“Just as the body is overcome by desire, so naturalism is overcome by surrealism…”–György Pálfi, director’s statement to Taxidermia
DIRECTED BY: György Pálfi
FEATURING: Csaba Czene, Gergö Trócsányi, Marc Bischoff
PLOT: Three short stories exploring three perverted generations, beginning with an extremely horny soldier in the private service of a lieutenant. His illegitimate child grows up to become a sport eater on the Hungarian national squad. The grandchild is a socially inept taxidermist who cares for his grumpy, obese father and his caged cats.
BACKGROUND:
This was Pálfi’s second movie, after the just-as-weird but much gentler Hukkle.
The first two segments of the film are based on short stories by writer Lajos Parti Nagy. Pálfi wrote the third episode himself.
While working on Taxidermia, Pálfi won the 2004 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award, a $10,000 grant intended to be used to help the filmmaker create his next project. The grant includes a promise for Japanese distribution for the completed film (estimated value: $90,000).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: A man ejaculating a torrent of flame. (Don’t worry, you won’t have to watch long to catch this sight).
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: By itself, the middle section of the triptych of stories—concerning the competitive eater with Olympic dreams—would have made a decidedly odd movie. Flank that tale with stories of a WWII soldier with a hallucinatory libido and a taxidermist with demented aesthetics, stir with surrealism and garnish with grotesquerie, and you have one of the 366 Weirdest Movies of all time.
FEATURING: Anne Carlisle, Paula E. Sheppard, Susan Doukas, Otto von Wernherr, Bob Brady
PLOT: Tiny aliens land their flying saucer on the roof of a New York City penthouse and begin sucking the brains out of sex-addicted New Wave beatniks.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Tsukerman’s filming style is free-form and unconventional. Liquid Sky‘s visual footprint is every bit as avant-garde as its story about drug addicted extraterrestrials is bizarre.
COMMENTS: Aliens come to Earth in search of a heroin rush. It seems the little green, er, ah, terrestrially challenged ones don’t have the requisite opposing thumbs needed for handling a set of works, so they enjoy their smack the next best way: by telekinetically extracting the gray-matter of heroin addicts whose brains are flooded with opiates. Wonderful though it may be, heroin turns out to be only a gateway drug for the saucer-jockeys. While some human poppy-heads may find death to be the ultimate narcotic, the aliens soon discover that the endorphin rush in a juicy human brain during orgasm is the ultimate high, and they reset their priorities accordingly.
Now the gnarly little starmen seek out fornicators and harvest their orgasms for the best buzz. Still guided by the scent of smack, the space-meisters dock their star-buggy on the roof of a penthouse shared by a drug dealer and her lesbian fashion model lover. Their apartment contains a large amount of heroin, but better yet, is the locus of a lot of degenerate sex.
When the two gal pals aren’t waxing philosophic during their performance art exhibitions and dance routines at a local New Wave club, they are attracting a steady stream of addicted customers, androgynous jet trash, and depraved sex fiends back to their pad. The astral hop heads make the most of the situation and suck hapless guests dry when they sexually relieve themselves. Of course this kills each guest, but no matter. A few dead bodies are an almost normalizing factor at these two girls’ crazy, drug-addled, day-glo, non-stop New Wave penthouse party.
A Berlin scientist who has been studying the aliens makes the scene and tries to rescue the girls before the little neuron nibblers absorb their whacked-out noggins as well. The situation becomes a bit sticky when he discovers that the fashion model has plans of her own for the moonmen junkies.
Liquid Sky is a terribly dated, low budget film that is imaginatively colorful and oh so avant-garde. While it looks pretty campy now, 1980’s hipsters affirm that at the time of its release, Liquid Sky was considered to be the coolest thing by New Wave standards since “smart drinks” and those wraparound mirrored “spectrums” Devo used to wear.
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.
Heather Mahler takes us on a fanciful journey through the campus of Snow College in Utah. Energetic, imaginative, and fun; “Wake Up” will be the highlight of your Saturday afternoon. Music by Snyder Mahler.
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].
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.
Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!
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