – Lea Stans, Silent-ology

ADDITIONAL LINK OF INTEREST: A Cinema History provides a comprehensive review of the film, with extensive visuals and thoughtful analysis.

(This movie was nominated for review by Shane. [But not, you know, this Shane. Some other Shane.] Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)  

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SHINBONE ALLEY (1970)

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DIRECTED BY: John David Wilson

FEATURING THE VOICES OF: , Eddie Bracken, Alan Reed, John Carradine

PLOT: A poet/newspaper man resurrected as a cockroach tells a  number of stories about his friend, a cat with loose morals and a knack for picking the wrong mates, and the many times he tries to pull her out of trouble.

Still from shinbone Alley (1970)

COMMENTS: Animation, frustrated aficionados will tell you, is not a genre, it’s a medium. Just because the twin monoliths of Walt Disney and Saturday morning television built their empire on a commitment to entertaining grade schoolers with moving drawings, we should not assume that cartoons are only for kids. But parents and studio executives never seem to get the message. There’s plenty of of evidence of this blindness — just count up the number of traumatized children who were exposed to the original Watership Down — and a leading piece of evidence should be the tagline that marketing wizards devised for Shinbone Alley: “It’s sophisticated enough for kids, simple enough for adults!” Because if anything cries out to be seen by all audiences, it’s the story of a sexually promiscuous cat who takes up with a series of abusive partners, as told by the suicidal cockroach who loves her.

The idea of a creating musical based on the “archy and mehitabel” stories of Don Marquis was unusually persistent. The tales were enormously popular in their day (the titular cockroach and cat are among the literary figures immortalized on the bronze screen that fronts the monumental Brooklyn Public Library), but they didn’t get paired up with song-and-dance until a concept album in 1954, penned by Joe Darion (who would gain acclaim as the book writer for Man of La Mancha) and composer George Kleinsinger (whose best known composition is probably Tubby the Tuba) and starring Bracken and Channing in the title roles. The script would get a punch-up from Mel Brooks before making its way to Broadway for a six-week run in 1957, now starring Bracken alongside the dangerously seductive Eartha Kitt as Mehitabel. (So now you know: Andrew Lloyd Webber did not provide the first dancing cats on the Great White Way.) Undaunted by the flop, a shortened version of the show found its way to television in 1960 (featuring Bracken and Tammy Grimes as the titular feline) before arising once more a decade later as an animated feature with the original stars in tow. So with all that effort, there must be something in the adaptation that was demanding to be seen.

I’m still trying to figure out what that is. Shinbone Alley is a collection of scenes in which our heroes go through a sad and troubling cycle: Mehitabel searches for fame, free love, and good times, ignoring Archy’s pleas to clean up her act; her latest beau turns out to be apathetic at best, cruel at worst; Archy has to bail her out of her latest predicament; Mehitabel becomes furious with Archy for trying to kill her buzz; Archy becomes deeply depressed; Mehitabel realizes that Archy is probably the best friend she has; the pair celebrates their friendship, and we go around again. It’s possible that this dysfunction once played for laughs and has just aged poorly, but it’s hard to see who might have enjoyed seeing one of the lead characters getting threatened by a big bully, stolen from by a charlatan actor, and ultimately knocked up by both and then saddled with a litter that she promptly abandons to be nearly drowned in a storm. Is that the part that’s sophisticated enough for kids, or is it the other lead character constantly threatening to kill himself?

Shinbone Alley is actually a well-animated film, and director Wilson has fun shifting from the ugliness of the alley to colorful flights of fancy like pop art representations of Archy’s free-verse musings, or especially the extended scene in which Archy plots revolution in the distinctive style of George Herriman, the “Krazy Kat” creator who illustrated many of Marquis’ stories. But the other elements are a drag. The score is utterly unmemorable; the most notable song is the pals-forever number “Flotsam and Jetsam,” which at least relates to the characters. Other tunes barely connect to anything in the story at all, such as Big Bill’s ode to the alley and his own violent nature (sung by Reed in the same voice he used for Fred Flintstone), or the reminiscence of Tyrone T. Tattersall (“sung” by Carradine) of his early days in the theater. At one point, we even get Shakespeare delivered in the style of beat poetry. It’s as though Darion and Brooks, both of them Tony-winning book writers, can’t think of a single reason for their characters to break into song, so no reason becomes reason enough.

Ultimately, the film seems to take its inspiration from Mehitabel herself. She never seems to learn from her setbacks, bouncing back with the repeated watchcry, “Toujours gai!” So it goes with Shinbone Alley. What worked in Marquis’ newspaper columns never translated to stage or screen, but here we are, giving it another go. The peculiar mix of perky animation and grim subject matter is is certainly weird, but not half as weird as the certainty its creators held that this was a story that must be told.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Shinbone Alley, you see, is a singular strange animated movie, trapped in the film marketplace of the early 1970s with absolutely nowhere to go, certainly no naturally-occurring audience… Weird stuff for a kids’ movie (I am, if nothing else, 100% confident that this was the first American animated feature in which one of the main characters has sex, gets pregnant, and gives birth, all out of wedlock, during the overall course of the narrative), and there’s something irresistibly jarring in that mismatch between the dopey simplicity of the film’s comedy and the thorny, mean streets filthiness of its plot, not to mention the sullen existentialism of archy’s overall arc, and the generally moody songs…”– Tim Brayton, Alternate Ending

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

Shinbone Alley

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: I BOUGHT A VAMPIRE MOTORCYCLE (1990)

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DIRECTED BY: Dirk Campbell

FEATURING: Neil Morrissey, Amanda Noar, Michael Elphick, Anthony Daniels

PLOT: Slacker motorbike enthusiast Noddy buys a bike, discovering almost too late that evil has infused the machine.

Still from I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle (1990)

COMMENTS: There’s something to admire about movies that get right to the point. In this respect, I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle gets off to an auspicious start: within the first 10 minutes, a Satanic priest calls out to his underworld master, a low-rent biker gang attacks the cult with a crossbow, the cult leader spills his last drops of life-sustaining blood into the tank of a 1974 Norton Commando 850, and a dullard named Noddy overpays for the damaged and now-possessed chopper as a fixer-upper for twice what he’s willing to admit. Action from the jump, with stakes in place and more conflict sure to come… and then the movie takes its foot off the gas. Comedy-horror is a perfectly legitimate mix, but I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle has a hard time getting either of the two to work on their own, let alone coalesce.

The central premise resists a 100% serious approach. After all, the title promises a vampiric motorbike, and it does not exaggerate. The demon hog goes dormant during the day, deploys a pair of piercing tubes that aim unwaveringly at a victim’s jugular, steadfastly steers away from crosses, and has an intense aversion to garlic. (It tries to kill a woman merely for ordering extra-garlicky prawns.) Sound like any undead creatures you know? But that strange notion of a murderous moped is only as successful as the ability to make you think it’s an actual (actual, actual) vampire motorcycle, and the film has absolutely no idea how to make the titular vehicle look menacing. True, the way it evolves to take on more of the characteristics of its supernatural avatars, such as the broken headlight that resembles bloody fangs or the handlebars twisted into devil horns, is somewhat amusing. But then the damnable crotch rocket moves, and the whole illusion falls apart. Even when it’s committing the most deadly atrocities (such as feeding on and then bisecting a candy striper at the hospital), it lumbers around like a lame puppet, in much the manner of a certain hellspawn earthmover I won’t name. Sure, it can spawn spikes and spinning blades whenever it needs to, but when you watch it galumphing through a gymnasium like an underpowered Rascal, it loses a lot of its menace.

If the movie can’t fully commit to its horror, it possibly overcommits to the impulse toward gross-out comedy. In the anything-for-a-joke spirit, we get poles rammed up keisters, we get once of the worst-executed bar fights in cinema history, and most importantly, we get Noddy’s Toilet Nightmare. After imagining and awakening from a terrible dream about a re-animated head, he immediately conjures up a new nightmare in which his own bowel movement first calls out to him, then leaps from the commode and tries to force its way down Noddy’s throat. So that’s a cinematic milestone achieved. For enduring such an indignity, you instinctively want to feel bad for Noddy, except that he’s a real prat. He lies, he cheats, he’s super lazy, and he repeatedly demeans his girlfriend Kim, even as the motorcycle leers at her leather-clad posterior. Incidentally, Kim is played by Morrissey’s actual wife Noar, so there’s some weird relationship issues on display. In addition to the objectification and the verbal abuse, the script calls for draping the Jewish actress in crucifixes. Apropos of nothing, the pair divorced a year later.

