Category Archives: It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CAST A DEADLY SPELL (1991)

2 Comments

DIRECTED BY: Martin Campbell

FEATURING: Fred Ward, Julianne Moore, David Warner, Clancy Brown, Alexandra Powers

PLOT: Private eye H. Phillip Lovecraft, who shuns magic in favor of old-school detective skills, searches Los Angeles for a missing grimoire.

Still from Cast A Deadly Spell (1991)

COMMENTS: Films set in other times and places sometimes turn to text prologues to help set the scene. The more that needs to be explained, the more convoluted and tedious the word scroll can become. So you have to admire the economical way Cast a Deadly Spell lays out the rules of the world we’re about to enter: “Los Angeles, 1948. Everyone does magic.” Boom, we’re done. Premise established, The Big Sleep meets Evil Dead, let’s do this thing.

At a surface level, the blend is just cheeky enough to work. Despite the specific references to H. P. Lovecraft (the detective and the author share a name, and little else) and his works (specifically, the Necronomicon, which serves as this film’s MacGuffin), Cast a Deadly Spell is content to pilfer its magic from any source handy. Lovecraft’s landlord and occasional girl Friday is a Caribbean voodoo priestess. Zombies are shipped in from West Africa to perform heavy manual labor until their bodies give out. (The racial element to this practice is left unexplored.) Unicorns are hunted for sport, gremlins could lurk beneath any car hood, and everyone uses supernatural powers to perform basic tasks: lighting cigarettes, carrying trays, filing papers and the like. It’s simple stuff, but it does create a strong feel of a world where magic is commonplace and even mundane.

Where the film truly succeeds is in capturing the 1940s crime thriller milieu. Screenwriter Joseph Dougherty has a good sense of the tropes and characters needed to populate the story, from the tough-but-fair police lieutenant to the poor little rich girl to the mysterious damsel with a secret (who, in this telling, is transgender, a fact the film treats with surprising respect, even if the characters do not). Dougherty also has a terrific ear for genre’s pulpy dialogue, from the hard-boiled explication of the hero’s moral code to any number of tossed-off bon mots, such as Lovecraft’s order at a swanky nightclub: “Bourbon. Show it some water, but be discreet.” Ward is perfectly cast, delivering this and other lines with exactly the right mix of cynical wit and world-weary sadness that marks him as the last honest man in L.A. The cast surrounding him is pretty solid, too: Moore is a sultry femme fatale not to be trusted, Brown is slick to the point of slimy, and there’s nowhere near enough David Warner with his malevolent dignity. All the elements are in place.

The two genres sit comfortably side-by-side for a while, with Lovecraft defiantly bypassing the easy path of magic, recognizing its corrupting influence. But the film can’t resist itself, and in the final showdown, it’s the monster movie that wins out, culminating in a special effects extravaganza (as much as its premium-cable budget can afford) that has little to do with its time or place. The ending is big, loud, and unworthy of its well-crafted setup, leaving behind unfinished plotlines and unrealized potential. It’s telling that we see monsters, zombies, and gargoyles simply fade away at the finale, as though the film couldn’t think of what else to do with them.

The cleverness of the basic idea doesn’t translate to any further breakthroughs; if you’ve seen a Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe tale, or even if you’ve seen newer takes like Chinatown or L.A. Confidential, then you’ve not only seen the style but a lot of the plot elements. And that’s okay; it’s a genre worth revisiting every now and then. The biggest problem for Cast a Deadly Spell is that the highwire mashup trick it’s attempting has been done much better. For example, Who Framed Roger Rabbit brilliantly joins the seemingly incompatible elements of noir and screwball animation in a way where each actually relies upon the other. By contrast, Spell is more of a patchwork than a true melange, taking bits from both styles but never really getting them to gel.

