Need your dose of surrealism for the week? This week’s short has masquerades, a diminished piano soundtrack, black lipstick, and, as promised, smoke. Extraordinary from start to finish, “Smoke” is seven minutes well spent.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 1/21/2011
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):
Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance (2009): The second part of the planned Evangelion remake trilogy reaches these shores, featuring more mysticism, more demonic Angels, more Eva pilots, and more spectacle and confusion. Read our review of Evangelion 1.11 here for an idea of what it’s all about. It’s showing sporadically across the country. Evangelion 2.0 official website.
Zenith (2010): Sci-fi conspiracy mindbender with a cool premise: in the future everyone has been genetically altered to feel perpetual happiness, so an entrepreneur makes a living pushing drugs that cause people to feel sad. Even cooler: Slant’s Glenn Heath Jr. says “the indescribably odd ending only sends the viewer off more confused.” Sounds good, but distribution is predictably weak: check your local listings. Zenith official site.
IN DEVELOPMENT:
1884: Yesterday’s Future (est. 2012): How’s this for a twisty concept: it’s a film made in 1848 (before the invention of film) about a “futuristic” steampunk 1884 in which Britain has colonized the moon. We’re not happy to see that it’s animated and campy, because we think the idea would look much cooler if it reinvented “actual” movie techniques from the fake period, but it still sounds more “out there” than anything Hollywood’s come up with lately. Oh, and it’s being made by Terry Gilliam‘s godson. 1884: Yesterday’s Future official site.
Werewolf Hunters of the Midwest (est. 2011-2012): Cory McAlbee and the Billy Nayer Show’s latest project; no idea on the plot, but the title pretty much tells all, doesn’t it? The band’s working on the soundtrack first, filming to start later this year. Werewolf Hunters of the Midwest Facebook page.
“The Wholly Family”: Speaking of Terry Gilliam, he’s been commissioned to make a 15-minute short film for the Italian pasta company Garofalo. No idea what the subject might be except that it involves the city of Naples, and Gilliam apparently was advertising for extras with circus skills. More from Bleeding Cool.
NEW ON DVD:
“Explosive Cinema – 12 Movie Collection”: Those cheap Mill Creek multi-packs full of guilty pleasures are a guilty pleasure of mine, and they should be a guilty pleasure of yours. This one supposedly features drive-in style action films, although as usual some of Mill Creek’s selections defy their genre. The most interesting film here is the wacky Nine Deaths of the Ninja (1985), with its wheelchair bound Nazis, evil lesbians and attack midgets; also along for the ride is The Skydivers (1963), Coleman Francis‘ dour and awful attempt to mix film noir with skydiving. The Hostage, Iron Angel, Killpoint, Low Blow, The Patriot, Scorpion, The Silencer, Terror in the Jungle, Top Cop and Van Nuys Blvd. round out the set. Also featuring a dude who sort of looks like Chuck Norris if you squint real hard on the cover. Buy “Explosive Cinema – 12 Movie Collection”
The Naked Kiss (1964): The Criterion Collection continues to shock with releases that sometimes seem more cult-oriented than arthouse-oriented. This odd Sam Fuller melodrama, shocking in its day, famously opens with a scene of a bald prostitute beating her pimp with a shoe. Not extremely weird, but Fuller certainly followed the beat of his own drummer. Buy The Naked Kiss (Criterion Collection)
Shock Corridor (1963): An even more shocking (rim shot) choice for Criterion treatment is Fuller’s 1963 expose of mental health malpractice, as a journalist goes undercover in an insane asylum and finds that it’s harder to get out than it was to get in. This one is a little bit weird, yeah. “Nymphos!” Buy Shock Corridor (Criteron Collection)
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Cold Dog Soup (1990): A black-comedy in the vein of After Hours that was so obscure even we’d never heard of it until it showed up on Blu-ray this week. The scenario involves Randy Quaid as a taxi driver who drives NYC all night meeting bizarre characters as he tries to rid himself of a dog’s corpse. Buy Cold Dog Soup [Blu-ray]
The Naked Kiss (1964): See entry in DVD above. Buy The Naked Kiss (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]
Shock Corridor (1963): See entry in DVD above. Buy Shock Corridor (Criterion Collection) [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.
FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1967)
This post is part of an ongoing series on Hammer horror director Terence Fisher. The previous entries in the series were Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed.