I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle has an odd sense of tone, careering from silly to serious in random and unexpected ways. It’s the kind of film that will go for an obvious joke like naming a funeral home “De’Ath and Sons,” and then turn around and hire Anthony Daniels, C-3PO himself as I live and breathe, to play it straight as a biker priest who doesn’t let the loss of all the fingers on his right hand get in the way of a full-throated exorcism. To be clear, it’s completely fine to try for a mix of screams and chuckles, but neither of them work particularly well here—they just call attention to strange choices that fall short of the mark. That’s what makes the film a weird watch, but also a disappointing one. Once you get the bike started, you’ve still got to finish the drive.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“No beating around the bush: this is a weird-ass movie!… The Film also goes off on weird diversions- like a random, gross-out Dream Sequence- and is arguably too silly at times.” – Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro

ADDITIONAL LINKS OF INTEREST: It’s all well and good to hear from movie reviewers like your humble correspondent, but discerning customers like yourselves want to hear from the people whose opinions really matter: motorcycle writers. Enjoy the review from Pete Brissette at Motorcycle.com or take in the analysis by Jason Marker over at RideApart.

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

I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle [Blu-ray]

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MÉCANIX (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Rémy Mathieu Larochelle

FEATURING: Julianne Côté, Stéphane Bilodeau

PLOT: One of the last surviving humans has discovered the embryo of the universe, and the hideous monsters who now control the world are desperate to keep him from using it to destroy them.

Still from Mecanix (2003)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The parade of unholy stop-motion concoctions gets our attention. The unflinching vision of a filmmaker in his only significant cinematic credit stokes our curiosity. But it’s those things in service of apocalyptic vibes and a story that is both bleak and somewhat irrelevant that pushes this film strongly towards consideration. It’s a movie beholden to nothing but itself.

COMMENTS: One of my favorite obscure novels is Future Boston, a shared universe by a collective of Beantown science fiction writers who imagined the fate of their city if the first alien contact was made smack dab in the middle of Boston Harbor. One of the significant characters in the book is Bishop 24, a mysteriously formal interplanetary overseer, resembling a gigantic praying mantis, who shepherds humanity into the galactic community. Interaction with the Bishop is described thusly: “The Bishop has a habit of moving in a quick, jerky fashion when his attention is distracted. This is unnerving to some people and has been known to cause epileptic seizures.” To depict the movement and bearing of a creature alien to us, the writer essentially describes classic stop-motion animation.

Rémy M. Larochelle undoubtedly recognizes this alien and uncanny quality. For his sole outing as a feature filmmaker, Larochelle unveils a rogues’ gallery of fascinating and appalling creatures. Shot in a dark sepia tone that makes every scene feel like deleted footage from a snuff film, Mécanix feels like a nightmare that the filmmaker was compelled to get out of his system any way he could, and 16mm stop-motion was the only tool he had at hand. Knowing that, he leans into both the imaginative potential and technical limitations of the technique; Mécanix features a remarkable variety of animated critters, looking variously like equine bipedal skeletons, bubo-ridden Buddhas, tree mermaids, wire-brush birds, and bad-permed llamas. Their appearances are already terrifying, but the hallmarks of their animation—spasmodic jerkiness, absence of motion blur—only heighten their disturbing nature. With flailing cable appendages and misplaced heads, they need only be themselves to be the stuff of bad dreams. Daniel Lagacé’s industrial sound design— an array of distorted clangs, whirrs, and whooshes—helps to give the varmints unnatural life.

Through interviews and key art, you can tease out the hint of a plot involving a lost embryo that, if found, will defeat the alien invaders and restore the promise of life to humanity. The live-action scenes exist primarily in service of this throughline. But the story is largely beside the point, as is demonstrated whenever humans and manipulated maquettes are called upon to share the screen. When they do so, the technique is most often a rudimentary split screen, with the actors standing carefully still while the monsters react dramatically to whatever plot development is presented to them. (It’s a reminiscent of the way Björk dances in front of oversized insects in her “Human Behaviour” video, although of course with none of her screen presence.) But the choice works because the aliens, in one of the few pieces of dialogue, explain the deadly power of emotion, so foreign and deadly to them that even the whiff of a flower could destroy them.

Larochelle knows this is only going to work if things get pretty gross. Early on, we watch a doctor search for the embryo by yanking out the innards of her few remaining fellow humans. Later, a man will invert the procedure by vivisecting an avian creature in an impressively effective piece of puppeteering. (In fairness, he’ll end up doing a little grisly self-surgery as well.) And the monsters often take themselves apart and reassemble for locomotion or conversation. None of this is frightening, exactly, but Mécanix is so viscerally broken and oozy that the effect is more powerful than a jump-scare. It all just feels so unfamiliar and not-at-all right.

