Next week, we offer for your consideration a review of Sushi Typhoon’s latest essay in ultraviolent Japana-madness, Yakuza Weapon (2011); a tour of the No-Wave/Cinema of Transgression documentary Blank City (2011); and, straight outta the reader-suggested review queue, it’s Shock Treatment (1981), the belated and bewildered sorta-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Add to that Isle of the Snake People (1971), the fifth entry in Alfred’s series on “Karloff’s Bizarre and Final Six Pack” and you have yourself a week!
The always weird Weirdest Search Term of the Week contest took a turn for the weirder this week. If you recall, last week we gave the search string “freaky kid who loved the taste of his mother’s boobies in a certain italian zombie film” an honorable mention. But here’s the even odder follow-up query that showed up in our server logs this week: “the last letter of the first name of the actor who played a freaky kid who loved the taste of his mother’s boobies in a certain italian zombie film.” (The answer, we believe, is “R”). It looks like some sort of scavenger hunt/rebus type of search-string puzzle? We’ll be on the lookout for another clue next week. Turning to more, er, conventional weird search terms, of course we have to mention the search for “drink jar of deer tesicles” (is that an order?) And in the “it’s probably dirty by we honestly can’t tell” category comes this entry: “”tell me about pussing in pipeline with video” (if you know what this means, please don’t spoil the mystery for us). Our Weirdest Search Term of the Week, however, wins by combining three terms that, while not necessarily weird in themselves, we never thought we’d see strung together in a search: “alter state, gecko, quick bang.” Google had no clue, either, and threw up our site as the most likely source of information on this topic. Thanks for the vote of confidence!
Here’s the world-famous ridiculously-long-and-ever-growing reader-suggested-review-queue for your planning and perusal:Shock Treatment (next week!); Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves Started Small; “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Freaked; Strings; Dellamorte Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE→
A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
American Animal (2011): Jimmy and James, two twenty-something trust-fund babies, live together in relative luxury, but unbalanced Jimmy becomes increasingly deranged when bookish James explains that he’s decided to grow up and get a job. We didn’t notice this when it played festivals last year, but quotes like the one from Slant’s Kenji Fujishima wondering if he “needed to be stoned in order to fully get on its bizarre wavelength” make us wonder if we missed a weird one. It was picked up for theatrical distribution by Screen Media Films, but we have no idea where this might be playing. American Animal official site.
Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012): Read our capsule review. Tim and Eric’s movie garnered lukewarm reactions (including ours) on its video-on-demand debut, but true fans will want to flock to the theaters to support the cult TV pair—won’t they? Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie official site.
IN DEVELOPMENT:
Frankenweenie (post-production, debuts Oct. 2012): Read our review of the original short. We’ve been burnt too many times hoping for Tim Burton to recapture the magic he once had, so we’re not going to get excited about this stop-motion remake of the short Frankenstein parody that originally got him fired from Disney. Watch the just-released trailer and determine your own level of anticipation.
The Humping Pact (2012): We’ll let director Dmitry Paranyushkin describe this one in his own words: ” it’s a meditative contemplation on the persistence in the futile and simultaneous tribute to desolate spaces that have lost their creative potential. And it’s full of multiplied naked men.” He wasn’t kidding about the naked men. Don’t follow this link unless you appreciate the artistic appeal of multiple nude dudes furiously thrusting their pelvises. You’ve been warned. You may also join in the “Humping Pact” at their own website: the makers hope to send naked humping men to various world destinations, and even promise “guest humpers” (Harmony Korine seems the obvious choice). Watch The Humping Pact on Vimeo or get more humping info on humping at humpingpact.com.
What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.
The results of the 2011/2012 Weirdcademy Awards are in, and you, the weird movie voting public, have selected the following honorees as your favorites:
Weirdest Short Film: “Snowballs,” dir. Harmony Korine.
Weirdest Scene: The “rainbow pee” sequence from The Oregonian
A full breakdown of all the votes can be found here. Thanks to all members of the Weirdcademy who participated, and be sure to stick around; the 2012 races are just heating up. Winners, your Cesare statuettes may, or may not, be in the mail…
Don’t forget that this Wednesday is Leap Day, the weirdest day on the calendar and the reason why this project is called 366 Weird Movies rather than 365 Weird Movies. Why not take a day off work and celebrate by watching Eraserhead? (We have ballot initiatives out there trying to get Leap Day declared a municipal holiday, but so far we have only been successful in the Northwest Territories of Canada. In four years, however, we feel pretty confident that the festivities will be universally recognized, so you can start making your travel plans for Feb. 29, 2016 now).
Here’s what’s on tap for next week: we’ll look at Wim Wenders 3-D avant-garde dance documentary Pina (2011), take a stroll through Steven Sorderbergh’s Schizopolis (1996), and Alfred will remind himself why he hates mainstream Hollywood films when he treks to the theater to see Nic Cage ham it up in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. We’re down to two possibilities for a bonus review: either the Japanese B-import Yakuza Weapon (2011) or 1972’s The Iron Rose [La Rose de Fer], another from Redemption Films’ 2012 Jean Rollin dump.
It wasn’t a great week for weird search terms, but as always there’s some scary craziness out there to pass along to you. We start with “litl people traped in boobis,” which we’re assuming is shorthand for the far more sensible “little people trapped in boobies.” Sticking with the boobie theme, we note the strangeness of search for a “freaky kid who loved the taste of his mother’s boobies in a certain italian zombie film,” despite the fact that this query almost certainly refers to a real movie. More suspect is the question of whether there really is a “beach jesus midget horror” movie (if there were, we’d like to think we knew about it). But nothing we saw this week beats the bemusement generated by our Weirdest Search Term of the Week, “why is festive golden hyperbolic occurrence of black male rapist”? Don’t try to answer that, it’s a rhetorical question.
We’ve cut the reader-suggested review queue down by one more entry (yay!); we noticed we’ve been listing The Quiet as an upcoming review for months when we actually reviewed it way back in May of last year. That subtraction makes things look a little more manageable, doesn’t it? Here’s the corrected queue: Schizopolis (next week!); Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves Started Small; “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Freaked; Strings; Dellamorte Dellamore [AKA Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE→
A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
DOGGIEWOGGIEZ! POOCHIEWOOCHIEZ! (2012): A found-footage feature film montage from the guys at Everything is Terrible, consisting entirely of clips featuring dogs (more than 2,000 of them, apparently). According to the advertising, it’s also–in some sense we can’t quite wrap our heads around—a remake of The Holy Mountain. Not really appearing in theaters, but rather on tour screening for one night only in various seedy bars and disreputable nightclubs across the US and Canada, through April. Check the Everything is Terrible website for dates near you, or you can purchase the DVD from them directly.
FILM FESTIVALS: FANTASPORTO (Oporto, Portugal, Feb 24 – Mar 3):
Fantasporto has become one of our favorite film festivals, since three of their grand prize winners (Toto the Hero, Pan’s Labyrinth and Idiots and Angels) have gone on to be Certified Weird (with more to come). With that track record, we consider Fantasporto an excellent predictor of what we’ll be focusing on in the coming months; of all the world’s major festivals, these guys take the offbeat most seriously. Heck, this year’s featured retrospectives are the films of Alain Robbe Grillet, shown alongside the oeuvre of Ed Wood; how much more simpatico with our tastes could they get? Here are some of the flicks we’d make it a point to check out, if we could only get out to Portugal:
The Bunny Game – B&W experimental shocksploitation about a prostitute named “Bunny” picked up and ritualistically tortured and humiliated by a trucker named “Hog.”
Chinese Take-Away [Un Cuento Chino] – Quirky culture clash dramedy about an irritable Argentinian who reluctantly takes a Chinese immigrant under his wing; features a cow falling from the sky.
Gandu – The life of a young man who lives with his mother—a kept woman—becomes increasingly hallucinatory as he experiments with drugs, pornography and rap music in an attempt to find meaning in his life. A rare slice of surrealism from the Indian subcontinent, decidedly un-Bollywood.
Guilty of Romance – Provocateur Shion Sono is back with another might-be-weird transgression: a “true crime” policier that involves three middle-class women playing dangerous sadomasochistic games.
Keyhole – The latest Guy Maddin film stars Jason Patric as Ulysses, a gangster on the run, journeying through his labyrinthine house trying to find his wife (Isabella Rossellini).
Kill List – A psychologically scarred hit man agrees to the proverbial “one last mission” and finds it ironically horrifying.
Meat – Surreal/absurd Dutch black comedy revolving around a perverted butcher.
The Theater Bizarre – A six-film horror anthology from directors Douglas Buck, Buddy Giovinazzo, David Gregory, Karim Hussain, Jeremy Kasten, Tom Savini, and Richard Stanley. Apparently Hussain’s segment is surreal.
This Must Be the Place – Here’s a truly odd premise for a comedy: a retired goth-rock star hunts the Nazi who persecuted his father at Auschwitz. Starring Sean Penn, of all people, as the laconic, androgynous angel of vengeance.
Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead – We’d probably skip this scatological zom-com, except that, since it’s from the director of The Machine Girl and RoboGeisha, our readers would demand we report on it.
NEW ON DVD:
Bad Actress (2011): Black satire about a has-been TV actress who finds that personal tragedy leads to career success. It took director Robert Lee King a dozen years to make this follow-up to his minor cult hit Psycho Beach Party. Buy Bad Actress.
Blank City (2011): Documentary on the “no wave” Super-8 experimental film movement in New York City in the late 1970s/early 1980s exemplified by Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch, etc., along with a couple of characters who emerged from the underground into the (relative) mainstream: Jim Jarmusch and Steve Buscemi. With lots of archival footage and the inevitable commentary from John Waters. Buy Blank City.
Track 29 (1988): A woman whose husband is obsessed with model trains starts a relationship with hitchhiker claiming to be her long-lost son. Image Entertainment quietly re-releases this Nicolas Roeg surrealist flop: the star power of Teresa Russell, Christopher Lloyd and a young Gary Oldman couldn’t help something this weird thrive at the box office. Buy Track 29.
Where The Dead Go To Die (2012): A talking dog takes neighborhood children on what’s described as a “surreal hell-ride.” The box cover is surreally appealing, but we have our doubts about any film released by a director working under a ridiculous pseudonym (Jimmy ScreamerClauz?), and Unearthed Films does not exactly have the greatest track record (can we forgive them for Slaughtered Vomit Dolls yet)? Buy Where The Dead Go To Die.
World on a Wire (1973): Originally made for German television, this dystopian Rainer Werner Fassbinder story scooped the virtual reality storyline more than twenty-five years before The Matrix. According to the press release, it’s a “satiric and surreal look at the weird world of tomorrow from one of cinema’s kinkiest geniuses.” A Criterion release. Buy World on a Wire (Criterion Collection).
Blank City (2011): See description in DVD above. It’s a bit strange to consider a hi-def release detailing a movement with such lo-fi aspirations. Buy Blank City [Blu-ray].
Race War: The Remake (2011): Read our capsule review. DWN productions, known more as mask-makers than filmmakers, are offering their politically incorrect Tromaesque blaxploitation comedy as a free download. Buy a DVD (or one of their masks) if you like it, won’t you? Download Race War: The Remake free from DWN productions.
What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.
Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.