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.

Nothing of interest coming to theaters this week.

FILM FESTIVALS: TRIBECA (New York City, April 20-May 1):

The eighth annual running of the Manhattan-based festival co-founded by Robert De Niro.  Tribeca Film, the distribution arm of Tribeca Enterprises, released 2009’s Certified Weird The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, so you know these guys aren’t afraid to go weird.  We list the features we think hold at least a little bizarre promise below:

• Beyond the Black Rainbow: Surrealist sci-fi supposedly in the 2001 vein about a mute woman trying to escape from a mysterious enclave.
• Bombay Beach: 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.”
• Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame: A mystery/action epic set in a fantastical steampunk China; some say this is a return to form for director Tsui Hark (Once Upon a Time in China, Zu Warriors)
• Grey Matter [Matière Grise]: An African filmmaker is advised to make an upbeat film instead of his war atrocity opus, “Cycle of the Cockroach;” when he goes ahead with his original plan, he finds scenes from his script manifesting themselves in reality.  This is the first movie we’ve ever heard of from a Rwandan director; it’s nice to imagine they’re starting their national film industry off weird.
• Hideaways: Fantasy/fable about a teen who flees to the woods in an attempt to escape an inherited curse: he seems to be something of an accidental angel of death.
• The Miner’s Hymns: 52-minute experimental film mixing old black-and-white footage of British coal miners with contemporary color footage, scored to a new avant-garde composition by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.
• The Troll Hunter [Trolljegeren] – We mentioned this one in our Sundance column: it’s a Norwegian “found footage” film about a man who literally hunts trolls for the government. It’s weirdness is questionable, but it appears to be a crowd-pleaser.
• Underwater Love – a “pink musical” (!) about a woman who falls in love with a water spirit; lensed by big-time cinematographer Christopher Doyle, with “outrageous” sex scenes

Tribeca Film Festival Home page.

NEW ON DVD:

Heartless:  Philip Ridley (writer/director of the Certified Weird The Reflecting Skin) is back after a fourteen year hiatus from filmmaking with this arthouse horror starring Jim (Across the Universe) Sturgess as a photographer with a disfiguring birthmark who makes a Faustian bargain in a hellish modern London. Ridley’s return would be notable even if the film wasn’t being well-reviewed; as it is, it won “Best Independent Feature” at the Toronto After Dark festival. Buy Heartless.

The Worst Horror Movie Ever Made (2005):  An axe-wielding maniac interrupts a card game, and the survivors are thrown into a stream-of-consciousness nightmare of horror movie cliches.  This frequently blasphemous amateur film (featuring Jesus pleasuring himself in a way only He could) from Bill Zebub (shouldn’t that be Bill Z. Bub?) was previously released in 2005; Zebub also remade the movie in 2008, but this is presumably an upgraded version of the original. Buy The Worst Horror Movie Ever Made.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Tokyo Gore Police (2008):  The notorious, crazed gore-fest set in a future Tokyo where self-mutilation is a fad and private police hunt “engineers” who modify human bodies to turn genitalia into deadly bio-weapons.  One Blu-ray disc, although reports say that the back cover claims the package contains two discs (because they recycled the art from the DVD version).   Buy Tokyo Gore Police [Blu-ray].

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Bad Taste (1987): Peter Jackson’s aptly named first movie is a gory comedy about aliens using the Earth as a fast food franchise. This is sitting deep in the reader-suggested review queue at the moment. Watch Bad Taste 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.

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):

The Double Hour (2009):  A lovelorn cop romances an immigrant and things turn (possibly) weird in this psychological thriller from Italy that nabbed best actor, actress and Italian film awards at the Venice Film Festival.  It’s described as full of twists, and while reviewers are keeping mum on the plot, it is being favorably compared to some great psychological thrillers like Jacob’s Ladder and Mulholland Drive, alongside more conventional thriller titles like Diabolique.  Opening in New York and Philadelphia with a few dates in major US cities to follow.  The Double Hour official site (Samuel Goldwyn films home page).

Footprints: Loosely, lightly “Lynchian” movie about a woman who wakes up with no memory outside Mann’s Chinese Theater and wanders down Hollywood Boulevard, meeting odd characters like superhero impersonators and Scientologists.  The critics aren’t digging this one.  Opening in Manhattan and L.A.  Footprints official site.

IN DEVELOPMENT:

The Chronicles of Rick Roll (est. 2011):  A man and woman are lost in an Alice-in-Wonderland type world inhabited by “that guy” YouTube celebrities: that guy from the projects who called the attempted rapist “so dumb,” that guy who screamed “Leroy Jenkins!” during a World of Warcraft session, and so on.  What’s weird about this project is imagining what it will look like to people in ten years (or in ten months), when today’s disposable “Internet memes” have been long forgotten and the characters look like completely arbitrary eccentrics. Could it be an el-bizarro camp classic to future generations?  The Chronicles of Rick Roll official site.

NEW ON DVD:

“H.R. Pufnstuf: Complete Series Collector’s Edition” (1969-1970): Just one look at the “dragon” puppet with the oversized head and clown face (complete with a shock of orange hair) should tell you that “Pufnstuf” was pretty weird kiddie fare, even without knowing that the kid hero’s sidekick was a talking magic flute.  A favorite of seventies eight-year-olds and acidheads  alike, the TVs series’ complete run is now available on a 3-disc set that comes with a Pufnstuf bobblehead guaranteed to provoke nightmares.
Buy “H.R. Pufnstuf: Complete Series Collector’s Edition”.

Ricky (2009): Magical realism about a French couple who have an angel baby.  From François Ozon, the director who brought us the enigmatic Swimming Pool (2003), among other intriguing movies we haven’t yet seen. Buy Ricky.

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Repo: The Genetic Opera (2008): Read our capsule review. No one on our staff much liked this gory Gothic sci-fi musical about organ repossession in the future, and we even split on its weirdness; here’s your chance to judge it for yourself. Watch Repo: The Genetic Opera 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.

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):

Blank City:  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 by John Waters.  Now playing at the IFC Center in Manhattan, with scattered dates to follow across this great land.  Blank City official site.

To Die Like a Man [Morrer Como Um Homem] (2009): A Portuguese transvestite fairy tale; it apparently gets pretty strange, and according to the Cannes press release by the end the characters “find themselves in an enchanted forest, a magical world…” Also playing the IFC center, with future screenings unknown.  No official site, but you can see the trailer on IMBD.

IN DEVELOPMENT:

Dylan Dog: Dead of Night:  A supernatural private eye hunts wolfmen, vampires, and so on in the Louisiana bayous.  “Dylan Dog” is a popular comic book character in Italy, whose adventures were somewhat surreal in tone; the comic book was the inspiration for the extremely weird existential living dead mood piece Cemetery Man (Dellamorte, Dellamore).  By all accounts this version has been “Americanized” in the worst way, turned into a teen-focused action/adventure movie with ample wisecracking; fans of the comics are already complaining. Coming to theaters April 29.  You can view a disheartening trailer on the Dylan Dog: Dead of Night Facebook page.

Suspiria (estimated 2012): It appears that work continues apace on the much-dreaded remake of Dario Argento’s Certified Weird horror classic.  Director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express and the soon-to-flop Your Highness) put his foot in his mouth in a recent Movieline interview, saying that his version would “focus more on the occult,” that he would expand on certain scenes and make them “very artful,” and announcing that he has purchased the rights to Goblin’s original music and has his own undistinguished composer reworking the originals.  In other words, he appears to be focusing only on the things that the original did superlatively well (occult feel, artiness, and music) and trying to improve them.  Which causes me to let out the Mother of all Sighs.

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Earth Girls Are Easy (1988): An alien lands in a valley girl’s pool in this very 80s cult comedy with musical numbers.  Starring Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, “Downtown” Julie Brown, Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey; directed by Julien Temple (also the force behind the bizarre Sex Pistols documentary The Great Rock and Roll Swindle and the rock and roll musical Absolute Beginnners).  Watch Earth Girls Are Easy free on YouTube.

Steamboy (2004):  From anime titan Katsuhiro Ôtomo (Akira, Metropolis) comes this scenario meant to define the steampunk subgenre: a boy inventor in Victorian England discovers a steam-powered weapon that could wreck the World Exposition, if it falls into nefarious hands.  This movie features characters named “Scarlett O’Hara” and “James Ray Steam.”  Watch Steamboy 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.

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.

Weird movie releases tend to be feast or famine—this week is pure feast.  Bloat yourself on midnight movies, new releases, and cult re-releases this weekend.

IN THEATERS (WIDE RELEASE):

Source Code:  A man wakes up inside the body of another, and realizes that he must use memories from his previous life to stave off a terrorist attack.  Probably not weird, but notable because it’s from Duncan Jones, who showed promise with his (non-weird) sci-fi debut Moon, and because the story is drawing comparisons to Christopher Nolan‘s Memento and Inception. It also stars Donnie Darko himself, Jake Gyllenhaal.  Source Code official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte) (2010):  The four stage journey of a shepherd’s soul through the afterlife, told according to one of geeky Greek cult leader Pythagoras’ lesser-known theorems.  We’ve been wondering if this art curiosity would ever surface since we first heard about it at last year’s TIFF; the wheel’s of weirdness turn slowly.  Of course, it’s only playing at the specialty venue Film Forum in Manhattan, with future stateside dates doubtful, but that’s better than nothing.  The Four Times at the Film Forum.

Rubber (2010): The French film about the serial-killer tire with telekinetic powers finally makes it to these shores, where it’s dividing critics down the middle as to whether it’s a clever absurdist goof or a tedious one-joke insult to the audience.  Whichever, it’s currently sitting in our review queue, so here’s hoping it arrives at a theater near us soon.  Rubber official site.

Super (2010): Another regular-guy-becomes-masked-vigilante black comedy; critics are comparing it to an edgier, more absurd Kick Ass.  From Tromeo and Juliet co-writer/co-director James Gunn, so it’s sure to be offensive, at least.  With TV’s Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler and Kevin Bacon.  It’s being reviewed all over, but it’s only playing in Vail, Colorado??  Super official site (not up to date). 

NEW ON DVD:

Black Swan (2010):  Read our capsule review.  A major event in recent weirdness; Black Swan was our 3rd weirdest movie of 2010, and Natalie Portman won a Weirdcademy Award for her role as a goody-two shoes ballerina who learns all about the dark side when she grows feathers.  Buy Black Swan.

Dead Awake (2010): Under-the-radar psychological thriller about a man who fakes his own funeral, then meets a strange crack addict and an ex-lover and finds All Is Not As It Seems.  With Nick Stahl, Rose McGowan and Amy Smart. Buy Dead Awake.

Evangelion 2.22: You Can [Not] Advance (2009): Part 2 of the Evangelion reboot (see our review of Part 1 here) features more giant robots, emo teen angst, apocalyptic occultism, and anime absurdity. If it follows the same path as the series’ two previous incarnations, then the third entry will be the weird one. Buy Evangelion: 2.22 You Can [Not] Advance.

Inferno (1980):  Dario Argento’s sequel to Suspiria, with the Mother of Tears now in the spotlight, is considered far weirder than the first entry in the series, but is not nearly as beloved.   This Blue Underground Special Edition release features only cast and crew interviews as extras, but more importantly it’s a brand new transfer of the movie, and should provide the best sound and picture quality Inferno has yet seen on home video. Buy Inferno (Special Edition).

Poor Pretty Eddie (1975):  About a jazz singer whose car breaks down in a redneck town inhabited by bizarro characters like a fat, drunk ex-stripper (Shelley Winters!) and a homicidal Elvis impersonator.  The promotional materials play this up as a “surreal” lost “cult classic”; we’re skeptical, but willing to give it a try.  Also known as Heartbreak Motel.  The DVD and Blu-ray aren’t sold separately at this time. Buy Poor Pretty Eddie Blu-Ray + DVD Combo Pack.

Smash Cut (2009): A horror director knocks off acquaintances to fill his movie with realistic gore effects. Probably just exploitation comedy trash, but it is made by the director of the pretty dang weird Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter with the blessing of gore godfather Herschell Gordon Lewis, and it features porn star Sasha Grey, who’s been involved in some interesting projects (starring in Steven Sorderberg’s well-received The Girlfriend Experience and “presenting” the weird looking faux-grindhouse spy thriller Modus Operandi). Another DVD/Blu-ray combo. Buy Smash Cut [Blu-ray].

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Black Swan (2010): See entry in DVD above. Buy Black Swan [Blu-ray].

Dogtooth (2009): Read the Certified Weird entry!Bizarre Greek black comedy about kids raised on an estate and kept completely apart from the world with their own unique language; truly disturbing, but more because of its ideas and matter-of-fact execution than its violence and perversity. Buy Dogtooth [Blu-ray].

Inferno (1980): See entry in DVD above. Buy Inferno [Blu-ray].

Poor Pretty Eddie (1975): See description in DVD above. The DVD and Blu-ray versions are sold together. Buy Poor Pretty Eddie Blu-Ray + DVD Combo Pack.

Smash Cut (2009): See entry in DVD above. Buy Smash Cut [Blu-ray].

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.

Our full slate of reviews for next week isn’t set in stone yet, but we promise we will be covering two frequently requested movies from the reader-review queue: we’ll peek at Andrzej Zulawski’s weird bestiality fantasy/nightmare, Possession (1981); and we’ll tag along on Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s mind-blowing mystical trip to The Holy Mountain (1973). You can also expect Alfred to continue his series on the Tod Browning/Lon Chaney movies with a review of The Unknown (1927), featuring another of this director’s typically freakish scenarios: it’s the tale of an armless knife thrower. Throw in a mystery review and you have a pretty weird week to savor.

There wasn’t a huge volume of weird search terms turning up in our server logs this week, but what the queries lacked in quantity they made up for in quality. There were two gems this week. While we’d sort of like to see a “weird swirl picks that move free online,” especially since it’s free (not sure anyone would pay to see a swirl pick a movie, no matter how weird), this string wasn’t strange enough to rate better than third place this week. The runner-up entry, “she excreted forest,” could have been a weird enough term to win another week; but we found the search for the answer to the burning question of “why criminals deficate” to be the most mind-blowing query of the week.  Well done, Google!

Here’s how the reader-suggested review queue stands (as always, many more titles after the jump): Possession (next week!); The Holy Mountain (next week!); Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Sublime;  Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]; Brazil; The Casserole Masters; Dark Crystal; Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (this appears to be unavailable at Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →