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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)
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.
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. 
