A brave 14 year old, Jerry Levitan, was able to sneak into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and talk him into a Q&A session. Thirty-eight years later, Jerry worked with Josh Raskin, James Braithwaite, and Alex Kurina to make an animated video to accompany the recording.
“I Met the Walrus” was nominated for the 2008 Animated Short Academy Award, and won the 2009 Emmy for New Approaches.
DIRECTED BY: Ursula Meier
FEATURING: Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Madeleine Budd, Kacey Mottet Klein, Adélaïde Leroux
PLOT: The idyllic existence of an isolated family is shattered by the re-opening of an abandoned highway that runs through their front yard.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite the absurd rot at its core, Home is structurally sound; but it’s too low-key and lacking in zing to be counted among the weirdest movies of all time.
COMMENTS: There’s not much plot to Home—a highway opens in a family’s front yard, the fumes and endless noise bug them, and they eventually put cinder blocks and cement over their windows to keep the outside world out. The idea could have packed a compact wallop in a short; but here, there’s ninety minutes to fill up. Promising first time director Ursula Meier saturates the empty spaces with acting; thankfully, she has Isabelle Huppert and a pro cast on her side.
Home will work best for those who find the carefully observed intimate details of other people’s family lives fascinating, but the leisurely pacing will make this thin allegory something of a grind for others. Early scenes establish the bucolic Eden that’s about to be paved over: the family plays hockey in the abandoned highway, watches TV on a couch outdoors, and bathes together. (Meier makes a major point of the family’s unselfconscious, unsexual nudity; Huppert is the only one in the film who keeps her clothes on). External pressure on the happy family arrives when the highway reopens (allowing Meier the opportunity for a nicely absurd parody of the “incredibly specific news broadcast” movie cliché: the only radio station the family receives focuses exclusively and obsessively on the new thoroughfare, tracking the progress of the first motorist as if he were a national celebrity). Amusingly, at first the brood attempts to go about its normal routines despite the intrusion of the motorway; college-age Judith continues her full-time bikini sunbathing career (to the delight of passing truckers), and the two younger kids dodge cars as they cross the highway on their way to school each morning. Eventually the pressure starts to get to the family unit; the incessant freeway noise causes sleepless nights, and fatalistic middle child Marion takes to wearing a homemade gas mask and filling her younger brother’s head with tales of how the gasoline fumes will stunt his growth. Father Michel (Gourmet) reasonably suggests relocation, but mother Marthe (Huppert) digs in to preserve the homestead.
Under stress, the family’s behavior takes a turn for the bizarre (especially Mom’s). When they decide to wall up the house, the heat inside becomes stifling and the air stale; they spend most of their time sleeping, lacking the strength to do more. The film’s symbolism is open-ended, which can be a very good thing, but which works better when coupled with a stronger narrative. Critics seem to be focusing on the happy pastoral family vs. poisonous industrial society theme and the environmentalist subtext, but there’s also a metaphor about growing up at work here. At each stage of the story, the tone reflects one of the three children’s perceptions of family life. At first there is a childish innocence and fun to the home, with nothing of too much importance existing outside it. The outside world (represented by the highway) begins to encroach on the family sanctuary and penetrate its four walls, reflecting the anxiety and disillusionment of the early teen years. Finally, the home becomes a stifling prison run by madmen whose walls must be torn down in order to become an adult.
This Home is often confused with Home (2008), a mother-daughter cancer drama, and Home (2009), an environmental documentary narrated by Glenn Close. I have no theory to offer as to why the filmmakers gave their French language film shot in Bulgaria an English title.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
DIRECTED BY: Scott Bunt
FEATURING: Troy Holland, Sarah Dauber, Tom Savini, Ingrid Pitt
PLOT: Prester John, a mythological crusader king, possesses the bodies of 19th century
Germans to manifest his sadistic religious ideology in this world.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Sea of Dust is a tough case: it’s definitely weird, but at the same time it’s neither polished enough to be counted as one of the best weird movies of all time, nor bad enough to earn the so bad it’s weird designation that could get it on to the List through the back door. The movie is worth a cautious recommendation for those who can overlook its ample flaws—bad acting, stilted dialogue, and an anti-religion message delivered with just a tad more subtlety than Religulous—and just want to soak in the b-movie weirdness of the “WTF?” third act.
COMMENTS: Much of the time, Sea of Dust is like a Hammer Studios period movie acted by community theater thespians, with the addition of spurting gore effects supplied by exploding-head maestro Tom Savini. As you watch the introduction where a rich landowner rejects a young medical student’s pleas for the hand of his daughter, your first thought will probably be “poorly acted and scripted.” That’s a shame, because the film gets better as the weirdness builds in later reels, and you may find yourself drawn into the movie if you can overlook the acting and dialogue and make it through the first half. In the actors’ defense, it’s hard to sound convincing when you’re asked to deliver lines like “I really do apologize, I’ve never tried to kill someone before. It’s very unlike me, I wouldn’t want you to think I behave like this all the time” just the way a 19th century German peasant girl who just been possessed by the spirit of a mythological crusader king would. (An even more challenging line delivery comes when the hero is washed up unconscious on a beach and awakened by a fisherman who inserts a wicked hook attached to a staff through his chin and drags him a few feet through the surf: mildly perturbed, he whines, “Was that really necessary? You poked a hole in me!”) If these descriptions make it sound like Sea of Dust is the work of incompetents, the look of the film belies that impression: the photography, lighting, costuming (lots of waistcoats and bodices), believable period sets, and editing are all strictly pro. Even the special effects, while obviously cheap, are effective: there are multiple gore effects (an exploding head, a pitchfork through the head), and there’s a fluid sequence where a steadicam rushes through forests and into other dimensions where a beautiful siren awaits, and another one where the camera enters a maggot-ridden brain through a puncture wound in the head. Even more importantly, for our purposes, there’s a lot of imaginative weirdness in the movie’s second half to recommend it. We get multiple flagellations, two finger-sucking scenes, a crucified Tom Savini with dilated pupils, surgery on a hollow Ingrid Pitt, a cat-woman “harpy” in a black latex bodysuit who urinates on torture victims, and an ending that involves dreams inside of dreams and should leave the viewer well confused about who has triumphed. At any rate, you have to give Sea of Dust credit: the film is overambitious, which is almost always a better thing than being underambitious. A movie’s reach should exceed its grasp.
