Greetings weird movie fans!  I hope Santa brought you lots of weird films for Christmas.  (Word has it good little boys and girls got limited edition Blu-rays of Eraserhead, while bad movie fans got “The Complete Uwe Boll” boxed set—I’d be happy either way).

In the final week of 2009, we’ll turn our attention to catching up with a few weird stragglers from the year past with reviews of  Jim Jamursch’s The Limits of Control and the grandiosely titled amateur production Prometheus Triumphant: A Fugue in the Key of Flesh.  For a change of pace we’ll toss in a review of the 1967 H.P. Lovecraft adaptation The Shuttered Room and perhaps a surprise review or two.

The weirdest search term used to locate the site this week was, undoubtedly, “elephant milk movies.”  I shudder to think what the searcher was hoping to find.

We actually made some progress on the reader suggested review queue this week by getting Dark Country off the board (though, as a borderline selection, we reserve the right to revisit it in the future).  Here’s what’s left for us to cover: 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. We’ll get to them all, we promise!

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus: The great Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, Tideland) returns with another tale of high fantasy in this Faustian story about a magical traveling carnival.  Starring Christopher Plummer, the always welcome Tom Waits, Johnny Depp, and the late Heath Ledger (in his final role).  Looks a bit “Hollywood,” but we admit to still being psyched!  The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus official site (site currently incomplete)

NEW ON DVD:

All About Steve (2009): This one is quite the stretch for weird interest, but we’ll mention it for the curious.  The romantic comedy All About Steve, starring Bradley Cooper and the never-weird Sandra Bullock, received absolutely abysmal reviews.  There were a smattering of opinions, however, that indicate that, if you’re in the right mood, this could be a flick of the so-bad-it’s-weird variety.  James Kendrick, for one, suggested that the film could be seen as an unintentional “satire of romantic comedies, or at least some kind of avant-garde experiment in testing the limits of audience identification… If you’re not on board with its scattershot comedy and fundamental weirdness, it could very well be a nightmare.  But, if you let yourself sink into its wild wrong-headedness and just go with the flow, there are sublime pleasures to be had.”  If you give it a try report back to us! Buy All About Steve from Aamzon.

No Right Turn (2009): There’s not much information to be found on this Danish pulp thriller, but it does somehow incorporate fantasy elements into its tale of drug dealers and prostitutes, and it also has a retro-exploitation movie poster in lurid yellow. Buy No Right Turn from Amazon.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

All About Steve (2009):  See DVD review above. Buy All About Steve (Blu-ray) from Amazon.