Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 3/4/2011

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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.

IN THEATERS (WIDE RELEASE):

The Adjustment Bureau: A Senatorial candidate accidentally gets a glimpse of what fate has in store for him—separation from the love of his life—and doesn’t like it; fate sends a couple of “adjustment bureau” agents to “persuade” him to go along with the grand plan.  Starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt (a -2 for potential weirdness), but from a Phillip K. Dick story (a +1).  So who knows?  The Adjustment Bureau official site.

Rango: It’s a Pixar-style animated Western starring a lizard cowboy for kiddies; even with the voiceover talents of el muchahco bizarro Johnny Depp, how could it be weird? It’s probably not, by our standards, but mainstream critics found it delightfully odd: the Florida Times-Union called it “willfully weird” and efilmcritic.com went with “defiantly weird.”  We weren’t planning to review this one, but we may have to teach these guys a thing or two about what constitutes “weird.”  Rango official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

I Saw the Devil: When a serial killer whacks his pregnant fiancée, a special agent goes outside the law to get his revenge.  Directed by Ji-Woon Kim (The Good, the Bad, the Weird) and starring Min-sik Choi (Oldboy) as the psychopath.  Seems more likely to qualify as “extreme” than “weird,” but it has a good pedigree.  I Saw the Devil official site.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010): Read Kevyn Knox’s review for 366.  Even though the Palme D’Or winner is already out on DVD, selected U.S. cities will get a chance to catch it on the big screen.  Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives official site (in German).

IN DEVELOPMENT:

Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter (scheduled 2011): The title alone’s weird enough to catch our eye.  The plot revolves around an LSD-damaged goth-girl serial killer, and the trailer looks like something put together by Harmony Korine working for Troma studios.   From the director of Frankenpimp.  Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter trailer on MySpace video.

Untitled Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze project: Not exactly a scoop by us, but we wanted to be the first to tell you that postmodern screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and prankster director Spike Jonze—who made the Certified Weird Being John Malkovich and List Candidate Adaptation—are pitching a new project together, said to be a world conspiracy satire (though with these guys involved, who knows what it will really be about?)  Kaufman is also working on a separate (autobiographical?)  script entitled Frank or Francis, about a director and a blogger with vicious opinions of his work (we’re pretty sure we’re not the model here).  Thanks to Being Charlie Kaufman for alerting us to these developments; Deadline.com supplies more info.  

NEW ON DVD:

“ReBoot: Seasons One and Two” (1994):  Anyone who caught this 1994 computer-animated kiddie show about a society that lives inside a desktop computer on a Saturday morning in 1994 might be forgiven for thinking they hadn’t yet come down from whatever substances they had consumed the night before.  It continues the great Saturday morning cartoon tradition of simultaneously appealing to kids and adults who love a little light weirdness. Buy “ReBoot: Seasons One & Two”.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Daughters of Darkness (1971):  Leave it to kinky Harry Kümel (Malpertuis) to make one of the strangest and artiest “lesbian vampire” movies of the 1970s.  Daughters stars Delphine Seyrig (Last Year at Marienbad, The Milky Way) as the undead Countess Elizabeth Bathory who, along with vampy gal pal sex slave Danielle Ouimet, focuses her attentions on a honeymooning couple in a deserted Belgian hotel resort.  Surprises abound. Buy Daughters of Darkness [Blu-ray].

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Heavy Metal 2000 (2000): We haven’t seen this sequel to the naughty 1981 animated sci-fi cult classic; it’s weirdness is fairly suspect and reviewers were not kind, but some may be interested nonetheless. Tell us if it’s any good. Watch Heavy Metal 2000 free on YouTube.

House of the Dead (2003): Read our capsule review. Uwe Boll‘s zombies-at-a-rave movie is bad—really bad—but is it “so bad it’s weird”? We’ll leave it to you to decide. Watch House of the Dead 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.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1974)

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This is the last of an ongoing series on Hammer horror director Terence Fisher.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell was the last of the Hammer Frankenstein series, as well as Terence Fisher’s final film. It is generally regarded as a weak swansong. At first glance, it seems a remake of The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), but with a noticeably reduced budget.

Peter Cushing, in his final portrayal of Baron Frankenstein, inexplicably sports a curly blond wig which makes him look a bit like a deranged Shirley Temple, and he looks alarmingly emaciated. Off-screen, the actor’s wife had died, after a long illness, only the previous year, in 1971 (Monster from Hell was filmed in 1972 and remained on the shelf for two years). Cushing was openly despondent and in intense mourning. He later admitted to having had suicidal tendencies during this period. Cushing never remarried, nor did he ever fully recover from the loss. The toll of that recent personal tragedy is clearly visible on him in this film and, despite all of the atrocities committed by his character, that off-screen blow adds a layer of wearied pathos revealed in the actor’s eyes.

