Capsules

CAPSULE: PSYCH: 9 (2010)

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DIRECTED BY:  Andrew Shortell

FEATURING:  Sara Foster, Cary Elwes, Michael Biehn, Gabriel Mann, Ryan James,

PLOT: A records clerk working the graveyard shift in a shut-down hospital has puzzling,

Still from Psych 9

ghastly visions that may or may not be connected to a string of murders and her own past. As she strives to interpret the unusual events, she becomes ensnared in the uncanny, plummeting into a morass of sick secrets, murder, arson and madness.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Psych: 9 sports a delightful, creatively non-linear plot. The story is conveyed via a reality-blurring mixture of flashbacks and delusions blended with the present.   Aside from the clever story-telling technique however, Psych: 9 is an otherwise conventional psychological thriller, with mystery and horror elements.

COMMENTS:  Roslyn (Foster) takes a night job sorting records in a defunct, mostly deserted, eerie old hospital. At work, a sleazy security guard (James) likes to leer, her nervous husband (Mann) likes to visit, and an off-kilter detective (Biehn) is taken to calling on her. Her only trustworthy ally is a shrink who is busy sorting records up on the fifth floor, and he’s somehow just a little bit too nice.

The detective is investigating a series of sensational hammer murders in the hospital’s creepy neighborhood, and the shifty-eyed husband, Cole, who drives a taxi, just happens to be in the vicinity every time the murders occur. Suspiciously, Cole can’t account for the whereabouts of, you guessed it, his long, sharp geologist’s hammer missing from his toolbox.

To make things even more coincidentally unsettling, Roslyn was born in the hospital where she now works and has some undisclosed issues about her past. Disturbingly, these past issues connect to troubling uncertainties about her present. Complicating matters, she starts seeing scary apparitions that may or may not really be there. Roslyn also has occasional daydream/nightmares. They are deepening in intensity and increasingly resemble psychotic episodes.

Roslyn does her best to maintain her composure by delving into her duties, and she has her Continue reading CAPSULE: PSYCH: 9 (2010) →

Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Next week, look for reviews of Psych 9, a 2010 psychological thriller that basically went straight to DVD, but that Pam thought deserved better; the latest in gory Japanese b-movie weirdness, the silly but energetic Aliens vs. Ninjas; and, from the reader review queue, we’ll take a look at The Peanut Butter Solution, a strange, follicle-based fairy tale, and one that no kid who saw at a matinee in 1985  ever forgot.

And a note about a movie we won’t be reviewing: Nickelodeon’s first animated flick, Rango, was number one at the box office this week and should have Pixar shaking in its boots.  Yours truly saw it with some wee ones and can safely say it’s not that weird, despite some reports in Friday’s Weird Horizon column to the contrary.  I do want to point out that it’s an excellent thrill ride, though, and it’s filled with references to other movies, from High Noon to Chinatown to Django.  More to the point, the weird viewer should be on the lookout for a couple of surreal Johnny Depp-related cameos: one from Fear and Loathing‘s Hunter S. Thompson, and a more obscure appearance by the flying fish from Arizona Dream (I have a feeling I may have been the only one in the theater who got it).  All in all, a good, if mainstream, time.

Search terms this week were positively normal; it was tough to pick out the few mildly weird ones.  We were amused by “globolinks phone services,” until we followed up on  the search and discovered that there was a communications company who actually wanted to associate themselves with the psychedelic music-loathing aliens of the Certified Weird opera.  The search “cars is a weird movie” brought us a new reader who’s really not ready for this site quite yet, and “male and girly feelings” made us wonder when “girly” became an acceptable synonym for “female.”  For the weirdest search term of the week, however, we dip once more into the fetishist cesspool for “bizzare electro shock sex tube ever.”

Here’s the ridiculously long and ever growing reader-suggested review queue (more titles after the break): The Peanut Butter Solution (next week!); Possession; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Sublime;  Pink Floyd: The Wall; Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]; Paprika; The Holy Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

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) →

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