Guest Reviews, List Candidates

RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: A TOWN CALLED PANIC [PANIQUE AU VILLAGE] (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar

FEATURING: Stéphane Aubier, Bruce Ellison, Vincent Patar

PLOT: The childish Cowboy and Indian decide to build their roommate Horse a brick

Still from A Town Called Panic (2009)

barbecue for his birthday, but after accidentally ordering 50 million bricks instead of just 50, they launch a spectacular and hilarious chain of events involving sea creatures, catapulted farm animals, music lessons, burning lava, mad scientist overlords, and a giant robotic penguin.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The inexplicable premise sets up a story that escalates into weirder and weirder territory as it progresses.  A lively assemblage of old-fashioned model figures rendered in clay prance about a candy-colored landscape sporting Looney Tunes-worthy voices and completely nonsensical motivations.  Their experiences get funnier as they become more surreal, with frequent disregard of the laws of physics, a range of goofy outbursts, eclectic personalities, and unpredictable changes of scenery.  As a film it’s immensely enjoyable, but completely impossible to explain.

COMMENTS: Belgian writers/directors Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar adapted A Town Called Panic from their television series starring bickering housemates Horse, Cowboy, and Indian, featuring a wide variety of shenanigans.  In the beginning of this movie, the trio transform a few normal life experiences (running a farm, finding a birthday gift, taking music lessons) into uncategorizable slices of a child’s playtime.  As it moves along, the small connection to reality dissipates in trips to the center of the earth, Antarctic mad science, and underwater department stores.

The animation is incredibly playful and dynamic, and the sets look like they jumped out of a Dr Seuss illustration.  The characters, modeled in clay to resemble plastic action figures, move around with jerky large movements and detailed fine ones, propelling the film forward with an insane energy.  No matter what is happening on screen, it is extremely fun to watch, as well as an impressive technical achievement.  The bursts of garage rock soundtrack perfectly suit the manic atmosphere of the visuals.

It’s immensely funny, and chock-full of surrealistic imagery and wacky surprises.  Many of the voices are high-pitched to match the rapid, anxious dialogue.  The story is crazy, but somehow it all makes sense within the parameters of this imaginary world that Patar and Aubier have created.  It fits that when a house is crushed by a mountain of bricks, it just flips upside down and hangs underwater, or that falling down a deep crevice leads to the earth’s molten core.  Once you’re into the swing of things, just sit back and allow the insanity, cartoon violence, and non sequiturs to unfold across this unplanned epic journey.

While the script is notably zany, it’s quite smart and thoughtful, with various cute details and references that create a good balance between the physical comedy and dialogue.  The characters are adorable and surprisingly relatable in their own ways, offering such delightful antics and madcap conversations that—when taken in together with the bold visuals—multiple viewings are required to fully appreciate the film’s humor and imagination.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Made with an anarchic, anything-goes spirit, this is truly a film, not to mention a town, where you never know what’s going to happen next.” – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

NOTE: This review is also published in a slightly different form at Film Forager.

Capsules

CAPSULE: SPIRAL (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Adam Green and Joel Moore

FEATURING: Joel Moore, Amber Tamblyn, and Zachary Levi

PLOT: A gregarious young professional befriends a complex loner at work and unleashes

madness when she tries to unravel his convoluted personal secrets.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While Spiral tells an offbeat story, it contains no outstanding weirdness, aside from the very odd personality of the lead character and the bizarre nature of his relationships.  In fact, it is the straightforward way in which the story is told that is responsible for its hypnotic feel and impact.

COMMENTS:  Overcast Portland, Oregon locations grace this gloomy and grim, offbeat psychological suspense story about a deeply troubled artist.  Spiral spins the whorled, offbeat portrait of a lead character with an odd personality and  bizarre personal relationships.

Mason (Moore) is a painter working as an insurance telemarketer.  He excels at his job, maintains a nice bachelor pad, and despite his gross social awkwardness and timid appearance he has tremendous luck with the ladies.  In fact, he has had a succession of girlfriends who all pose for his oil and canvas portraits.

Despite all that he has going for him, Mason is tortured and confused.  A shy loner at work, he feels trapped in his overly bright, sterile, corporate cubicle.  The nervous Mason is coiled so tightly that he’s about to spring out of his skin.  To make matters worse, he is prone to asthma flare-ups triggered by extreme night terrors and panic attacks.

Mason harbors more than a few skeletons in his inner footlocker and they are especially grim.  Like malevolent phantasms, dreadful images of his past girlfriends twirl our of his dreams and splash across his conscience like spatter from a centrifuge.  Striking terror, these hit and run specters jar Mason out of deep slumbers, and slap him out of daydreams.  The experiences leave him in a cold, sweaty daze, scrambling for his asthma inhaler with a racing heart.

