We are happy to announce that 366 Weird Movies has gone into the video distribution business!
Our first venture is the surrealistic satire of the Bush presidency, W the Movie (review), by this site’s own Alfred Eaker. We hope to acquire the rights to distribute more weird, underground titles in the future.
One important function we think our distribution efforts can serve in the future is to offer compilations of shorts by up-and-coming directors whose work might be too strange and experimental to merit a mainstream release.
The reason we’re informing you, the casual reader, of this development is not to beg you to buy our titles to support independent filmmakers (although if you want to do so anyway, you can buy W here).
Believe it or not, our priorities are completely backwards. We believe in the integrity of the List more than in making a fast buck off of you.
The reason we’re devoting space to this announcement is to assure you that no movie will be getting special critical treatment simply because we distribute it, or because we hope to acquire its rights. Every title that comes across our desks will be impartially reviewed first, before any distribution contract is contemplated. Determining the suitability of a movie to make it onto the List of the 366 best movies of all time will always be made before we have any financial stake in the film. If there is a potential conflict of interest—i.e., we receive a movie for review from someone we have a pre-existing business relationship with—we’ll outsource the initial review to an independent third party.
We hope that by doing our small part to promote the weird by distributing the occasional film, we can strike a small blow against the pallid realism and pervasive normalcy of calculated Hollywood product. We’ll grow as large as we can to combat the monster. Viva la weird!
Today’s Saturday Short is a music video made by Chad Vangaalen. Chad is a musician and artist from Canada who rarely leaves his basement, where he is constantly working. Besides his passion for music and the visual arts, Chad also has a passion for skateboarding.
In the video you’ll see that Chad’s music style is a combination of indie, folk, pop, and experimental. He has created a few stop motion videos to advertise his latest album, “Soft Airplane,” but in his other videos he uses computer animation.
Originally, I wanted to use the music video to “Molten Light.” I find the animation as well as the music to be much better, but this video is a little too graphic for our site. There are sequences of strong comic violence and nudity throughout. If that content doesn’t bother you click here.
If you enjoy the music be sure to look up Chad’s alias, “Black Mold,” as well. He just released an album under the name.
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.
SPECIAL EVENTS:
The Wizard of Oz (1939) – 70th Anniversary Hi-Def Event: Finally, flying monkeys in high definition! This remastered re-release of the fantasy classic, with bonus features, is playing on Wednesday, September 23 only, in theaters across the country (click here for the list). Definitely an event.
SCREENINGS (NEW YORK CITY; TEMPE, AZ.):
Devil Girl (2007): This low budget “hallucinatory” horror road-trip features strippers, a drug-addled clown, and a literal devil girl. It’s getting a token release at the Times Square Art Theater in New York City tonight only, and at a single theater in Tempe, Arizona tonight and tomorrow night (Sep 18-19); scheduled to arrive on DVD in early November. Devil Girl official site.
NEW ON DVD:
An American Werewolf in London (1981): This werewolf black comedy is more offbeat than weird, but on release it was was a trailblazer in the modern horror/comedy genre, and the film has a definite cult following who may be interested in a new, remastered special edition release. Buy from Amazon.
Army of Darkness: Screwhead Edition (1992): Read our capsule review of the third entry in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy here. It appears Anchor Bay’s contract to distribute Army is up, necessitating a new release from Universal. Unfortunately, this means that the excellent bonus features on the Anchor Bay release are now out of print, and this new release is sparse on extras, with no commentary. The Screwhead edition does include an alternate ending and the new featurette “Creating the Deadites,” but it rabid fans believe this release must have been created by a bunch of primitive screwheads. Completists can buy from Amazon.
Deadgirl (2009): Controversial, provocative fable about horny high-school boys who discover the plastic-wrapped body of a naked woman in an abandoned mental hospital; is she dead, alive, or neither, and what will they do about it? It appears to be an extreme allegory on the objectification of women; many audience members were reported to have walked out of theatrical screenings due to the (ahem) “strong” scenes. Buy from Amazon.