Dougherty penned a sequel, Witch Hunt, set at the height of the Red Scare. Starring Dennis Hopper as Lovecraft and directed by Paul Schrader (!), the latter film is by all accounts a dud. So stick with Cast a Deadly Spell, an enjoyable watch that hits its noir marks with just enough horror seasoning to catch your eye. You can wish it did more with its juicy premise, but let’s be grateful for the small gift we have. All the rest… that’s the stuff that dreams are made of. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Cast a Deadly Spell is a pleasingly bizarre mix of 50’s noir with elements of arcane horror with surprisingly high production values… a weird curio that definitely would never get made today…” – Garry Gallon, All The Ones That Got Away

(This movie was nominated for review by Adam, who said it was “So goddamn weird that I was angry at myself for never having seen it and angrier at the cult following it never got.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE FOOL AND THE FLYING SHIP (1991) / MOUSE SOUP (1993)

4 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

The tradition of celebrities narrating children’s literature is as old as recorded media itself; the first thing Thomas Edison ever recorded on the phonograph was his own recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Ever since then, plopping their children down in front of a famous person reading a book has been tried-and-true escape for parents. It’s a win for everyone: the kids get literature, the parents get distraction, and the celebrities receive a low-pressure gig with major PR upside. Not for nothing has SAG-AFTRA provided a helpful archive of famous storytellers, and if you needed another reason to hope for a speedy resolution to the ongoing strike (#sagaftrastrong #wgastrong), then it’s to save the world from recitations of kidlit by narrators with a lesser pedigree like, say, this guy.

Today, we present two such star-powered endeavors, each of which reflect the character of their narrators, but which tap into weirdness through their design as much as through the stories themselves. 

This is particularly true of “The Fool and the Flying Ship,” which features Robin Williams doing his best impression of an immigrant Jewish Eastern European grandfather unspooling an old folktale about a young schlub who sets out to win the hand of a princess by fulfilling a number of impossible conditions set forth by the King. The only thing the ridiculous young man has going for him is his innate friendliness, but that proves a decisive advantage, as he assembles a retinue of similarly odd companions who are unusually well-suited to meeting the King’s challenges. The film is a product of Rabbit Ears Entertainment, a storytelling outfit responsible for numerous memorable celebrity narrations (foremost among them Jack Nicholson’s peerless rendering of some of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just-So Stories”), but “Flying Ship” stands out as a notably odd entry. Williams’ raucous recounting of the tale frequently feels improvised, with snarky asides and deadpan diversions (perhaps best-exemplified by the casual dismissal of the Fool’s two older brothers), and the rollicking score by The Klezmer Conservatory Band mirrors his energy. The story itself is happily unweighted, with any perceived morals secondary to the silliness of the Fool’s adventures.

Still from The Fool and the Flying Ship

There’s a case to be made, though, that Williams is simply following the lead of the wild illustrations that visualize the tale. Not a true animation, the movie consists of still images of Henrik Drescher’s artwork, similar to the snapshots of book pages found on “Reading Rainbow.” Drescher’s drawings are often ugly, sometimes even deranged, but filled with such joyful anarchic spirit that director Craig Rogers doesn’t need to do much more than add a little Ken Burns-effect here and there. The illustrations, set to Williams’ energetic performance, do the lion’s Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE FOOL AND THE FLYING SHIP (1991) / MOUSE SOUP (1993) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LITTLE MURDERS (1971)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

“You get to the point where you’re, like, ‘I want someone to be sad, and I want to know that I’m responsible!’”– on living in New York City

DIRECTED BY: Alan Arkin

FEATURING: Elliott Gould, Marcia Rodd, Vincent Gardenia, Elizabeth Wilson, Jon Korkes, John Randolph, Doris Roberts, Lou Jacobi, , Alan Arkin

Still from Little Murders (1971)

PLOT: A photographer beaten down by the cruelty and indifference of modern life meets the optimistic Patsy, who has a history of “molding” her romantic partners.

COMMENTS: If the movies are to be believed, New York City in the late 60s and well into the 70s was a nightmarish hellscape, a place where morality was absent, cruelty was commonplace, and the fundamental rules of life could gain no purchase. It was a labyrinthine trap for visitors (see Neil Simon’s original The Out-Of-Towners), a hotbed of insanity amongst the residents (witness ’s crude Where’s Poppa?), and just an ungovernable mess on the whole (Death Wish, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Dog Day Afternoon, among others). How much the city has improved since then is in the eye of the beholder, but this period does seem to have been New York’s nadir.

So it goes in the New York of Little Murders. Muggings occur in broad daylight. Calls to the police are placed on hold. Lewd phone calls find you, wherever you may be. Electricity gives out at random times. No one on the subway bats an eye at a man covered in blood. The psychic trauma of just trying to get through the day is overwhelming; who cares about Vietnam, when a war hero can come home to be gunned down on the Upper West Side? These Manhattanites just suck it up and soldier on, but a lot of people are beginning to crack under the pressure.

Our central couple presents two very different ways to deal with this world. Patsy is the kind of person who dusts herself off after every setback. She’s not an optimist, exactly, but she is persistent. She has a history of “fixing” men who are probably homosexual, and then ditching them when they become too pliant. (She tells Alfred of her dream mate: “I want to be married to a big, strong, vital, virile, self-assured man… that I can protect and take care of.”) When her apartment is looted and ransacked, Patsy automatically begins a mental checklist of all the things she’ll need to do to restore her home. The one thing she absolutely cannot do is give up. “If you don’t fight, you don’t feel,” she insists, “and if you don’t feel, you don’t love.”

Alfred, meanwhile, has chosen to disassociate from everything. When confronted by muggers, he lets them have their way and slips into pleasant daydreams. The market for his photographs shifts from beautiful things to actual pictures of excrement, so he readily goes along. He insists upon omitting God from his wedding vows, but when his prospective father-in-law tries to buy off the officiant, he’s indifferent. Not feeling anything is his only protection, so when Patsy cajoles him into letting down his guard, it’s about the cruelest thing that can happen to him.

There’s no model for how to behave under these circumstances, as demonstrated by the three authority figures who share their wisdom. Lou Jacobi’s judge is a disgusted back-in-my-day type who insists that his immigrant ancestors’ persecution was integral to his success. (Amusingly, his harangue against the young couple continues well into a court case over which he is presiding.) Gould’s M*A*S*H cohort Donald Sutherland appears as a man of the cloth with no convictions whatsoever. The lasting marriages over which he has presided are happy accidents, while the failures are just the cost of doing business, and he shares this fact in the course of his own homily. Finally, director Alan Arkin shows up as a police lieutenant who has slipped into madness. By turns quivering with undirected rage and cackling maniacally, he sees conspiracy everywhere, and is as suspicious and demanding of victims as he is of suspects. What none of these authority figures are is helpful. It’s everyone for themselves.

There’s undoubtedly a version of this tale that plays out like a witty New York comedy of the Neil Simon/Woody Allen variety, but events keep conspiring to kill the comic buzz. The little indignities of big-city life are compounded by crime and cruelty, culminating in the most appalling tragedy of all, which ultimately tells you which of the two leads the movie thinks is right. In the face of this disaster, Little Murders ultimately proposes another way to cope: hurting others. The only thing that brings joy to Alfred and his newfound family is the opportunity to direct all of the sadness and anxiety and rage at another human being, and the laughter that ensues is emblematic of writer Jules Feiffer’s pessimism. People will ultimately make hostile choices, but they’re just trying to get through the day. Would you deny them this little pleasure?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Funny and frightening, Little Murders strikes a tone that few films attain. It certainly doesn’t look like many movie comedies… Godard at first expressed interest in the material, but ended up turning down the project. Even though he wasn’t involved with Little Murders, the film often suggests a kindred spirit with Godard’s late-1960s work.” – Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader (2017 revival)

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

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TAOISM DRUNKARD [GUI MA TIAN SHI] (1984)

Leave a comment

aka Drunken Wu Tang, Miracle Fighters 3

DIRECTED BY: Yuen Cheung-Yan 

FEATURING: Yuen Cheung-Yan, Yuen Yat-Chor, Yuen Shun-Yi

PLOT: A bucktoothed alcoholic beggar is ordered by his brother, a temple priest, to round up a group of virginal young men to defend against a powerful villain with supernatural abilities.

Still from Taoism Drunkard (1984)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The Chinese martial arts genre is rife with insanity, but even by those lofty standards, Taoism Drunkard is pretty zany. No character behaves with any respect to reality as we might know it, factors such as physics are disregarded at will, and the whole film is laced with an undercurrent of naughtiness. It’s consistently unexpected. 

COMMENTS: Taoism Drunkard follows multiple traditions at once. It is, of course, a martial arts film. It also joins the ranks of films utilizing the techniques of drunken boxing, the fighting style that mimics the movements of an intoxicated person to make every contact seem surprising and impactful. In particular, it carries on the tradition of Yuen Clan, the filmed output of actor Yuen Siu-Tien (who played Jackie Chan’s sensei in Drunken Master) and six of his children, including the legendary martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping. And significantly, it’s the third and final entry in the Miracle Fighters series, which gave the Yuen brothers a chance to perfect their blend of fighting, magical elements, and twisted comedy. It’s a lot to live up to, which maybe is why Drunken Taoism is so strenuous in its wildness; it’s almost desperate to stand out amongst so much product, so much tradition. 

Taoism Drunkard has only three of the brothers, but each play their appointed roles, like Chinese Marx Brothers (they even do the famous mirror routine). Cheung-Yan (wearing an absurd pair of buckteeth and pedaling around in his own rat car) is the perpetually inebriated screwup whose drinking fuels his fighting skill. Yat-Chor is practically the straight man as the immature but serious-minded love interest constantly struggling to impress his grandmother. (In drag, Cheung-Yan conveys considerably more dignity in that role.) And then there’s Shun-Yi, gloriously over-the-top as the malevolent Old Devil who exists only to fight and cackle maniacally. If you’ve seen any of their other films (particularly this one’s predecessor, Shaolin Drunkard), then you’ll feel right at home with these cartoonish characters. 

It’s where they put them that makes the difference. On the one hand, the brothers engage in fight scenes with extraordinary combinations of action and imagination. Characters fly, spin through the air like a corkscrewing missile, run up walls, and hurl objects that seem to have minds of their own. (One of the few women not treated as a joke is so skilled at combat that she can use the sleeves of her gown as weapons.) The fight scenes are like glorious dance numbers, casting realism aside, joyful in their inventiveness.

The counterpart to this breathtaking stuntwork is the dumbest of dumb comedy. Everyone behaves with an indignity that Benny Hill would find embarrassing. Fat jokes, shrewish women jokes, drunk jokes, jokes about butts and groins and boobs, a joke with very lengthy setup about drinking urine, and one joke of the literal “g-g-g-ghost” variety. Consider a funeral in which the reanimated corpse interrupts both a graverobber’s attempt to steal his golden upper plate and his widow’s intended assignation with another mourner. Or a confrontation on the street that is suddenly accompanied by a snippet of Howard Jones’ “New Song”, which is the only thing that plants the film in its time. (The 1984 production date is nothing short of astonishing; the ancient-looking film stock and even creakier misogynist mindset seem a decade older at least.)  As though made by 14-year-olds for 12-year-olds, it’s comedy of the most infantile strain, and staging it directly alongside the ridiculous-but-serious fight scenes creates a startling contrast.

Perhaps nothing captures the spirit of Taoism Drunkard better than the craziest thing in it. Yat-Chor’s wise grandmother has created a kind of automaton fighting machine to defend the plot’s MacGuffin, and seeing it in action is unforgettable. The original subtitled release calls it the Banana Monster (a reference to its preferred target, its opponent’s genitals), while the English dub refers to it as the Watermelon Monster (due to its appearance). Whatever you call it hardly matters in the face of what it does. This smooth-skinned, razor-toothed Q*bert speaks in a childish voice, jumps about the room like a rabid frog, deploys spring-loaded satellite dishes that can only be called breast detectors, and snaps hungrily until it finally rolls back into its box. It provokes laughter the moment you see it, and yet the Old Devil’s fear of it is entirely appropriate. It’s utterly absurd, yet believably dangerous. It’s the film in a nutshell — or possibly a watermelon rind.

There’s a reliable streak of weirdness in the martial arts genre, but Taoism Drunkard stands out through its willingness to go bigger, to be sillier and more gross, and to push the boundaries of what makes for a compelling showdown. It has done its legacy proud, and possibly done it one better.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Taoism Drunkard is, dare we suggest it, their weirdest movie ever. A weird, wiggy explosion of talent and surreal brio….” – Subway Cinema

OTHER LINK OF INTEREST:

WriteUps – Banana monster aka Watermelon monster – This character page for the Banana Monster is useful for all your RPG needs.

(This movie was nominated for review by TheMooCow, who got sick of waiting for us to review it and reviewed it themselves in 2022. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KILLER CONDOM (1996)

Leave a comment

Kondom des Grauens

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Martin Walz 

FEATURING: Udo Samel, Peter Lohmeyer, Marc Richter, Leonard Lansink, Iris Berben

PLOT: Hard-boiled detective Luigi Mackeroni sets out to stop a  malevolent predator resembling a prophylactic that uses its razor-sharp teeth to perform impromptu penectomies on the patrons of sex workers at a grungy New York flophouse.

Still from Killer Condom (1996)

COMMENTS: Does anyone go into a movie titled Killer Condom with high expectations? Before you’ve seen a frame, you’re already primed for an experience that will be trashy fun at best, exploitative and gross at worst. And your reservations will only be reinforced when you learn that the title is in no way metaphorical; the movie really is about a killer condom. 

Reality turns out to be much better than expectation, because that title monster—a ravenous rubber that looks like a Snapchat logo but with the teeth of a fluke—is an ideal metaphor for the movie itself. So much of Kondom des Grauens is about misleading appearances. For one thing, it’s distributed (though not made) by , with all the crudeness, grotesquerie, and DGAF attitude attached to that label, and yet it has a sweetness and enlightened viewpoint not often found in films produced by the studio. For another, it’s a movie about the seedy side of gay culture that is decidedly pro-gay, complete with a central romance and an unexpected level of empathy for a trans character. Most significantly, it’s a typical New York police procedural that’s distinguished by the fact that everyone in the film is speaking German.

It’s a measure of how much Western audiences have been trained to accept their stories in English, regardless of time or setting, that the language is the part that feels most bizarre about the film. And while turnabout is fair play, the lengths to which the filmmakers go to provide some verisimilitude only adds to the confusion of seeing this parade of New Yorkers delivering their lines in German. Ample Manhattan location shooting magnifies the many tropes that die Deutschen leave intact: the gruff black police chief who frequently threatens to take the hero’s badge, the tough-as-nails medical examiner with a blindness for social niceties, the parade of undesirables who wander through the fleabag flophouse (bearing the name “Hotel Quickie”). Killer Condom could pass for a low-budget Charles Bronson flick, if not for the Teutonic dialogue. 

Foremost among the required elements is our hero, the impeccably named Luigi Mackeroni. Like many a downtrodden movie cop, he spends his days wandering the streets of the Big Apple, monologuing in voiceover about what a dump it is and how he would maybe be better off in his native Sicily (again, this is all in German). He’s pretty Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KILLER CONDOM (1996) →