Guest Reviews

RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: CROWLEY [AKA CHEMICAL WEDDING] (2008)

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AKA:  Crowley. This film is referred to as Chemical Wedding in film databases and in the U.K., and Crowley in the U.S.A.   We have used the title Crowley in this review, despite Chemical Wedding being perhaps the more “correct” title.

NOTE: Those interested in the learning more about the roguish Aleister Crowley will want to read the Appendix to this post, which gives background on the occultist and his belief system.

DIRECTED BY: Julian Doyle

FEATURING:  Simon Callow, Kal Weber, Lucy Cudden, Paul McDowell, Jud Charlton John Shrapnel, and Terence Bayler

PLOT: Aleister Crowley comes back to life and goes on a murderous rampage, ultimately warping the universal space-time continuum.



WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Crowley is a strange mix of serous sci-fi elements and over-the-top characterizations of a notorious and eccentric historical figure.  Combined with a bizarre story of reincarnation, quantum physics and parallel universes, it’s an occult film that transcends the norms of the genre, providing a viewing experience that is funny, intriguing and peculiar all at once.

COMMENTS :  Crowley is an imaginative and clever occult science fiction film.  It is partly serious, partly campy, but not in a way that is meant to be silly or cheap.  It is also witty and ribald.  Well researched, the film draws its premise partly from the story of maverick rocket physicist and eccentric black arts follower, Jack Parsons (see Appendix).  Mixing fact with fancy, Crowley is a fast paced, multi-genre, satirical thriller.  Tawdry yet brainy, the movie proffers an oddball, but sophisticated mix of historical fact, occult fantasy and hardcore science fiction.  Based on the infamous “wickedest man in the world,” master occultist Aleister Crowley, this film will entertain, amuse, and perhaps enthrall the unconventional viewer.  Reflexively, it is sure to provoke and offend the mainstream audience.

In the present day, a Cal Tech scientist, Dr. Joshua Mathers (Weber) invents a sinister computerized, virtual reality space-time simulator in which the user steps into a creepy full body immersion suit.  Mathers conducts experiments with a joint scientific team at Cambridge.  There the virtual reality device is coupled with “Z93”, the most powerful, superconductor computer in the world.  It works!  It works too well.

Mathers’s rapaciously amoral assistant, Neberg (Charleton), surreptitiously introduces a Continue reading RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: CROWLEY [AKA CHEMICAL WEDDING] (2008) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

58. DILLINGER IS DEAD (1969)

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Dillinger e Morto

“Dillinger Is Dead throws narrative, psychological, and symbolic common sense out the window… the film’s refusal of clear-cut logic, its contradictory symbols, and its moral ambiguity open it to endless interpretation.”–Michael Joshua Rowin, from the notes to the Criterion Collection edition of Dillinger is Dead

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Annie Girardot, Anita Pallenberg

PLOT: Glauco designs gas-masks by day.  One night, he returns to the apartment he shares with his wife and live-in maid and, while searching for ingredients for dinner, discovers a gun wrapped in newspaper in his pantry.  He spends an evening puttering around the house, making dinner, watching home movies, playing with his various toys, disassembling and reassembling the gun, painting it, then using the weapon in a senseless final act.

Still from Dillinger Is Dead (1969)

BACKGROUND:

