Now that we’ve certified over 100 movies weird, we’ll be kicking off next week by taking a second pass at our semi-official “top 10 weird movies” list. I know this will be a rehash for you long-time 366 veterans, but it’s a useful service for new visitors who want a best-of-the-best primer to start off with; and, you would not believe how much Googlers love top 10 lists! Don’t worry, though, we’ll still be adding new reviews to the database, including our take on Jean-Luc Goddard’s divisive latest movie essay, Film Socialisme (2010), and, from the reader-suggested review queue, we’ll break down the bizarre stop-motion fairy tale Blood Tea and Red String (2006).
We’re getting more and more search engine traffic—over 1000 unique queries most days. This is making it harder, not easier, to find a Weirdest Search Terms of the Week, as we’re forced to scan the server logs with a quicker eye to keep the project from eating up our little bit of free time. Nonetheless, we’ll continue to point out the strange noises we do find amidst the massive signal. First, we’re proud (though a bit confused) that we continue to hold a top 5 ranking for the term “saxyshat.” Also, we are now going to be on the lookout for “an alien movie that made some womens boobs grow” (personally, if I can find it, I think it would be worth a shot to show this one to my girlfriend). We’re less enthused about the “movie where pregnant goat moves to woman,” and “monsther minds perverted wit tens ladys porno movies” is just outside our area of expertise. Our weirdest search term of the week, however, goes to ‘illuminati face “skinning” children.’ We knew the Illuminati worked in mysterious ways, but for God’s sake, can’t they leave the children out of it?
Here’s the massive, ever-growing reader-suggested review queue: Blood Tea and Red Strings (next week!); Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; The Bride of Frank; La Grande Bouffe; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves Started Small; “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; 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):
Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos (2011): The heroes of the long running anime series find themselves embroiled in a rebellion. This is being released in the original Japanese with English subtitles to please purists. It’s playing all over the U.S. and Canada, but for one day only in some locales, so schedule accordingly if you want to catch it. Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos official Facebook page.
FILM FESTIVALS– SUNDANCE (Park City, Utah, Jan 19-29):
It’s that time again: time for Sundance, the make-or-break festival for American indies. If last year’s slate is a predictor, about a third of the movies listed here will fail to find a distributor and virtually disappear, another third will struggle hard to earn only a limited release, and of the remainder one or two will become minor hits. Nonetheless, it’s still our earliest indicator for what we’ll be anointing as “weird” in 2012. Sundance festival home page.
Beasts of the Southern Wild – A six-year old girl named Hushpuppy contracts a fever, which seems to usher in the apocalypse and a plague of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. Screening Jan 20-24, 26.
Bobby Yeah – We don’t usual spotlight shorts, but this 23-minute film by the talented and macabre Robert Morgan is an exception. Watch the trailer to see why. Jan 20, 21, 24 & 27.
Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared – We’re breaking our rule of not mentioning short films for a second time, but this time it’s because we scooped Sundance by featuring this creepy kids song about creativity gone too far way back in August. If you must see it on the big screen, then you can catch it screening before the indie drama Kid-Thing Jan 23-24 or 26-28.
Elena – Modern Russian class-struggle drama about an aging woman maneuvering to secure her husband’s inheritance. Yawn, Sundance, we already reviewed this one. Give us something new. Jan 21-22, 24, 27-28.
Excision – Horror film about a spooky, morbid teen girl who decides to lose her virginity and then, per the synopsis, “the weirdness really begins.” Not much is known about this one except that it’s playing in the “Midnight” category and it features both Traci Lords and the man who gave disgraced Traci her “big” break— John Waters. Jan 21, 25, 27-28.
Grabbers – Irish monster movie where potential victims discover they can dissuade alien invaders from snacking on them by raising their blood alcohol levels. A “Midnight” feature. Jan 23, 25-27.
It’s Such a Beautiful Day – Once again, we don’t focus on festival shorts, but we’ll make a third exception for Don Hertzfeldt‘s latest, since it’s the third installment of the stick-figure psychodrama Everything Will Be OK, which we first embedded way back in May. See it Jan. 21, 23, or 27-28, screened in the animated shorts program.
John Dies in the End – Cult director Don Coscarelli adapts a popular webseries about two losers saving the world from a psychedelic drug being used by aliens to take over the planet. In the “Midnight” category, natch. Jan 23, 25-26, 28.
L – A man lives in his car and delivers honey to a narcoleptic for a living in this “willfully bizarre,” bear-obsessed Greek feature. Co-written by the co-writer of Dogtooth, so it starts with weird Hellenic cred. Jan 23-25, 27-28.
Oversimplification of Her Beauty – An impressionistic, experimental, partially animated portrait of a young artist and his desire for a beautiful woman. Part of the “New Frontier” series. Jan 21, 23-24, 28.
Room 237 – Documentary about a phenomenon I didn’t realize existed, but am not at all surprised by: people who believe that Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining contains hidden messages revealing vast international conspiracies. One loony theorizes that the entire movie is Kubrick’s coded confession that he helped fake the footage of Americans landing on the moon. Jan 23-24, 26, 28.
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. Jan. 21-22, 25, 28.
Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie – The Cartoon Network cult comics get their own billion dollar extravaganza, but blow the entire budget on celebrity cameos by Jeff Goldblum, Zach Galifianakis, and Will Ferrell, among others. The plot has something to do with shrim [sic]. Jan 20-21, 24, 27-28.
V/H/S – A horror anthology wherein burglars are hired to break in to a home to steal a rare VHS tape, but find that every cassette they watch is stranger and more disturbing than the last one. Playing at Midnight. Jan 22-24, 28.
whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir – Here’s something you’ll probably never see on home video. If I’ve understood the synopsis correctly, this black and white dystopian noir selects, semi-randomly and in real time, a combination of film clips, voiceover dialogue, and background music to create an experience that’s different with every showing. Catch it Jan. 22, 24-25.
Wrong – A man looking for his lost dog encounters bizarre characters and risks losing his sanity. This is director Quentin Dupieux ‘s followup to his weird hit Rubber, and per the synopsis this one is “equally bizarre.” Jan 21-22, 24, 26-27.
NEW ON DVD:
Belle de Jour (1967): Catherine Deneuve is a housewife by day, hooker by night in this masochistic, surrealistic erotic fantasy from Luis Buñuel. At one point she’s tied up and splattered with shovelfuls of mud while workers insult her; strong stuff for a 1967 art film. The Criterion disc comes with 30 minutes of supplemental material. Buy Belle de Jour (Criterion Collection).
Bombay Beach (2011): Footage of three residents of the decaying Salton Sea region—a bipolar boy, a high school athlete fleeing gang violence, and a retired oil-rig worker—is mixed with musical montages from Beirut and Bob Dylan to create what the makers describe as a “slightly surreal documentary experience.” Buy Bombay Beach.
Caterpillar (2010): The Japanese emperor declares a deaf-mute quadruple amputee a Sino-Japanese war hero and orders his wife to take care of him—including sexually. Not so surreal, but certainly unusual, and the scenario recalls the weird anti-war classic Johnny Got His Gun. Buy Caterpillar.
Cold Sweat (2010): An elderly couple abduct women, strip them to their underwear, and douse them in liquid nitroglycerin to force their obedience in this odd low-budget Argentinian horror-thriller. The consensus seems to be its utterly ludicrous but shamelessly fun. Buy Cold Sweat.
The Overcoat [Il Cappotto] (1952): A lowly bureaucrat buys, then loses, a fancy overcoat, then returns from the dead to look for it. No idea how strange this seldom-seen Italian adaptation of Nicolai Gogol’s short story is, but the original tale was odd enough that Vladmir Nabokov gave a famous lecture on it in which he concluded “great literature skirts the irrational.” Buy The Overcoat [Il Cappotto].
The Platinum Pussycat (1968)/The Sexploiters (1965): We mention this Retro-Seduction Cinema double-feature release for Pussycat [AKA The Losers]; it’s a gangster sexploitation/action feature, and simultaneously a silent film with tinted footage. It may not be good, but at least it’s sure to be bad in a different way. Less is known about The Sexploiters. Buy Platinum Pussycat/The Sexploiters.
Redline (2009): An anime about a futuristic race, and a rebel who tries to win it while foregoing the customary arsenal of weaponry. It sounds like an animated Japanese version of Death Race 2000, from a director who worked as an animator on Ninja Scroll and Funky Forest. Buy Redline.
Simon (1980): A psychology professor is brainwashed into thinking he’s a space alien, and winds up living with a hippie cult who worship TV Guide. Starring Alan Arkin and Madelaine Kahn, we had to mention this long-forgotten satire based on the plot synopsis. On DVD-R from Warner Archive. Buy Simon.
The Oregonian (2011): Read our capsule review. Many readers have asked about the availability of this movie (which debuted at Sundance last year). Here’s your chance to see what the fuss is about. We’ll keep an eye out for a DVD release. Rent The Oregonian on Video on Demand.
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
Flatliners (1990): Medical students experiment with inducing near-death experiences by deliberately stopping their own hearts; they have postmortem hallucinations. The cast features then up-and-comers Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, and Kevin Bacon; it’s somewhat mainstream, but hey, it’s free. Watch Flatliners free on YouTube.
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.
It’s 2001: A Weird Movie Odyssey next week at 366 Weird Movies, as by pure coincidence all three of the reader-suggested movies we’ll be checking out were products of the first year of the millennium: Cory McAbee‘s absurdist-space-western-musical The American Astronaut, Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s lonely ghost apocalypse outing Pulse [aka Kairo], and Brad Anderson‘s haunted mental asylum psychohorror Session 9. If you get tired of that particular period in weirdness, we’ll also flashback to a 1964 offering: the dreadful Face of the Screaming Werewolf (starring Lon Chaney Jr. as a “mummified werewolf”!)
We’re faced with a ragtag bunch of questionable queries, but rest assured we’ll find something to nominate as our Weirdest Search Term of the Week. First off, as a public service announcement, we’d like to advise people who don’t speak English not to try to search for porn in this language. You can hardly query Google for something innocuous like “best coffeemaker reviews” without half the suggestions directing you to a some site specializing in big busted drunk horny Asian cheerleaders, yet bizarre phrases like “free videos of girls bended worsely for sex” and “rassian old women and men foucing videos” completely confound the search engine—and send them to our site instead. Now, nrmally, a term like “beard ninja rapes stone game” would win the weirdest award hands down, but we had to subtract points because this refers to something that actually exists (though after watching it, we still don’t know what the hell it is). That leaves us going with the simple and subtle option for our Weirdest Search Term of the Week: “pants in the movies.” We like to think the searcher is in the opening research stages of writing his master’s thesis for a dual degree in film studies/men’s fashion.
Here’s the reader-suggested review queue, which, as long as it is, is still filling up faster than we can knock out reviews: The American Astronaut (next week!); Kairo [AKA Pulse] (next week!); Session 9 (next week!); Blood Tea and Red Strings; Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; The Bride of Frank; La Grande Bouffe; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves 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):
We Need to Talk About Kevin: After her son commits an atrocity, a mom looks back on their troubled relationship and wonders if she was to blame, or if Kevin was evil from the womb. Not thoroughly weird, but it is heavily stylized and impressionistic, and it does inexplicably begin with the protagonist being hoisted over a vat of tomatoes. Expect an Oscar nom for Tilda Swinton. Opening in New York, then L.A., then the rest of us. We Need to Talk About Kevin official site.
SCREENINGS (NEW YORK CITY, Jan 12-16, 18):
Toll Booth [Gise Memuru] (2010): A psychological drama from Turkey about an unbalanced tollbooth operator who hallucinates on the job. Few reviewers have seen it but their notices have all been positive. No English language trailer exists for this interesting film. Playing at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the “Global Lens” series. Toll Booth at the Global Film Initiative.
NEW ON DVD:
Film Socialisme (2010): Jean-Luc Goddard’s latest film is enigmatically described as “a symphony in three movements,” titled “Things Such As,” “Quo Vadis Europe,” and “Humanities.” No one has been able to satisfactorily synopsize the plot. It’s split critics right down the middle, and it looks very weird. Buy Film Socialisme.
The Hellstrom Chronicle (1972): Today the fake documentary is considered a vehicle for comedy, but this 1972 mockumentary presents itself as a horror/sci-fi outing. A fictional scientist explains the threat insects pose to humanity, illustrated with then state-of-the-art microphotography of the sick and perverse world of bugs. A minor cult item that played college campuses in its heyday. Buy The Hellstrom Chronicle.
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973): The film adaptation of the seminal Andrew Lloyd Weber/Tim Rice rock opera takes some weirdish liberties with the setting, putting tanks and machine guns in ancient Judea (as if the rock music wasn’t anachronistic enough). It’s an interesting staging of a surprisingly thoughtful play about the paradoxes of predestination, but a big downside is that the vocal performances suffer in comparison to the mesmerizing 1970 concept album. We’re not aware of any special features (other than a digital copy) on this Universal re-release. Buy Jesus Christ Superstar.
Touch of Evil (1958): Orson Welles’ overheated noir about a Mexican lawman (Charlton Heston!) who uncovers border town corruption, embodied in the massive, commanding personality of bad cop Hank Quinlan (Welles). Maybe it’s not completely weird, but if you’ve never seen it you’ll likely be amazed at the ornate camerawork, frighteningly quirky characters, Code-challenging evocations of drugs and rape, and general ahead-of-its-time style. Again, there are no known extras other than a digital copy but this classic crime film has historically been underrepresented on home video, so any release counts as a good one. Buy Touch of Evil.
Maniac (1934): Read the certified weird entry! Here it is: all the orangutang men, eyeball-eating, cat-skinning, and syringe catfights one person can stand! It’s widely considered one of the worst movies ever made, yet holds an 89% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Can your sanity handle the unsettling madness that is Maniac? It is not unlike a grape, or an oyster… Watch Maniac free on YouTube.
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.
Fnord. Dear readers, please ignore this mysterious code: 9FGRZWS6WJX5. It is intended for Illuminati eyes and will be gone soon enough. /Fnord.
You may want to bone up on your Evangelion history, because we’ll start off next week with a review of the second installment in the re-reboot of the sexually-confused-teenagers-in-giant-robots-fight-candy-colored-angels series, Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance. Following that, we’ll dip into the reader-suggested review queue for the agoraphobic-European-road-trip-flashback comedy Bunny and the Bull (2009). We’ll follow that up with a review of a disc inspired by the reader-suggested review queue: Cinema 16’s amazing compilation European Short Films, featuring early works by 366 favorites like Christopher Nolan, Lars von Trier, Roy Andersson, Run Wrake and Jan Svankmajer. (Funny story: we thought this disc would fulfill our obligation to review Chris Morris‘ “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117”; but when we bought it we didn’t realize that there were completely separate lineups of films for the Region 0 and Region 2 versions of European Short Films. So, “My Wrongs” isn’t on the version we purchased, and we’ll have to find it elsewhere). Not only that, but we’ll also throw in a review of Luis Buñuel’s religious hypocrisy parable Nazarin (1959).
It was a decent week for weird search terms used to locate the site. We begin with this weird-sounding search for “soft virgins of horror island;” what’s even weirder about this search string is that a story by this name actually exists. (It’s a bondage-themed pulp tale from the 1950s—see it listed on the cover of “Shock Mystery Tales” here). Also of note is the search for “bronson throat flossing,” a hygiene procedure which which we are happily unacquainted. For our Weirdest Search Term of the Week, our staff selects “weird movies that are ecleeeenet.” We like to think we offer the most comprehensive coverage of truly ecleeeenet weird movies you’ll find anywhere!
Here’s how the reader-suggested review queue stands: Bunny & the Bull (next week!); Kairo [AKA Pulse]; The American Astronaut; Blood Tea and Red Strings; Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; The Bride of Frank; La Grande Bouffe; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE→
Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!
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