Larochelle began working on Mécanix right out of college and spent four years filming and animating the piece. It’s a point in favor of his native Canada that a movie like this can not only be made, but even get funding from the National Film Board of Canada. At a lean 70 minutes, it still feels like it could use a little tightening. There isn’t much in the way of conflict: the aliens demand the embryo, the man steadfastly refuses to give it, and the finish has the whiff of anticlimax. But there’s no denying that Mécanix is a singular effort, one that combines animation technique and icky atmosphere in a form that resembles little before or since. You might say that it’s “unnerving to some people.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Imagine then if someone had rifled through Ray Harryhausen’s bins, scavenging for his discarded works. Those ideas that he deemed too weird to finish. Imagine too that this “someone” then took that weirdness and ran with it, stripping the designs back to their most basic forms, at times down to their wire frame maquettes. Such are the denizens of Larochelle’s world… this little slice of the bizarre is a beast that stands tall and one that more than holds its own…” – Andy Stewart, Nerdly

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

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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: WOMB (2010)

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AKA Clone

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DIRECTED BY: Benedek Fliegauf

FEATURING: Eva Green, Matt Smith, Lesley Manville, Peter Wight, Hannah Murray

PLOT: A woman impregnates herself with a clone of her dead lover and raises the child to adulthood, grappling along the way with the confusing nature of their relationship.

Still from Womb (2010)COMMENTS: “She is the victim of artificial incest,” the snooty mom declares. “Her mother gave birth to her own mother.” In the universe of Womb, the battle lines have been drawn, and the detractors of the ability to bring loved ones back through the science of cloning view the procedure as an abomination. What makes the moment funny is that the prickly parents who are lecturing our heroine on the immorality of the practice would be nearly apoplectic if they had any idea how far she’d taken it. They’ll find out soon enough, and we’ll get to see her go even further.

Its shocking premise powers Womb. To his credit, Fliegauf is never coy about what’s going on here. The main character raises the only man she has ever loved as her own child. The implications are significant, and she experiences urges both maternal and carnal, sometimes simultaneously. The most powerful images in the film are the ones that bring this contradiction to the surface. Many a horror movie has labored to create a moment half as shocking as the scene where 10-year-old Tommy stands up in the bathtub he is sharing with the mother who has cloned him from her lover and proceeds to recite a poem while she stares up at him. Is the look on her face pride? Lust? Both? Womb readily embraces every awkward moment, crafting discomfort out of such scenarios as Rebecca’s meeting with college-age Tommy’s new girlfriend, or a wordless confrontation with the biological mother of Tommy’s genetic material upon seeing her resurrected son for the first time.

Watching Perfect Sense was a terrific reminder of how much I enjoy the work of Eva Green, and it’s great to see her particular brand of repressed passion deployed here. With her icy beauty, her deep and commanding voice, and her uncanny ability to balance outward coolness with an interior fire, she presents a vented steeliness, letting out glimpses of her conflicted soul in careful portions. When her adolescent son falls on top of her in what would be a playful moment under any other circumstances, Green carefully betrays an electric thrill that lies beneath her calm demeanor. It’s easy to see what initially attracts her to the laid-back enthusiasm of Smith, and later what drives her to both impulsively bring him back into the world, and then hide him away from it.

Rebecca is a fascinating character, emotionally immature at best and morally corrupt at worst. (Notably, Tommy is killed while en route to conduct some eco-terrorism against the very cloning plant that will soon give him renewed life.) The film suggests that Tommy’s untimely demise has trapped Rebecca in amber, forcing her to bring him back to the very moment when his life stopped in order for her life to go forward. Some critics have noted that Green never seems to age over two decades, but they often fail to notice that she doesn’t grow in any other way, either. There’s a strong suggestion that Rebecca has retained her virginity over all this time (one scene makes explicit that clone Tommy is delivered via caesarean), which gives context to the concluding scenes that take Womb into a new level of weirdness and discomfort.

Here again, Fliegauf doesn’t shy away from the most interesting questions, no matter how skeevy they might seem. If you’re picking up on some will-they-won’t-they vibes, rest assured that you’ll get an answer, and even if you correctly anticipate exactly what is going to happen in Womb’s final 15 minutes, there’s still genuine shock value in seeing it all play out, and particularly watching Green’s shifting reactions. It’s unusual to encounter a movie that so readily indulges your innate morbid curiosities without itself being grotesque or devoid of morality. Womb is patient but focused, sometimes tedious but rarely dull, transgressive but calmly and soberly so. It anticipates the protests of those like that angry mother, and it responds with a nod and a thin smile.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Yeah, it’s as weird as it sounds, but sadly not as exciting… The upswing is that Fliegauf has created a certain mood for the film through its staging and its cold bleak setting works well with the subject matter. It’s just a shame that the script can’t match it.” – Niall Browne, Movies in Focus

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

Womb [Blu-ray]

Womb [Blu-ray]
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