Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 3/31/2011

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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.

Weird movie releases tend to be feast or famine—this week is pure feast.  Bloat yourself on midnight movies, new releases, and cult re-releases this weekend.

IN THEATERS (WIDE RELEASE):

Source Code:  A man wakes up inside the body of another, and realizes that he must use memories from his previous life to stave off a terrorist attack.  Probably not weird, but notable because it’s from Duncan Jones, who showed promise with his (non-weird) sci-fi debut Moon, and because the story is drawing comparisons to Christopher Nolan‘s Memento and Inception. It also stars Donnie Darko himself, Jake Gyllenhaal.  Source Code official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte) (2010):  The four stage journey of a shepherd’s soul through the afterlife, told according to one of geeky Greek cult leader Pythagoras’ lesser-known theorems.  We’ve been wondering if this art curiosity would ever surface since we first heard about it at last year’s TIFF; the wheel’s of weirdness turn slowly.  Of course, it’s only playing at the specialty venue Film Forum in Manhattan, with future stateside dates doubtful, but that’s better than nothing.  The Four Times at the Film Forum.

Rubber (2010): The French film about the serial-killer tire with telekinetic powers finally makes it to these shores, where it’s dividing critics down the middle as to whether it’s a clever absurdist goof or a tedious one-joke insult to the audience.  Whichever, it’s currently sitting in our review queue, so here’s hoping it arrives at a theater near us soon.  Rubber official site.

Super (2010): Another regular-guy-becomes-masked-vigilante black comedy; critics are comparing it to an edgier, more absurd Kick Ass.  From Tromeo and Juliet co-writer/co-director James Gunn, so it’s sure to be offensive, at least.  With TV’s Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler and Kevin Bacon.  It’s being reviewed all over, but it’s only playing in Vail, Colorado??  Super official site (not up to date). 

NEW ON DVD:

Black Swan (2010):  Read our capsule review.  A major event in recent weirdness; Black Swan was our 3rd weirdest movie of 2010, and Natalie Portman won a Weirdcademy Award for her role as a goody-two shoes ballerina who learns all about the dark side when she grows feathers.  Buy Black Swan.

Dead Awake (2010): Under-the-radar psychological thriller about a man who fakes his own funeral, then meets a strange crack addict and an ex-lover and finds All Is Not As It Seems.  With Nick Stahl, Rose McGowan and Amy Smart. Buy Dead Awake.

Evangelion 2.22: You Can [Not] Advance (2009): Part 2 of the Evangelion reboot (see our review of Part 1 here) features more giant robots, emo teen angst, apocalyptic occultism, and anime absurdity. If it follows the same path as the series’ two previous incarnations, then the third entry will be the weird one. Buy Evangelion: 2.22 You Can [Not] Advance.

Inferno (1980):  Dario Argento’s sequel to Suspiria, with the Mother of Tears now in the spotlight, is considered far weirder than the first entry in the series, but is not nearly as beloved.   This Blue Underground Special Edition release features only cast and crew interviews as extras, but more importantly it’s a brand new transfer of the movie, and should provide the best sound and picture quality Inferno has yet seen on home video. Buy Inferno (Special Edition).

Poor Pretty Eddie (1975):  About a jazz singer whose car breaks down in a redneck town inhabited by bizarro characters like a fat, drunk ex-stripper (Shelley Winters!) and a homicidal Elvis impersonator.  The promotional materials play this up as a “surreal” lost “cult classic”; we’re skeptical, but willing to give it a try.  Also known as Heartbreak Motel.  The DVD and Blu-ray aren’t sold separately at this time. Buy Poor Pretty Eddie Blu-Ray + DVD Combo Pack.

Smash Cut (2009): A horror director knocks off acquaintances to fill his movie with realistic gore effects. Probably just exploitation comedy trash, but it is made by the director of the pretty dang weird Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter with the blessing of gore godfather Herschell Gordon Lewis, and it features porn star Sasha Grey, who’s been involved in some interesting projects (starring in Steven Sorderberg’s well-received The Girlfriend Experience and “presenting” the weird looking faux-grindhouse spy thriller Modus Operandi). Another DVD/Blu-ray combo. Buy Smash Cut [Blu-ray].

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Black Swan (2010): See entry in DVD above. Buy Black Swan [Blu-ray].

Dogtooth (2009): Read the Certified Weird entry!Bizarre Greek black comedy about kids raised on an estate and kept completely apart from the world with their own unique language; truly disturbing, but more because of its ideas and matter-of-fact execution than its violence and perversity. Buy Dogtooth [Blu-ray].

Inferno (1980): See entry in DVD above. Buy Inferno [Blu-ray].

Poor Pretty Eddie (1975): See description in DVD above. The DVD and Blu-ray versions are sold together. Buy Poor Pretty Eddie Blu-Ray + DVD Combo Pack.

Smash Cut (2009): See entry in DVD above. Buy Smash Cut [Blu-ray].

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.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

TOD BROWNING’S THE UNKNOWN (1927)

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The Unknown (1927) is one of the final masterpieces of the silent film era.  Suspend disbelief and step into the carnival of the absurd.  The Unknown is the ebony carousel of the Tod Browning/Lon Chaney oeuvre, the one film in which the artists’ obsessions perfectly crystallized.  This is a film uniquely of its creators’ time, place and psychosis and, therefore, it is an entirely idiosyncratic work of art, which has never been remotely mimicked, nor could it be.  That it was made at MGM borders on the miraculous, or the delightfully ridiculous, but then this was an era of exploratory boundaries, even at the big studios (again, the risk-taking Irving Thalberg produced).

“There is a story they tell in old Madrid.  The story, they say is true.”  So opens the tale of “Alonzo, the Armless.”  Browning spins his yarn like a seasoned barker at the Big Top of a gypsy circus where “the Sensation of Sensations! The Wonder of Wonders!,” Alonzo (Lon Chaney), the Armless, throws knives, with his feet, at the object of his secret affection, Nanon (an 18 year old Joan Crawford).

Illusions abound.  Alonzo  is actually a double-thumbed killer on the lam.  With the aid of a straight jacket and midget assistant Cojo (John George, who worked with Browning in Outside the Law [1920]), Alonzo feigns his handicap and performs the facade of one mutilated.

In addition evading the law and securing employment, Alonzo’s act of the armless wonder benefits him greatly.  Nanon has a hysterical, obsessive repulsion to the very touch of a man’s arms.   She calls on the Almighty to take away the accursed hands of all men.  Nanon vents histrionic, sexual anxiety to Alonzo every time Malabar the Mighty (Norman Kerry) puts his vile hands upon her.  Alonzo, ever the performer, simulates expressed sympathy, although his affection for Nanon is the one thing about Alonzo that is genuine.

Still from The Unknown (1927)Alonzo, secretly venting enmity, advises Malabar on how to win Nanon.  It is, of course, intentional ill-advice which will eventually karmically rebound and become genuine ill-advice for Alonzo. Malabar’s arms are muscled and strong, compared to Alonzo’s armless torso, or compared to Alonzo’s deformed, hidden double thumb—the very same double thumb which he used to strangle the ringmaster of Browning’s perverse milieu: Nanon’s sadistic Continue reading TOD BROWNING’S THE UNKNOWN (1927) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

83. THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973)

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“Nothing in [critic’s] educations or experiences can have prepared them for The Holy Mountain. Here is a film completely outside the entire tradition of motion picture art, outside the tradition of modern theater, outside the tradition of criticism and review. Criticism is irrelevant.”–film critic Jules Siegel, a quote chosen for The Holy Mountain‘s trailer

Must SeeWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Alejandro Jodorowsky

FEATURING: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas

PLOT: A thief, who looks like Jesus Christ, silently wanders through a bizarre and depraved city with an armless and legless midget companion, participating in a lizard circus where toads are dressed like conquistadors, bearing a crucifix through the streets and eating from Jesus’ body, and meeting a prostitute with a chimp. He comes to a giant tower in the middle of a busy highway and rides up a hook to the top, where a mystic with a menagerie introduces him to seven companions and purifies him by burning his feces and turning it into gold, among other rituals. After preparation the assembled nine set off the find the Holy Mountain where the immortals are said to live, so they can displace them and become like gods themselves.

Still from The Holy Mountain (1973)

BACKGROUND:

  • In preparation for making the film Jodorowsky studied with both a Zen master and with a disciple of Gurdijeff. Part of his training involved sleep deprivation (he claims he went a week without sleep) and taking LSD for the first time.
  • During filming, the Catholic church in Mexico was not happy with The Holy Mountain because of its apparent blasphemy, and the President Luis Echeverría’s regime was angry with Jodorowsky because soldiers in Mexican uniforms were depicted massacring civilians. There were public marches protesting the filming. Per Jodorowsky’s DVD commentary, he left Mexico with the footage he had already shot to finish the movie in New York after receiving threats from government officials and paramilitary groups.
  • John Lennon partly financed the film. The budget was $750,000, a fairly extravagant sum for a film largely made in Mexico in 1973.
  • According to Jodoworowsky’s DVD commentary, George Harrison wanted to play the role of the thief, but balked at playing a nude scene where the character has his anus scrubbed. Sources at the time reported that it was Lennon who wanted the role and that he could not follow through due to scheduling conflicts.
  • Jodorowsky dubbed the voice of the thief.
  • Various “masters” the characters meet as they prepare for their ascent of the Holy Mountain were played by actual Mexican shamans and witch doctors.
  • Due to disagreements between Jodorowsky and producer Allen Klein, The Holy Mountain did not receive any sort of legitimate home video release until 2007. The same issues plagued Jodorowsky’s previous film, El Topo. According to Jodorowsky, Klein became angry and vindictive when, thinking it was too commercial, the director abandoned a project to adapt the erotic classic The Story of O with the producer and instead pursued an opportunity to make George Hebert’s cult science fiction novel Dune (a project Jodorowsky never completed—David Lynch was hired instead to film Dune, which ended up as a flop and an embarrassment).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are so many candidates—the apocalyptic toad and chameleon circus with amphibians dressed as conquistadors and missionaries, the giant mechanical vagina art installation stimulated by a nude woman with a probe, the hermaphrodite with leopard head breasts that squirt milk onto a proselyte—that choosing a single representative image seems like an almost arbitrary exercise.  Still, there is one trick so stunningly beautiful and effective that Jodorowsky essentially uses it twice: the live birds that fly from out of the gaping wounds of corpses mowed down by fascist soldiers.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Holy Mountain plays like a cut-up version of the world’s sacred texts. If you tore out pages from the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, The Golden Bough, and a dozen other esoteric works from the Kabbalah to Gurdijeff—throwing in a couple of sleazy pulp novels for good measure—and put them together in a giant cauldron, stirred them up and pulled out sheaves at random and asked a troupe of performance artists, carnival freaks, and hippies tripping on peyote to act them out, you might come up with a narrative something like The Holy Mountain. Here, the cauldron is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s skull, and the stirrer was LSD, and an ex-Beatle gave the director and master visual stylist a small fortune to bring any elaborate and depraved fantasy he could dream up to shocking life. The singularly bizarre results—the pure, undiluted essence of mad Jodorowsky—are unlike any film that has ever existed before, or ever shall be, world without end.


Rerelease trailer for The Holy Mountain

COMMENTS: The first thirty or forty minutes of The Holy Mountain are as astounding, Continue reading 83. THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: SUCKER PUNCH (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Zach Snyder

FEATURING: , Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, , Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, ,

PLOT: After accidentally killing her sister in an attempt to save her from their evil step-father, Baby Doll is locked away in a horrific mental institution and condemned to a lobotomy. She invents two separate fantasy worlds in which she and her fellow inmates can attain freedom through a video-game-like epic quest.
Still from Sucker Punch (2011)
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WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While some of Snyder’s visual tactics and musical cues are interesting, most of Sucker Punch is a highly referential, poorly written adventure whose stranger elements only recall better, weirder movies.

COMMENTS: Set in a dark, tall-tale version of the 1950’s, Sucker Punch’s plot is just a mess. The dank mental asylum is shown for no more than 5-10 minutes, with Baby Doll’s cohorts popping up briefly in the beginning.  Her first mental escape—a glitzy brothel in which she and the other inmates are imprisoned sex workers—provides another set of challenges for our boring protagonist to meet.  This leads to a second imaginary escape, prompted by the madame (Carla Gugino) forcing Baby Doll to dance for everyone.  She slips into a trance involving an epic journey to secure five mystical items that will set her free, and her dance is apparently so sultry she practically hypnotizes everyone in the room.  The script flits between these two fantasies for most of the film, mixing the made-up quests into one metaphorical goal: freedom.

The trailers for this film made me think Sucker Punch could go either way: it could be an imaginative, high-flying action flick with strong women characters at the center, or it could be a teenage boy’s sexual fantasy thinly disguising itself as a feminist steampunk adventure.  To very little surprise, it turned out to be more of the latter.  The story is almost offensively dumbed-down while somehow remaining unnecessarily convoluted thanks to the pointless fantasy-within-a-fantasy conceit.  The barely-written characters are flat as can be, with most of the actors putting in dull-faced performances.  The battle scenes, while large in scale and generally exciting, feature so many familiar set pieces and villains that it’s hard to be genuinely swept up in Snyder’s world.  Oversize metal samurai?  Mother dragon fighting to protect her baby?  Nazi zombies?  It’s been done.

The fact that almost the entire proceedings—all of which are meant to be the conscious projection of an independent 20-year-old woman, mind you—involve scantily-clad twentysomething hotties with heavy fake eyelashes fighting evil in egregiously high heels while their male tormenters ogle them, well… that just gives Mr Snyder a chance to incorporate as much exploitation and fetishization as he can.  The overabundance of slow-motion is the cherry on top of this very indulgent and overloaded psycho-sexy sundae.

Admittedly, there are some positive aspects to the film.  Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, and Carla Gugino—arguably the most talented actors present—do their best with the shoddy material, adding just a dash of emotional weight to the proceedings amidst the clunky dialogue and overblown electronica soundtrack.  Malone especially stands out: with her adorable spiky haircut and acute expressiveness she is a welcome relief from Emily Browning’s infantalizing pigtails and ever-present look of worried, victimized Barbie doll.  Many of the visuals, too, are quite intriguing, with Snyder utilizing his usual dulled color palette and sped-up/slowed-down battle sequences. Several of the action scenes feel like an anime in real life (Baby Doll’s ridiculous schoolgirl outfit and katana and Amber’s giant mech certainly help), which is a nice thought.

It’s always nice to see confident, independent women kicking butt onscreen, and it’s a thing that doesn’t happen as often as it should, but Sucker Punch is not a good example of this genre.  While on the surface it features some memorable fantasy images, sexy babes in killer costumes, and exciting gunplay, it’s neither fun nor smart enough to make up for the uninspired script, bad acting, and wanton exploitation.  In the end, the weirdest thing about it is that it seems to take itself seriously.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Spastic, bombastic, and incoherent, Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch is a baroque, highly polished chunk of pop culture vomit. A nonsensical mash-up of Shutter Island, The Lord of the Rings, I, Robot and Kill Bill, it doesn’t even have the decency to have fun with its cartoonish obsessions, instead delivering a somber, moody, metafictional melodrama that that thinks it’s about female empowerment but instead has all the philosophical heft of Maxim Magazine.”–Jeff Meyers, Detroit Metro Times (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: POSSESSION (1981)

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Possession has been officially promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies of All Time. This post is left here for historical purposes. Please read the official Certified Weird entry.

AKA: The Night the Screaming Stops

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Margit Carstensen, Heinz Bennent, Johanna Hofer, Carl Duering, Shaun Lawton

PLOT: A secret agent finds himself in a real mess when he hires a detective to track his unfaithful wife.

Still from POSSESSION (1981)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: With campy acting, absurdist elements mixed with existentialist philosophy, arty cinematography, and a story full of all kinds of bizarre and wacky stuff like sex with sea creatures, pointless self mutilation, and people making funny faces for no apparent reason, Possession is practically tailor made to make the List. While I personally don’t think Possession represents a serious effort to convey meaning substantial enough to qualify for the List, I am confident that most viewers will strongly disagree with me.  Possession has a resolute feel about it that will be enough to convince most fans of weird movies that it is a meaningful and significantly weird cinematic endeavor.  Out of deference to those fans I hereby recommend it without reservation.

COMMENTS:  A love triangle among eccentric characters spirals out of control and becomes a love octagon. And the protagonist’s girlfriend is in love with some of kind of octopussy thing.

Sam Neil plays a spy who quits his job to spend more time with his girlfriend and out of wedlock son.  She leaves him, he has a nervous breakdown that leads to a three-week black-out, he meets the new boyfriend who is quite completely insane and possibly a little queer for Sam.

Sam dates his son’s teacher who appears to be his wife’s twin.  Meanwhile the wife leaves the new boyfriend for another boyfriend who is some kind of extraterrestrial octopus, to whom she feeds a succession of uninvited guests, such as a private detective and an insane window inspector (yes that’s right, an insane window inspector.)

In the midst of all of this, the characters physically and verbally convulse in spastic apoplexies Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: POSSESSION (1981) →

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