Directed by Michael Langan, “Doxology” is an experimental head trip beginning and ending with verses from “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow” or “The Common Doxology”. This short contains floating carrots, dancing cars, and a tennis ball crashing into the moon. What more could you ask for?
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 12/11/09
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):
The Lovely Bones: Visionary, and sentimental looking, tale about a little murdered girl who watches over her family from the afterlife. Once weird Peter (Meet the Feebles) Jackson’s fantasy/drama opens to mixed reviews, and given the talent involved and Jackson’s Hollywood cred, it’s a bit surprising that it’s only getting a limited release. Starring young Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Marky Mark, Rachel (The Brothers Bloom) Weisz, and Susan Sarandon. The Lovely Bones official site.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?: An actor who’s killed his mother holds a family hostage while a detective investigates his bizarre personal history. Sounds like it could be a mundane tale of descent into madness, except that it comes from a weird dream team: directed by Werner (Even Dwarfs Started Small) Herzog, and executive produced by David Lynch! With that pedigree, coupled with mystified early reviews, My Son sounds like a good candidate for weirdest film of 2009—although it’s likely too late to the party to get a mention here until 2010. Debuting in NYC Dec. 11, in LA Dec. 18, and hopefully following soon to the rest of the country. My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done? official site.
SCREENINGS (DEC. 11 & 12, NEW YORK CITY):
Coming Soon (2006/2008): See our review. The controversial bestiality mockumentary makes its U.S. debut at The Living Theater. This is your second and final notice; if you attend, feel free to report back to us on the experience. Expect one weird crowd.
NEW ON DVD:
AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa: The Criterion Collection busts out this massive film geek’s wet dream just in time for the holidays. Contains the intermittently weird Rashomon (1950) along with non-weird, but essential, Kurosawa classics like Stray Dog (1949), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961), and nineteen others. We wish the Master’s most unabashedly surreal work, Dreams (1990), was included in the set, but how can anyone really complain that a treasure trove is missing a pearl? Buy AK 100: 25 Films of Akira Kurosawa from Amazon
Beautiful Losers (2008): A documentary examining the DIY skatepunk art movement in New York City in the early 1990s. Among those profiled is weird director Harmony Korine. Buy Beautiful Losers from Amazon
Coraline (2009) Widescreen Limited Edition Gift Set: Read our capsule review of Coraline. The box set includes the movie with director’s commentary, a second disc of extra features, a digital copy, 4 pairs of 3-D glasses, postcards, and a hardbound “making of” mini-book. Buy Coraline (Widescreen Limited Edition Gift Set) from Amazon
World’s Greatest Dad (2009): Robin Williams stars in this dark comedy about a failed writer turned high school poetry teacher who gets a shot at fame late in life. Plot descriptions are circumspect, but we can tell that there is a twist in there, and it’s described as a very black one. Directed by the always outrageous Bobcat (Shakes the Clown) Goldwaith. It had a token theatrical release after a film festival run, but is essentially straight-to-DVD. Buy World’s Greatest Dad from Amazon
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
The Alphabet Killer (2007): A schizophrenic female detective freaks out while investigating a brutal series of murders. Hallucinations ensue. Buy The Alphabet Killer from Amazon
Coraline Widescreen Limited Edition Gift Set: See description in DVD above. Buy Coraline Gift Set [Blu-ray] from Amazon
World’s Greatest Dad (2009): See description in DVD above. Buy World’s Greatest Dad [Blu-ray] from Amazon
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE
Rebirth of Mothra II (1997): With his miniature princess guardians, Mothra was always one of the weirdest of the kaiju (giant Japanese monsters). Here, Mothra fights a monster genetically engineered to eat garbage. It’s a modernized Mothra, but it features old school ridiculous dubbing. Watch Rebirth of Mothra II 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.
CUBAN STORY (1959) AND CUBAN REBEL GIRLS (1959)
In the late 1950s movie star Errol Flynn owned a movie theater in Havana. Not the beautifully chiseled Flynn from The Adventures of Robin Hood, but a fat 50 year old has-been, yellowed with cirrhosis, eaten up with syphilis and dodging numerous creditors, including the IRS, with his latest teen age girlfriend: fourteen year old Beverly Aadland. Flynn, probably feeling his self-fulfilled hour (which predictably came shortly after) wanted to sow his macho oats one last time in the thick of the Cuban revolution (clearly, he wasn’t up to it).
Flynn, with Producer Victor Pahlen, made this pseudo-documentary about Flynn’s meeting Castro, although this meeting is only seen in photographs.
The film proclaims Flynn a sympathizer with Castro’s Batista Regime (paradoxically, he was also posthumously charged with being a fascist sympathizer during WWII). Most likely, this was a feeble effort, on the part of Pahlen and Flynn, to cash in on being in the right place at the right time.
Cuban Story [AKA The Truth About Fidel Castro Revolution] was only screened once, in Moscow, and disappeared until Pahlen’s daughter released it the early 2000s. This utterly bizarre film begins with Flynn drunkenly narrating (more like a strained slur), from a cheap office, something about “freedom fighters.” Flynn, with long cigarette hanging from his mouth, picks up a globe to show viewers “‘where Cuba is” and then throws the globe off camera. It can be heard bouncing off the wall. The remaining film narration (credited to Flynn, although it clearly is not) is frequently incoherent, pro-Castro, and pro-terrorist.