Despite the many elements working against this film, its bad reputation is mostly hyperbole. Like nearly all of Fisher’s films, Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell is stamped with the director’s assured composition and electric editing. The opening sequence, with a grave robber (Patrick Troughton, from Doctor Who and Scars of Dracula) being pursued by a constable,  is nearly as kinetically paced  as the tense opening of Frankenstein Must be Destroyed. Later in the film, the Baron, momentarily young again, springs to his old self  in a leap atop the creature’s back. The creature’s eventual fate is gruesome and frenzied. These are diversions from a prevailing, fatigued bleakness. Indeed, a desolate milieu permeates this culmination of Fisher and Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein saga.

Still from Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)David (Darth Vader) Prowse plays the monster, and he is as encased in his rubbery, hairy ape-like latex as he was in black armor. Prowse attempts to inject sympathy into his monster, much the same way that Freddie Jone’s monster did in the superb Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed.  Prowse, however, was at the mercy of an immobile costume which defeats his efforts.

The Baron himself is a complicated mix of ruthlessness and an occasional “weak”, but not Continue reading FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1974) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

81. ENTER THE VOID (2009)

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366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

“Q: How would you define the film’s genre?
A: Psychedelic Melodrama.”–Gaspar Noé, Enter the Void Cannes pressbook

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Gaspar Noé

FEATURING: Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta

PLOT: Oscar is a drug-dealer living in Tokyo with his stripper sister.  One day he is shot and killed during a deal inside a bar called “The Void.”  He spends the rest of the movie as a silent ghost, floating around Tokyo and observing his sister and friends, while simultaneously hallucinating and remembering the details of his life.

Still from Enter the Void

BACKGROUND:

  • Noé wrote preliminary scripts for Enter the Void as early as 1994; the screenplay was consider to expensive to produce until the director’s 2002 success with Irréversible made it appear commercially viable.
  • Star Nathaniel Brown, a non-actor, was chosen because of his physical resemblance to lead Paz de la Huerta and because he was interested in directing.  As someone with no acting ambitions, Noé presumed Brown would not be upset by the fact that his face is only seen once in the film, briefly in a mirror.
  • Visual perfectionist Marc Caro supervised the set designs.
  • The 100 page script indicated the action and described the visual effects, but very little dialogue was scripted; the actors improvised most of their lines.
  • The paintings Alex is shown working on in the film were actually painted by Luis Felipe Noé, the director’s father.
  • The original run time of the film at its Cannes debut was 163 minutes.  Post production and editing continued after this debut, and, as completed in 2010, the final run time of the film (which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, 2010) as screened in the U.S. is about 140 minutes.  There is a longer version of the film, however, including a 17 minute sequence where Oscar believes he has woken up in the morgue; this segment occupies reel 7 of 9 reels, and for American screenings the film was simply shown with reel 7 omitted.  The extended cut is available on French DVD releases.
  • Noe instructed theaters that the film should be run at 25 frames per second rather than the usual 24 frames (this fact accounts for some of the discrepancies in listed running times).
  • At the Cannes premier there were no opening or closing credits.  The film began on a closeup of the sign reading “enter” and ended with the words “the void.”
  • Noé got the idea for the film form watching Robert Montgomery’s noir The Lady in the Lake while on a magic mushroom trip.  Like Enter the Void, Lady in the Lake is filmed entirely from a first-person point of view (actually, in Void the POV is usually from about a foot behind Oscar’s head, though at other times we see events through his eyes).
  • Tokyo was chosen as the location of the film partly because Japan’s strong ant-drug laws would make the actions of the police more believable, partly because Noé believed the city, with its abundance of neon, had a “druggy mood.”
  • Pioneering acid guru Timothy Leary used to read “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” to voyagers undergoing LSD trips in an attempt to steer the experience in a spiritual direction.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The opening DMT trip, with its multicolored mandalas, floating planetoids, and neon tentacles seems hard to top, but it merely sets the mood.  It’s the pornographic “Love Hotel” scene, with its parade of rutting couples with mystically glowing genitalia, that really impresses itself on the mind’s eye.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: As the most impressive and eye-splintering acid trip movie of the decade (by a wide margin), Enter the Void gets an automatic pass onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time. The fact that the protagonist is dead throughout most of the movie doesn’t hurt its chances one bit.  But the clincher, the sure sign that the movie is weird, is the walkouts.  Less than halfway through the screening I saw, the sexagenarian couple who had stumbled into the film by accident (probably thanks to ad copy suggesting the movie was a sentimental ghost story about brotherly love that transcends death) walked out of the theater, leaving me alone with two same-sex couples with facial piercings and hair that glowed in the dark.


Original trailer for Enter the Void

COMMENTS:  Enter the Void is an exploitation piece masquerading as an art installation, Continue reading 81. ENTER THE VOID (2009) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: 4 (2005)

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This post was originally lost in the Great Server Crash of 2010; the article was partially recovered from Google cache, and the rest of the text was recreated from memory.  Sorry, original comments were irretrievably lost in cyberspace.

