Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Next week, look for reviews of the 80s cult item Liquid Sky (1982), the already notorious grossout horror The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009), and György Pálfi’s surrealist sensation Taxidermia (2006).

It was a good week for weird search terms.  We have to admit some pride in seeing that a search for “PICTURES OF 1935 MAKEUP DRESSER WITH MIRROR THAT BENT IN” brings up our Cowards Bend the Knee review as the number 1 hit on Google!  Our plan to siphon traffic by tapping into the incredibly specific antiques research market is working like a charm!  In more distressing news, we noticed a hit in our referrer logs from http://satan/: a site (with no earthly domain) that clearly does not exist—in this universe, at least.  Are some of our hits coming from the eternally damned in the afterlife?  We’ll take them. Despite all this, our favorite weird search term of the week was “weird pics of midget madness.”

Here’s the updated reader-suggested review queue: Suicide Club (haven’t forgotten it!); The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (cutting in line);Taxidermia (cutting in line); Trash Humpers (DVD release is imminent, but this will probably be pushed back while we wait for it); 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]; 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; and Sweet Movie.

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 4/30/2010

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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 (WIDE RELEASE):

A Nightmare on Elm Street: The inventive dream sequences of the original made it a slasher series of marginal weird interest. The uninspiring reviews of the reboot make it sound like it’s of marginal human interest. A Nightmare on Elm Street official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009): This intended cult horror film about a mad doctor who creates a human centipede by linking victims together mouth to anus (!) is already in our reader-suggested review queue, but is only now getting a limited release here in the U.S.  Debuting in NYC this week, and going on a 12 city tour the following week.  It’s also appearing contemporaneously on IFC’s “On Demand” service (available on many US cable systems), which may be how we end up seeing it.  The Human Centipede (First Sequence) official site.

IN POST-PRODUCTION:

Inception:  Buzz is continuing to build around director Christopher (Memento, The Dark Knight)  Nolan’s latest project, reported to be a mind-bending psychological thriller with the tag line, “your mind is the scene of the crime.”  This will be the second psychological thriller of the year for star Leonardo di Caprio, who has been quoted as saying Inception “didn’t make sense to any of us when we were doing it.”  Sounds great, though it could just be marketing.   Release date is set for July 26.   Inception official site.

NEW ON DVD:

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009): Read our capsule review.  This tale of magic mirrors, carnival drifters and Faustian bargains may be ever-so-slightly underwhelming, but only because Terry Gilliam has set the bar so high.   It might have worked better had Heath Ledger survived to do re-shoots, but it’s a Gilliam movie and it’s still worth seeing. Buy The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Life Blood [AKA Murder World] (2009): The plot appears to involve God, a gay female, who turns two lipstick lesbian lovers into vampires and sends them out to wreak vengeance on the straight world. That’s the plot as I understand it from skimming the synopsis while drunk, and if it’s actually something more conventional I don’t want to know about it.  Buy Life Blood.

Mega Piranha (2010): This laughable, cheap and ridiculous Asylum production about mutant flying piranhas got noticed in the camp community thanks to a Syfy channel screening.  Our own Eric Young even reviewed it on his personal site.  Now, it’s on DVD, where it belongs.  The only question, is why isn’t this home-video version the unrated director’s cut with nudity and piranhic gore?  Buy Megapiranha.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Dune (1984): The flop sci-fi epic about giant sandworms and messianic prophecies is perhaps David Lynch‘s most divisive work; it turned out too weird for a blockbuster, but it has it’s defenders. A nice weird addition to the Blu-ray ranks. Buy Dune [Blu-ray].

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009): See review in DVD above. Buy The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus [Blu-ray].

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE

Breakfast of Aliens (1993):  We’re just going to quote the plot synopsis here: “A lovable loser, Walter Clydepepper (Vic Dunlop) eats an alien from outer space in his cereal and becomes a deadly stand up comic.”  Looks cheap and campy, like it might have been made specifically for the old “Up All Night!” TV show.  Watch Breakfast of Aliens 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.

Capsules

CAPSULE: HEADS OF CONTROL: THE GORUL BAHEU BRAIN EXPEDITION (2006)

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BewareWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Pat Tremblay

FEATURING: Neil Napier, and amateurs who answered a newspaper ad

PLOT: Pharmaceutical molecules visualized as alien beings travel inside the mind of a

Still from Heads of Control (2006)

man afflicted with dissociative identity disorder and collect various “personalities,” who are examined as they perform monologues in front of surreal computer generated backgrounds.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s not released.  But even if it were released, it’s too uneven to qualify for a list of the 366 Best Weird Movies, although it would definitely have a shot at a list of the weirdest movies ever made regardless of quality.

COMMENTS: Before beginning the description of Heads of Control, I must explain why it earns a “beware” rating.  Normally, I reserve the “beware” badge for movies that are badly done, or even, in some cases, movies that are morally bad.  Heads of Control, however, meets neither of those criteria; although it’s cheap and uneven, it is quite competently mounted and the experimental impulse behind it is admirable.  Here, the rating is given due to the simple fact that this movie is so far out, so much like a performance art piece, that will only appeal to a very small slice of the most dedicated avant-gardists, or to those looking for the ultimate micro-budget drug trip film.  This experiment requires work on the viewers part to watch, and anyone looking for something remotely resembling a normal narrative movie is going to be hugely disappointed.

With that intriguing warning out of the way, just what is Heads of Control?  It begins with the protagonist, Max, being attacked by river zombies; it quickly appears that this is a hallucination, as we see Max in a mental institution being shot up with drugs.  Soon, we are inside Max’s diseased brain, watching a pair of hooded creatures.  The subordinate journeys into the patient’s psychedelically appointed neurons to fetch various two-dimensional rectangles from his tangled neural networks, which the superior creature places into a floating computer monitor.  The pair then watch the results, which consist

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Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

REPRINT: DAMON ZEX, INTELLECTUAL PROVOCATEUR

Alfred Eaker is off this week. A new “Alfred Eaker’s Fringe Cinema” will return next Thursday. Here is a reprint of an older column (the original post, with comments, can be seen here).

While there might still be quality, dramatic television, there is little doubt the medium has lost it’s imaginative powers and any penchant for innovative, experimental, provocative, quirky aesthetics. Ernie Kovacs and Andy Kauffman are long dead. In addition to Kauffman, the 80’s did see Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Bakshi’s “New Adventures of Mighty Mouse”, but they have been relegated to distant memories. Then, in the 1990’s came Damon Zex; the underground cult icon from Columbus, Ohio’s short-lived public access television.

One writer speculated that Charlie Chaplin was nearly the sole silent super star to have survived sound because he alone understood it was a different art form. There is a reason that Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Langdon, Charlie Bowers, Theda Bara, etc. were inspirational fodder to later surrealist luminaries such as Samuel Beckett and Andre Breton. Those provocateurs understood and connected with elements from the silent art form which had it’s origins in vaudeville and can be seen in today’s performance artists such as Diamanda Galas and Damon Zex.

Damon Zex’s “Asana Assassin” (discussed below)

Much in early film, by today’s standard, was experimental because the rules had not yet been set as to what constituted ‘film’ and what did not. Luis Buñuel once said, “Moving pictures merely repeat what we have been told for centuries by novels and plays. Thus, a marvelous instrument for the expression of poetry and dreams (the subconscious world) is reduced to the role of simple REPEATER of stories expressed by other art forms.”

In lieu of today’s obsession for squeaky clean, hypernarrative Hollywood realism, reactions to expressionism, experiment, rough improvisation range from red flag dismissals such as “artsy” and “pretentious” to downright hostility. Audiences can numbly sit through porn fests such as Hostel or Passion of the Christ, but will react quite differently when aesthetically provoked.

Author Scott MacDonald nails it in his introduction to avant-garde film studies:

Mainstream cinema is so fundamental a part of our public and private experiences, that even when filmmakers produce and exhibit alternative cinematic forms, that dominant cinema is implied by the alternatives. If one considers what has come to be called avant-garde film from the point of view of the audience, one confronts an obvious fact. No one–or certainly, almost no one–sees avant garde films without first having seen mass-market commercial films. In fact, by the time most people see their first avant-garde film, they have already seen hundreds of films in commercial theaters, and their sense of what a movie IS has been almost indelibly imprinted in their conscious and unconscious minds by their training as children and by the continual reconfirmation of this training during adolescence and adulthood. The earliest most people come in contact with an avant-garde film of any type is probably mid to late teens (for many people the experience comes later, if at all). The result is that whatever particular manipulations of imagery, sound, and time define these first avant-garde film experiences as alternatives to the commercial cinema are recognizable only because of the conventionalized context viewers have already developed. Generally, the first response generated by an avant-garde film is, ‘This isn’t a movie,’ or the more combative, ‘ You call this a movie?’ Even the rare, responsive viewer almost inevitably finds the film–whatever its actual length in minutes–‘too long .’ By the time we see our first avant-garde film we think we know what movies are, we recognize what ‘ everyone’ agrees they should be; and we see the new cinematic failures-to-conform as presumptuous refusals to use the cinematic space (theater, VCR, viewing room) ‘correctly.’ If we look carefully at this response, however, we recognize that the obvious anger and frustration are a function of the fact that those films confront us with the necessity of redefining an experience we were sure we understood. We may feel we KNOW that these avant-garde films are not movies, but what are they? We see them in a theater; they’re projected by movie projectors,just as conventional movies are… we can see that they ARE movies, even if we KNOW they’re not. The experience provides us with the opportunity to come to a clearer, more complete understanding of what the cinematic experience actually can be, and what–for all the pleasure and inspiration it may give us–the conventional movie experience is NOT.

Elitism in artistic taste has become a dirty word and frequently one hears the
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