Alone at sea, an aged fisherman struggles to hold onto the various items he reels in. Yielding no progress, he begins to epitomize the inescapable progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
With such beautiful imagery and shocking surrealism, “Undone” could only be assembled by a first-hand witness to the effects of the illness.
Undone from Hayley Morris on Vimeo.
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):
Blank City: Documentary on the “no wave” Super-8 experimental film movement in New York City in the late 1970s/early 1980s exemplified by Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch, etc., along with a couple of characters who emerged from the underground into the (relative) mainstream: Jim Jarmusch and Steve Buscemi. With lots of archival footage and the inevitable commentary by John Waters. Now playing at the IFC Center in Manhattan, with scattered dates to follow across this great land. Blank City official site.
To Die Like a Man [Morrer Como Um Homem] (2009): A Portuguese transvestite fairy tale; it apparently gets pretty strange, and according to the Cannes press release by the end the characters “find themselves in an enchanted forest, a magical world…” Also playing the IFC center, with future screenings unknown. No official site, but you can see the trailer on IMBD.
IN DEVELOPMENT:
Dylan Dog: Dead of Night: A supernatural private eye hunts wolfmen, vampires, and so on in the Louisiana bayous. “Dylan Dog” is a popular comic book character in Italy, whose adventures were somewhat surreal in tone; the comic book was the inspiration for the extremely weird existential living dead mood piece Cemetery Man (Dellamorte, Dellamore). By all accounts this version has been “Americanized” in the worst way, turned into a teen-focused action/adventure movie with ample wisecracking; fans of the comics are already complaining. Coming to theaters April 29. You can view a disheartening trailer on the Dylan Dog: Dead of Night Facebook page.
Suspiria (estimated 2012): It appears that work continues apace on the much-dreaded remake of Dario Argento’s Certified Weird horror classic. Director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express and the soon-to-flop Your Highness) put his foot in his mouth in a recent Movieline interview, saying that his version would “focus more on the occult,” that he would expand on certain scenes and make them “very artful,” and announcing that he has purchased the rights to Goblin’s original music and has his own undistinguished composer reworking the originals. In other words, he appears to be focusing only on the things that the original did superlatively well (occult feel, artiness, and music) and trying to improve them. Which causes me to let out the Mother of all Sighs.
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
Earth Girls Are Easy (1988): An alien lands in a valley girl’s pool in this very 80s cult comedy with musical numbers. Starring Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, “Downtown” Julie Brown, Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey; directed by Julien Temple (also the force behind the bizarre Sex Pistols documentary The Great Rock and Roll Swindle and the rock and roll musical Absolute Beginnners). Watch Earth Girls Are Easy free on YouTube.
Steamboy (2004): From anime titan Katsuhiro Ôtomo (Akira, Metropolis) comes this scenario meant to define the steampunk subgenre: a boy inventor in Victorian England discovers a steam-powered weapon that could wreck the World Exposition, if it falls into nefarious hands. This movie features characters named “Scarlett O’Hara” and “James Ray Steam.” Watch Steamboy 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.
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London After Midnight (1927) is the most sought after and discussed lost film of the silent era. Whether it actually deserves to be the most sought after has been intensely debated, but the fact that London After Midnight is lost is solely the fault of MGM.
MGM head Louis B. Mayer was something akin to the devil incarnate. For Mayer, film was strictly profitable, escapist fare to corn feed and increasingly dumb down audiences. At the opposite end of the spectrum was his in-house studio competitor, producer Irving Thalberg, who nurtured the Tod Brownings and Lon Chaneys of the world. Thalberg was hardly infallible (he sided with Mayer, against Erich von Stroheim’s 9-hour version of Greed [1925,] which resulted in the film being excised and led to an actual fistfight between Mayer and Stroheim). However, Thalberg’s concern was to make quality films, as he saw quality. Hardly the egoist, Thalberg never took a producer’s credit. He could turn out escapist family fare, but he was eclectic in his tastes and had a penchant for edgy, risk taking films with only the side of his eye on the profit meter.
Sometimes the devil wins, and when Thalberg died at the age of 37, Old Nick (Mayer) had no one to rein him in. MGM, under Mayer, had a notorious habit of buying out rivals—the original versions of the studio’s watered-down remakes—and then would make every attempt to destroy and/or suppress the superior original. For instance, they bought out the 1940 British version of Gaslight and unsuccessfully attempted to destroy all the copies just in time for the debut of their inferior 1944 version, starring Charles Boyer. MGM did destroy many, but not all, Continue reading TOD BROWNING’S LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (1927) & MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935)
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DIRECTED BY: Calvin Reeder
FEATURING: Lindsay Pulsipher, Robert Longstreet
PLOT: A young woman blacks out after an automobile accident on a lonely rural road, and wakes up in a nearly deserted world inhabited only by silent women in red robes, truck drivers with a taste for omelets and gasoline cocktails, and man-sized green Muppets.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Though not entirely successful, it’s the most dedicatedly weird surrealism/horror hybrid to come down that lonely pike in quite some time.