Grace (2009): Indie horror about a mother whose baby is born undead; first time feature director Paul Solet expanded Grace to a full length movie from an award-winning short that Fangoria called “superbly bizarre.” Buy from Amazon.
John Carpenter: Master of Fear: Four of sometimes cult director John (Dark Star; Big Trouble in Little China) Carpenter’s lesser horror efforts collected in a single budget set. Includes The Thing (1982), the jewel of the set, along with Prince of Darkness (1987), They Live (1988), and the mediocre 1995 remake of The Village of the Damned. The four movies are on two discs, so extras are unlikely. Buy from Amazon.
Phantasm II (1988): Reggie Banister and Angus Scrimm return in this belated sequel to Phantasm (read entry), already certified as one of the 366 best weird movies ever made. Dedicated Phanatics seem to love it, but most mainstream reviewers were unkind; at any rate, this long out-of-print film definitely deserves a revival. Buy from Amazon
Hero [Ying xiong] (2002): Beautiful looking, poetic epic martial arts film with a Rashomon-style storyline. It became an international crossover hit, and is available on this standalone release and a bundled release (see below). Buy from Amazon.
The Ultimate Force of Four: Another budget blu-ray bundle of some of the more renowned wuxia films: Iron Monkey (1993), Legend of the Drunken Master (1994), Hero (2002) (see above), and The Blind Swordsman Zatoichi (2003). A nice selection of films to start a collection in this genre. Buy from Amazon.
NEW FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) ON YOUTUBE:
Fear X (2003): Danish thriller with John Turturro, mysterious visions, and an ambiguous ending. Watch free on YouTube.
BMC: B-MOVIE CLASSICS:
Even more free online viewing experiences, courtesy of the American Movie Classics cable channel. The main drawback is low picture quality, and the fact that a lot of these are public domain movies that could be viewed elsewhere commercial free. Selected titles are listed below, or you can browse all the selections here.
Carnival of Souls (1962): We’ve certified this sublimely creepy low-budget wonder about a church organist out-of-sync with reality as one of the 366 best weird movies of all time (read entry); here’s another way to watch it. Watch Carnival of Souls free.
Dark Star (1974): John Carpenter’s sci-fi spoof feature debut. Watch Dark Star free.
The Prisoner (1967): Not a b-movie, and in fact not a movie; this is the existential/surreal BBC spy series starring Patrick McGoohan as a “retired” secret agent (known only as “Number Six”) trapped (for undisclosed reasons) in a village on an remote island patrolled by deadly balloons. The bizarre final episode blew everyone’s minds in 1967, when minds were hard to blow indeed. Watch The Prisoner free.
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.
Any hip, against-the-grain aficionado with an appreciation for the surreal, the avant-garde, and the experimental will tell you flat out that there’s no comparison: it’s Keaton over Chaplin. You simply have to concede Keaton’s superiority because Chaplin was too accepted, too famous, too popular, too sentimental, too rich, too pedestrian in directorial style, too populist, too egotistical, too narcissistic, and nowhere near as prone to risk-taking as Keaton.
That was THE prevailing thought from the 60’s until quite recently and accurate only in theory because, like Beethoven, Chaplin really can’t be overrated, while Keaton certainly is (i.e., The General).
That doesn’t mean the above comparison has no truth and, naturally, it would be preposterous to say that Chaplin did not make some truly terrible films (King of NewYork and A Day’s Pleasure are people’s exhibit A).
However, Keaton’s experimentalist stature is grossly exaggerated. He was certainly the most innovative of the “A” list silent clowns, but was nowhere near as much so as either the recently re-discovered Charlie Bowers or Harry Langdon, who, as blasphemous as it may sound, really had more memorably etched, modern characterizations (Chaplin did say he only felt threatened by Langdon).
In hindsight, Keaton’s innovation, which surfaced only sporadically, seems suspiciously unintentional, even if his best films are indeed brilliant and highly innovative—The Playhouse and Sherlock Jr.
Years later, when working with Samuel Beckett on Film, Keaton revealed his impatience with experimentation by loudly grumbling.
One walks away from Keaton’s best films feeling impressed. One walks away from Chaplin’s best film unforgettably moved.
There is hardly a more profoundly artistic, emotionally overwhelming ending than that of City Lights . It remains the most memorable ending in screen history. Montgomery Clift declared it the greatest screen acting he had seen (that’s saying quite a bit from an actor of Clift’s caliber, but perhaps he had not seen Falconetti in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, which is hardly acting in the gauged sense).
City Lights deserves all the acclaim it has received. It is Chaplin at his most spiritual and at his most expertly balanced (the pathos does not draw attention to itself, as in many of Continue reading IN A WORD, “CHAPLIN”→
“…Gilliam fearlessly brings the logic of children’s literature to the screen. Plunging headfirst into history, myth, legend, and fairy tale, Gilliam sends his characters—a boy and six good-natured if rather larcenous little persons (i.e. seven dwarves)—careening through time-twisting interactions with Napoleon, Robin Hood, and Agamemnon (played, respectively, by Ian Holm, John Cleese, and Sean Connery). The landscape is populated by the giants, ogres, and sinister crones of legend and fairy tale, all in the service of Gilliam’s weird, ecstatic vision.”–Bruce Eder, “Time Bandits” (Criterion Collection essay)
PLOT: 11-year old Kevin is largely ignored by his parents, who are more interested in news about the latest microwave ovens than in encouraging their son’s interest in Greek mythology. One night, a gang of six dwarfs bursts into his bedroom while fleeing a giant floating head, and Kevin is swept up among them and through an inter-dimensional portal in their scramble to escape. He finds that the diminutive and incompetent gang is tripping through time robbing historical figures using a map showing holes in the space-time continuum of the universe that they stole from the Supreme Being; things get complicated when Evil devises a plan to lure the bandits into the Time of Legends in order to steal the map for himself.
BACKGROUND:
Time Bandits is the first movie in what is known as Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination” or “Trilogy of Dreams.” It deals with the imagination in childhood; the second movie, the bleak Brazil (1985), with adulthood; and the third, Baron Munchausen (1989) with old age. Gilliam did not intend from the beginning to make three films with similar themes; he only noticed the connection between the three films later, after fans and critics pointed it out.
Gilliam began the script in an attempt to make something marketable and family-friendly, since he could not find anyone interested in financing his innovative script for Brazil. The success of the idiosyncratic Time Bandits allowed Gilliam to proceed making imaginative, genre-defying films.
The film was co-written by Gilliam with his old Monty Python’s Flying Circus mate Micheal Palin, who is responsible for the snappy dialogue.
Ex-Beatle George Harrison helped finance the film, served as executive producer, and is credited with “songs and additional material” for the movie. Only one Harrison composition is featured, “Dream Away,” which plays over the closing credits.
Gilliam shot the entire movie from a low angle to give an impression of a child’s-eye view of the world.
Sean Connery was not originally intended to appear in the final scene, but was meant to appear in the final showdown with Evil. The actor’s schedule did not allow him to appear when the battle was being shot, but Connery suggested that he could play a role in the final scene. His second, quite memorable, role consists of two shots, filmed in an afternoon.
A low budget release, Gilliam’s film cost about $5 million to make but grossed over $42 million.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The avenging floating head of God appearing out of a cloud of smoke.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: As an utterly original blend of history, comedy and theology wrapped in Monty Pyhton-eque verbal sparring and presented as a children’s fable, Time Bandits starts with a weird enough design. As the film continues and the bandits journey from history into myth, the proceedings get more mysterious and existential, until the flick winds up on a shatteringly surreal climax that is bleak enough to supply the most well-adjusted of kiddies with years of nightmares. As the tagline says, it’s “All the dreams you’ve ever had—and not just the good ones.”
We are happy to announce that 366 Weird Movies has gone into the video distribution business!
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There is hardly a more profoundly artistic, emotionally overwhelming ending than that of City Lights . It remains the most memorable ending in screen history. Montgomery Clift declared it the greatest screen acting he had seen (that’s saying quite a bit from an actor of Clift’s caliber, but perhaps he had not seen Falconetti in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, which is hardly acting in the gauged sense).
