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.
Well, the summer blockbuster season is upon us, which means that there will be even less chance for weird or unusual films to get a major release. If your dead set on seeing something in a theater this week, you may want to check out Winter’s Bone, a “hillbilly noir” that, while not weird, is drawing almost universal praise and early Oscar buzz for star Jennifer Lawrence. Here’s the official site .
NEW ON DVD:
Long Pigs (2007): Fake documentary about a camera crew documenting the life of a cannibalistic serial killer. Sound familiar? Buy Long Pigs.
Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy) (2009): Heads up, casual Monty Python fans! (Hardcore fans will have already pre-ordered this). Not the Messiah is a comic oratorio (riffing off Handel’s “Messiah”) that retells the story of the famous not-messiah Brian through newly written songs (and some old favorites). From a Royal Albert Hall concert, starring Eric Idle with guest appearances by the surviving Pythons (including Terry Gilliam, but minus John Cleese). Buy Not the Messiah.
Baby Geniuses (1999): OK, so it’s an incredibly stupid comedy, not a weird movie, but we mention it for those bad movie lovers who enjoy torturing themselves. This movie about talking babies who disco-dance and deliver karate chops made Roger Ebert cry. With embarrassed Christopher Lloyd and Kathleen Turner. Followed by the even worse Superbabies: Baby Geniuses II (2004). You couldn’t pay me to watch it, but you can watch it for free! Watch Baby Geniuses 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.
The Black Cat has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made. Please make comments general comments about the film on the official Certified Weird entry.
Edgar G. Ulmer has a cult reputation, particularly in France. The late British film critic, Leslie Halliwell, believed that reputation to be wholly undeserved, since most of Ulmer’s films ranged from B to Z status. Ulmer did not begin that way when, in 1934, he was handed “complete freedom” in an A (A-) production, teaming, for the first time, Universal Studio’s reigning horror stars Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired The Black Cat. The resulting film, and Ulmer’s affair with his employer’s wife, quickly ended a promising top-notch studio career almost as quickly as it began.
This first Karloff/Lugosi teaming was also their best. That is because of their eight collaborations this was their only joint-starring project directed by a visionary auteur. In The Black Cat Lugosi was cast as protagonist Dr. Vitus Werdegast, and Karloff as antagonist Hjalmer Poelzig. In the original, uncut film, Lugosi’s hero does some less than heroic things. Enough of Vitus’ sinister quality remains that Lugosi gives us a hero we are never quite comfortable with. Under Ulmer’s direction, Lugosi’s performance is superb, an extreme rarity for this actor. As good as Lugosi is, Karloff is even better and, as unpopular as it may be to say now, Karloff was always a far better actor than his co-star.
Ulmer’s “complete freedom” came to a screeching halt when universal execs saw the filmed footage and script. Lugosi’s hero rapes the heroine, the heroine occasionally turns into a black cat, and Karloff’s Poelzig is skinned alive and last seen crawling on the floor with his skin hanging from his body as Lugosi’s mad hero laughs hysterically. All of these scenes were cut from the film and, par the course at that time, were destroyed. There are conflicting accounts as to whether the scenes were shot and then burned, or merely scripted and axed.
Regardless, what remains of The Black Cat is a flawed, baroque masterpiece, intoxicating to watch and simultaneously frustrating, especially in light of Ulmer’s original intent. Lugosi’s Hungarian psychiatrist Vitus is traveling by train, and he is on a journey of revenge and retaliation. Vitus meets two newlyweds—American novelist Peter Alison and his wife Joan (played by David Manners and Jaqueline Wells)—who are as bland a 30s couple as one is likely to find. Lugosi sees something in the young woman Joan and touches her hair as she sleeps. The Hays Code be damned, it’s an erotic, Continue reading EDGAR G. ULMER’S THE BLACK CAT (1934)→
PLOT: In Ireland in the Dark Ages, Brendan chafes under the rule of his stern uncle, an
abbot obsessed with building a wall around the monastery to repel Viking invaders; the boy’s apprenticeship into the art of creating illuminated manuscripts gives him the courage to leave the safety of the village and enter the faerie-haunted forest that surrounds it.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s original, artistically superior and nearly dreamlike, but it lacks that defiant sense of “otherness” needed to carry it from the realm of the offbeat to the truly weird.