DIRECTED BY: Ilya Khrjanovsky

FEATURING: Marina Vovchenko, Yuri Laguta, Sergey Shnurov

PLOT: Three Moscow strangers meet at a bar and tell tall-tales, and then we follow what

Still from 4 (2005)

happens to each of them after they leave.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s weird, indubitably. The problem with this cold, wandering drama is that very few viewers will have patience with its molasses pace and murky symbolism; it’s slow without being hypnotic, and mystifying without being mysterious.  It’s difficult to reject out-of-hand a film with high critical marks, excellent technique, and definite weirdness, but 4 seems too dry and directionless to resonate with many non-Russians.

COMMENTS: The shadow of Tarkovsky must still cast over the shoulder of every weird Russian filmmaker, just as the legacy of Lynch haunts their American counterparts.  The master’s influence can be seen throughout 4 in the lovely, leisurely treks through misty tundra; heard in the sound collages mixing mutated railroad clicks and hisses with synths and the baying of far off hounds; and felt in the appropriation of one of Tarkovsky’s favorite symbols, the dog.  The dogs who prowl the rubble of 4‘s Moscow streets and chew up villager’s livelihoods are not the loyal, mystical, otherworldly observers of Stalker and Nostalghia, however; they are remnants of social upheaval and agents of chaos.  With it’s Kafkaesque moments, portentous dialogues, mutant piglets and nightmare crones, incidents of Khrjanovsky’s feature debut conjure up a gloomy mystery that would have fit comfortably into a Tarkovsky film; but unlike its inspirations, it lacks much of a story, is missing an undercurrent of hope that cuts the despair, and has no emotional core.  The film likely reflects the mood of early capitalist Russia, circa 2005: ashamed of the past, already weary of the present, and fearful of the future.  Maybe the fact that the movie captures the latest iteration of Russian melancholy so perfectly is what makes it difficult to watch, and harder to love.  As the story begins we follow three contemporary Muscovites: a meat packer, a prostitute, and a Continue reading CAPSULE: 4 (2005) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: M.O.N. (2006)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Brian Lupo

FEATURING: Leada Ghareaghadje, Lindsay Coffelt, Donovan Vincent Kit, Amanda Rivera, Joe Hammernik

PLOT: Four teenagers stranded in rural California are stalked by a serial killer called “M.O.N.”



WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Simply put, it’s just not weird; instead, it’s a rehash of clichés from other, better horror movies that aims for competence and misses its mark completely. A couple scenes (like the ending, where one of the victims watches a video of the killer, dressed as a clown, copulating with a mannequin) are slightly weird, but none of it is even remotely memorable.

COMMENTS: To borrow the classic line from Thomas Hobbes, this amateur no-budget horror movie is, alas, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” I guess I should append “mercifully” to the last item on that list, although M.O.N. manages to pack a surprising amount of nothing into its 67-minute running time. Whole minutes go by with nothing but the sound of screams, or the sight of characters stumbling in and out of forests. If you’ve ever wondered whether snuff films could be boring, here is your answer.

After a long pre-credits sequence involving a woman being gratuitously tortured, M.O.N. shifts its attention to a car full of high schoolers going down a wilderness road. The car’s lone male is of the “macho jerk” variety familiar to slasher film afficionados, and he has to utter lines like, “Hey, don’t mess around, that s*** ain’t funny. I’m telling you right now, if any hairy-a** animal tries to shoot a load in my a**, I’ll snap a d*** off.” Let it be known: acting and dialogue are not this film’s strong suits. After some more driving and yelling, a woman runs out of nowhere and gets hit by the car; a few more minutes of yelling and accusations later, the teens discover that the car won’t start.

So naturally, they split up and wander aimlessly around the spoooky countryside, then start getting killed off in slow, dull ways. These scenes share the same penchant for mindless, unfettered brutality as something of the Friday the 13th ilk, but without any of the redeeming talent or resourcefulness. The jump scares and random loud noises are all present and accounted for, but since M.O.N. has the production values of a suburban haunted house and is largely shot through shaky handheld camera, it fails to evoke anything but the occasional chuckle.

By far the film’s most successful sequence arrives late in the film, when one of the girls wakes up in the woods with her leg chained to a refrigerator and a camera sitting next to her on a tripod. Yes, the set-up is clearly a rip-off of Saw and yes, it goes on forever, but—especially when the girl starts talking to an unheard person she seems to think is in the fridge—the scene is both odd and economical in a way that the rest of the film direly lacks. It’s still not good, per se, but at least it’s intermittently entertaining.

I’d love to say that writer/director/producer/cinematographer/editor Brian Lupo had his heart in the right place when he made M.O.N., and the film does contain a few set-pieces that could become mildly creepy with a little more thought and money. On the whole, though, it’s grating, icky, mean-spirited, and incoherent. At least it’s short.

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