Mason’s only safety net is his cocky, but empathetic boss, Berkeley (Levi)—who is also his only friend and advocate.  Willing to act as Mason’s ad-hoc therapist, Berkeley is the closest thing Mason has to some much needed Xanax.  Suppressing Mason’s panic with a combination of good-natured ridicule and reassurance, he talks his frightened employee down like Rasputin hypnotically calming Czar Nicholas II’s hemophiliac son.  The effect is temporary, however, as Mason seems to be plagued not only by the serpentine hallucinations, but by a wide range of deeply seated personal issues, all indicating a winding, ganglionic tangle of dark, hidden secrets.

Berkely begins to find his role as counselor diminished when a bubbly new employee named Amber (Tamblyn) jumps on board and takes a shine to Mason.  Inexplicably attracted to the shy salesman, she is like a schoolgirl rescuing a baby bunny.  Intrigued by the dark enigma of Mason’s persona, Amber radiantly circles Mason, determined to unravel his helical psyche by patiently prying away at the repressed layers of his complicated personality.

Mason gradually warms to her efforts and finally admits her to his inner world.   Once inside, Amber wreaks havoc like a Trojan horse when she realizes too late that she has opened a Pandora’s box. But how genuine is Amber?  Is she really who she appears to be?  What does Berkeley know about Mason’s past girlfriends that he isn’t telling Mason?  And why the haunting visions?  As tensions reach the meniscus, unanswered questions brew a churning swirl of fantasy, reality and bedlam as Mason, Amber and Berkeley cross paths in a twisting maelstrom of truth and lies.

Crisp audio processing of the soundtrack compliments the high definition DVD release of this Santa Barbara Film Festival entry. Spiral is the directorial collaboration of Joel David Moore and Adam Green, who worked as actor and director respectively on the 2006 slasher film, Hatchet.   Spiral was co-written by Moore with Jeremy Danial Boreing.  Amber Tamblyn may be known to some viewers from her roles in The Grudge II (2006) and The Ring (2001).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Like an urban cousin of Jon Keder’s ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ as filtered through Edgar Allen Poe, the disturbed and delusional aspiring artist at the center of ‘Spiral’ promises much terror and delivers far less… Given the sheer weirdness of his character’s neuroses, Moore the actor tries to tamp down the urge for an over-the-top perf…”–Robert Koehler, Variety (contemporaneous)

Spiral trailer

Capsules

CAPSULE: 44 INCH CHEST (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Malcolm Venville

FEATURING: , Ian McShane, , Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane, Joanne Whalley

PLOT: Four men (presumably gangsters, though it’s never made explicit) kidnap the lover of a cuckolded mate’s wife and try to goad the bereaved man into killing him for revenge.

Still from 44 Inch Chest (2009)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s not weird, although it is an example of how an isolated weird scene can creep into a mainstream drama.

COMMENTS:  44 Inch Chest sets up an intriguing conflict that captures our interest, but it fails to capitalize on the inherent drama and its force gradually dissipates into a wisp.  When sexy Liz (Whalley) announces she’s leaving Colin (Winstone), he first pleads with her not to go, then winds up beating the name of her lover out of her.  Afterward, Colin is so emotionally spent he can’t even get up off the floor or stop listening to Harry Nilsson wail “I can’t live, if living is without you” over and over. His four friends, shady characters at best, kidnap the adulterer and deliver him to their comatose mate so he can extract his vengeance.  There’s no evidence that Colin ever asks for their assistance or that his buddies kidnap the loverboy as a favor to him.  They are prodding him to do his duty; they take it upon themselves to set up the ritual revenge, and as they egg him on, it becomes clear that if the cuckold fails to conform to the code of gangster honor and kill the man who disrespected him, their value system will be undermined.  The problem is that Colin is a clinically depressed, blubbering, lovesick mess who’s barely capable of lighting his own cigarette, much less pulling a trigger and taking another man’s life.  The conflict isn’t between between Colin and his wife’s helpless lover (who spends the movie stuffed into a wardrobe or tied to a chair), but between Colin and the bad angels standing two on each shoulder, each using a different tactic to convince him to uphold his “honor.”  An actor’s movie, 44 Inch Chest unspools like an overextended one-act play, with each of the major characters getting a monologue and a turn in the spotlight.  Winstone’s performance is nuanced, burly and scary, but even more pathetic.  As a suave homosexual, Ian McShane dominates whenever he’s onscreen; despite his sophistication and questionable sexuality he’s one of the gang, as crudely masculine as any of them at bottom (in fact, his “love ’em and leave ’em” sexual philosophy is, if anything, the most authentically guy-ish).  John Hurt is also excellent as the bitter and shriveled “Old Man Peanut,” who’s as dried up a bundle of bigotry and spite as you’d ever have the misfortune of encountering outside of a Mafia nursing home.  Tom Wilkinson does well as Archie, the regular guy of the group and frequently the mediator among clashing egos, and Stephen Dillane is fine, if underused, as the youngest member of the group.   As Liz, Whalley is sexy, elegant and distant; the unknowable (to these guys, at least) feminine.  The F-word and C-word laden dialogue strives for profane poetry and strikes a reasonably nasty rhythm, though it never sails to the heights of a David Mamet.  The problem is the plot, which peters out long before the end and winds up in a philosophically sound but dramatically unsatisfying anticlimax.