  • John Dillinger was a bank robber in the 1930s who became both Public Enemy #1 and a folk hero.
  • Ferreri barely directed Piccoli, giving him only simple blocking instructions and dialogue and allowing the actor to improvise the rest of the performance.
  • This is the first of six films Ferreri and Piccoli made together.
  • Model Anita Pallenberg may be best known for her romantic involvements with two members of the Rolling Stones (first Brian Jones, and later Keith Richards), but she has had small roles in a couple of weird movies besides this one: Barbarella (1968) and Performance (1970).
  • The movie was filmed in the apartment of Italian pop-artist Mario Schifano, and some of the painter’s works (most prominently, “Futurismo Rivisitato“) can be seen in the background.
  • The observations that the young worker makes to Glauco in the prologue are all paraphrases from philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s essay One-Dimensional Man, a critique of then-contemporary consumerism, mass media and industrialism.  Marhola Dargis of the New York Times believes that the entire movie is an attempt to give cinematic form to Marcuse’s ideas.
  • After its initial release, Dillinger is Dead nearly disappeared.  Variety‘s 1999 version of the “Portable Movie Guide” didn’t mention it among their 8700 reviews, Halliwell never heard of it, and Pauline Kael didn’t encounter it in “5001 Nights at the Movies.”  It was seldom screened and never appeared on home video until a 2006 revival led to the film being virtually rediscovered, culminating in a 2010 release by the Criterion Collection.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The gun that may have belonged to John Dillinger, which fascinates the protagonist. Especially after he paints it bright red and carefully paints white polka dots on it.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Dillinger is Dead is a disconnected, absurdist parable where nothing seems to be happening, and when something happens, it doesn’t make sense. It’s very much a product of its time—the anarchic, experimental late 1960s—-yet the world it portrays still feels oddly, and awfully, familiar.


Clip from Dillinger is Dead

COMMENTS: Dillinger is Dead doesn’t take leave of reality until its very last moments, Continue reading 58. DILLINGER IS DEAD (1969) →

Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Next week, look for a review of Marco Ferreri’s nearly forgotten avant-garde 1969 experiment, Dillinger Is Dead, which was recently resurrected by the Criterion Collection and issued on DVD for the first time this year.  There are several possibilities for other reviews to fill out the week, but we’re going to let them be a surprise…

It was a decent week for weird search terms used to locate the site.  We really wish we knew what the following searcher was looking for when he typed “WTF Japanese Horror Movie Trailer Destroy your lies lynch cronenberg” into Google.  But, just for the image it creates in our mind’s eyes, we’re going to go with “lactating dvd with plots” as the weirdest search term of the week.

The embarrassingly long reader suggested review queue looks like this: Suicide Club (soon);  Trash Humpers (DVD release is imminent, but this will probably be pushed back while we wait for it); 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; 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]; Necromentia; Hour of the Wolf; MirrorMask; Possession; Suspiria; Mary and Max; Wild Zero; 4; Nothing (2003); The Peanut Butter Solution; Ninja Scroll; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Danger: Diabolik; Faust; Sublime; Battle Royale; Pink Floyd: The Wall; Escanaba In Da Moonlight; Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter; Zardoz; The Films of Suzan Pitt; Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]; Paprika; The Holy Mountain; Brazil; The Casserole Masters; Dark Crystal; Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets; The Nines; 964 Pinocchio; The Pillow Book; Final Flesh; Lunacy [Sílení]; Inmortel; Tetsuo; Dead Ringers; Kairo [AKA Pulse]; The Guatemalan Handshake; Dead Leaves; The Seventh Seal; Primer; Maniac (1934); Hausu; A Boy and His Dog; 200 Motels; Walkabout; Private Parts (1972); Possession; Saddest Music in the World; Mulholland Drive; The American Astronaut; Blood Tea and Red Strings; Malice in Wonderland; The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. II (for Lucifer Rising, among others); Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ; The Bride of Frank; La Grande Bouffe; Uzumaki [Spiral]; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves Started Small; Bunny & the Bull; “I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney” (assuming I can find it); Cinema 16: European Short Films; Freaked; Session 9; Schizopolis; Strings; Dellamorte Dellamore [AKA Cemetery Man]; The Hour-glass Sanatorium [Saanatorium pod klepsidra]; The Addiction; Liquid Sky; The Quiet; Shock Treatment; Tuvalu; “Zombie Jesus” (if we can locate it); 3 Dev Adam; Fantastic Planet; “Twin Peaks” (TV series); Society; May; The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension; Little Otik; Final Programme; Careful; Sweet Movie; The Triplets of Belleville; “Foutaises” (short); Johnny Suede; and “Jam” (TV, UK, 2000), The Tale of the Floating World, Un Chien Andalou, Bloodsucking Freaks; Fellini Satyricon; Three Crowns of the Sailor; 8 1/2; Death Race 2000; and Dororo.

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 5/14/10

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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 Living Wake:  This whimsical story about a self-proclaimed genius traveling about with his biographer in a bicycle/rickshaw on his final day of life before attending his own wake appears perched somewhere halfway between quirky and absurdist.  Reviews have been on the bad side of mixed, but it looks like it should score points for originality, if nothing else.  Opening in New York this week, with Los Angeles and Seattle to follow.  The Living Wake official site.

Metropolis [The Complete Metropolis] (1927): It is with extreme embarrassment that we confess we missed the chance last week to announce the US premier of the restored version of Metropolis, which incorporates 25 minutes of recently discovered footage into Fritz Lang’s expressionist science fiction masterpiece. Fortunately, it’s still playing the Film Forum in New York City for one more week. The current schedule shows that the masterpiece will tour the US through the summer, starting next week, including multiple stops in southern California along with dates in Cleveland; San Francisco; Denver; Minneapolis; Brookline, MA; Detroit; Shreveport, LA; upstate New York (Rochester, Ithaca and Schenectady); Philadelphia; St. Louis; San Antonio; Montreal; Columbus, OH; Kansas City; Tampa; Ann Arbor, MI; Milwaukee; and hopefully more. A new Metropolis is without a doubt the major cinematic event (weird or otherwise) of 2010.  They’re pulling the old short-sighted “embedding disabled by request” trick at YouTube, so view the trailer at The Complete Metropolis official website.

FILM FESTIVALS: CANNES

Cannes is upon us again, before many of last year’s most interesting weird entries (e.g. Dogtooth) have made it to this shore. It will be running from May 12 to May 23, and none other than fallen star Tim Burton is head of the jury. A refresher on Cannes terminology: “In Competition” means that the film is eligible to win one of the major awards like the Palme D’or, while “Un Certain Regard” means the film is too interesting to qualify for a major award.  Films shown “Out of Competition” are either too interesting to be shown in “Un Certain Regard,” or just plain crappy (e.g. Robin Hood).  Here are the movies we’ll be keeping an eye on this year (in what frankly looks like a very bland year):

  • Filme Socialisme:  Tell the truth: you didn’t realize Jean-Luc Goddard was still alive, either.  His latest film is enigmatically described as “a symphony in three movements,” titled “Things Such As,” “Quo Vadis Europe,” and “Humanities.”  The press kit is certainly weird, even if nothing else is.  Un Certain Regard.
  • Kaboom: Gregg Araki is growing up: the 53 year old has graduated from making movies about high schoolers to making movies about college students.  This one involves a hunky bisexual protagonist,  hallucinogenic cookies, and a murdered dream girl, and is also described as “a sci-fi story centered on the sexual awakening of a group of college students.”  Out of Competition.
  • Tender Son – The Frankenstein Project [Szelíd teremtés – A Frankenstein-terv]: A loose adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the part of the monster played by a son returning home from a mental institution.  Hungarian, In Competition.

NEW ON DVD:

Malice in Wonderland (2009):  Another twist on the Alice in Wonderland legend, this time deliberately dark and surrealistic.  This one is currently sitting in our reader-suggested review queue, and that’s a good sign! Buy Malice in Wonderland.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Rock n’ Roll High School (1979):  OK, this campy/spoofy tale of teen punk rebellion produced by Roger Corman and featuring the Ramones isn’t all that weird, but it is cult-y and psychotronic-y, and there’s a good chance it will interest those who also love weird movies. Buy Rock ‘N’ Roll High School [Blu-ray].

Samurai Princess (2009): Another Japanese exercise in absurd gory excess from the distributors of Meatball Machine and Tokyo Gore Police. Two words will tell you whether you’re interested in this: breast grenades. Buy Samurai Princess [Blu-ray]. We missed the announcement back in November 2009, but this is also available on DVD.

NEW ON VIDEO ON DEMAND:

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (2009): We noticed this very weird sounding movie, an absurdist comedy about janitors undergoing male pregnancy, way back in April 2009 and were wondering if it would ever see the light of day. Well, it’s finally shown up on Amazon Video on Demand, and we’re hopeful a DVD release will follow. Watch The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle on Video on Demand.

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.

Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!