The film’s villain, Prester John, was a “real” legendary king during the Crusades; he was said to rule a Christian kingdom to the east of the Holy Land. In writer/director Bunt’s vision he is a blatantly fictional creation of the kings of Europe during the crusades to lure volunteers into the wars. In the film, people’s belief in Prester John causes him to take on a real existence, though he can only effect this world by possessing the souls of others. Belief in Prester acts like a zombie virus in the affected villagers, but what’s unexplained is why the king would have a Sadean worldview, proclaiming pain is “the most delicious sensation” and perverting the Christian message into one that seeks to maximize suffering and therefore views inflicting cruelty as a holy act. No orthodox Christians appear to oppose the evil; the good guys are rational Enlightenment scientists, men of medicine. It’s not exactly what you would call a subtle or fair-minded allegory.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
DIRECTED BY: Larry Cohen
FEATURING: Michael Moriarty, Andrea Marcovicci, Garrett Morris, Paul Sorvino, Scott Bloom, Danny Aiello, Patrick O’Neal, Laurene Landon
PLOT: An investigator makes grim discoveries when he searches for the formula of a dangerously addictive, malignant new taste sensation.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The Stuff is a classic example of disgusting exploitation horror about a living parasitic desert that oozes up through the ground “like a bubblin’ crude.” Gooey creme that is. White gold.
COMMENTS: Eleven year old Jason (Bloom) just can’t understand his family’s strange, compulsive behavior. They are going nuts over a weird new dairy-like confection. What starts out as a treat that mom brings home a couple of times a week becomes their constant craving. As his brother and parents increasingly hunger for more of it, The Stuff soon becomes the primary staple in the house, replacing all of the other food in the fridge. When Jason sees the dessert literally crawling around the icebox late one night he goes on a one man campaign to warn people—but will anyone listen?
The dessert is pretty weird. It’s deposited in thick white pools and man, is it ever tasty! It’s The Stuff, a bizarre white globby substance that percolates up through earth from God knows where. When a mining company finds a lake of The Stuff in their lime quarry, they mass distribute the product and it becomes the new consumer passion.
Fluffy, uncommonly smooth, satisfying, low calorie and more addictive than heroin, it also makes a good wood polish. The ravenous public just can’t get enough. Its mysterious composition has become a trade secret, so there’s notelling what the hell it is.
There’s one nagging lil’ ol’ problem, however. The insidious Stuff has a plasma-like animal mobility and a mind of its own. There seems to be a self-promoting collective consciousness to the Stuff supply that turns everyone who eats it into a vapidly mindless, Madison Avenue product placement spokesman—for The Stuff.
Like stampeding fans at a Who concert in Cincinnati, enthusiasts will literally walk right over Continue reading RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: THE STUFF (1985)
“For Suspiria I was inspired by… everything that German Expressionism means: dreams, provocations, unreality, and psychoanalysis.”–Dario Argento
DIRECTED BY: Dario Argento
FEATURING: Jessica Harper, Joan Bennet, Allida Valli, Stefania Casini
PLOT: Suzy, an American ballet student, is accepted to a German dance academy, but when she arrives there one stormy night she is denied entrance and watches as a young woman flees the school and runs into the forest. The next day she returns and is admitted to the academy with apologies, but she soon falls ill and becomes too weak to practice with the other students. After a series of bizarre occurrences and disappearances, Suzy becomes convinced that the faculty and staff of the academy are not who they pretend to be.
BACKGROUND:
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Isolating a single indelible image in the movie is an impossible task; Suspiria shapes its surreality from the play of supersaturated colors on the baroque walls of the dance academy, and from its impossible, unnatural lighting schemes. The colors as a whole are indelible; there are perhaps a dozen impossibly lit individual shots (scenes that look as if they were inked by a demented gnome) that together form an impression of a world gone luminescently awry. The image of Suzy posed in front on a neon peacock as she enters the witch’s chamber, with a background column glowing an improbable scarlet from an unseen light source, is as a representative an image as any.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although there are plenty of “weird” (in the sense of “uncanny” or“ occult”) occurrences in Suspiria—such as the rain of maggots—it’s the stylized sensual elements, the brilliantly unreal cinematography and the relentless unnerving score, that catapult the movie out of the realm of ordinary supernatural horror and land it in its own unique fairy tale nightmare realm.
COMMENTS: Suspiria is more an assault on the senses than a narrative; it’s Gothic horror Continue reading 67. SUSPIRIA (1977)