A military squadron stationed in a desert landscape becomes aware that it is not alone. As days transpire, the sightings of unfamiliar beings becomes more common, and, to the dismay of the squad, the creatures don’t seem all that friendly.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 6/16/2011
A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…
Summer blockbuster season is upon us; there’s nothing really weird in theaters right now (unless you find movies about a telepath and a shapeshifter teaming up with the CIA to recruit a squad of teenage mutants in order to head off the Cuban missile crisis “weird”—we don’t). That’s no surprise, considering the season, but there’s an unusual drought in offbeat video releases this week, too. Don’t panic; there’s good stuff coming in the near future, we swear…
SCREENINGS (West Hollywood, CA, Laemmle Sunset 5, June 24):
Butterfly (2010): A deranged fan kidnaps a direct-to-DVD horror auteur to show him her line of avant-garde snuff films. It looks like this will play the same theater again on 7/29 and 8/26, but we have no further information on future screenings or a DVD release.
NEW ON DVD:
Insignificance (1985): In a week where we’re struggling to find weird things to watch, we may have to settle for Nic Roeg‘s 1985 adaptation of a play about an imaginary meeting between Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and Senator Joe McCarthy. Not too bizarre, but Roeg certainly has his weird fans—and it’s from Criterion, which is a plus. Buy Insignificance [Criterion Collection]
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Heavy Metal (1981): Eight animated tales involving busty spacewomen, loosely revolving around an evil glowing green rock. Naughty, nerdy science fantasy animation set to a hard rock soundtrack, unapologetically aimed at young males; this piece of 1980s nostalgia is a guilty pleasure for many and a cult movie in the purest sense. Buy Heavy Metal [Blu-ray]
Insignificance (1985): See description in DVD above. Buy Insignificance [The Criterion Collection Blu-ray]
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
The Thirteenth Floor (1999): A scientist must enter a computer-simulation of 1930s Los Angeles to discover the truth about a murder in this recursive virtual reality thriller that was overshadowed by The Matrix on release. The Detroit News called it “a film about deeply confused people that seems likely to put viewers in a state of deep confusion for most of its running time.” Watch The Thirteenth Floor 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.
TOD BROWNING’S THE MYSTIC (1925)
Tod Browning‘s frequent collaborator Waldemar Young wrote the screenplay for The Mystic from Browning’s story, and it is clearly part their family of work together which includes The Unholy Three (1925), The Blackbird (1926), The Show (1927), The Unknown (1927), London After Midnight (1927), West of Zanzibar (1928), and Where East is East (1929). The early knife-throwing act seen here could be a blueprint for the same act in The Unknown. The Mystic (1925) opens in a Hungarian gypsy carnival. The main attraction of the carnival is “The Mystic,” Zara (Aileen Pringle). Zara is part of a trio which includes Poppa Zazarack (Mitchell Lewis) and Zara’s lover Anton (Robert Ober). Of course, Zara’s clairvoyant act is all illusion and Browning, as usual, lets his audience in on the trickery almost from the outset.
Conman Michale Nash (Conway Tearle) approaches the trio with a proposal to take their act to America, where they can bilk naive, rich Manhattanites out of their fortunes. The New Yorkers make Zara’s seances a hit, although not all of the natives are so gullible, and the police are secretly investigating the scam. To complicate matters, Nash puts the moves on Zara, and Anton is pushed aside. Love does funny things, and soon Nash develops a conscience. He becomes reluctant to swindle a young heiress. The ever-jealous Zara believes Nash must want her for himself; but, Nash simply wants to reform and make a better, honest life for Zara. Their relationship is reminiscent of the one between Priscilla Dean and Wheeler Oakman in Browning’s Outside The Law (1920), as are the familiar Browning themes of reformation and unpunished crimes.
Pringle shows considerable screen charisma; or, at least, Browning draws it out of her here. Her performance compares to other great female roles in Browning’s ouevre: Joan Crawford in The Unknown and Lupe Velez in Where East is East. In many scenes, such as the knife throwing scene, Pringle looks remarkably like Crawford; in close-ups, Pringle exudes the same soft sensuality and subtle anguish. In other scenes, Pringle shares the bubbly quality that we see later in Velez’s performance. At other times Pringle calls to mind the mysterious exoticism of Edna Tichenor. Unfortunately, Pringle and Browning never got to work together again. The actress was reportedly difficult to work with; most of her co-stars considered he an intellectual snob. Indeed, she kept company with many of the artisans and intellectuals of her day. George Gershwin and H.L. Mencken were among her notable lovers and she was married, briefly, to author James M. Cain. Pringle’s acting career never really took off, and she didn’t seem to care. She remained active in films (mostly small parts, which included uncredited roles) up until the mid 1940s and died in 1989 at the age of 94.
Because of the lack of usual Browning stars, The Mystic is an interesting, lesser known film in the director’s canon. Not only is it thematically related to his other films, but it also shows the idiosyncratic continuity of his taste in actresses and his ability to mold actors, whoever they were.
Note: the luxurious costumes for The Mystic were the work of legendary French designer Erté. Erté, who was a big fan of Georges Méliès, later said it was a thrilling experience to collaborate with such a distinguished surrealist as Tod Browning.
