Top 10 Lists - Guest Experts

JAMES FELIX MCKENNEY’S TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES

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James Felix McKenney is the director of the campy cannibal fest CanniBallistic! (2002), the ghost story The Off Season (2004), the retro sci-fi robot flick Automatons (1996), and the just-released Satan Hates You (2009), a modern Christian scare movie that plays like a Jack Chick tract brought to life (view the trailer here).  You can read up on his projects at his production company website, monsterpants.net.

A top 10 list! I love making movie lists but narrowing it down my favorite ten weird ones was a real challenge!

Films by David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, José Mojica Marins, Guy Maddin, Ken Russell and Andrzej Zulawski should be included on EVERY list of this type, but I’m guessing that most visitors to this site already have them as part of their own top ten.  I also should have put a Jean Rollin film somewhere on here, but which one?  Lost in New York, maybe?  After eliminating these directors’ works from my list, I still found myself with over 30 movies to choose from.

Hausu should also be on here, but my colleague Graham Reznick recently included it on his top ten, giving me an excuse to trim my list down further.   Begotten, Phantasm, and The Wicker Man are among of my favorite movies in the world, but have already made this wonderful web site’s master list.  Other films that didn’t make it to my top ten were: The Last Movie (one of my favorite films of all time), Rubber’s Lover, The Flew, Daft Punk’s Electroma, Frankenstein’s Bloody Nightmare, Blood Freak, Arrebato, We Are the Strange, Zardoz, Red to Kill, Jigoku, Dementia (AKA Daughter of Horror), Gusher No Binds Me (AKA Hellevator), Abhay and Goodbye, 20th Century.

Anyway, here’s my (sort of) Top Ten.  I’m sure I’m forgetting at least one of my all-time favorites.  These are the films that make my brain hurt while putting a smile on my face.  Thanks for asking.

Deafula (1974): I used to have friends over to my house every Wednesday for a movie night.  Of all of the oddities I subjected my guests to, none ever went over quite as well as Deafula.

The awkward storytelling and bottom-of-the-barrel production values of this bizarre, so-bad-it’s-good film are almost enough to warrant a spot on any weird movie list. But when you add the fact that this is a vampire movie for the hearing impaired in which Continue reading JAMES FELIX MCKENNEY’S TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES →

Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Happy 2010 to everyone!  We’re still cleaning 2009 movies out of our vaults, so next week you can expect to see reviews of the fantasy noir The Perfect Sleep and Mr. Sadman, the indie comedy/drama about a Saddam Hussein body-double on the loose in Los Angeles.  Also on tap is a capsule review of Sharon Tate’s movie debut, Eye of the Devil (1966).  And, now that the 2009 wrap-up is nearly complete we promise to get to work on that reader-suggested review queue!

Search terms used to locate the site are getting less and less weird every week, but we thought “wierd movie titles three words” was noteworthy.  A couple of weeks ago what was presumably the same searcher was looking for two-word weird movie titles; I guess he’s completed that project and moved on.

The reader suggested review queue looks like this: Greaser’s Palace (substituted for Institute Benjamenta), Waking Life, Survive Style 5+, The Dark Backward, The Short Films of David Lynch, Santa Sangre, Dead Man, 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, 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, and Wild Zero.  Yes, we really are gearing up to start whittling this list down!

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 1/1/2010

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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 (LIMITED RELEASE):

The White Ribbon (2009): The 2009 Palme d’Or winner at Cannes.  Mysterious accidents pile up in a sleepy pre-WWI German town.  Described as “haunting,” “creepy,” and “mesmerizing,” but unlikely to be weird; then again, reviewers are keeping the plot details very close to their chest, so who knows?   The White Ribbon official site.

NEW ON DVD:

9 (2009):  Read our capsule review.  Shane Acker’s visually thrilling, plot-lite “stitchpunk” stop-motion kiddie epic hits vidstore shelves. The original (superior, and weirder) short on which the feature is based is included as an extra. Buy from Amazon.

Half-life (2008): Despite being a festival hit, this one never got a theatrical release that we can discover and flew under our radar. The plot is a multithreaded indie drama about the travails of suburban Asian-Americans combined with surreal animated flights of childhood fantasy.  Looks interesting. The IMDB message boards for this film are amusingly overwhelmed by complaints from disappointed teenage fans of the popular, identically titled video game. Buy from Amazon.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

9: See description under DVD above. Buy Blu-ray from Amazon

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.

Top 10 Lists

TOP 10 LIST EXTRAVAGANZA: TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES OF THE YEAR, DECADE, AND MORE

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Here’s my personal picks for top ten weird movies of the decade (setting aside the fact that it may be more reasonable to consider the decade as ending in 2010, rather than 2009).  This list only covers movies we’ve actually reviewed, so if you read on you’ll also find the top 10 movies we didn’t get to, the top 10 weird movies of 2009, and my top 10 picks for 2009 (regardless of weirdness).

TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES OF THE DECADE (2000-2009)

10. Elevator Movie (2004) – A loser is trapped inside an elevator with a former slut turned Jesus freak, for months on end, in a compelling low-budget surrealist drama mixing No Exit and The Exterminating Angel with a touch of Eraserhead.

9. Funky Forest: The First Contact (2005) – A jumbled up series of surreal short movies and music videos, linked by common characters and themes, but refusing to make sense; no one forgets the scene where the schoolgirl inserts a tube in her navel to give birth to a miniature sushi chef.

8. I Can See You (2008) -A neurotic, romantically frustrated loner goes on a camping trip with his advertising company buddies, and loses complete contact with reality.  Features a wonderfully bizarre musical sequence; an oily, omnipotent ad pitchman who talks to the protagonist inside his head; and a 20 minute psychedelic freakout at the climax.

7. Tideland (2005) – Terry Gilliam’s dark and controversial riff on Alice in Wonderland tells a bleak and frightening story of a young girl abandoned to the world of her imagination. There’s nothing explicit shown, but the nuanced and challenging scenes implying child abuse and molestation were too intense and downbeat for mainstream viewers.

6. Ink (2009) – Visually impressive low-budget fantasy about a mysterious figure who snatches a sleeping girl into a world of dreams. The nightmarish incubuses, with their smiley-faced facades displayed on malfunctioning LCD screens attached to their heads, are unforgettable, and the payoff is emotionally satisfying.
Continue reading TOP 10 LIST EXTRAVAGANZA: TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES OF THE YEAR, DECADE, AND MORE →

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