“Sultana Meadows” is a fine example of the delightful, under appreciated shorts by Spike McKenzie. The unsettling images throughout this video are quite reminiscent of David Lynch, and paint a very weird and wonderful picture.
Relationships tend to slowly draw away our good side, and expose the bad. Mayhap you’ll have much in common with this journey into the bizarre.
For more of Spike visit his YouTube account. I strongly recommend his mock kids show, “Wonderbang Island”.
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):
Zombieland: There are many readers of this site who would flock to any zom-com offering, but the good news is that this particular post-zombie-apocalypse comedy, starring Woody Harrelson as a professional killer of the undead, is getting good advance notice, and may even be slightly weird: Andrew Wright of The Stranger is calling it “an absolute, occasionally surreal hoot.” Zombieland official site.
IN THEATERS (WIDE RELEASE):
A Serious Man: The latest Coen brothers film, a star-free philosophical dramedy about growing up Jewish in the American Midwest in the 1960s, is not making theater owners salivate at the prospect of ticket sales, but fans can safely expect to see the brothers’ trademark quirkiness on display. A Serious Man official site.
SCREENINGS: NEW YORK CITY (MUSEUM OF MODERN ART)
Where Is Where? (2009): Experimental narrative film from Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila centers around the murder of a French boy by his two Arab playmates during the Algerian war and a poet’s attempts to understand the act years later; featuring split-screens and Death as a character. Where Is Where? at the Museum of Modern Art.
NEW ON DVD:
The Wizard of Oz: 70th Anniversary Edition (1939): Even with flying monkeys, taking apple trees and green-faced cossacks, The Wizard of Oz might not qualify as “weird”; but there’s no doubt that the story is the touchstone of indigenous American fantasy. This 2-disc edition is from a crystal clear 2005 restoration and features outtakes and deleted scenes, numerous interviews with the surviving cast members and featurettes, and a numerous other extras—disc 1 can even do duty as a Wizard of Oz karaoke machine. Buy from Amazon
NE W ON BLU-RAY:
The Wizard of Oz: 70th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition: A scaled down Blu-ray release is probably set for the future, but first comes this extravagant 4 disc limited-edition set with 16 hours (!) of bonus content, along with a 52 page booklet, a 7oth anniversary watch (with “genuine crystals”), and reproductions of original marketing materials. Buy 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.
In 2005, Ken Tipton made a labor of love; an indie film called Heart of the Beholder, regarding the true story of the initial video release of Last Temptation of Christ and the effects it has on a family who owned a small video chain in St. Louis, Missouri during the 1980s.
The CFD, Citizens for Decency, arrived when the owners of the chain chose to carry Martin Scorsese’s controversial film. These God-loving red, white and blue, flag- waving Americans came out in droves to harass, bully and literally threaten their employees, family, business, and life.
These are the same Americans who undoubtedly burned Dixie Chick albums when that group criticized God’s ambassador here on earth, little George W, and are the same Americans who still visit the Heart of the Beholder website telling Mr. Tipton and company that they are going to hell while undoubtedly pleasuring themselves at the thought of the filmmakers frying for all eternity. Heart of the Beholder is a damned important, desperately needed film.
Although Heart of the Beholder got good reviews and even won some festival awards, predictably, no distributor would touch it. One would surely think that the making of the film would have brought in some support, perhaps from Temptation‘s producers, Scorsese, etc. Continue reading HEART OF THE BEHOLDER (2005) & THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988)
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DIRECTED BY: Tobe Hooper
FEATURING: Mathilda May, Steve Railsback, Peter Firth
PLOT: A space shuttle investigating Halley’s comet discovers a spaceship containing three suspended, nude human bodies; returned to Earth, the bodies come alive and begin vampirically sucking the life force out of humans.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Lifeforce is a grandly cheesy and frequently nonsensical mishmash of B-movie cliches, and a great movie to watch with a six-pack on hand. Although it’s loony, offbeat and fun, it’s ultimately too lightweight and not quite systematically deranged enough to rank as one of the greatest weird movies of all time.
COMMENTS: Lifeforce starts out as an Alien ripoff, and ends up as a Quatermass and the Pit ripoff; in between, it’s a Dracula ripoff, only with a naked woman wandering around using her electric French kiss to turn half of London into dessicated scarecrows who reanimate as zombie vampires after two hours pass. Yes, I said naked woman: French model Mathilda May’s totally nude performance is the thing everyone remembers about the film, and quite obviously the main source of the movie’s unending popularity. The woman is stunning; her body is such a perfect Platonic embodiment of the feminine form that, like a Greek statue, it transcends the erotic and becomes an object of pure aesthetic reverence. The flick would still be worthwhile without Mathilda, but her nude performance adds that certain something that lodges the movie in the cinematic consciousness. Add in early Industrial Light and Magic style special effects, with electric blue rays shooting everywhere in sight during the vampire zombie apocalypse as stolen human souls merge together and climb into a great glowing column shooting up to the alien mothership, and you have a film that’s visually unforgettable. When the beautifully overwrought pyrotechnics of the film are matched to the ludicrous story, a certain magical b-movie alchemy occurs. Lifeforce‘s script seems to be being made up as the film progresses, with the stunned actors getting their lines a few seconds before shooting (the movie is stuffed with deadpan lines like “a naked girl is not going to get out of this complex,” “now she has clothes,” and “in a sense, we’re all vampires”). Soon after the aliens have been returned to Earth and start sucking the life force from humans, we learn that astronaut Steve Railsback has a convenient psychic link with Mathilda May because she gave him part of her life force when she electro-kissed him, which allows him under hypnosis to follow her about as she jumps from body to body infecting more Englishmen and -women with the rapidly spreading plague, only now she needs her life force back so she visits Steve in erotic dreams and tries to steal it, but then she goes to Westminster Abbey and starts acting as a conduit for all the pilfered human souls her sub-vampires are stealing and draws Steve to her and… well, the exact mechanics of this plot to take over Earth from beyond the stars are iffy (had the script for Lifeforce been available in 1959, Ed Wood might have considered making it Plan 10 from outer space). But the movie just keeps forging ahead, giving the audience more of what it wants (that is, a naked Mathilda May), regardless of logic.
Dan O’Bannon scripted Lifeforce: although he also wrote the serious Alien, some of his other campy screenwriting efforts (Dark Star, Return of the Living Dead) suggest that his tongue might have been planted in his cheek when he delivered this wacky script to Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Hooper.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“Extraordinarily bizarre mix of science fiction and vampire movie, more likely to provoke derision than any other emotion.”–Halliwell’s Film Guide
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DIRECTED BY: Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel
FEATURING: Jenny Spain, Shiloh Fernandez, Noah Segan
PLOT: Two high school delinquents find an undead young woman and use her as a sex slave.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Deadgirl is weird by virtue of its highly unconventional subject matter, which is treated in as matter-of-factly as a conventional drama. It’s also better than you might think; Deadgirl is one of the best necrophilia-themed movies I’ve seen.
COMMENTS: When I read any description of a horror movie that includes the words, “teenager” or “students,” it stops me in my tracks, and I groan in disappointment. However, it was conducive to the plot of this horror yarn that the two antagonistic protagonists be just that.
The pair are working class high school misfits. (I must note that they are little more working class than the jocks and cheerleaders at most high schools, who stridently compensate for their ordinariness by engaging in meaningless make-work activities and ardently conform in order to raise their perceived social status.) The two boys in this film are misfits only in the sense that they aren’t on the football team. Like all teenage boys (and girls, let’s be honest) they are also dying of horniness.
Rickie (Fernandez) predictably covets a cheerleader possessing no redeemable qualities, who is saving herself to be date raped by the captain of the football team some drunken Homecoming night. One afternoon, his friend J.T. (Segan) convinces him to skip class to drink beer in an abandoned insane asylum. Where else?
Once there, they discover an inexplicably re-animated, shapely young dead girl (Spain) Continue reading RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: DEADGIRL (2008)