COMMENTS: If Walt Disney hired a group of 9th century Irish monks to oversee the work of the animators who created Fantasia, the completed project might look something like The Secret of Kells. (In fact, the animators weren’t Disney veterans, but some of the same folks who pulled off The Triplets of Belleville). Both the story and the animation style of Secret were inspired by the historical Book of Kells, one of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts in the history of Christendom. Just as in the movie, books like Kells kept the light of knowledge and civilization burning during the Dark Ages, and invading barbarian hordes intent on plunder did threaten to quench that flame. (The movie is impeccably researched and filled with sly little details: even the white cat Pangur Bán is a historical figure). Brendan’s quest to preserve and complete the Book places his story in an epic context, and it raises interesting implications about the way pagan and Christian beliefs melded to form a common culture, but the real tale here is the mythological Hero’s Journey, as Joseph Campbell defined it: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Brendan, the novice, ventures from the walls of the monastery into the mystical forest, where he encounters the faerie spirit Aisling: he defeats the sleeping pagan god Crom Cruach, symbolically becomes a man, and returns to Kells as the conquering hero who completes the Book and keeps civilization alive. (Curiously, Christianity is never explicitly mentioned in the script; presumably, the omission is an attempt to universalize the tale). The simple and familiar structure is a brilliant choice to tell this story, because it allows you to settle in and let the amazing imagery float through your eye and into your mind. The color scheme is jewel-like, like the eye-popping miracle inks the monks go to great lengths to acquire for the Book. Like the illustrations on the margins of an illuminated manuscript, elaborate curlicue motifs and baroque Celtic knots appears everywhere in the film—look for them drifting about in fog, falling in snowflakes, or hidden in the foliage of the forest. Sometimes the edges of the frame will be decorated with these figures, like the margins in the real Book of Kells: but here, they acquire another dimension, swirling and dancing about, sometimes invading the frame like spinning Celtic amoebae. The human figures, in contrast, are abstract, stylized and geometric. Abbot Cellach’s stature in the community is revealed in his freakish height; the bodies of the wolves are assembled out of sharp toothy triangles; the Vikings are brute cinderblock shadows with horns. The styles merge to create a unique, otherworldly visual experience that simultaneously recalls the artwork of medieval monks and classic storybooks. The synthesis is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It’s a picture-perfect, visionary universe in which to set a tale trumpeting art and imagination as the essence of civilization, the only power strong enough to defeat the forces of darkness and barbarism.
No one denies the films visual authority; the sole criticisms revolve around the supposition that it’s light on plot. I’m not so sure: the movie encompasses the story of a young boy who becomes a man and an artist, and it has fox-spirits, ancient pagan gods, mystical forests, spells, historical allegories, a flawed authority figure, moral dilemmas, Viking assaults… really, all its missing is a wisecracking anthropomorphic sidekick and a chase scene. And I don’t miss those.
PLOT: An amnesiac wakes up from a coma; an internal trauma stemming from a
brutal, repressed tragedy is gradually revealed in scenes that mix flashbacks with uncertain reality.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s a noble low-budget attempt, but it’s not distinctive enough, and not ready for big-time weirdness.
COMMENTS: When I glanced at the back of the Burning Inside DVD case and saw that the running time was 120 minutes, I got an anxious feeling; I was afraid that I might end up trapped iside the work of a young director in love with his own vision, who didn’t know when to turn the camera off. After watching the first scene—five minutes of a nurse shaving a comatose man—my suspicions were confirmed. The man (known only as John Doe) awakens from his coma with a gasp; 15 minutes later, he hasn’t spoken and we haven’t learned anything at all about him. 30 minutes in, all that’s happened is that he’s drawn a mysterious picture on the wall. By that time, most people will have given up on the movie, which is a bit of a shame because by the halfway point the pace picks up, the weirdness commences, and some interesting things start to happen: chief among them is a montage mixing a slaughter and a love scene, set to “Ave Maria” (the sudden introduction of music is jarring considering the near silence of the surrounding soundtrack). Unfortunately, Burning Inside falls prey to a style-over-story fallacy that’s too common in the avant-garde: the filmmakers believe the atmosphere they’re creating is so intoxicating that viewers will want down time to breathe it in without the constant distraction of plot developments. It ain’t so. Visually, Burning Inside takes its cue from the grainy, high-contrast monochrome aesthetic of great weird films like Begotten and Pi (not to mention Eraserhead, from which Wrann also took the idea of using a far off industrial hum as sonic wallpaper). Weird movie fans who’ve seen these black and white classics will feel they’re in a familiar landscape. There are some very pretty shots along the way, including some bleak landscapes where the contrast is turned up so high the grass glows like snow, and some interesting uses of double images and dissolves (there’s a very effective dissolved where the protagonist appears to be going cross-eyed, until the image resolves and we see that another character has been sharing an eyeball with him). Some sequences use a washed out color for contrast, as if we were looking at someone’s old Super-8 home films. The attractiveness of the b&w cinematography is undermined at times by the grain added to the film, which looks blocky and pixelated and very obviously digital. The performances are competently amateur for the most part, but star Michael Wrann, usually shown in a grimy wife-beater and two day growth of beard, has an effective presence: he displays the necessary mix of torment and menace, and remains enough of a cipher that we’re able to project imaginary tragedies on him. He’s asked to over-emote at times, but he’s more effective when he stands unspeaking, grim and mysterious. Enough plot is eventually revealed to piece together a backstory, although there’s nothing especially shocking or surprising about the tale, and the viewer will still have to sort out what’s flashback and what’s fantasy.
