Category Archives: It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ZOO ZÉRO (1979)

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DIRECTED BY: Alain Fleischer

FEATURING: , , , ,

PLOT: A singer spends a night trying to escape from her overbearing manager while pursued by one admirer who insists he heard her sing in a city she’s never been to, and another who claims he lost his voice when he heard she’d given up singing.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Have you ever thought to yourself, if only someone would make a Last Year at Marienbad/The Magic Flute mash-up, written according to the non-narrative principles of  Eden and After? They could have Catherine Jourdan in the lead as the “A” character, and Klaus Kinski as “M”. . . and why not set it in a grimy, late ’70s Paris overrun with rabid animals? Okay, you probably haven’t; but someone did, and that someone was Alain Fleischer. A director largely unknown in the English-speaking/Region A world, Fleischer moved in the same artistic circles as and . While he was clearly influenced by the same ideas as the better known Alains, Fleischer’s work is perhaps too weird to have been rescued from obscurity; all the more reason to give him some consideration.

COMMENTS: There are so many WTF elements in Zoo zéro I can’t possibly cover them all, but between the ventriloquist chauffeur who only speaks through his socialist revolutionary Donald Duck dummy, to a brothel where clients simply listen to prostitutes describing their actions from unlit rooms, practically every scene features someone, or something, inexplicable.

The opening credits sequence recall those of Eden and After‘s. The actors announce themselves by name, then begin reading texts featuring animals, including the biblical story of Noah and the Ark, and the French fairy tale about Reynaud the fox. Each actor keeps reading as another joins the chorus, until, by the end, the overlapping voices form an unintelligible cacophony. A fitting introduction to the experience of watching Zoo zéro: a movie so jam-packed with references and metaphors, its actual meaning becomes almost impossible to interpret.

Zoo begins at the Noah’s Ark nightclub on a rainy night. Eva (Jourdan), dressed like Liza Minelli in Cabaret, performs before an audience all wearing animal masks. A mysterious man later appears in Eva’s dressing room, saying she once knew him as Ivo (pronounced “Eevo”; all the characters have names beginning with vowel sounds and a majority begin with a long “e”.)

Ivo claims to have heard her performance in Salzburg, in The Magic Flute. Even though Eva says she’s never even been to Salzburg, Ivo has a recording to prove it. Uwe, Eva’s manager, takes possession of the tape and refuses to let her hear it.

The dialogue, while not as obscure as in Marienbad, never resolves Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ZOO ZÉRO (1979) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Joseph M. Sonneborn, Jr.

FEATURING: Balloons, marching bands, parade floats, clowns, and more balloons

PLOT: During an especially drowsy storytime, a boy has dreams about large parade balloons that cavort and loom over him; we then see the balloons in their natural habitat, the 1964 Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia, with play-by-play from a possibly inebriated narrator.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Exhibit A in the case for advertising’s malign influence, this hour-long promo for parade balloons is both horror show and monument to boredom. Viewed through the ironic shades of nostalgia, it’s gleefully ignorant, but as a relic of its era, it’s a searing indictment of the utterly misguided definition of “fun” among the City of Brotherly Love’s cultural elite.

Still from Fun in Balloonland (1965)

COMMENTS: Perhaps you started your day today with a viewing of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a hours-long march of giant helium balloons, high school bands, and uncomfortably cold Broadway performers hiking through the streets of Manhattan. They (and you) are partaking in a tradition that goes back to 1924, but that’s not even the oldest Thanksgiving street party there is. That crown is held by Philadelphia’s parade, created by Macy’s rival Gimbel’s back in 1920. So it’s more than appropriate to turn our gaze toward that venerable Turkey Day bastion, and see how it inadvertently spawned a turkey of a very different kind.

Fun in Balloon Land wastes no time in delivering off-putting weirdness with the shockingly atonal theme song, sung by a man backed by a group of faux-enthusiastic children and the world’s saddest roller-rink organ. Through slant rhymes and methodical destruction of meter, the “tune” previews attractions to come like the Marrying Turkey, suggests that a teddy bear has fallen arches, and just generally shreds the auditory nerve. Already, we’re off balance before we’ve even seen the opening credit for “Giant Balloon Parades Inc. Presents,” a declaration that doesn’t augur well for artistic achievement.

