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BORDERLINE WEIRD: CALVAIRE (2004)

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[AKA:  The Ordeal]

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DIRECTED BY:  Fabrice Du Welz

FEATURING:  , Jackie Berroyer,

PLOT: Small time entertainer Marc Stevens ventures along a rural route to reach his next gig, but everything goes profoundly wrong. His car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, a stranger takes him to an inn, and he finds himself trapped in a countryside of insane predatory sodomites.  When Stevens is outrageously and systematically victimized for no discernible reason, he begins to go insane.  Calvaire is a fantasy that depicts a series of absurd events in a strange setting: the foggy, boggy,  deep woods of rural Belgium.

Still from Calvaire (2004)
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  When I watch a weird movie I expect to be horrified, scared as hell, titillated, awestruck or otherwise captivated.  At the very least I want to be inspired to think. Calvaire failed to deliver anything like this to me.  Calvaire‘s story is oddball, but frankly, I found it to be superficial, tedious and depressing without any real point.  Calvaire is a movie that could have been greatly weird, but wasn’t.

COMMENTS:  Calvaire opens with an odd scene and becomes inexplicably more bizarre.  A small time troubadour, Marc Stevens (Lucas) sings at a nursing home.  Later, an elderly woman drops by his dressing room to seduce him.  This peculiar encounter sets the tone for the rest of the film, but bears no relation to the subsequent plot points.  The remainder of Calviare’s storyline consists of a sequential chain of ghastly but only loosely related incidents.

While driving to his next venue on isolated back roads during a heavy rain, a figure darts out in front of Marc’s van.  The vehicle stalls and won’t restart.  An oddball stranger leads him to Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: CALVAIRE (2004) →

Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Next week, we have reviews planned for the strange and perverse Belgian horror Calvaire and Ken Russell‘s Gothic. Also, as I write, the 366 Weird Movies High Council is meeting to decide whether we should officially certify A Serious Man as one of the Best Weird Movies of all time; we hope to have the results of their deliberations for you next week.

Weirdest search term used to locate the site last week: “Sean Gullette actually drilled his head.”  Talk about your method actors!

The scary-long reader-suggested review queue now looks like this: Santa Sangre;  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; Gothic (jumping in line to come out next week!); 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; 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; and Kairo [AKA Pulse].

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 2/19/2010

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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):

Shutter Island:  Psychological thriller about tough cops (Leonardo di Caprio and the ubiquitous Mark Ruffalo) who investigate a (possibly supernatural) disappearance in a spooky asylum for the criminally insane. Unlikely to be truly weird (although there are reports of some “small-s” surrealism), but the trailer is intriguing and a new Scorcese genre movie is always notable.  Shutter Island official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

2009 Oscar Nominated Shorts:  Showing in select cities across the US, UK, Mexico and Canada.  Usually something mildly weird (or at least mildly experimental) will make its way into the shorts field, usually in the animated category.  The big draw should be Nick Park’s latest 30 minute installment of the popular Wallace & Gromit series, “A Matter of Loaf and Death.”  The official site is still listing the lineup from last year’s offering.  2009 Oscar Nominated Shorts Official Site.

Happy Tears (2010): Parker Posie and Demi Moore star as two adult women returning home to confront their dad (Rip Torn) and search for his buried treasure, in a film that features “surrealistic” dream sequences (apparently de-emphasized in the trailer).  Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter called it “simply weird” (comparing it unfavorably to director Michael Lichenstein’s previous feature, Teeth, which he found “weird-funny”).  Happy Tears official site.

NEW ON DVD:

Black Dynamite (2009): Not weird, but notably offbeat.  A blaxploitation parody/spoof that authentically mimics the look and feel of the 1970s genre film, even including a visible boom mic. Buy Black Dynamite.

Georges Melies Encore: 26 new, recently unearthed short films (and some fragments) from Melies (A Trip to the Moon, 1902) the French cinema pioneer trickster who was the first to recognize cinema’s natural affinity for the fantastic.  Contains some intriguing titles, like “L’hallucination de l’alchimiste” (translated into English as “An Hallucinated Alchemist,” for some reason). Historical film fanatics will be delighted by this offering. Buy Georges Melies Encore.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Black Dynamite (2009): See review in DVD above. Buy Black Dynamite [Blu-ray].

OUT-OF-PRINT HEADS UP:

The Criterion Collection has lost the rights to more than a dozen StudioCanal films, and the Criterion editions (usually the industry standard for technical quality and extras) will be going out of print.  The most notable losses for our purposes are the entire Orphic trilogy and Jen-Luc Goddard’s Alphaville.  The rights are going to Lionsgate, so the DVDs may be reissued.  You can see the complete list of lost titles in Criterion’s official public announcement of the deal.  Criterion is offering $5 off if you purchase from their website.

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.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema, Guest Reviews

GUEST REVIEW: AVATAR (2009)

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James Cameron’s Avatar is his first film since 1997’s Titanic, and Avatar looks like it’s actually going to top that monster ship as far as revenue goes.  Reportedly, with PR expenses, Avatar costs somewhere between 250 and 500 million dollars and one would think with that kind of investment, Cameron and corporation would have come up with a better script and a more substantial film.  Avatar is riddled with the same level of asinine dialogue that sunk Cameron’s cruise ship, a plot that blatantly echoes Dances with Wolves, hopelessly two-dimensional, stereotyped cardboard villains, and a mixed bag of CGI visuals which often look like Gil Kane comic characters turned into blue rubber toys amidst a computer game version of a Franz Marc rain forest.

Still from Avatar (2009)
Avatar opens in the distant future on the planet Pandora.  A paraplegic named Jake (Sam Worthington, the latest wooden hunk) is a volunteer on Pandora’s Earthling military base.  The native Pandorans justifiably mistrust the “Sky People” who want to strip-mine their lush world to save a dying Earth.  So, the Sky People have an ingenious plot to infiltrate the Pandorans by linking human consciousness into a Pandoran avatar.  All-American swell guy Jake seems the perfect volunteer, as he is promised his lost legs back.  So, Jake gets turned into a twelve foot blue native.  The problem is that the Sky People need pesky “green” scientists to help them and, naturally those lovers of the land are going to throw a monkey wrench into Operation Pandora.

Predictably, once Jake interacts with the natives, he bonds with them and even falls in love with their princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana, playing Pocahontas, in all but name.  She Continue reading GUEST REVIEW: AVATAR (2009) →

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