According to Pahlen’s film, Flynn made his way through the heart of the revolution to meet Castro, but the only footage of the extremely soused, dissipated Flynn is of his escorting women into one of George Raft’s casinos, to gamble with them and Beverly. The rest of the film is a collage of seemingly unrelated, and often shocking, but historically valuable footage. Silent images of slain “comrades” and the savage killing of young men in the streets as Batista police casually observe are unsettling.
Cuban Story is redeeming in its historical value and its unintentional strangeness, both in Continue reading CUBAN STORY (1959) AND CUBAN REBEL GIRLS (1959)
CAPSULE: GRACE (2009)
DIRECTED BY: Paul Solet
FEATURING: Jordan Ladd, Gabrielle Rose, Stephen Park
PLOT: A mother gives birth to a stillborn baby girl after a car wreck leaves her young family dead. The baby, however, comes back to life shortly after she is born. Unfortunately, the infant girl, with her proclivity to attract flies and drink human blood, is far from what her mother expected from parenthood.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There are sequences in Grace that approach a state of uncomfortable strangeness, but too often the movie subverts itself and stews in its own conformity by sticking to horror conventions. By the time there’s a chance for a chance for what might have been a truly remarkable climax, the film has devolved into a maternal instincts cat-and-mouse thriller of sorts.
COMMENTS: Out of the gate, Grace has a strong concept that needs to be applauded. The undead-baby market has been virtually untapped, and I’m glad someone finally “went there.” The indie horror circuit has buzzed about writer and director Paul Solet as the next big thing, and this, his feature-length debut, is a notable entry amidst the middling horror releases this year. This is a strong film that is fresh, fairly terrifying, and smarter than one might think.
Grace’s complicated spirit masks itself in familiar trappings. It has an intellectual mindset, full of surprisingly difficult questions about a myriad of issues: veganism, lesbianism, midwives, maternal instincts, and coping with loss. And while we don’t always know where the filmmakers stand on said issues, posing the questions is intriguing enough. The ideas revolve around the modern family, and its new-found complexities in the 21st century coalescing with the timeless trials of parenthood. We witness complex relationships where people are intertwined in ways that are hard to understand, and at times hard to take; this is a movie where a woman asks her husband to suck her breast like he was a baby out of maternal grief for her dead son!
But in the end, it chickens out quietly and ends up being a horror movie like all the rest. The plot untangles rather quickly as we shift from a particularly nasty mother-daughter relationship to a thriller involving a mother-in-law off her rocker. In a brief 87 minutes, we’re back to basics, with only a hint of weird lying around as a memento in the form of Grace, a somewhat zombified child. What could have been something remarkable is instead just good, and while it won’t leave a bad taste in your mouth, I was really looking for something more from a film that proposed such interesting ideas.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: HOUSE OF THE DEAD (2003)
DIRECTED BY: Uwe Boll
FEATURING: Jonathan Cherry, Ona Grauer, Clint Howard, Jürgen Prochnow
PLOT: Teenagers go to the Isle of the Dead for the “rave of the century,” but ravenous killing machines from somewhere within the zombie genus spoil the party.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Uwe Boll’s weirdest idea is to periodically insert brief, totally unrelated clips from the “House of the Dead” video game into fight scenes in the House of the Dead movie. It’s not enough of a gambit to make this into a truly weird experience, but combined with the film’s transcendental, comic dumbness, it’s enough to make it an interesting curiosity.
COMMENTS: I think the people who have voted House of the Dead into the IMDB bottom 100 movies are too hung up on little things like believable characters, continuity, acting that doesn’t embarrass the performers, and dialogue that respects the intelligence of the target audience. Those are fine qualities in, say, a movie about a poor seamstress who falls in love with a consumptive poet in 19th century England, but they’re just window dressing in a movie about pumping as many bullets into the heads of as many zombies as possible in 90 minutes. Uwe Boll understands this, and, with an honesty that proved too brutally revealing for the 2003 movie watching public to handle, he delivered an experience in House of the Dead that’s the equivalent of sitting in front of a video game screen for an hour and a half, watching blood spatter, without even having to frantically press buttons for the gory payoff. I could say many uncharitable things about the inessential technical qualities of House of the Dead, but I can’t say that I was ever bored watching it, or that it reminded me of any other film in existence. The unbelievable seven minute centerpiece alone should save it from being listed among the worst movies of all time. Set to a relentless rap/metal metronome meant only to pump adrenaline, not generate suspense, it features photogenic, scantily-clad teens grabbing a cache of automatic weapons and slaughtering legions of living dead extras while Boll experiments with Matrix-style “bullet time” effects. Blood spatters; heads explode; college girls in low-cut, skintight American flag jumpsuits reveal ninja-quality melee skills; grenade blasts fling bodies through the air; guns inexplicably change from rifles to pistols in the blink of an eye. All the while, video game footage flashes onscreen, complete with health bars and “free play” notices.
There’s an energy and misplaced love of brain-dead action moviemaking here that’s brilliant, in its own way. It’s as effective a parody of the first-person shooter mentality as will ever be committed to celluloid. Add in shameless gratuitous nudity and pepper with headscratching verbal exchanges (“You did all this to become immortal. Why?” “To live forever!”) and you have a movie that is unforgettable in its stupidity.
If you gave this exact same material to a competent hack like Michael Bay, he would work it over, smoothing out the rough patches of dialogue and continuity errors and polishing it to a dull, marketable, mediocre sheen. Given a modicum of acceptable storytelling and a surface appearance of competence, audiences wouldn’t feel so insulted—although the joke would be on them, since at bottom the result would be just as dumb. I much prefer the rough-hewn, all-too-human character of Boll’s work, which is at least interesting in its flaws.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: