WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

First off, apologies for the advertising creeping onto the site.  It’s only going to get worse in the coming weeks and months, as we try to reach the level where the site can pay for its own hosting fees, but I will always try to keep it as unobtrusive and relevant as possible.

Next week, you can expect to see reviews of Takashi Miike‘s Gozu, and a reader review of Big Man Japan.  We’re hoping (no promises yet) to add a review of Suicide Club for an (almost) all “weird Japan” week—that is, until Thursday, when Alfred brings us another in his ongoing survey of the offbeat world of B-Westerns.

As for the weirdest search term used to locate the site this week, we had the usual string of fetish porn requests, including (among the printable and least disturbing ones) “penis weird movies” (a legitimate quest to find Taxidermia?)  We’ll go in a more PG related direction, however, and select “Dracula eye trick”: was the searcher looking for info on how they lit Bela Lugosi’s eyes, or advice on how to hypnotize potential victims just by looking at them?

The reader suggested review queue looks like this: Suicide Club (hopefully next week);  Gozu (next week); Trash Humpers (DVD release is imminent, but this will probably be pushed back while we wait for it); Tales of Ordinary Madness; The Wayward Cloud; Kwaidan; Six-String Samurai; Andy Warhol’s Trash; Altered States; Memento; Nightmare Before Christmas/Vincent/Frankenweenie; The Science of Sleep; The Attic Expeditions; After Last Season; Getting Any?; Performance; Being John Malkovich; The Apple; Southland Tales; Arizona Dream; Spider (2002); Songs From The Second Floor; Singapore Sling; Alice [Neco z Alenky]; Necromentia; Hour of the Wolf; MirrorMask; Possession; Suspiria; Mary and Max; Wild Zero; 4; Nothing (2003); The Peanut Butter Solution; Ninja Scroll; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Danger: Diabolik; Faust; Sublime; Battle Royale; Pink Floyd: The Wall; Escanaba In Da Moonlight; Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter; Zardoz; The Films of Suzan Pitt; Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]; Paprika; The Holy Mountain; Brazil; The Casserole Masters; Dark Crystal; Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets; The Nines; 964 Pinocchio; The Pillow Book; Final Flesh; Lunacy [Sílení]; Inmortel; Tetsuo; Dead Ringers; Kairo [AKA Pulse]; The Guatemalan Handshake; Dead Leaves; The Seventh Seal; Primer; Maniac (1934); Hausu; A Boy and His Dog; 200 Motels; Walkabout; Private Parts (1972); Possession; Saddest Music in the World; Mulholland Drive; The American Astronaut; Blood Tea and Red Strings; Malice in Wonderland; The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. II (for Lucifer Rising, among others); Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ; The Bride of Frank; La Grande Bouffe; Uzumaki [Spiral]; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves Started Small; Bunny & the Bull; “I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney” (assuming I can find it); Cinema 16: European Short Films; Freaked; Session 9; Schizopolis; Strings; Dellamorte Dellamore [AKA Cemetery Man]; The Hour-glass Sanatorium [Saanatorium pod klepsidra]; The Addiction; Liquid Sky; The Quiet; Shock Treatment; Tuvalu; “Zombie Jesus” (if we can locate it); 3 Dev Adam; Fantastic Planet; “Twin Peaks” (TV series); Society; May; The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension; Little Otik; Final Programme; Careful; Sweet Movie; The Triplets of Belleville; “Foutaises” (short); Johnny Suede; and “Jam” (TV, UK, 2000).

SATURDAY SHORT: THE FOX AND THE RABBIT (2006)

The band Xiu Xiu (named after the award-winning Chinese film, Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl) is anything but conventional, so it’s only fitting that the strange and innovative Cam Archer should direct the cinematography for their song, “The Fox and the Rabbit”.  Instruments, lyrics, imagery: everything comes together in this short to create an experience you won’t take lightly. “When the fox hears the rabbit cry, he comes running… but not to help.”

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 5/7/10

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):

Trash Humpers (2010): Harmony Korine’s latest follows a gang of elderly Peeping Toms around in low-grade video as they engage in trash humping and other activities.  Reviews have been on the poor side of divided, but then the critics (including us) didn’t “get” Gummo, either.  Opens in NYC next week, with scattered showings across major U.S. cities through the summer.  We’re probably going to have to wait for DVD.  Trash Humpers official site.

SCREENINGS (ANTHOLOGY ARCHIVES, NYC)

DDR/DDR (2010): Descriptions of this collage-style documentary on the vanished East and West Germany sound like first drafts of a masters’ thesis, full of terms like “propositional” and phrases like “a self-reflexive inquiry into non-fiction film.”  It’s a “dreamlike” “ciné-constellation,” but jargon aside, the idea of a free-association visual essay mixing up historical surveillance footage with interviews with a group of German “‘Redskin’ Indian hobbyists” has real potential to weird-up the reality-bound documentary genre.  DDR/DDR official site.

NEW ON DVD:

Nine (2009):  Read our capsule review.  Adapting Federico Fellini’s relationship problems into a musical is a “small-w” weird concept, but with Oscar aspirations, the movie succeeds in being as conventional as it can. Buy Nine.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Nine (2009): See entry in DVD above. Buy Nine [Blu-ray].

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE

Fantasy Mission Force (1982): This is a great, crazed, weird kung-fu comedy about a gang of misfits (including a young Jackie Chan) who brave a haunted house and fight Amazons, among other obstacles, in their quest to rescue Abraham Lincoln from the Soviets. That description barely scratches the surface of the lunacy of this movie, which also mixes in musical numbers and violent, epic gun battles. The legitimacy of this release is questionable, but as long as YouTube is OK with it, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. This may disappear soon. Watch Fantasy Mission Force free on YouTube.

Hamlet (2007): A surrealistic rendition of the Shakespeare tale focusing on the supernatural elements with minimalist sets. Very few people have seen this, including us. Watch Hamlet 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.

MYSTERY RANCH (1932) & MYSTERY RANCH (1934)

Two B westerns, two years apart with the same title.  Both are off the beaten path and good in their own way.

First is the 1932 Mystery Ranch, atmospherically directed by David Howard and starring George O’ Brien.  This Ranch might be aptly described as a Gothic western, often looking more like an early thirties horror film than a western.  Charles Middleton is a tyrannical land baron and a piano playing, manipulative sadist who is holding his dead partner’s daughter, Cecilia Parker, hostage in order to force her into marriage and seize control of the Arizona valley.  Middleton is so chilling, so slimy that he leaves a trail and, in the process, steals every scene he is in.  Joseph August’s expressionistic camerawork certainly helps when the villain is so moodily lit.  You know from that outset that any villain who would stoop to bullwhipping a deaf-mute native American henchman is going to mean trouble for O’Brien, and our hero has his hands full trying to save the fair maiden from her evil guardian.

Mystery Ranch (1932) is suspenseful to the nail-biting level, has a great action sequence, is aptly scored, and climaxes with a great end for the villain.  Many of O’ Brien’s westerns were a notch above (of course, quite a few were several notches below) and the star holds his own with Middleton.  The scene in which the two are riding side by side, playing a suave cat & mouse dialogue until Middleton lays it all down, has a quality similar to the best James Bond/villain scenes.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Mystery Ranch (1934), directed by B.B. Ray and Starring perennial “B” favorite Tom Tyler (who also played a strange Mummy in Universal’s The Mummy’s Hand).

This Mystery Ranch opens with a bizarre scene in grotesque, high melodramatic, grand stand vaudeville style.  The added-on, delivered dialogue is just as flowery and absurdly theatrical.  It turns out that it’s just a scene from the latest book of pulp novelist Tom Tyler.  Tom’s daddy lectures his son for trivializing the west.  Soon, an opportunity comes, in the form of a invitation by letter, for Tom to get a glimpse of the real west.  Tom goes to visit The Mystery Ranch.  Only, it’s a scam to get some publicity for the ranchers, who, at first see Tom merely as a hack dime western novelist.  They stage a fake lynching, hold-ups, and a duel.  Tom gets wise and decides to turn the tables on his pranksters.  Of course, a real hold-up takes place and it’s a case of “the boy who cried wolf.”  The real hold-up scenario gets mixed up with Tom’s fake hold-up, which in turn gets another “one good gag deserves another good gag” gag.  One halfway expects Tom to shout out, “Let’s go play hide and seek!”

This film plays, at time, like an unintentionally surreal sitcom comedy filtered through B-western sensibilities. Of course there is a pretty girl and the obligatory fight between the real bad guys and Tom, in tight jeans,over some stolen gold bullion. There is even a spanking and, of course, a happy ending, with Tom proudly proclaiming “Now I have a great idea for new story,” getting the pretty girl and a last line of comedy relief.  A real curio.

Opening to Mystery Ranch (1934)

CAPSULE: THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) (2009)

DIRECTED BY: Tom Six

FEATURING: Dieter Laser, Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, Akihiro Kitamura

PLOT: A mad doctor turns three people into a human centipede.

Still from Human Centipede (First Sequence)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Not weird, just gross.

COMMENTS:  There’s something in Hollywood that’s called a “high concept.”  It doesn’t mean what you probably think it means.  It refers to a plot hook that is so simple it can be compellingly summarized in a single sentence, like “a mad doctor turns three people into a human centipede.”  People will buy tickets to see the picture based on that easily digestible premise, so filmmakers can fill the remainder of the movie with whatever supporting crap they need to, just so long as it pads the film out to feature length.  The Human Centipede is a perfect example of a high concept horror film.  People are seduced into buying a ticket by the idea of seeing a human centipede, never minding the fact that they won’t see anything in the movie they didn’t already imagine when they heard the one sentence summary.  After watching the two minute trailer, it seemed like I knew everything that was going to happen in the film, so I was curious to see how director Tom Six would fill up the remaining 88 minutes.   The results of my study follow.  (Note: there aren’t really any spoilers in the following description, as there’s not enough plot to spoil).

  • HORROR MOVIE SETUP WE’VE SEEN 1,000 TIMES BEFORE:  Two hot, ditzy American tourists in Holland put on too much eye makeup, sensing that it will make them look cool, sexy and vulnerable when it smears in the rain after they’re caught in a downpour when their car breaks down late at night in a spooky woods and they have to walk to an isolated ranch-style home where a doctor who looks like a Dutch Christopher Walken with acne scars serves them a drugged drink.  There is actually one valuable lesson to be learned in this segment: if you’re on a deserted road and find you have to rush into the woods to use the bathroom, don’t do your business right in front of the parked car of the only homicidal maniac to be found in a twenty five kilometer radius. 20 minutes.
  • RECOGNITION OF THE HORROR THAT’S ABOUT TO BEFALL THEM:  The dastardly villain proves he’s willing to go to any lengths in his villainy.  Recapitulating the trailer in case the girls didn’t see it on YouTube, he then shows his helpless victims a helpful Continue reading CAPSULE: THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) (2009)

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