COMMENTS: Before The Oregonian screening at the Dallas Film Festival, an almost apologetic writer/director Calvin Reeder came out and told the audience that, if they were expecting to see a horror film, they would probably be disappointed. He (accurately) described the movie as “a surrealist/experimental film with horror splashes” and confessed that previous screenings had seen “a lot of walkouts.” A crowd of about 30 people was on hand. Two people walked out about thirty minutes into the experience, during the “rainbow pee” sequence, a long bit where a bearded wheezing man stops by the side of the road to relieve himself, and his urine stream changes color from yellow to red to green to black. (Ironically, this was possibly The Oregonian‘s best and funniest sequence, and the walkouts left before the punchline). Three more patrons departed soon after, when, in response to the heroine’s desperate pleading for help, a man offers her omelet recipes instead. After that exodus, the remainder of the audience seemed to settle in to the movie’s groove, bursting into laughter when omelet man disposes of eggshells in the toilet and gasping when the shapeless green puppet (which looks like an experiment in splicing the genes of Kermit the Frog with the Cookie Monster) suddenly appears behind the protagonist. Still, not everyone could make it to the end; two more fled at about the one-hour mark, when the whole crew of accumulated weirdos (by this time the shapeless Muppet and omelet man have been joined by a gentle folksinger, a cigarette smoking man and a pair of robed women who don’t say anything but emit deafening screams) suddenly relocated the party from the Oregon woods to the Mojave desert, for no apparent reason. None of the audience members left because the content playing on the screen was offensive or shocking; they simply beat it at the point when their personal tolerance for non-narrative noodling reached its breaking point. The loud and Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE OREGONIAN (2011)
Your faithful correspondent has returned from the field with reports on two offbeat festival films…
Alex de la Iglesia bolsters his already fine cult film résumé (Acción Mutante, The Day of the Beast) with this b-movie styled action/melodrama that’s also an allegory for the Spanish Civil War. The movie’s best sequence is the prologue, where the Republican army conscripts a circus troupe into emergency action (“a clown with a machete—you’ll scare the s**t out of them”!) Flash forward to 1973, when the embittered son of one of the Shanghaied carnies embarks upon a career as a “Sad Clown,” but is immediately smitten by a beautiful trapeze artist. Unfortunately for him, the acrobat Natalia is the personal property of the “Happy Clown,” a psychotic, drunken woman-beater who just happens to be great with kids. The two mountebanks’ working relationship quickly turns sour as they take turns beating the greasepaint off each other in a brutal rivalry that eventually leaves both of them mutilated and insane. Which mad harlequin will Natalia choose? The Spanish Civil War angle is simplistic and neither adds nor subtracts from the narrative, which starts as a tawdry carnival melodrama and morphs into an action movie with a high-flying, clown-mauling showdown atop a giant cross. A few Sad Clown dream sequences–he keeps seeing his dead father and archival footage of Spanish pop singer Raphael singing a vintage ballad in clownface—add nominal weirdness, but these touches aren’t pervasive enough to raise the film above the level of aggressively offbeat. Still, there are those who are going to want to check out any film where an insane jester uses lye, an iron, and some clerical vestments to improvise his own clown costume, then steals a cache of automatic weapons and walks the streets of Madrid armed to the teeth with homicidal gleam in his eye. One final note: my movie-going companion was disappointed in the lack of variety in the clown-on-clown violence; he had been hoping to see a wide variety of Bozos brutalizing each other in an all-out melee. So be forewarned—if you consider two killer clowns too few, this Circus is not for you.
THE LAST CIRCUS [Balada Triste de Trompeta] (2010). Dir. Álex de la Iglesia, Featuring Carlos Areces, Antonio de la Torre, Carolina Bang.
If The Last Circus is edgy, Rainbows End occupies the opposite end of the offbeat spectrum—it’s whimsical. Ostensibly a documentary about six east Texas eccentrics on a road trip to California to pursue a motley assortment of dreams, it’s also one of the funniest movies yours truly has had the privilege of checking out in 2011. It’s the characters who drive the bus in this episodic feature—and in this case that bus needs a push start, leaks radiator fluid, and at times is literally held together with duct tape. Continue reading FILM FESTIVAL DOUBLE FEATURE: THE LAST CIRCUS [BALADA TRISTE DE TROMPETA] (2010)/RAINBOWS END (2010)