In between watching whatever comes his way, Niels Matthijs has been dedicating his time and effort to highlighting the films he loves. With a soft spot for contemporary Asian genre cinema and a sweet spot somewhere between auteur and genre, he has written for ScreenAnarchy while keeping a fully detailed overview of all his watches, review and interviews on onderhond.com.

Rather than give a regular rundown of my all-time favorite weird films, I figured it would be more interesting to highlight some films that have fallen (or are on the verge of falling) through the cracks. Films that are so odd, different and out there that they managed to divide even the most hardcore fans of unusual cinema.

Back when I was first becoming serious about film (the late 90s) the internet wasn’t what it is now. When I got my hands on VHS cassettes with bad copies of  Tetsuo or Eraserhead, I felt like I had just made the biggest underground discovery ever. Things are different now, with many websites and communities out there doing their very best to spread the word about weird and off-kilter cinema. Nowadays, talking about Tetsuo doesn’t feel too different from gushing about the latest Marvel film, so it felt unnecessary to go that route. But from time to time I’ll hit a film so delightfully different that I can’t imagine how it could’ve slipped under the radar. These are the films I would love to give that extra push.

I made a first draft for my shortlist, which turned out to be rather voluminous. To narrow it further down to 10 films, I checked IMDb and Letterboxd for sub-1K vote counts. I also tried to stay away from familiar directors and took a bit of care not to swamp my list with Japanese films (a personal soft spot and a country known for having poor export channels). The result is the following list of beauties, which I’m sure will hold some secrets for even the most hardened cult fan. In alphabetical order:

01. Ambiguous Places [Uron na Tokoro] by Akira Ikeda

Don’t be fooled by the low-key poster of Ambiguous Places, this is not a simple Japanese drama. Ikeda was supposedly inspired by dream logic when making this film, and boy does he have some crazy dreams. It’s a wildly absurd comedy about a small rural town and its oddball inhabitants, made even stranger by the utterly deadpan delivery of the comedy. The mix of wacky creatures, odd rituals and near-comatose performances makes this a tough sell, but it sure made me laugh out loud a lot.

02. Baby Bump by Kuba Czekaj

Continue reading NIELS MATTHIJS TOP 10 “OFF-THE-RADAR” WEIRD FILMS →

Scott Dwyer is a writer and filmmaker living in upstate NY with his black cat Haxan. His weird short film “Stillborn” is available to view on Youtube. He also runs the weird horror in film and literature website The Plutonian.

I have been a fan of weird films pretty much my whole life. I remember wandering around video stores in the 1990’s looking for strange thrills, surreal dreams, bleak zombie apocalypses, and poetic perversions. The thrill of finding a strange film on the rack that you have never heard of is a pleasure lost in this modern era of Wikipedia and YouTube.

The true connoisseur of the weird is the hardest to please. Most films that try to be weird fall flat. Usually the best weird films are made by people who are just so weird that they don’t realize how weird their visions are, like Lynch, or who are held back by budget or other factors and their film just ends up this strange offspring they did not intend, like Manos: The Hands of Fate. I classify the best weird movies as films that you can throw on late at night, fire up your hallucinogenic of choice, and see which of your friends gets freaked out and bounce, and which ones stay, lost in the infectious signals emanating from your television. Weird films tend to have a nonlinear logic to them, a kind of alien ambience. Sometimes you can’t tell if you are still watching a film, or have fallen asleep and are dreaming. Weird films are transgressive to those not into them, and objects of obsession to those who love being lost in a nightmare. So here is a list of my top ten, in no particular order, weird films that have somehow injected themselves into my psyche and force me to re-watch them repeatedly.

10. The Black Cat (1934) – A couple traveling find themselves somehow caught in a tragic revenge story that seems to have emerged from some fevered horror fan’s wet dream. A revenge obsessed Bela Lugosi and a satanic Boris Karloff square off against each other in a art deco complex built over an old battlefield, eventually sending the whole film diving headfirst into a self-annihilating abyss. The plot and the acting are so over the top that it goes way beyond the Gothic horror that the director Edgar G. Ulmer may have been going for and heads straight into bad drug territory.

9. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) – Racing camera, exploding transformations, a pounding industrial soundtrack, never has a weird film been so in your face. This film was my first exposure to the very strange field of Japanese cult films. If Eraserhead is a slow burn weird film, Tetsuo is a hyperkinetic burst of corrupted bodies, cold steel, and black blood.

8. Mystics in Bali (1981) – The image of a witch’s head flying around, dragging its spinal cord, looking for fetuses to suck out of pregnant women’s wombs, is the zenith of Continue reading SCOTT DWYER’S TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES →