Category Archives: It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE COMING OF SIN (1978)

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La Visita del Vicio;  AKA Vice Makes a Visit

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DIRECTED BY: José Ramon Larraz

FEATURING: Patricia Granada, Lidia Zuazo, Rafael Machado

PLOT: An orphaned girl haunted by prophetic dreams becomes the maid of a wealthy young widow.

Still from the coming of sin (1978)

COMMENTS: If asked by a producer to make a “sexy movie,” not many directors would combine the unsettling atmosphere of Belgian weird fiction with the Tenebrism of the Spanish Baroque, and then mix it all up with an ancient Greek myth about bestiality. José Ramon Larraz does just that. The tale of Pasiphaë provides the surreal imagery; the painting of Diego Velazquez the light and shadows; and the setting, an isolated country manor house, is straight out of Thomas Owen, along with the film’s shockingly violent conclusion.

Trianna (Zuazo) suffers from a recurring nightmare. An orphan without any family, she ends up working for Lorna (Granada), an eccentric and independent widow living alone in the remote countryside. When Lorna asks Trianna about her dream, she says there’s a man on a horse and he frightens her, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. They drop the subject and soon fall into a cozy domesticity which eventually develops into a full-on Sapphic relationship.

When the subject of her nightmare appears in real life—a nude young man riding a black horse bareback—he terrifies Trianna (and tramples the rose bushes in the process). Trianna greets him with a double-barreled shotgun. “That’s no reason to shoot somebody,” Lorna tells her.

Lorna insists Trianna’s nightmare results from her fear of sex and/or men; she has books that will explain it all to her, but illiteracy saves Trianna from having to read volumes of pop psychology. Instead, she visits the local fortune-teller, who asks why she even bothered to come, since her fate is sealed. Trianna is the devil’s child; and if she and the man on the black horse ever become a couple then someone will die.

After this disturbing revelation, the young man on the horse becomes a regular guest at Lorna’s house; she insists he learn some manners, so he begins wearing pants when he joins the ladies for tea. Eventually Chico (Machado) becomes the lover of both Trianna and Lorna, despite Trianna’s fears. Though Chico wants Trianna, Lorna begins aggressively pursuing him, unbalancing their fragile love triangle.

In between orgies, they visit the local museum, a nightclub where two female dancers perform a tango, and Lorna convinces Trianna and Chico to pose half-naked together for her latest painting. Lorna insists the pair would make a fine couple, even as she continues her clandestine visits to Chico’s shack down by the river. To make her assignations, Lorna passes through towering reeds, a landscape vividly described in Owen’s “The Conquered Beauty and the Troubadour,” wherein gunshots obliterate the post-coital calm of a summer afternoon.

Larraz started his artistic career as a comic book illustrator, and Spain’s then-restrictive censorship laws drove him to other parts of Europe. He turned to directing films after a chance meeting with Josef von Sternberg in Brussels, where Larraz also met Owen, friend of Jean Ray, the author of the novel Malpertuis. The influence of these two men shaped the course of Larraz’s idiosyncratic film career. The Coming of Sin was made in Spain upon his return at the end of the Franco regime.

In interviews, Larraz claims that every one of his films is actually a Thomas Owen story. Larraz wears this inspiration on his sleeve, but anyone who hasn’t read Owen’s work won’t recognize him as Larraz’s muse, and he’s never mentioned in the credits. Owen was a fan of old dark house stories (one of his collections is titled “Les Maisons suspectes”), and Larraz clearly shares this obsession. His first film, 1970’s Whirlpool, takes place in an isolated house outside of London, where the protagonists get up to artsy, sexy, and occasionally murderous menages á trois, as they do in The Coming of Sin.

In Owen’s stories uncanny events fracture mundane life. Old mansions reveal to strangers worlds unto themselves, where the normal rules of everyday existence no longer apply. The Coming of Sin exists in numerous cuts and under a plethora of titles (S&M scenes were excised from some versions, or augmented with hardcore footage in others), but Owen’s themes are the focus in Larraz’s original. When Trianna and Chico intrude upon Lorna’s den of solitude they set in motion the hand of fate.

The films of Larraz (AKA J. R. Larrath) are admittedly something of an acquired taste. Like and , his pacing can be slow, the scenery repetitive, the amateur acting impeded by stilted dialogue. He had the makings of a genuine auteur; his film Symptoms was England’s submission to Cannes in 1974, where it received favorable notice from French audiences. Despite that success, Larraz primarily worked in low budget Eurotrash productions, his wild imagination sacrificed to excessive sex scenes and gore at the behest of producers. But no matter how cheap or sleazy the film, Larraz always retained his artist’s eye, and he speaks in his own voice, a unique downbeat tone with a heart of weird fiction hidden at the core.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

‘…another Larraz offering that is almost weirdly suffused with a near hallucinogenic, dreamlike ambience, despite some of the more shocking aspects of the visuals.”–Jeffrey Kauffman, Blu-ray.com (Arrow box set)

Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin ) [ Blu-Ray, Reg.A/B/C Import - United Kingdom ]

Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin ) [ Blu-Ray, Reg.A/B/C Import - United Kingdom ]
  • Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool /
  • Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz
  • Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio
  • Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

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

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AKA The Loser

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DIRECTED BY: Quashiq Mukherjee

FEATURING: , , Kamalika Banerjee, Silajit Majumder,

PLOT: A young man in the slums of Kolkata ekes out a mindless existence, dreaming of getting out and becoming a famous rapper.

Still from gandu (2010)

COMMENTS: “Gandu” doesn’t translate literally as “loser.” That’s a polite interpretation for the benefit of weak-hearted English speakers. The most common reading is “asshole.” (The subtitles default to that term, although some onscreen interviewees say even worse.) So the fact that our hero is not only called Gandu but willingly responds to the slur tells us a lot about him. He’s not just bad; he’s happy to make you think he is.

Gandu’s world is one of dreary hopelessness. His mother spends the day in thrall to her boyfriend, the owner of the local internet café where sad people try to reach their loved ones over terrible connections. The young man whiles away the day by stealing from his mother’s beau while the couple is having sex (he literally crawls into the bedroom to lift the cash) and heads out into the streets to find no prospects for employment or romance, placing bets in a numbers racket that is never going to come through and dreaming of becoming a rap star. We get peeks at Gandu’s rap game, and while he throws down some decent verses, the biggest thing he brings to the table is anger.

The story gets some necessary development when Gandu is nearly run down by a rickshaw. While his instinct is to get mad, he changes his tune when he meets the driver, a friendly fellow curiously named Ricksha who idolizes Bruce Lee, to the point of adopting the legendary star’s hairstyle and building a shrine to him. Ricksha isn’t going any further in life than Gandu is, but he’s more satisfied with his lot, and the two make an appealing pair: Gandu sullenly bemoans his fate, and Ricksha encourages his new pal to at least try for his own level of achievement.

Gandu goes on like this for a while, with the two men living life in a loop, while documentary interviews pop in to express the wider world’s general contempt for their sort. However, in the third act, the film takes a big swing, demolishing the fourth wall to make a point about exactly these kinds of stories. Gandu, having been caught stealing and booted out of his home, contemplates ending it all. Ricksha has an alternate plan: get high on the best stuff there is, the drugs of the gods. Clearly, these do the job, because shortly after dosing, Gandu learns that there is a filmmaker named Quashiq Mukherjee (“Q”) who is making a movie about him. Q in fact shows up, camera already filming, and then the dominoes come a-tumbling. Gandu’s lottery tickets finally win, and win big. A record deal quickly falls into place. The hand-scrawled credits that opened the film are replaced with new, slick, professionally designed titles. Most notably, this loser who has been reduced to self-pleasuring while watching porn finds himself in the company of a pink-haired prostitute who takes his virginity, an occasion so momentous that the film switches to color to capture the event in all its unsimulated splendor.

All the while, Q takes shots at the Indian film industry. At the outset, he jettisons the raucous colors, fantastical storylines, and elaborate musical numbers in favor of stark monochrome, brutal realism, and hardcore rap. Then, twisting the knife further, he produces a deus ex machina to give Gandu the obligatory happy ending, but he does so in the most anti-Bollywood way possible: the rap numbers are professionally produced. The romance is pornographic sex. The hero who saves the day is… the director himself. An audience member has the choice of indulging in this absurd grotesque fantasia or accepting the likely possibility that we’re watching Gandu’s last magnificent dream before succumbing to the drugs in his system. Either way, Q refuses to play by the Indian film world’s rules.

Even if you err on the side of the “rap conquers all” interpretation, Gandu is a grim watch. For all of Q’s inventive storytelling, no one in the movie has any real agency or plays an active role in their own lives (as may be true for many of the residents of Kolkata’s slums). For all the rejection of the illusions of the silver screen, the alternative is aimless and hopeless. Gandu is insightful and daring, but in the end, it doesn’t really go anywhere. You can throw magic at him, but the hero never changes. He’s just an asshole.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…hte film begins in an almost realist style… until they eventually descend into hard drug abuse, at which point the film takes an extremely surreal, post modern tangent.  A mess from start to finish, [Gandu] nevertheless guarantees a unique ride.” – Daniel Green, Cinevue

(This movie was nominated for review by… um… by Gandu. Hmm. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)      

Gandu

Gandu
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DETENTION (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Joseph Kahn

FEATURING: Shanley Caswell, Josh Hutcherson, Spencer Locke, Aaron David Johnson, Dane Cook

PLOT: A serial killer is loose in the halls of Grizzly Lake High, and there may be a connection with events 20 years in the past; only a pair of eye-rolling millennials, uncool vegetarian klutz Riley and popular slacker screwup Clapton, can save the day.

Still from Detention (2011)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Plenty of movies like to subvert audience expectations by mixing genres and deploying radical shifts in tone. Yet it’s hard to recall a film that pursues these goals with such ruthlessness, rapidity, and thoroughness as Detention. The filmmakers practically carpet-bomb the audience with twists, references, and backstories, producing a tale of such density the only people who could possibly keep track of it all are the men who made it. Detention is a movie that would make Dennis Miller say, “Whoa, Chachi, dial it back with the pop culture smorgasbord.”

COMMENTS: The opening credits of Detention are the essence of the whole film in microcosm: exceedingly clever, with names appearing in every possible location: sneaker brand, chocolate bar, upchuck in a urinal. (The director reserves that last one for himself.) Several have even been thoughtfully chosen to match, like the costume designer’s name stitched on a letter jacket or the sound designer appearing on a fire alarm. The flip side to this visual wit is that the names go by so quickly, amidst so much activity and chaos, that there is precious little opportunity to take the information in. The signal is overwhelmed by the noise, and you feel assaulted rather than edified. This will become a theme.

Even if Detention weren’t determined to be some kind of tonal chimera, it would still be a massive millennial snarkfest. The first five minutes play out as a kind of Clueless-meets-Scream, as a too-cool ice princess outlines the secret to high school success (complete with whip-pan edits and onscreen text) before having her head briskly removed from her body. It’s a whole postmodern vibe, and it telegraphs the desire of director Kahn and co-screenwriter Mark Palermo to pile on the jokes and references like so many hats on hats. But this is just an appetizer. The movie adds characters and plotlines like courses in a fancy meal. After introductions to our heroes, all the other high school archetypes get their turns in the spotlight, including the blond cheerleader, the lunkhead jock, the nerdy sidekick, the tech wizard, the bitter administrator… heck, even the stuffed bear that serves as the school’s mascot gets its own storyline. But Detention finds its own path by layering on incongruous genre elements that stupefy with their appearance. Time travel, UFOs, body swapping, predestination paradox, Cronenbergian body horror, and even a Minority Report-style touchless interface are among the twists and turns that arrive unexpectedly.

It’s tempting to view Detention as a parody or send-up of horror and teen comedy genres, and it does work on that level. But Kahn is such a committed nerd that you have to take all the sci-fi tropes as legitimate ventures into the genre. For all the seeming randomness of each new element, the film studiously connects everything in the end. No matter how arbitrary – a cheesy horror film within the film, a teenager obsessed with the 90s, a legend of a student engaging in sexual congress with a stuffed animal – it all ties into the plot. And cast’s commitment to playing every bizarre left turn earnestly (especially Caswell, who should have found a springboard to stardom here) helps keep you engaged, even as the dense plot pushes you away.

Kahn, an incredibly successful music video director, is excited for the opportunity to try his hand at the big-screen format. (He reportedly provided the bulk of the budget himself.) He’s willing to take his lumps – one student speaks disparagingly of his debut feature Torque, while another snarkily references the coke habits of music video directors – and he puts his experience to work on some appealingly offbeat setpieces. Easily the film’s highlight is a montage of one student’s 19-year-long detention, a one-shot tour backwards through changing fashion styles and popular music of the day. But Kahn also refuses to let a moment be a moment, and every bit of wackiness is decorated with more wackiness, so that there’s no real opportunity to take any of it in. Like a McFlurry with a dozen different mix-ins, it’s undeniably sweet, but dizzying and ultimately too much.

For a film as cravenly derivative as Detention, there’s honestly nothing quite like it. It stands as a fascinating artifact, a celluloid Katamari Damacy collecting genres and tropes and stereotypes into one big stew. It’s a piece of pop art, fascinating to observe even if difficult to admire.   

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A seriously (and unapologetically) bizarre piece of work… while Kahn deserves some credit for attempting something different within the teen-movie genre, Detention is simply (and finally) too weird and too off-the-wall to become anything more than a mildly amusing curiosity.” – David Nusair, Reel Film Reviews

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

Detention

Detention
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  • AC-3, Blu-ray, Dolby
  • English (Audio Description), German (Subtitled), French (Subtitled)
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  • 93
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KUSO (2017)

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BewareWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Flying Lotus (credited as “Steve”)

FEATURING: Bethany Schmitt, Ouimi Zumi, Iesha Coston, Zack Fox,  Shane Carpenter, George Clinton, , voice of

PLOT: Survivors of an L.A. earthquake are stricken by disease and experience bizarre events.

Still from Kuso (2017)

COMMENTS: “Kuso,” the Blu-ray’s liner notes explain, is Japanese for “shit,” and you’ll see plenty of kuso in the course of Kuso. The film opens with a shot of maggots wriggling in trenches spelling out the film’s name, followed by a shot of a jerking seismograph. That intro segues into the opening sequence, in which two straight-laced white news anchors reporting on an earthquake are interrupted by a black man in putty-makeup who performs a free jazz scat explaining that “no one will save you” (among the more coherent lines). Then the kuso-show begins in earnest.

The brief earthquake mention is about all the context we get for the segments that follow, which are intercut together and interspersed with surreal (and usually obscene) collages and animations. There’s a couple with a pus-based love life, a flatulent bald kid in a dunce cap who finds a giant anus in the woods, a woman who loses her baby in a hole, a stoner girl who lives with two fuzzy Muppet creatures with TV monitor faces (and who has an exceptionally tasteless date rape/abortion subplot), and a man who undergoes scat therapy to cure himself of his fear of breasts. It’s not clear that all of these characters live in the same universe, except on one occasion when two of them meet and converse in a doctor’s waiting room.

None of the individual stories have much structure or go anywhere interesting, and none of the individuals have any characterization beyond their surface deformities. The lack of storyline and of characters of course contribute to Kuso‘s surprising dullness, but there’s also the lack of variation in the suffocating atmosphere: there’s no real humor, no joy, just endless darkness, cruelty, and a fetishistic focus on disease and bodily fluids. There’s no tonal contrast in the film, which is surprising for a director who’s a musician. It’s no symphony, but instead the cinematic equivalent of a 90-minute bass solo.

There is so little African-American surrealism out there that it’s a crime that this lump ends up as one of the more prominent examples of the form. The film seems pointless, never applying its vision to any end beyond the most juvenile variety of shock possible. It depicts a world of cruelty and disease unrelieved by any sort of thought or emotional investment. That is a sort of vision. But it has nothing to do with Flying Lotus’ anarchic but groovy and joyful music, which is experimental and challenging but harmonic—unlike Kuso, which is a harsh blast of formless noise. Because Lotus is so talented, I hope that he will aim higher in future filmic excursions, and that one day we’ll look back at this movie as a lonely misfire in his artistic catalog. But as it stands, Kuso does a great disservice to weird films. , and their brethren often shock, but you never doubt that deep down the fillmakers actually like people. Kuso has nothing good to say about our species, and actually appears to actively hate humanity—including, by extension, its audience.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…inevitably whets the appetite of people who 50 years ago would have been lining up for their 10th viewing of ‘Mondo Cane’ — the sort of audiences forever on the lookout for something weirder or more extreme to make them go, ‘Ewwwww!’ Those viewers, as well as some among the habitually-stoned, will constitute the primary fans of this first feature… Everybody else is going to want to take a wide detour around this insufferable mishmash of interwoven segments — aimless in themselves, even more so as a whole — almost entirely concerned with bodily functions and bodily fluids.”–Variety (festival screening)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Dan M.”, who said “I’m assuming somebody else has already suggested it but there you go.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Kuso [Blu-ray]

Kuso [Blu-ray]
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE POSSESSED (1965)

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La Donna del Lago

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DIRECTED BY: , Franco Rossellini

FEATURING: , Salvo Randone, , Pier Giovanni Anchisi, Virna Lisi

PLOT: A writer visits a childhood vacation spot at a lake and investigates the mystery of a missing acquaintance.

Still from The Possessed (1965)

COMMENTS: “It’s difficult to look inside oneself honestly, eh?”

Is this why award-winning author Bernard (Baldwin) claims to have never written anything autobiographical? His friends seem skeptical. He returns to a lakeside village to begin work on his next book, one inspired by memories of his childhood summers. But instead of writing, Bernard begins a routine of gossiping with the locals and spying on the staff of his hotel, “a hotel. . . filled with memories,” where “everything seem[s] normal on the surface.”

Moody black and white photography heightens the suggestion that everything isn’t quite normal in this unnamed locale. The cinematography emphasizes shadows; picturesque tree-lined lanes become sinister and otherworldly. The light dappling the lake’s surface could be the sun or the moon. The immersive sound design features a menacing whisper of wind which begins at Bernard’s first sight of the lake.

It’s the off-season, and characters furtively scurry about, either to escape from the cold or from prying eyes. The camera slides around corners, rendering the layout of both the town and the hotel endlessly labyrinthine. It sidles up to the cracks in doors, providing his point of view whenever Bernard’s voyeurism in the present day is intercut with his memories of Tilde, a beautiful blonde chamber maid (Lisi). As we search through the hotel and the village along with him, we quickly come to realize that, though he never fully admits it, Bernard is completely infatuated with the memory of Tilde.

After mistakenly following another woman, he discovers that Tilde died under mysterious circumstances since his last visit the year before. Determined to find out what happened to her—was it suicide or murder?—Bernard enlists the help of Francesco (Anchisi), a cynical local photographer. He willingly shares photographic evidence along with his own theories, but becomes increasingly reluctant to dig too deeply into the mystery. As Bernard becomes ever more obsessed with Tilde, he begins having nightmares about her case. Gradually he comes to suspect the hotel owner’s family must be somehow implicated.

When it was first released in 1965, La Donna del Lago (“The Lady of the Lake”) was poorly received. Italian critics lambasted its art-house style, including the use of washed out high-contrast in dreams and flashbacks, and creative editing that consistently blurs the lines between past and present. Cultural and historical baggage may also have sunk it. The screenplay is loosely based on a novel of the same name, which was in turn was inspired by a true crime1.

News of the actual case was still fresh in the popular consciousness while the film was being made, but if the filmmakers had hoped to cash in, they misread their audience. By the mid ’60s, color was in, and The Possessed seemed hopelessly pretentious and out of date. Instead of a typical crime thriller, it’s an Expressionist and hallucinatory fever-dream tour through the corridors of memory and imagination. Like Last Year at Marienbad, only with faster pacing and moments of ian suspense, The Possessed is both beautiful and occasionally confusing to watch, but it’s never boring.

Later re–branded as a giallo, The Possessed features some tropes of the genre, but even though pretty girls are dying mysterious deaths, there is no black-gloved killer (and the young women may not have been murdered at all). The writer protagonist is a familiar figure, the outsider trying to carry out his own investigation while becoming further mired in mystery. Renzo Rossellini’s orchestral score swells to ironic crescendos whenever Bernard fails to uncover any meaningful clues. There are plentiful red herrings: ambiguous photographic images, scraps of paper scrawled with obscure sentence fragments, women who wear each other’s coats so they become unrecognizable when bundled up in scarves against the wind. Ultimately The Possessed resists easy genre categorization, and for this reason its hybrid qualities make it weird-adjacent. It conjures a pervasive unsettling atmosphere, even though nothing overtly surreal appears on screen.

The fact that the screenplay was originally drafted by (Death Laid an Egg, If You Live, Shoot) may account for some of the film’s more unusual qualities, and makes The Possessed of interest to Questi completists. The original novel by Giovanni Comisso describes a writer’s journey to the scene of the crimes where he receives psychic impressions of the suspects, and Questi focuses heavily on this aspect. Cues such as the high contrast lighting and a repeated mournful bird cry provide hints for interpreting Bernard’s thoughts, imaginings, memories, and dreams, but in the end these images from inside his head all become tangled up together. Anyone familiar with the story’s background would of course already know who the killers will turn out to be, but Questi’s script isn’t a whodunit. He isn’t afraid to leave questions unanswered. As Bernard is subtly implicated as an unreliable narrator, a true crime story becomes a study of subjectivity and desire.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story’s a feverish dream-narrative in which Bernard is often literally fevered and dreaming… For its amplified layers of bafflement within its hallucinations, I prefer [the title] The Lady of the Lake to The Possessed, but this highly polished mirror of uncertainty and obsession is a lovely discovery under any identity.”–Michael Barrett, Pop Matters [Blu-ray]

1 The Alleghe killings were a series of murders that began in the 1930s in a small village in Northern Italy, and after being interrupted by WWII, they continued, still unsolved, into the 1950s. The case had been closed, then reopened, and the killers were only convicted in 1964.

The Possessed

The Possessed
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