89. FINAL FLESH (2009)
“I don’t know if I really like this movie, it’s just kind of weird. It’s worth checking out; it’s weird. Something to talk about. So, if you like really, really weird stuff, check out Final Flesh, it’s really weird.”–YouTube reviewer
DIRECTED BY: Written by Vernon Chatman, directed by “Ike Sanders” and three other uncredited directors
FEATURING: Twelve amateur porn stars
PLOT: After a prologue explains that the atom bomb is about to drop, we’re shown a family of three (mother, father and adult daughter) sitting around a kitchen table, deciding that they will stay and “die with dignity.” The mother and daughter give birth to various food items and the father tires to climb back into the womb, and then daughter relates a dream. We see a mushroom cloud, then another trio of actors in a different apartment who believe they are in the afterlife: they recite more humorous nonsense about God, death and the apocalypse and enact more bizarre skits before the action shifts to another trio in a different room, then another…
BACKGROUND:
- Vernon Chatman made Final Flesh by submitting scripts to four different amateur porn production companies that specialize in acting out their client’s fantasies. The scripts were submitted between 2002 and 2009, so the film was actually 7 years in the making.
- Chatman is a stand-up comic and Emmy-winning television writer. He wrote for “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” and “The Chris Rock Show” before co-creating the short-lived, weird cult TV series “Wonder Showzen” and “Xavier: Renegade Angel.” He’s most famous for his work with “South Park,” where he provides the voice of “Towelie,” the pot-smoking towel.
- Chatman is a member of the Brooklyn-based art collective PFFR, who produce music, art, and short films. The first segment of Final Flesh was made as a short film for a PFFR art show, and although the final project was Chatman’s work alone, it was still released under the PFFR umbrella.
- Final Flesh is distributed by Drag City, an independent music label that has only recently branched out into underground film (and may have given up that side-business already). Drag City’s other 2009 movie release, Trash Humpers, hogged the company’s headlines when it became a minor cause célèbre after Netflix refused to stock it. Final Flesh received relatively little promotion, despite the fact that Netflix declined to carry it, as well.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: For Final Flesh, we’re going to break with tradition and provide four different “indelible images,” one from each segment of the film. A girl breastfeeds a porterhouse steak; a woman in a jeans, a tank-top and a skull mask threatens a man on his deathbed; a couple make out by mashing the skulls drawn on their backs together; a young lady in black lingerie performs a wedding ceremony on two corpses lying side by side.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The conceptual art premise of sending a non-erotic script to be acted out by pornstars-for-hire might be weird enough, but when that apocalyptic screenplay requires the bemused amateur actors to bathe in the tears of neglected children and recite lines like “I just creamed my demon” after being slapped, we’ve traveled beyond the snarkily experimental into the realm of the existentially deranged. All the world’s a stage and these men and women play many parts; if some of those roles require them to pour ketchup in a conch shell and poke at it with a turkey baster while moaning orgasmically, then maybe that’s just how this universe rolls.
Short clip from Final Flesh
COMMENTS: In porn, when a woman wiggles and says “oh my God, there’s something going Continue reading 89. FINAL FLESH (2009)
CAPSULE: RICKY (2009)
DIRECTED BY: François Ozon
FEATURING: Alexandra Lamy, Mélusine Mayance, Sergi López
PLOT: A single mom factory worker gives birth to a very special baby; of course, every mother thinks her baby is miraculous, but in this case the press thinks so, too.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A minor but sometimes effective meditation on motherhood, Ricky might not be good enough to make this exclusive list even if it were extremely bizarre. Its “what if” premise and strange, vacillating tone is just off-normal enough to place the movie within the weird genre, but it in no way pushes the boundaries of the bizarre.
COMMENTS: If you’ve read other reviews of Ricky, you might have already discovered what it is that makes this baby special; only a few critics have managed to keep the film’s turning point a secret. I don’t think it’s necessary to give away the surprise to discuss the film, but you might be able to figure it out anyway from context. It’s less important precisely what it is that makes Ricky a special baby, which is mainly a matter of concern for the special effects crew, then it is to consider the role Ricky’s “specialness” plays in the story: a metaphor for the wonder with which a mother views her own offspring. The wizardry that brings the baby to life is inconsistent—the analog elements are neat looking, if unconvincing, while the digital realizations are just unconvincing—but that’s not what most people will find unsatisfactory about the film. Ricky begins life as a dreary domestic drama, then shifts gears about halfway through and tries to be a whimsical semi-comedy before gliding into a mystical, suspiciously happy ending. As the movie gets weirder the tone gets lighter, but the hard realities of the earlier drama still weigh it down. The two hemispheres of the movie work against each other; the part of the movie that’s well done is kind of boring, while the more intriguing portion often seems thrown together on the fly.
As stressed lower-middle class parents Katie and Paco, Alexandra Lamy and Sergi López are believably flawed: they bicker and accuse each other, they sometimes neglect Katie’s older child Lisa, and they can be irresponsible parents (no pediatrician for Ricky?), but in the end they fight through their own limitations to do the right thing for their offspring. Lamy sells the film’s potentially ridiculous emotional climax and makes it affecting; a poor performance would have turned it into pure camp. It’s a serious and thoughtful movie with points to praise (particularly Lamy’s performance); but, even as an experiment in deliberately inconsistent tone, it’s hard to say the film works on the whole. In the end, Ricky never really gets off the ground.
The movie begins with an out-of-sequence prologue that’s incompatible with the rest of the story. Although the scene frustrates and confuses some viewers, it’s a great tear-jerking moment for Lamy; and, more importantly, by it contrasting the grim reality of single parenthood with the fantasy that follows, it’s the key to the film’s psychology.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: