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 White Ribbon (2009): The 2009 Palme d’Or winner at Cannes.  Mysterious accidents pile up in a sleepy pre-WWI German town.  Described as “haunting,” “creepy,” and “mesmerizing,” but unlikely to be weird; then again, reviewers are keeping the plot details very close to their chest, so who knows?   The White Ribbon official site.

NEW ON DVD:

9 (2009):  Read our capsule review.  Shane Acker’s visually thrilling, plot-lite “stitchpunk” stop-motion kiddie epic hits vidstore shelves. The original (superior, and weirder) short on which the feature is based is included as an extra. Buy from Amazon.

Half-life (2008): Despite being a festival hit, this one never got a theatrical release that we can discover and flew under our radar. The plot is a multithreaded indie drama about the travails of suburban Asian-Americans combined with surreal animated flights of childhood fantasy.  Looks interesting. The IMDB message boards for this film are amusingly overwhelmed by complaints from disappointed teenage fans of the popular, identically titled video game. Buy from Amazon.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

9: See description under DVD above. Buy Blu-ray from Amazon

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.

Greetings weird movie fans!  I hope Santa brought you lots of weird films for Christmas.  (Word has it good little boys and girls got limited edition Blu-rays of Eraserhead, while bad movie fans got “The Complete Uwe Boll” boxed set—I’d be happy either way).

In the final week of 2009, we’ll turn our attention to catching up with a few weird stragglers from the year past with reviews of  Jim Jamursch’s The Limits of Control and the grandiosely titled amateur production Prometheus Triumphant: A Fugue in the Key of Flesh.  For a change of pace we’ll toss in a review of the 1967 H.P. Lovecraft adaptation The Shuttered Room and perhaps a surprise review or two.

The weirdest search term used to locate the site this week was, undoubtedly, “elephant milk movies.”  I shudder to think what the searcher was hoping to find.

We actually made some progress on the reader suggested review queue this week by getting Dark Country off the board (though, as a borderline selection, we reserve the right to revisit it in the future).  Here’s what’s left for us to cover: Greaser’s Palace (substituted for Institute Benjamenta), Waking Life, Survive Style 5+, The Dark Backward, The Short Films of David Lynch, Santa Sangre, Dead Man, Inland Empire, Monday (assuming I can find an English language version), The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Barton Fink, What? (Diary of Forbidden Dreams), Meatball Machine, Xtro, Basket Case, Suicide Club, O Lucky Man!, Trash Humpers (when/if released), Gozu, Tales of Ordinary Madness, The Wayward Cloud, Kwaidan, Six-String Samurai, Andy Warhol’s Trash, Altered States, Memento, Nightmare Before Christmas/Vincent/Frankenweenie, The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gothic, The Attic Expeditions, After Last Season, Getting Any?, Performance, Being John Malkovich, The Apple, Southland Tales, Arizona Dream, Spider (2002), Songs From The Second Floor, Singapore Sling, Alice [Neco z Alenky], Necromania (1971, Ed Wood), Hour of the Wolf, MirrorMask, Possession, Suspiria, Mary and Max, and Wild Zero. We’ll get to them all, we promise!

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus: The great Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, Tideland) returns with another tale of high fantasy in this Faustian story about a magical traveling carnival.  Starring Christopher Plummer, the always welcome Tom Waits, Johnny Depp, and the late Heath Ledger (in his final role).  Looks a bit “Hollywood,” but we admit to still being psyched!  The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus official site (site currently incomplete)

NEW ON DVD:

All About Steve (2009): This one is quite the stretch for weird interest, but we’ll mention it for the curious.  The romantic comedy All About Steve, starring Bradley Cooper and the never-weird Sandra Bullock, received absolutely abysmal reviews.  There were a smattering of opinions, however, that indicate that, if you’re in the right mood, this could be a flick of the so-bad-it’s-weird variety.  James Kendrick, for one, suggested that the film could be seen as an unintentional “satire of romantic comedies, or at least some kind of avant-garde experiment in testing the limits of audience identification… If you’re not on board with its scattershot comedy and fundamental weirdness, it could very well be a nightmare.  But, if you let yourself sink into its wild wrong-headedness and just go with the flow, there are sublime pleasures to be had.”  If you give it a try report back to us! Buy All About Steve from Aamzon.

No Right Turn (2009): There’s not much information to be found on this Danish pulp thriller, but it does somehow incorporate fantasy elements into its tale of drug dealers and prostitutes, and it also has a retro-exploitation movie poster in lurid yellow. Buy No Right Turn from Amazon.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

All About Steve (2009):  See DVD review above. Buy All About Steve (Blu-ray) from Amazon.

First off, merry Christmas to all our readers, and we hope that you have all been very weird this past year so that Santa will stuff your stocking full of the collected works of Stan Brackhage.

We won’t be taking Christmas off; you can expect to see our normal “Weird Horizon” column on Christmas Day, along with another unsettling holiday-themed short. The rest of the week, you can expect to see reviews of Dans Ma Peau [In My Skin] and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, and an introduction to the weird words of John M. Bennet, among other features.

In looking for the weirdest search term used to locate the site this week, we’ll stick with the holiday theme and nominate “singing santa and reindeer- I am a weirdo.”

The ever-growing reader-suggested review queue looks like this: Greaser’s Palace (substituted for Institute Benjamenta), Waking Life, Survive Style 5+, The Dark Backward, The Short Films of David Lynch, Santa Sangre, Dead Man, Inland Empire, Monday (assuming I can find an English language version), The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Barton Fink, What? (Diary of Forbidden Dreams), Meatball Machine, Xtro, Basket Case, Suicide Club, O Lucky Man!, Trash Humpers (when/if released), Gozu, Tales of Ordinary Madness, The Wayward Cloud, Kwaidan, Six-String Samurai, Andy Warhol’s Trash, Altered States, Memento, Nightmare Before Christmas/Vincent/Frankenweenie, The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gothic, The Attic Expeditions, After Last Season, Getting Any?, Performance, Being John Malkovich, The Apple, Southland Tales, Arizona Dream, Spider (2002), Songs From The Second Floor, Singapore Sling, Alice [Neco z Alenky], Dark Country, Necromania (1971, Ed Wood), Hour of the Wolf,  MirrorMask, Possession, Suspiria, and Mary and Max.  Honestly, that list should take us all the way through 2010!

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 (WIDE RELEASE):

Nine: Here’s a curiosity for sure: a musical based around the putative romantic adventures of Federico Fellini while filming the classic weird movie 8 1/2.  Too bad the critics mostly hate it.  Also, we have to point out that fractional numbers are weirder than integers (though not as weird as irrational numbers).  Nine official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

A Town Called Panic: A stop-motion animated children’s film from Belgium; according to the press release, it “follows the wacky, hilarious and often surreal adventures of three plastic toys named Cowboy, Indian and Horse who share a rambling house in a rural town which never fails to attract the weirdest events.”  We’re going to keep an eager eye out for the DVD release!  A Town Called Panic official site.

Ricky: Reviewers are being tightlipped about the plot of this one, but it concerns a French couple who have a remarkable, miraculous baby.  There are strong hints that many are upset by the fact that the movie begins in the realm of pure realism, and slips into magical realism for the second half, something that always makes weird-hating audiences feel cheated.  From François Ozon, the director who brought us the enigmatic Swimming Pool (2003), among other intriguing movies I haven’t seen.  Ricky official site.

IN PRODUCTION:

Alice in Wonderland (2010): Tim Burton‘s eagerly awaited adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is now in post-production, scheduled for a March 5th, 2010 release.  Burton and company released a new trailer two days ago. In a chintzy move, embedding the video is disabled so that Disney can sell exclusive embedding rights to other sites (Rotten Tomatoes will allow you to embed the video from their site—but the code hijacks the user’s browser and redirects him to Rotten Tomatoes when it finishes playing!) Access the trailer from the following link, then come back and tell us what you think:

Alice in Wonderland official Trailer 2.

We’re cautiously optimistic… but a little more cautious than optimistic after seeing this second trailer.

NEW ON DVD:

The Headless Woman [La mujer sin cabeza] (2008): Argentinian film about a woman who experiences a mysterious form of amnesia after striking something—a dog, or a child?—with her car.  Described as head-scratching, slow and oblique.  Buy The Headless Woman from Amazon.

Year of the Fish (2007): Here’s a movie idea you don’t see everyday: a rotoscoped animated adult retelling of “Cinderella,” with the lead role taken by a Chinese immigrant woman forced to work in a “happy-ending” massage parlor and befriended by a magical goldfish.  Critically acclaimed. Buy Year of the Fish from Amazon.

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.