The film kicks off in earnest with the sleepytime dream of Sonny (whose name we won’t learn until the last 10 minutes of the film), who rises from bed to stand in the corner of a book of fairy tales like a punished child and starts imaging a series of locales that correspond perfectly with Giant Balloon Parades, Inc.’s product line, including an undersea kingdom, a farm, and a culturally insensitive Old West. Sometimes these scenes are accompanied by amateur dances, but occasionally the film gets ambitious and tries to tell a story, as when the boy dons a gold lamé diaper and blows off a couple of Philly-accented mermaids. The “magic” of the balloons is meant to be self-evident, so there’s no attempt to reference any actual fairy tales or stories of adventure; they’re just generic milieus. All of this Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: IT COULDN’T HAPPEN HERE (1987)

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“I’ve just been fishing with Salvador Dali. He used a dotted line. . . caught every other fish.”

DIRECTED BY: Jack Bond

FEATURING: Neil Tennant, Chris Lowe

PLOT: From West End towns with dead end walls, the Pet Shop Boys travel around England before ending up at King’s Cross; all the while, singer Neil Tennant recalls his childhood memories in a narrative postcard to his mother.

COMMENTS: By 1987 the Pet Shop Boys had produced two hit albums with a number of chart-topping singles but they still couldn’t afford the expense of touring. When a planned concert fell through, their manager suggested they make a film, something like did with A Hard Day’s Night. Director Jack Bond, whose prior credits included the documentary Dali in New York (1965) and a series of experimental films with Jane Arden, proved integral to the project. Structured as a road movie, Bond turns the film into a Surrealist game of free association. Though punctuated by popular songs, It Couldn’t Happen Here sank into obscurity after being panned by film critics.

Anyone expecting this to be a typical band film must have been surprised by a movie that’s anything but. It lacks concert footage and behind-the-scenes interviews; instead, the Boys meander through a series of vignettes. Lyrics suddenly crop up in the dialogue as spoken word poetry or snippets on the radio. Fans of Tennant’s literate compositions, in which love, romance, and commerce all intertwine, will instantly recognize them. To anyone less familiar with the music, the isolated refrains make the film even more enigmatic.

The road trip begins at the seashore. Tennant stops by a souvenir stand to purchase  bawdy holiday postcards. He reminisces about his family nearly being kicked out of a boarding house due to his bad behavior. The scene then cuts to Chris Lowe, narrowly escaping the same overbearing landlady after he throws his breakfast in her face. “Chrissy, baby,” she moans, “what have I done to deserve this?”

The present day continually blends with the past as Lowe joins Tennant at the seaside and a blind priest chases two schoolboys through a carnival. After Tennant recalls how his father once spent their family’s savings on a blue and cream-colored Ford Zephyr, the priest then reappears as a hitchhiking serial killer. While Lowe drives and Tennant lip-syncs to himself on the radio, the hitchhiker gleefully recounts his murderous exploits with Salvador Dalí as they continue their journey across the country.

A pitstop at a diner stars a ventriloquist’s dummy who rants about the nature of time, sparking an existential crisis in a pilot seated nearby. A plane and car-chase scene, reminiscent of North by Northwest, ends in front of a phone booth being vandalized by Neo-Nazis, who politely cease in their destruction so Tennant can call the landlady.

And so it goes, passing from one bizarre set-piece to another, the proceedings occasionally interrupted by MTV-style dance breaks. Tennant and Lowe retain deadpan expressions throughout, observing everything from a man on fire and zebra keepers with black-and-white striped faces with incurious nonchalance.

Re-considering It Couldn’t Happen Here, some commentators are kinder to it in hindsight, uncovering clever political critique lurking beneath the odd sensibility. Others are not so nice, declaring it a misguided foray best left forgotten. Dedicated fans of the Pet Shop Boys should seize opportunities to check it out on physical media or streaming; there’s a certain nostalgia to hearing the group’s hits again in this context. For others, it’s an interesting, if not entirely successful, attempt at making a film according to Surrealist principles; at least, that’s my impression.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the result is as idiosyncratic to the deadpan duo as A Hard Day’s Night was to the Fab Four. The film takes second place in a Fellini-style phantasmagoria of British seaside life, mixing past, present and abstract surrealism…”–Eddie Harrison, film-authority

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

Pet Shop Boys - It Couldn't Happen Here (Std Edition DVD + Blu-ray)

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: 8½ WOMEN (1999)

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DIRECTED BY: Peter Greenaway

FEATURING: John Standing, Matthew Delamere, Polly Walker, , Toni Collette, Amanda Plummer, Shizuka Inoh

PLOT: A wealthy businessman’s son attempts to bring his widower father out of his grief by introducing him to the pleasures of libertinism.

Still from 8 1/2 Women (1999)

COMMENTS: Probably the most quoted line from Peter Greenaway’s exploration of high-class sexual adventurism comes when father and son watch Fellini’s classic 8½. “How many film directors make films to satisfy their sexual fantasies?” Philip asks. “Most of them,” his son replies. It’s a noteworthy piece of art that coughs up its mission statement so readily. Greenaway is already renowned for his treatment of sex as an artistic endeavor. By aligning himself with one of the acknowledged greats of the cinema, he would seem to be making a definitive statement on the primal urge.

It’s important to remember, however, that Greenaway really doesn’t think much of the male of the species. The two weirdest elements of 8½ Women—how much humiliation men are willing to endure to get their base needs met, and what women deem important enough to lead them to assent—are opposite sides of the same coin. Blinkered, selfish, easily distracted by carnal matters, men are always getting in their own way, and so it goes with Philip and his son Storey. These men possess staggering wealth (their fortune was built on debt collection), so much so that they can usually ignore the niceties of culture or propriety, and even then, they can think of little but their next gratification. No surprise that women recognize them for the pathetic, hollow beings they are. 8½ Women feels like an argument for mutual benefits: the men get the sexual gratification they crave, and the women get to fulfill their own needs, be they professional or psychological.

Those needs, to be certain, are kinda peculiar. Gioconda wants to be pregnant at all times, but Clothilde just wants permission to wear her old mistress’ hats, while Beryl has a thing for farm animals, a fetish that lands her in the world’s most perverse body cast. Lording over them all is Palmira, the most powerful person in the house (and probably in any room she enters) by virtue of having the most control over her reason for being there: the pleasure of shagging Philip until he drops, a fact which is completely lost on Philip’s son, who petulantly expects to be next in line.

Walker is electrifying in her power, which highlights how deliberately unsexy this movie about men who keep a harem is. This spiciest scene in the film features novice nun Griselda (played by Colette) leading the Emmenthal boys to her chamber; they are enraptured, she is paying off a debt. She’s not the only one. It’s noteworthy that when one of them actually needs something from the men–such as Mio, a Japanese woman who wants to take on the qualities of a Kabuki female impersonator–they come up pathetically short. 8½ Women never stops reminding you that these relationships are transactional, and is surprisingly cruel to anyone who dares think love has anything to do with it. (One woman is even bludgeoned over the head with a roof tile for her mistake.)

8½ Women is implicitly weird because of what Greenaway brings to any project, but it ultimately doesn’t add up to much. People come, people go, those who understand the rules get what they want. Philip and Storey may get to the root of Fellini’s imagination, but never get anywhere near the magic found there.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Like all other Greenaway movies, 8 1/2 Women transpires in a surreal setting that reflects our reality as seen through a looking glass darkly… traditional cinematic elements exist primarily to provide a framework in which Greenaway can operate to present a variety of outrageous sequences… unless you like the offbeat simply because it’s offbeat, 8½ Women may not be the best choice for an evening’s entertainment.” – James Berardinelli, Reel View (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Caleb Moss, who described it thusly: “”Peter Greenaway presents Marquis de Sade, complete with father/son homoerotic subtext, a giant pig, a woman with an odd sexual predilection for horses and swine, inexplicable earthquakes, self-aware parallelisms with Fellini, and as you may of guessed, literally half of a woman, to name some of the very least of strange, detached debaucheries in this film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: WELCOME HOME, BROTHER CHARLES (1975)

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AKA Soul Vengeance

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“Too bad the title ‘Shaft’ was already taken.”–Peter Hanson, “Every ‘70s Movie”

DIRECTED BY: Jamaa Fanaka

FEATURING: Marlo Monte, Reatha Gray, Stan Kamber, Ben Bigelow, Jake Carter, Jackie Ziegler

PLOT: After a three-year stint in the pen, Charles returns home with an extraordinary new ability that will help him settle scores with the racist cop who nabbed him and the former friend who stole his drug-dealing business and his old girlfriend.

Still from "Welcome Home, Brother Charles" (1975)

COMMENTS: Jamaa Fanaka rejected the term “blaxploitation” to describe his films. He felt it was more apt to describe the movies that white producers made to exploit the market, as opposed to home-grown productions representing the real concerns of black people. But he was no elitist; this is, after all, the man behind the Penitentiary series (one of which also has a spot in our reader-suggestion queue). So it’s interesting to see what Fanaka had in mind when he first had the chance to tell a story of his own. Welcome Home, Brother Charles, a movie that he cobbled together on weekends during his tenure at UCLA film school, contains plenty of sex and violence to titillate audiences, and the portrait of an African American society ridden with drugs, booze, and prostitution would be right at home in the genre. But this is a film with a genuine anger to express, and it manifests itself in the most extraordinary revenge.

(The story of Fanaka’s name is too good not to be told. The aspiring filmmaker born Walter Gordon attended a screening of Cooley High and was shocked to discover that director Michael Schultz, name notwithstanding, was black. Determined to avoid any confusion, he got hold of a Swahili dictionary and invented a new name for himself that roughly translates as “through togetherness we will find success.”)

Things look bad for our hero from the start: we open with the title character on the edge of a building, with a white cop trying to talk him down. Then we flashback to when all the trouble began, most notably his arrest by a cop so bigoted that he tries to cut off Charles’ genitals even before he’s read him his rights. (Not surprisingly, this earns the cop a mild “knock it off” from his superiors as punishment. He gets more of a smackdown from his cheating wife, who notes that he’s not only bad in bed, but doesn’t even have the fortitude to slap her around.) Monte’s scream is purely derived from pain, but it serves as a howl of injustice.

To this point, this has all been extreme and unfair, but not unexpected. The hint that something weirder is coming first arrives during Charles’ stay in jail, when he has terrible dreams with suggestions of illicit experimentation. It’s clear that something much stranger is going on when Charles pays a visit to the racist cop’s home and seduces the bigot’s wife. She is flat-out hypnotized by the sight of him, literally dropping her panties and agreeing to do nothing while he seeks vengeance on her odious husband. In fact, that turns out to be his whole plan: find the men who railroaded him, seduce their ladies with his superior sexual prowess, and then kill the damned racist pig. It’s a simple, straightforward scheme, only complicated by Charles’ weapon of choice.

You see, while we recognize the trope of the well-endowed black man, Charles’ gifts are considerably  greater than that. In fact, his manhood is incredibly large, unthinkably long, and fully prehensile. (If you were paying close attention during the opening credits, you are rewarded for spotting the foreshadowing.) Yep, his trouser snake is actually a 15-foot boa constrictor, and it operates in similar fashion, wrapping around the necks of the white men who wronged him and choking them until they’re dead. This is the astounding plot twist that kicks Welcome Home, Brother Charles into the strange stratosphere, because while this site is no stranger to giant johnsons pursuing justice, this killer anaconda is on a whole other level.

Perhaps the surest sign that Fanaka did not want a run-of-the-mill blaxploitation film is his determination to end the film on a dark note. Despite the monster in his pants, Charles can’t hold off institutional racism for long, and the fact that going out on his own terms is the victory reflects this movie’s mindset. Brother Charles finishes with a serious-minded epigram—“Let them indulge their pride if thinking I am destroyed is a comfort to them; let it be”—that isn’t really earned, and which suggests a very different film in Fanaka’s head from the one we just watched. If that film existed, the third act strangled it to death with its audacious twist. Maybe Welcome Home, Brother Charles isn’t blaxploitation. But something’s being exploited, that’s for sure.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…really, really weird… one of the most insane movies you will ever see. It’s also not very good, but it’s not awful, and I still wholeheartedly recommend it, at least to lovers of all things cheese related.”–Ryan McDonald, Shameless Self Expression

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

Soul Vengeance

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