Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Hi, boys and girls, it’s time to check in again and take a sneak peak at what’s coming to 366 next week…

First, our long awaited treatment of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is ready to go tomorrow… so be sure to check back in 24 hours!  We’re going to try to get out another major review as well, for Jim Jarmusch‘s Dead Man.  We also plan to finish up our treatment of the Toxic Avenger series with a look at 1999’s Toxic Avenger IV: Citizen Toxie, which we’re praying will remain the final entry in the series…

In terms of weird search terms used to locate the site, lonely men (and probably gals too—hey, it’s the 21st century) looking for freaky porn remain our weirdest demographic.  Our favorite search term was “yogic intellectual porn.”  But we have to give ourselves a pat on the back for ever so briefly scoring as the #1 result on a Bing search for “weird sex movies.”

Our reader-suggested review queue continues to grow at an alarming and gratifying rate.  We want to make one change: research has shown that Survive Style 5+ has never been released in North America in any form, so we’re not going to review it right away.  We’re going to put it on our “pray for a Region 1release” list instead and get to it immediately when it comes around.  In it’s place we’re going to cover an alternate suggestion for a weird Japanese film, Takashi Miike‘s Visitor Q.   Taking that substitution into account, the queue looks like this: Visitor Q; The Short Films of David Lynch; Santa Sangre; Dead Man (next week); Inland Empire; Monday (assuming I can find an English language version); The Abominable Dr. Phibes; Barton Fink; What? (Diary of Forbidden Dreams); Meatball Machine; Xtro; Basket Case; 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; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (jumping in line to come out next week!); Gothic; 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; and The Holy Mountain.  Wowie!

Saturday Short, Shorts

SATURDAY SHORT: DREAM IN GREEN

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Today’s Saturday Short was suggested by a reader, Nina. Our protagonist in this short, Gustafer Yellowgold, is an alien from the sun who only dreams in green. In the midst of all those kid shows that encourage children to dance around and shout out answers to questions comes one that actually has a calm, soothing nature to it. It’s fanciful personality makes it acceptably weird.

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 2/5/10

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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 (LIMITED RELEASE):

Terribly Happy [Frygtelig lykkelig](2009): Danish film noir about a police officer assigned to a strange and insular town after he has a nervous breakdown; often compared to the Coen brothers or David Lynch, Slant calls it a “surreal noir” and The Hollywood Reporter called it “seriously weird.”  The Danish submission for the foreign language film Oscar; too weird to be nominated.  Terribly Happy official site.

NEW ON DVD:

The Time Travelers Wife (2009):  Romantic sci-fi/fantasy about a man born with a gene which causes him to become unstuck in time at random intervals.  Scripted by Bruce Joel Rubin of Jacob’s Ladder fame from a bestselling novel by Audrey Niffenegger.  Few critics thought it was too good, but at least one (Brandon Judell) thought it was “too weird,” which may be considered an endorsement. Buy The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Triangle (2009): Time-travel tale about passengers on a capsized yacht who escape to a mysteriously deserted cruise ship.  Some viewers call it a surrealistic mindbender, while others suggest its a bigger-budget version of the intriguing but non-weird Spanish film Los Cronocrimes [Timecrimes].   Looks like we’ll have to view it and weigh in. Buy Triangle.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Fear and Loathing is Las Vegas (1998): You often hear the hackneyed phrase “an acid trip on film”, but the description actual fits Terry Gilliam‘s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s hallucinogenic counter-cultural touchstone fairly literally. A big weird Blu-ray addition! Buy Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [Blu-ray].

The Man from Earth (2007): Philosophical, independent sci-fi film about a college professor who claims to be 14,000 years old. A thinking man’s picture, which explains why you’ve probably never heard of it before. Buy Man From Earth [Blu-ray].

The Time Travelers Wife (2009): See description in DVD above. Buy The Time Traveler’s Wife [Blu-ray].

Triangle (2009): See description in DVD above. Buy Triangle [Blu-ray].

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.

Miscellanea

2009 ACADEMY AWARDS: THE ONLY WEIRD THING ABOUT THEM IS THAT PEOPLE WILL WATCH THE 8 HOUR BROADCAST

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The 2009 Academy Awards nominations are out, and they are every bit as tepid and conventional as we would have predicted.  The small sliver of hope is that, by expanding the field to 10 nominations, one mildly weird film did manage to worm it’s way into Best Picture contention: the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, which also garnered a well-deserved “Best Original Screenplay” nomination.  The beautiful looking Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus also got mentions for “Best Art Direction” and “Best Costumes.”

A few non-weird titles we covered in the past year got noticed by the Academy.  Coraline received a nomination for “Best Animated Film”: an honor, but a win isn’t in the cards considering the competition it’s Up against.  Stanley Tucci was mentioned for his chilling performance as a child murderer in the otherwise unremarkable The Lovely Bones.  And, to our shock, the musical snoozer Nine gathered a stunning four nominations: a Best Supporting Actress for the lovely and talented (but for this performance, undeserving) Penélope Cruz; one for art direction; one for costume design (corset and fishnet stocking fetishes are obviously common among members of the Academy); and one for the original song “Take it All” (now, which one was that, again?)

With all due respect to the Academy, we’d like to offer this alternative, weirder slate of nominees:

BEST WEIRD PICTURE OF 2009:

  • Antichrist: torture-porn in the style of Tarkovsky
  • The Box: a confusing sci-fi fable about moral dilemmas
  • Cold Souls: Paul Giamatti misplaces his soul and it winds up on the black market in Russia
  • Dark Country: Noir/horror hybrid about a couple that hit a man on a lonely desert road on the way back from their honeymoon
  • The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus: An ancient mystic with the power to make dreams real in a magic mirror tries to weasel out of a deal with the devil
  • Ink: A mysterious creature kidnaps a young girl and takes her into the world of dreams
  • Ponyo: A goldfish becomes a real live girl
  • A Serious Man: An absurdist retelling of the story of Job embodied by a Jewish physics professor in 1960s suburban Minnesota
  • Thirst [Bakjwi]: A Korean Catholic priest tries and fails to suck blood ethically after he is cursed with vampirism
  • Where the Wild Things Are: A rambunctious boy travels to a storybook land to meet symbolic psychological monsters

WEIRDEST ACTOR:

Continue reading 2009 ACADEMY AWARDS: THE ONLY WEIRD THING ABOUT THEM IS THAT PEOPLE WILL WATCH THE 8 HOUR BROADCAST →

Capsules

CAPSULE: BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR (2003)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Jeffrey Combs, Jason Barry, Elsa Pataky, Simón Andreu

PLOT: A brilliant young med school graduate gets himself assigned to the institution where Dr. Herbert West is imprisoned so that he can enlist the good doctor’s assistance in continuing his forbidden experiments in reanimating the dead.

Still from Beyond Re-animator (2003)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Beyond is a welcome third installment in the Re-Animator saga that continues the series’ tradition of going way over-the-top, but though it’s deranged, nonsensical fun, it’s not even the weirdest entry in its own franchise.

COMMENTS: Fans of the taste-challenged Re-Animator series should be pleased with this charmingly grotesque third sequel, which zips along briskly with a delightful disrespect for logic to a phantasmagorically bloody zombie prison riot finale.  Jeffery Combs, now middle-aged but still looking like a eternally perturbed boy genius, returns as Dr. Herbert West to inject his deadpan wit into the proceedings while the world goes mad around him.  A large part of Dr. West’s mad charisma comes from the fact that he’s constantly sowing seeds of chaos by pushing forward into realms where man was not meant to meddle, then staring at the carnage with a slightly befuddled frown as yet another reanimated corpse unexpectedly turns homicidal.  Obsessed and opportunistic, he’s a nerdy Dr. Frankenstein with an unabashedly amoral streak, who always emerges from his own foul ups unscathed while his unlucky companions end up in the charnel house.  West’s experiments on rats in prison have led him to believe that he can use electricity to restore the souls of re-animated corpses and keep them from killing off the nubile women who always happen to be standing around whenever a new zombie pops up.  This time around, it’s a Doogie Hauser-esque young prison MD who risks everything to help West better the lot of mankind by mixing up a new vat of glowing green reanimation juice, but through a long string of unfortunate occurrences ends up getting kickboxed about the head by a hot zombie dominatrix for his troubles.  Even though this entry aims more for comedy than horror, the atmosphere is eerie: what’s spookier than a half-abandoned post-riot prison, with sounds of massacres echoing in the background while burning toilet paper rolls cast the shadows of iron bars on gray stone walls?  The crazed climax gives us about as many zombie-hyphenates as any reanimated corpse fan could hope for: zombie-rats, zombie-girlfriends, a half-zombie, zombie-vision, zombie-fellatio.  There’s also a pill-popping prisoner who gets hooked on reanimation fluid, leading to the flick’s most bizarre and surreal gag, and a “cockfight” that must be seen to be believed.  All in all, Beyond Re-Animator should leave your lower jaw hanging reasonably close to the ground, which is all we ask for in any movie with “Re-Animator” in the title.

Technically inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, though not at all uncanny, Beyond Re-Animator is set in mythical Arkham, Massachucets.  To get that New England ambiance down perfectly, Yuzna hired a team of regional filmmakers—guys like screenwriter José Manuel Gómez and executive producer Carlos Fernández—guys with mucho dinero, who understand that an authentic Massachusetts prison looks exactly like something you’d find on the outskirts of Barcelona.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…leads to a wonderfully degenerate 30-minute final sequence that involves not only lotsa gore and f/x but also some genuinely surreal visual wit.”–Jonathan Holland, Variety (contemporaneous)

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