A couple of fantasy sequences explain why this vulgar gangster drama is being covered on a weird movie site.  When Colin is left alone in a room with his bloodied-up romantic rival, he begins to hallucinate.  The visions elucidate his psychology and provide somewhere for the movie to go when the droogs seems to have run out of misogynist arguments.  Even when you’ve been warned they’re coming they may catch you by surprise, as its not always completely obvious where the objective world ends and Colin’s internal fantasies begin.  Nonetheless, they’re a diversion and don’t really substitute for a more thoughtful plot resolution.  Watch 44 Inch Chest for the performances by a superlative collection of British actors, and for the brief glimpse a John Hurt in a black cocktail dress; don’t watch it for the story, or for weirdness.

Louis Mellis and David Scinto, co-writers of the 2000 hit Sexy Beast, wrote the screenplay for Chest.  The movie also stars Beast‘s Winstone.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The actors go at the material with obvious relish… On the debit side, and it’s a doozy, the picture’s narrative trajectory fails to deliver a third act that takes the story anywhere of note except into a silly realm of cut-rate surrealism. Final reel ends not with the expected bang but with an almost inaudible whimper.”–Leslie Felperin, Variety (contemporaneous)

44 Inch Chest

44 Inch Chest
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WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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The July contest is finished: congrats to the winners!

Next week, you can expect reviews of the latest macho fantasy from the creators of Sexy Beast—44 Inch Chest (2009); the 2007 psychological horror Spiral; the childishly surreal Belgian stop-motion animation feature A Town Called Panic (2009); the final entry in Alfred Eaker’s survey of B-westerns, the bizarre, silent Hell’s Hinges (1916); and Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly [AKA Girly], a 1970 entry in the “deadly family of weirdos” subgenre.  We’ll also get the early Tim Burton shorts Vincent and Frankenweenie out of the reader-suggested review (with Nightmare Before Christmas to follow shortly thereafter), along with Danger: Diabolik (1968).

Last week was not the greatest week for weird search terms used to locate the site, but this little bit of insane doggerel—“weird coupling in minute to win it”—caught our eye.

Here’s how the reader-suggested review queue stands: Trash Humpers (still waiting for the DVD); Danger: Diabolik (next week); Nightmare Before Christmas/Vincent/Frankenweenie (coming soon); The Science of Sleep; The Attic Expeditions; After Last Season; Getting Any?; Performance; Being John Malkovich; The Apple;  Arizona Dream; 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;  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;  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; Private Parts (1972); Saddest Music in the World; Mulholland Drive; The American Astronaut; Blood Tea and Red Strings; 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; “Jam” (TV, UK, 2000), The Tale of the Floating World, Un Chien Andalou, Bloodsucking Freaks; Fellini Satyricon; Three Crowns of the Sailor; 8 1/2; Death Race 2000; Dororo; Lost Highway; Valerie and Her Week of Wonders; Dogville; and Julien Donkey-boy; Amelie; The Ten; The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao; 1; Fast, Cheap and Out of Control; Tokyo Gore Police; At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul; The Trial [Le procès) (1962); Marquis; Hell Comes to Frogtown; Hellzapoppin’; Seom [The Isle]; Allegro Non Troppo; Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus; Lust in the Dust; Celine and Julie Go Boating; “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life;” The Magic Christian; Black Cat, White Cat; The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T; Abnormal: The Sinema of Nick Zedd; Robot Monster; Nightdreams; 3 Women; Rubin & Ed; Teeth; Vera; Weirdsville; Prospero’s Books; Inferno; Garden State; Persona; and The Real McCoy; Rat Pfink a Boo Boo; Themroc; Candy (1968); Run Lola Run; Pink Flamingos; Buffalo ’66; Northfork; Weekend; The Room; Glen or Glenda?; Night of the Hunter; The Fox Family; Midnight Skater; Angelus; Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs; Twister (1989); Yokai Monsters, Vol. 1: Spook Warfare [AKA Big Monster War]; Haxan; This Filthy Earth; Conspirators of Pleasure; Piano Tuner of Earthquakes; Clean, Shaven; Bubba Ho-Tep; Sheitan; Innocence; “Chingsao the Clown”; and Léolo.

Canonically Weird (The List)

63. BRANDED TO KILL (1967)

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Koroshi No Rakuin

“Showing these incomprehensible and thus bad films would disgrace the company.” –Nikkatsu studio representative’s explanation for refusing to authorize a 1968 Seijun Suzuki retrospective, immediately after the studio fired the director (presumably for making Branded to Kill)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Annu Mari, Kôji Nanbara, Mariko Ogawa

PLOT: As the film begins, Hanada, an assassin with a yen for the smell of fresh boiled rice, is the Organization’s #3 killer.  He falls in love with a beautiful but suicidal woman whom he meets on a job, then botches a hit when a butterfly lands on his gun barrel and throws off his aim.  By slaying an innocent bystander by mistake, Hanada inadvertently breaks his killer’s code and becomes a wanted man, and finds himself hunted down by none other than the Organization’s mysterious #1 killer.

Still from Branded to Kill (1967)

BACKGROUND:

  • The story of Branded to Kill is a notorious example of film studio’s shortsightedness in valuing conformity over artistic innovation.  Suzuki was hired as a journeyman action director for the Nikkatsu studio, directing moderately successful B-movies in the yakuza (gangster) genre.  As the director’s career developed he gradually began adding absurd and surreal elements to his pictures; the studio chastised Suzuki for his artistic tendencies and tried to reign in his flamboyance by cutting his budgets.  Heedless of Nikkatsu’s demands, Suzuki delivered the phantasmagorical Tokyo Drifter (1966); as punishment, he was restricted to making black and white films.  Called in to salvage a faltering production called Branded to Kill, Suzuki rewrote the script to create his most surreal movie to date.  Nikkastsu responded by firing Suzuki on the grounds that the films he produced for them were “incomprehensible.”  Suzuki sued the company for breach of contract and eventually settled out of court, but was blacklisted by the Japanese film industry and did not make another movie for ten years.
  • Nikkatsu and Suzuki later made up.  Suzuki directed Pistol Opera, a loose sequel to Branded to Kill, for a revamped Nikkatsu company in 2001.
  • The script is credited to Hachiro Guryu, a pen name often used by Suzuki and seven collaborators (known informally as “the Group of Eight”).
  • Star Joe Shishido underwent “cheek augmentation” surgery in 1957 to gain his distinctive, chipmunk-like look.  This film was intended by the studio to be his first vehicle as a leading man after playing heavies.
  • Annu Mari has said that she was drawn to the part of Misako because she herself was experiencing suicidal thoughts at the time of filming.
  • Jim Jarmusch, a Suzuki admirer, lifted two famous scenes from Branded to Kill for his film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: the shot where the assassin kills a man by shooting up a water pipe and the image of the butterfly landing on the killer’s rifle.  The Limits of Control also shows a strong Suzuki influence in the way it attempts to deconstruct and mythologize the spy genre in approximately the same way Branded to Kill splinters yakuza films into their basic story elements.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The repeated cardboard cutout butterflies and birds that unexpectedly swarm the screen as a confused and despondent Hanada leaves his latest attempted sex/murder assignation with Misako counts as a bizarre film’s strangest video, but it’s the simple image of Annu Mari’s alluring face impossibly materializing from a rain shower has stuck with me for a decade.  Misako is repeatedly associated with motifs of rain, birds and butterflies, and movie’s most bewitching images all revolve around her.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Seijun Suzuki scrambled a standard yakuza script into a stylized hash; in doing so, he existentialized the material, lifting it into the realm of the mysterious, mystical and mythic.  Branded to Kill‘s B-movie skeleton—made up of shootouts, gratuitous sex and macho showdowns—gives the movie its shape.  But the new flesh that hangs off the recognizable frame is strange, unsettling, and beautiful.


Japanese trailer for Branded to Kill

COMMENTS: Branded to Kill is traditionally branded as “incomprehensible,” an inapt adjective.  Any one of the following would be a Continue reading 63. BRANDED TO KILL (1967) →

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