WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

Next week, look for a lengthy review of the Hungarian subway flick Kontroll (2003), the lowdown on the new-to-DVD Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! tribute Bitch Slap (2009), and coverage of the would-be cult musical Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008).

After a few down weeks for bizarre search terms used to locate this site, the Internet showed us glimpses of Googles potential to generate random and surreal requests this week.  We liked “movie french clown war” (actually we want to see that one), “french hypno sex” (but who doesn’t?), and our runner-up, “donney a boy is 13 black hair the vampire in 2009.”  But once again we’ll vote for simplicity and honor “who makes odd movies named richard” as our weirdest search term of the week.

Here’s how the reader-suggested review queue currently looks: Suicide Club; O Lucky Man!; Trash Humpers (when/if released); Gozu; 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]; Necromania (1971, Ed Wood); 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; Taxidermia; 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); The Human Centipede (First Sequence); 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; and we’ll even take a stab at locating the hard-to-find short “Zombie Jesus.”

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 4/16/2010

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):

Pornography: A Thriller (2009):  Murder and weirdness in three related tales from the world of gay porn.  The press release promises us that “surreal and supernatural elements weave together these three haunting stories.”  Due to its subject matter and less than thrilling reviews it’s exceedingly unlikely to be coming to a theater near you. Expect a DVD release soon.  Pornography: A Thriller official site.

UPCOMING:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead (2009):  The wacky premise involves a vampire writing a bizarre adaptation of Hamlet.  The distributors promise a “perfect mix of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ Terry Gilliam, Dude Where’s My Car and Woody Allen all in one fantastic film!” Release date was originally scheduled for this week but has been pushed back to June 11.  Rosencrantz and Guildendtern are Undead official site.

NEW ON DVD:

Essential Art House, Vol. 5: Courtesy of Janus films under the Criterion imprint, the Essential Art House series positions itself a low priced, extras-free alternative to Criterion Collection’s special editions. Beyond the “art house” theme, the selections are relatively random. Vol. 5 includes David Lean’s adaptation of Noel Coward’s Brief Encounters, the 1959 Japanese drama Floating Weeds, Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, the Finnish holocaust drama Kapo (1959), and Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde (1965). We mention it because of the sixth feature: Fellini’s weird masterpice 8 1/2. Buy Essential Art House, Volume Five.

Nightmare on Elm Street Collection: With its iconic villain, multiple dream sequences and blackly comic puns, A Nightmare on Elm Street was a bright spot of imagination in the wasteland of 1980s teen-oriented slasher horrors. Later entries in the series became much campier than the frightening original, but were enjoyable nonetheless. This box set collects together Nightmares 1-5 along with Freddy’s Dead, Ronnie Yu’s “high concept” Freddy vs. Jason, and 1994’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, an admirable attempt to steer the series away from self-parody and back to horror. Buy Nightmare on Elm Street Collection.

Tenderness (2009): Despite starring Russel Crowe, theaters passed on this serial killer thriller and it debuts on DVD this week. Reviews are mediocre, but Bret Frazer of Amazon suggests that “flashes of David Lynch-esque eeriness provide some thrills” and fan reviewers often describe it as “strange” or “odd.” Buy Tenderness.

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.

GEORGES MELIES ENCORE

The films of Georges Méliès are testosterone for surrealists. In 2008 Flicker Alley and the esteemed Blackhawk films released The First Wizard of Cinema, a mammoth 5 disc, thirteen hour collection of Méliès’ surviving films. It was the DVD event release of several years. In 2010, the same forces have released a supplemental collection of 26 newly discovered shorts, aptly entitled “Encore”.

Understandably, this is not the event from two years ago, but it is an essential, released addition in the appreciation of Méliès’ unique art.  Contemporary viewers with preconceived notions of the term “film” may be thrown off by the aesthetic mindset from a turn of the century experimental filmmaker. Get over it and don’t look for narrative in the post-Edwin S. Porter sense of the word. There is much to savor here when transported into Méliès’ very different world.

First, there are two films here that were at one time mistakenly attributed to Méliès, but were in fact directed by the Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomon in the Méliès style (he was often compared to Méliès). Chomon, who worked for the smae company as Méliès (Pathe), specialized in color tinting and “The Rose Magician” (1906), with its washy blues, yellows, streams of flowers and painted backdrops, including a giant seashell, exudes a heady, exotic nouveau flavor. “Excursion to the Moon” (1908) is clearly a homage to Méliès’ famous “A Trip to the Moon” (1902). Sublime golds, oranges, pinks, greens and blues permeate “Excursion”. Chomon beautifully utilizes snowy imagery, sleep, mushrooms, space rockets, explosions and a snow covered face in the moon, which has to be seen to be believed. Taking nothing from Méliès, the two Chomon shorts may be the most significant discoveries in this collection.

Still from Melies Encore (2010 DVD)As for the actual Méliès pictures, “The Haunted Castle” (1896), which is not related to Poe, begins in a castle set with a bat (on strings, of course) that transforms into the Devil himself (complete with horns and costume which looks like it was bough from L.S. Ayres). Old Nick waves his hand and a giant cauldron appears. He follows this with some black magic business, summoning forth a servant and a maiden, who emerges form the cauldron, then quickly disappears. The servant, then the cauldron, then the Devil himself all disappear.  Two Continue reading GEORGES MELIES ENCORE

CAPSULE: BASKET CASE (1982)

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Frank Henenlotter

FEATURING: Kevin van Hentenryck, Terri Susan Smith, Beverly Bonner

PLOT: Duane checks into a derelict Times Square hotel carrying a wicker basket under his arm; inside is something about 1/4 the size of a person, that eats about 4 times the hamburgers a person would.

Still from Basket Case (1982)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Most people will go through their entire lives and never see anything as weird as the micro-budgeted cult shocker Basket Case.  A fine little offbeat exploitation shocker, the flick makes a late-in-the-game play for true weirdness with a strange dream sequence that sees Duane running naked through the streets of New York as a prelude to the film’s most shocking development.  To us, however, Basket Case shakes out as nothing more (or less) than a fine example of a unique, campy monster flick with only marginally weird elements.  That’s just how selective we are with our weirdness.

COMMENTS:  One of the secrets to Basket Case‘s success is that it positively oozes indecency and vice, but isn’t mean-spirited or sadistic.  Director Frank Henenlotter nails the aesthetic of sleaze, and for the most part keeps on the right side of the fine line between trash and crass, only crossing over briefly once or twice so that we know where the border is.  You emerge from a screening titillated and pleasantly shocked, but not feeling like you have to take a bath or go to confession.  The setting—the 42nd street red light district as it existed in Times Square in the early 1980s—creates an immediate atmosphere of moral and social decay.  Since renovated and Disneyfied, back then the neon-lit 42nd street was an avenue where you could walk past peep shows and marquees advertising “3 Kung Fu hits!” while being propositioned for weed, heroin and/or whores by strangers.  The scenes Henenlotter shot Continue reading CAPSULE: BASKET CASE (1982)

Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!