As uncomfortable as it is original, Unglewd will challenge your concept of music. Samples of chatter and screeching, accompanied by erratic drums, blend with a slew of distressful images to make this week’s short a bad trip you must experience.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 4/16/2010
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 (LIMITED RELEASE):
Pornography: A Thriller (2009): Murder and weirdness in three related tales from the world of gay porn. The press release promises us that “surreal and supernatural elements weave together these three haunting stories.” Due to its subject matter and less than thrilling reviews it’s exceedingly unlikely to be coming to a theater near you. Expect a DVD release soon. Pornography: A Thriller official site.
UPCOMING:
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead (2009): The wacky premise involves a vampire writing a bizarre adaptation of Hamlet. The distributors promise a “perfect mix of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ Terry Gilliam, Dude Where’s My Car and Woody Allen all in one fantastic film!” Release date was originally scheduled for this week but has been pushed back to June 11. Rosencrantz and Guildendtern are Undead official site.
NEW ON DVD:
Essential Art House, Vol. 5: Courtesy of Janus films under the Criterion imprint, the Essential Art House series positions itself a low priced, extras-free alternative to Criterion Collection’s special editions. Beyond the “art house” theme, the selections are relatively random. Vol. 5 includes David Lean’s adaptation of Noel Coward’s Brief Encounters, the 1959 Japanese drama Floating Weeds, Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, the Finnish holocaust drama Kapo (1959), and Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde (1965). We mention it because of the sixth feature: Fellini’s weird masterpice 8 1/2. Buy Essential Art House, Volume Five
Nightmare on Elm Street Collection: With its iconic villain, multiple dream sequences and blackly comic puns, A Nightmare on Elm Street was a bright spot of imagination in the wasteland of 1980s teen-oriented slasher horrors. Later entries in the series became much campier than the frightening original, but were enjoyable nonetheless. This box set collects together Nightmares 1-5 along with Freddy’s Dead, Ronnie Yu’s “high concept” Freddy vs. Jason, and 1994’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, an admirable attempt to steer the series away from self-parody and back to horror. Buy Nightmare on Elm Street Collection
Tenderness (2009): Despite starring Russel Crowe, theaters passed on this serial killer thriller and it debuts on DVD this week. Reviews are mediocre, but Bret Frazer of Amazon suggests that “flashes of David Lynch-esque eeriness provide some thrills” and fan reviewers often describe it as “strange” or “odd.” Buy Tenderness
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.
GEORGES MELIES ENCORE
The films of Georges Méliès are testosterone for surrealists. In 2008 Flicker Alley and the esteemed Blackhawk films released The First Wizard of Cinema, a mammoth 5 disc, thirteen hour collection of Méliès’ surviving films. It was the DVD event release of several years. In 2010, the same forces have released a supplemental collection of 26 newly discovered shorts, aptly entitled “Encore”.
Understandably, this is not the event from two years ago, but it is an essential, released addition in the appreciation of Méliès’ unique art. Contemporary viewers with preconceived notions of the term “film” may be thrown off by the aesthetic mindset from a turn of the century experimental filmmaker. Get over it and don’t look for narrative in the post-Edwin S. Porter sense of the word. There is much to savor here when transported into Méliès’ very different world.
First, there are two films here that were at one time mistakenly attributed to Méliès, but were in fact directed by the Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomon in the Méliès style (he was often compared to Méliès). Chomon, who worked for the smae company as Méliès (Pathe), specialized in color tinting and “The Rose Magician” (1906), with its washy blues, yellows, streams of flowers and painted backdrops, including a giant seashell, exudes a heady, exotic nouveau flavor. “Excursion to the Moon” (1908) is clearly a homage to Méliès’ famous “A Trip to the Moon” (1902). Sublime golds, oranges, pinks, greens and blues permeate “Excursion”. Chomon beautifully utilizes snowy imagery, sleep, mushrooms, space rockets, explosions and a snow covered face in the moon, which has to be seen to be believed. Taking nothing from Méliès, the two Chomon shorts may be the most significant discoveries in this collection.
As for the actual Méliès pictures, “The Haunted Castle” (1896), which is not related to Poe, begins in a castle set with a bat (on strings, of course) that transforms into the Devil himself (complete with horns and costume which looks like it was bough from L.S. Ayres). Old Nick waves his hand and a giant cauldron appears. He follows this with some black magic business, summoning forth a servant and a maiden, who emerges form the cauldron, then quickly disappears. The servant, then the cauldron, then the Devil himself all disappear. Two Continue reading GEORGES MELIES ENCORE
CAPSULE: BASKET CASE (1982)
DIRECTED BY: Frank Henenlotter
FEATURING: Kevin van Hentenryck, Terri Susan Smith, Beverly Bonner
PLOT: Duane checks into a derelict Times Square hotel carrying a wicker basket under his arm; inside is something about 1/4 the size of a person, that eats about 4 times the hamburgers a person would.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Most people will go through their entire lives and never see anything as weird as the micro-budgeted cult shocker Basket Case. A fine little offbeat exploitation shocker, the flick makes a late-in-the-game play for true weirdness with a strange dream sequence that sees Duane running naked through the streets of New York as a prelude to the film’s most shocking development. To us, however, Basket Case shakes out as nothing more (or less) than a fine example of a unique, campy monster flick with only marginally weird elements. That’s just how selective we are with our weirdness.
COMMENTS: One of the secrets to Basket Case‘s success is that it positively oozes indecency and vice, but isn’t mean-spirited or sadistic. Director Frank Henenlotter nails the aesthetic of sleaze, and for the most part keeps on the right side of the fine line between trash and crass, only crossing over briefly once or twice so that we know where the border is. You emerge from a screening titillated and pleasantly shocked, but not feeling like you have to take a bath or go to confession. The setting—the 42nd street red light district as it existed in Times Square in the early 1980s—creates an immediate atmosphere of moral and social decay. Since renovated and Disneyfied, back then the neon-lit 42nd street was an avenue where you could walk past peep shows and marquees advertising “3 Kung Fu hits!” while being propositioned for weed, heroin and/or whores by strangers. The scenes Henenlotter shot Continue reading CAPSULE: BASKET CASE (1982)
CAPSULE: TRIANGLE (2009)
DIRECTED BY: Christopher Smith
FEATURING: Melissa George
PLOT: The mother of an autistic son reluctantly goes on a pleasure cruise with five other
young adults; the yacht capsizes in a freak electrical storm and the party is “rescued” by an abandoned ocean liner.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Triangle is weird, and frankly entertaining, but like Stay, it kept reminding me of other, slightly better, movies I’d seen before.
COMMENTS: Triangle depends so much on its plot twist—which you will be highly unlikely to see coming until about the midpoint of the movie—that it’s difficult to talk about the film without spoiling it, though I’ll do my best. Melissa George does a creditable job and was a good casting choice for the lead: she’s easy on the eyes, tough yet vulnerable, anguished in her misplaced guilt over “abandoning” her autistic son to go on the ill-fated pleasure cruise, and generally likable, all of which makes the film’s ultimate revelation about her easier to take. The rest of the cast does a decent job in supporting roles, but it’s entirely George’s picture. The direction is good: dramatic, suspense and action scenes are handled well, although there’s no single scene that sticks out quite far enough for the movie to hang a hat on. The abandoned steamer—it’s never clear whether it’s a commercial ship or a luxury liner, although it does have a theater and a banquet room—makes for an atmospheric location on a mid-sized budget. As noted, the mystery of the opening builds until about the midpoint, where things begin to get clear; then, it’s mostly a question of details, of following the premise where it will inevitably lead. Unfortunately, where it leads is to a coda that creates more questions than it resolves. It’s safe to say that the movie is more satisfying on an emotional level, as a metaphor for the difficulty of escaping a pattern of self-destructive behavior, than it is on a plot level. Eventually, the script becomes too clever for its own good, gliding casually past the difficult paradoxes it creates, hoping the audience either won’t notice or won’t care. That’s not always a problem in a movie, and along with the fact that the movie never tries to explain where it’s supernatural rules originate, it certainly adds to the weird factor. But Triangle gives off the vibe that it wants to provide a satisfying and complete resolution, something that closes the loop, but can’t quite manage it. When you get to the end, you may wind up asking yourself, where does this story actually begin? With it’s cyclical structure that appears to wrap the plot up in a self-contained ball but actually falls apart on closer inspection, Triangle reminded me of a poor man’s Donnie Darko. Compared to that adolescent angst flick, it’s more coherent but less original, less aggressive in its outrageous plot devices, less emotionally affecting, and lacking in star turns and impeccably orchestrated individual scenes.
Triangle is worthy of a recommendation. But the film compares unfavorably not only to Donnie Darko, but also to the little seen Timecrimes [Los Cronocrímenes] (2007). (To make things as twisted as one of these psychothriller plots, the original Timecrimes is being remade in English and is scheduled for a 2011 release, meaning soon enough we will see people complaining that Timecrimes is nothing but a Triangle rip-off). It shares its central plot idea with the low-budget Spanish picture, and maybe even a little more than that: Continue reading CAPSULE: TRIANGLE (2009)