Burning Inside has about 45 minutes of story to tell, but tries to cram that plot into 120 minutes of film. It could have been an effective mood piece at 80 minutes, and still have been a very leisurely tale with plenty of time for the viewer to soak up the atmosphere. This is a case where studio interference would have been a good thing: would the director really go to the mat for the extra three minutes of shaving footage?
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“…Wrann’s style of filmmaking reminds me a lot of David Lynch’s, not for its weirdness, but in the way it stretches scenes and moments out to almost unbearable length – and yet I could not stop watching… definitely a film worth seeking out, just don’t expect something you can watch with your friends and a six pack as part of a Friday night double feature; it isn’t a low budget slasher/monster flick, but a surreal trip through one man’s bent mind.”–Greg Lamberson, Fear Zone
DISCLOSURE: Screener copy provided for review by Channel Midnight.
PLOT: American Alice gets amnesia after being hit by a taxicab while fleeing unknown
pursuers; she tries to figure out her identity while traveling through a hallucinatory Wonderland of London gangsters.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s a diverting weird movie and a must for Alice-adaptation completists, but it’s neither weird nor good enough to be on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies.
COMMENTS: Malice in Wonderland may not be the ultimate trip to Wonderland, but you have to give scripter Jayson Rothwell major props for one thing: unlike other “Alice in Wonderland” updates (*cough*, Burton, *cough*), he doesn’t shy away from wordplay and nonsense. A riddle (delivered by a talking billboard) serves as a major plot point, although the answer is a bit bungled at the end. Puns are scattered throughout the movie (check out the way Alice steals the tarts), and some characters speak only in rhyming couplets. Whitey addresses Alice as “Britney,” and when the amnesiac objects that that’s not her name, he shoots back with the Humpty Dumpty-esque rejoinder, “You don’t know who you are, so you don’t know who you aren’t.” There’s a cleverness to this script and a love of nonsense that goes beyond just re-imagining the beloved characters in a novel setting. That part’s admirable, but the script also falls into one of the more annoying rabbit holes that plague Alice adaptations; giving Alice a romantic interest (or a platonic boyfriend to serve the same purpose, like Johnny Depp‘s Mad Hatter in the latest Disney version). Ideally, Alice should wander through Wonderland meeting bizarre entities who help and hinder her in equal parts, with no way of predicting which will come next. The romantic anchor, always ready to lend Alice his aid and rescue her when things get tough, is an unnecessary safety net and an unwelcome intrusion of Hollywood reality. In Malice‘s case, the misstep is aggravated by the fact that there’s no real chemistry between leads Maggie Grace and Danny Dyer, and no motivation for them to get together; in fact, their dalliance only distracts from Alice’s quest to rediscover her identity. Grace’s performance (or her direction) can also be faulted for not being beleaguered and bewildered enough; she’s suddenly thrown into a world of grimy, loony London lowlifes, and accepts the insanity too easily, never seeming the slightest bit endangered or even very concerned. True, that world seems only a tad bit more off and dangerous than a typical Guy Ritchie movie—the gangsters’ extreme quirkiness defangs them—but a little more fear and urgency would have helped involve the viewer in her plight. One last criticism: when the movie reverts to reality to wrap up the psychological loose ends, the transition from the psychedelic London underground of hoodlums to the physical London Underground of mass transit is awkward and arbitrary. Malice may not go very deep, but it’s entertaining, clever, colorful, and zips along at a nice clip. And what lover of light absurdity won’t respond to a smoky midnight ride with a rapping Rastafarian and a hooker, a mobile brothel in the bed of a sixteen wheeler, continuous trippy flashbacks, and a competition among thugs and con-men to deliver an impressive gift to the gangland kingpin who has everything?
Malice in Wonderland received shockingly low marks from the critics (only a 10% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes?) A quick analysis of that data reveals the negative reviews coming from the United Kingdom, and they seem to be largely related to some sort of national Danny Dyer fatigue. Dyer wasn’t spectacular (which may be as much the fault of his part being underwritten as his talent), but I had no objection to the bloke other than his sometimes incomprehensible Cockney accent. Looking at his résumé, it appears he may be a bit overexposed at the moment, and if he’s repeating basically the same shtick in every BBC role as he does in this movie, I can see how he might grow tiresome.