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) marked the return of Terence Fisher to the Hammer Frankenstein series. Fisher had been temporarily ousted after the studio’s displeasure over the director’s character driven Phantom of the Opera (1961). Freddie Francis had been assigned to the Evil of Frankenstein (1964) and the predictable, pedestrian result was a case of the studio quite obviously having shot itself in the foot.
Fisher and writer Anthony Hinds showed that, even with a lurid, studio-assigned title, a visionary team can do imaginative, innovative wonders, much in the same way that Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur had delivered a sublime film from I Walked with a Zombie (1943), studio be damned.
Frankenstein Created Woman is hardly flawless, but it is full of inimitable ideas and bold style. In lesser hands, Woman would have been an abject failure. A prisoner (Duncan Lamont) is being escorted to the guillotine. He is boastful and defiant, until he discovers, to his intense horror, that his son Hans is witnessing his execution from afar. Parental concern overwhelms the sinful father but, alas, too late. Young Hans witnesses his father’s decapitation.
Years later, the adult Hans (Robert Morris) visits the site of his father’s execution. That guillotine becomes a recurring image, as it was in the Revenge of Frankenstein (1958). Hans works for Dr. Hertz (Thorley Walters) and Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing). Frankenstein’s obsession here is the soul itself, and the unfolding events will plunge the Baron into unfamiliar territory, even for him.
The film narrative sympathizes with Frankenstein’s contempt for bourgeoisie society. Hans is wrongly accused of murder, framed by three upper class hooligans. Society assumes guilt of Hans by association with his late father and Hans is condemned. Although Frankenstein has a genuine, albeit cool-toned, affection for Hans, as usual he sees beyond conventional circumstances and realizes that Hans’ tragedy can serve a greater purpose. When Hans’ girlfriend, the deformed Christina (Susan Denberg) commits suicide after her Romeo’s death, Frankenstein transfers Hans’ soul into the drowned girl.
Christina is reborn into a beautiful, new woman whom the fatherly Hertz grooms and educates. Hertz assures Christina that her seemingly cold father, Frankenstein, is a great, visionary man whom she should respect and be grateful to. However, Hans’ soul takes over Christina and calls for revenge against the three who had wronged them both. The film plunges into an almost standard revenge plot, but it is underlined with Fisher’s genre driven, unique pop theology. The trio of Frankenstein, Christina and Hans becomes a metaphoric trinity in Fisher’s hands and he infuses this development with typically elegant, icy grandeur.
Lamont, in his small role, gives a memorable, stand-out performance and Walter, as usual, is a delight. Cushing’s Dr. Frankenstein is not the focus of Woman, yet he is able to evoke cautious empathy, and divinely inspired obsession. Denberg and Morris are adequately decorative. Denberg had been a Playboy model and she looks the part, convincingly conveying innocence, in sharp contrast to the real-life candle burning of the actress.
The two opening sequences, at the guillotine and the resurrection of the Baron on ice (by the presiding Hans and Hertz) are excitingly staged with Fisher’s typical athletic prowess.
75. ALICE [NECO Z ALENKY] (1988)
“Alice thought to herself, ‘Now you will see a film made for children… perhaps. But—I nearly forgot—you must close your eyes. Otherwise, you won’t see anything.'”–Opening narration to Alice
DIRECTED BY: Jan Svankmajer
FEATURING: Kristýna Kohoutová, voice of Camilla Power (in English dubbed version)
PLOT: A bored young girl sits in a drab room throwing stones into a teacup when she suddenly sees a stuffed white rabbit in a display case come to life, pull a sawdust-covered stopwatch from inside its torso, and disappear into a desk drawer. She follows it and winds up in a strange land full of talking socks, slithering steaks, and menacing skull-headed animals with razor sharp teeth. The girl follows the white rabbit through a series of bizarre rooms until he leads her to a playing card king and queen who order the rabbit to cut off her head with the pair of scissors he carries.
BACKGROUND:
- Alice was Jan Svankmajer’s first feature length film after making award-winning short films for twenty-four years. After Alice he returned to making shorts for six years before he made his next feature, Faust, in 1994.
- Before branching out into filmmaking, Svankmajer’s primary training had been in building marionettes.
- Svankmajer sneaks a couple of references to classic horror/suspense films into Alice: a scene where Alice is menaced by a flying creature is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), and a scene where the White Rabbit takes an axe to a door and then sticks his head through the hole is a blackly funny citation to Kubrick‘s The Shining (1980).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Although it’s difficult to top the bony “animals” that look like they were reassembled at random from a jumbled pile of a paleontologist’s relics, it’s the White Rabbit who makes the biggest impression, from the moment he comes to life and pulls his paws out from the display case floor where they had been nailed. His strangest habit is licking sawdust (his own guts) off the pocket watch he keeps stashed inside a wound-like gash in his torso.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: “Alice in Wonderland” is a nonsense fantasy, a fairy tale of fractured reality; it makes a perfect template for a weird movie, but no adaptation has taken the story so deep into the frightening labyrinths of the subconscious as this uncanny animation. Carroll’s and Svankmajer’s opposite talents and sensibilities complement each other perfectly, like pure cane sugar mixed with white powder heroin.
Clip from Alice
COMMENTS: “Alice in Wonderland” has been adapted for the screen a dozen times, and the Continue reading 75. ALICE [NECO Z ALENKY] (1988)
CAPSULE: ESCANABA IN DA MOONLIGHT (2001)
DIRECTED BY: Jeff Daniels
FEATURING: Jeff Daniels, Harve Presnell, Joey Albright, Wayne David Parker, Randall Godwin, Kimberly Guerrero
PLOT: 42-year old Rueben must bag a buck during this year’s deer season or he’ll become
the oldest male in the history of the Soady family never to have done so; with the help of a potion supplied by his Native American wife, he encounters strange supernatural forces that help him in his quest.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Escanaba is unique, at least: it’s got an interesting subject (the deer hunting subculture in Upper Michigan), lots of local color, and evil spirits (or UFOs, or God) haunting the woods. Jeff Daniels has a lot of ideas here, but most of them fail: the crude quirk and sporadic weirdness never gels into something either meaningful or mirthful. It ends up as a regional indie curiosity. Escanaba does have its share of dedicated fans (mostly Michiganders)—must be a Yooper thing, eh?
COMMENTS: The name Escanaba in da Moonlight sounds pretty cool, but doesn’t really fit the film—almost none of the action takes place in the town of Escanaba, and what little that does happens in the glare of the sun. There’s plenty of moonlight, but it all falls well outside the town’s borders. That’s pretty much the story of the movie, which puts things in just because they seemed cool at the time, without paying attention to whether they fit or not. The movie knows where its soul is—holed up in the woods of the Upper Peninsula in a shack stocked with of maple whiskey and Leinenkugels, pronouncing its “th”‘s as “d”‘s, worried whether this will be the year middle-aged Rueben Soady finally shoots a deer. It’s a recipe for a low-key male bonding comedy, but Escanaba loses its way when it expands beyond deer camp and goes cosmic. Rueben is determined to break his curse before he becomes the record holder for oldest buckless Soady male, so he drinks a potion brewed by his mystically-attuned Indian wife and things get a bit weird. Rueben and his camp pals—crusty but supportive dad, superstitious brother, and a family friend named “da Jimmer” who’s had a speech defect ever since he was abducted by an alien—chug down the brew and endure a night that’s half vision quest, half mushroom trip, with a touch of demonic possession and religious ecstasy thrown in for good measure. They endure the flashing lights of UFOs, denatured whiskey, impossible euchre hands, a DNR ranger who’s just seen God, anxiety dreams, possession, epic flatulence, and a “bearwalk,” an evil spirit from Algonquin folklore. The Soadys and their guests aren’t nearly as freaked out by these events as folks from under da Bridge would be; no matter how unsettling the paranormal events should be, the tone remains consistently stuck on coarse quirk, with jokes revolving around the supposed magical properties of jars of porcupine urine and the humiliation of accidentally drinking a moose testicle. The movie’s message seems to be that in order to self-actualize and shoot a deer, it’s necessary to believe in something—anything—and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s aliens, ancient spirits, God, or the power of love. That’s why all the supernatural occurrences that afflict the cabin are so damnably arbitrary; the trials Rueben goes through in that long night of the soul aren’t tightly tied to his psychological journey, and anyway, helpful spirits will show up at the end to solve his problem in about two minutes. The unique Upper Peninsula flavor, deer-hunting rituals and likable rustic characters give Escanaba a lift, but the weirdness doesn’t work for the film, the comedy is gutshot and the spiritual triumph is lame.
Jeff Daniels, who grew up in Lower Michigan, not only starred, but also directed and scripted Escanaba, from his own play. In the public mind, Daniels’ Golden Globe for The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) has long been overshadowed by the scene where he suffers sudden and severe colonic distress in Dumb and Dumber (1994).
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Wycuff,” who called it “defiantly weird” but hedged with “It probably wont make the list but it’s at least worth a review and an honorable mention.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)