Gay internet celebrity Samwell needs convincing when he finds that citrus milk facials are out of season at the spa.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 11/29/2024
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs and Blu-rays (and hot off the server VODs), and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available at the official site links.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
The Myth of Man (2024): The Winans (Ink ) are back with another mystical low-budget fantasy that should be plenty weird, if the trailer below is any indication. In limited release for a series of one-night preview screenings in early December in New York metro area, Los Angeles, and Denver; not sure what the plans are after that, but some form of VOD/streaming seems a safe bet. (Thanks to reader Nc for the heads up!) Check out The Myth of Man official site for screening information.
NEW ON HOME VIDEO:
“Alfred Hitchcock: The Iconic Film Collection”: A beautiful book-style limited edition of some of Hitchcock‘s finest, including (naturally) the Canonically Weird Vertigo along with Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. Universal advertises 15 hours of bonus material (most of which have probably been previously available on the many, many previous releases of these films over the years). Cinephile Christmas gift-bait at it finest. Buy “Alfred Hitchcock: The Iconic Film Collection.”
Coma (2022): A sequestered 18-year-old girl loses her grip on reality as she watches a YouTuber named “Patricia Coma.” An odd-looking one, with animated and Barbie doll sequences, from the busy Bertrand Bonello (who followed this up with the better-distributed The Beast). Buy Coma.
“The Cult of AFGA Trailer Show” (2024): This is a sequel to 2021’s “The AGFA Horror Trailer Show,” which we did not cover because we wrongly assumed it was just a collection of trailers. But by all accounts, both Trailer Shows are actually Everything is Terrible!-style mixtapes, and the Blu-ray includes “hallucinogenic shorts” as bonus features, so this should be worth checking out. Buy “The Cult of AFGA Trailer Show”.
Dororo (2007): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. The movie features the strange Japanese folkloric monsters called yokai in a story about a swordsman seeking to collect his 48 missing body parts. It’s the first time this live-action adaptation has appeared on Blu-ray in North America, but no special features will be found. Buy Dororo .
Electric Dragon 80,000V (2001): Read the Apocryphally Weird review! The first appearance of this crazy cult film about a lizard-obsessed high-voltage rock n’ roll superhero on Blu-ray; no word on whether the special features were ported over from the DVD (although since Discotek released both versions, there would be no reason for them not to be included). Buy Electric Dragon 80,000V.
Mononoke the Movie: Phantom in the Rain (2024): Read Giles Edwards’ Apocrypha Candidate review. The spectacular psychedelic period anime skips a theatrical release (unfortunately) and makes its American debut on Netflix (where at least more people will have a chance to see it, if not on the huge screen it demands). Mononoke the Movie: Phantom in the Rain on Netflix.
Murder Party (2017): Read Pete Trbovich’s review. A packed Blu-ray release of this minor cult black comedy about a man who accepts a mysterious invitation to a party which turns out, unfortunately, to be a Murder Party. Buy Murder Party.
Santa Claus (1959): Read the Canonically Weird entry! This appears to be just a reissue of VCI’s 2011 Blu-ray release of what one Amazon reviewer calls “the most surreal Mexican Christmas movie of 1959!” Buy Santa Claus.
The Shape of Water (2017): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. Guillermo del Toro‘s cold war monster romance with musical numbers flick didn’t sniff our list of weirdest movies of all time, but it was one of the stranger Best Picture Oscar winners. The Criterion Collection gives it the usual reverential treatment, on 4K UHD + Blu-ray. BuyThe Shape of Water.
The Tenant (1976): Read the Canonically Weird entry! Roman Polanski‘s take on the identity-shift genre has an immigrant taking on the personality of his flat’s previous tenant, to weird effect. This could have been in the Criterion Collection, but somehow genre specialist Vinegar Syndrome got the rights to this art-house cult classic and releases it in a 4K UHD + Blu-ray set that’s the equal of the venerable Collection in terms of extra features. Buy The Tenant.
Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971): Read the Canonically Weird entry! Weird Willy joins the 4K UHD club (beware: no Blu-ray) in this limited edition steelbook aimed at collectors. Buy Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
Pod 366 will return from the holiday hiatus next week; no guest is scheduled, but we will discuss the week’s weird news and releases. In written content, Shane Wilson addresses another one that Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue with Nina Menkes’ 1986 experimental feminist screed Magdalena Viraga, about a sex worker accused of murder; Giles Edwards has promised to use his holiday break to catch up with Tomie (1998), the first of many adaptations of stories about Junjo Ito‘s recurrent murderess; and Gregory J. Smalley plans to catch the magical realist Netflix release Pedro Páramo, set in a dusty Mexican town where the living may be the dead. Onward and weirdward!
What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that we have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.
50*. TOBY DAMMIT (1968)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
“I am always displeased by circumstances for which I cannot
account. Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his
health.”–Edgar Allan Poe, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”
DIRECTED BY: Federico Fellini
FEATURING: Terence Stamp
PLOT: Toby Dammit, a once famous actor whose career is in jeopardy because of alcoholism, accepts a role in a “Catholic Western” to be shot in Italy, on condition that he be given a Ferrari. Drinking throughout the evening of his arrival in Rome and increasingly incoherent, Dammit bumbles his way through a television interview and an appearance as guest speaker at an awards ceremony. Finally, he jumps into the sports car and races through the deserted streets of Rome, but becomes lost in an increasingly unreal city.
BACKGROUND:
- “Toby Dammit” was originally filmed as an entry in Spirits of the Dead, an anthology based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. Louis Malle‘s version of “William Wilson” and Roger Vadim‘s “Metzengerstein” were the other entries. “Dammit” is inspired by Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” an unusually comic outing for the macabre author, but takes almost nothing from the short story’s plot.
- Terence Stamp traveled to Italy to make this film with Fellini, and stayed for several years afterwards. His very next film project was the lead role as the mysterious seductive stranger in Pasolini‘s Teorema.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: In Poe’s story, the Devil was an old man, but Fellini chose to recast Old Scratch as a young girl (the actress was actually 22, but appears much younger). Fellini said he felt that Toby’s personal devil should represent his own immaturity. Fellini again demonstrates his genius with faces, as the pallid, mysteriously grinning girl is as devilish and chilling as waifs come.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Bouncy-ball escalator game; waxwork chef run down by sports car
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Fellini and Poe are an unexpected combination, but the Italian director takes to the American writer’s gloominess like a libertine takes to laudanum. Fellini’s carnivalesque portraiture easily bends towards the ghastly. The director never tried his hand at another outright horror movie, but “Dammit” makes you wonder what might have been.
Trailer for Spirits of the Dead (1968) with “Toby Dammit” clips
COMMENTS: “Toby Dammit” is an interstitial work which Fellini Continue reading 50*. TOBY DAMMIT (1968)
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE BIRTHDAY (2004)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
The Birthday is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.
DIRECTED BY: Eugenio Mira
FEATURING: Corey Feldman, Erica Prior, Jack Taylor, Dale Douma
PLOT: Norman Forrester navigates his girlfriend’s father’s birthday party as he waits for the right moment to tell her how he feels.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Whatever Corey Feldman is doing to portray Norman is up there alongside Tommy Wiseau‘s turn as a romantic lead in The Room (albeit hovering on the reality-side of believable), and that’s just for starters in this oddball bit of capering which unfurls like a forgotten Coen Brothers b-side.
COMMENTS: Norman wears white socks with his tuxedo. His powder-blue ruffled shirt is more appropriate for a high school prom. Alison, his girlfriend, runs hot and cold, making her difficult for him to read. The father, whose birthday is being celebrated, is dismissive of Norman’s pizzeria job. Norman can’t unload a hotel room glass he picked up at the start of the night, an old school buddy insists they watch the strippers together, blackouts begin to plague the main event, and he never finds a moment to give his girlfriend that special gift. All told, it’s not a good night for Norman—and that’s not even taking into account his discovery of a death cult hoping to summon a Lovecraftian-style god of hopelessness.
Norman is our constant guide for this special evening, whether we want him or not. His eyebrows are always rising and lowering; he often doesn’t know what to do with his hands; and his voice sounds like it should be coming from a tertiary Dick Tracy villain with one line. But we’re with that voice, and that awkwardness, for two hours. It’s a heckuva gambit on the part of both actor Corey Feldman and director Eugenio Mira. This fractured character is what’s needed, though, for channeling this irregular narrative, peopled as it is from the basement to the penthouse with differently aberrant characters. To perform Mira a modest disservice, the dialogue oscillates between the goofiness of The Hudsucker Proxy and the menace of Barton Fink. Is everyone having a great time? Are they doomed? As with life, there’s a bit of both.
The Birthday kicks off with an Art Deco font-flourished title card reading “The Most Amazing 117 minutes in Norman Forrester’s Life,” before fading into a shot of the named character emerging from a creaking elevator whose tinny music, after some repetitions, clarifies itself as a Muzak rendition of “It’s My Party.” Mira’s promise trundles along deliciously for the first hour, as he slaps snips and snatches of eccentricity into the mix—the belligerent father, the Valium-addled mother, the alarmingly eager-but-unhelpful staff, and even the hotel itself, with its strange secrets—culminating in a first act climax of soul-searching and monologue from Forrester as he descends into the basement.
For a reason that baffled me at the time, Mira seems to cut away the entire, hard-earned accumulation of dark wacky and silly foreboding, deciding that the second half will instead travel full bore into a kind of stupid story line. For a stretch, I worried that Yes, the first half is weird enough to carry the film and an apocrypha recommendation, but I’ll have to warn that—and before I knew it, Mira was building again. A final blow-out wraps up this strange birthday party with style and intensity. Norman, who has spent his life ducking down and backing away from conflict, is provided the ultimate test; and despite his white socks, ruffled shirt, and “My Goodness What is that Voice?” timbre, by the very end, my weird hopes had triumphed.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CONFESSIONS [KOKUHAKU] (2010)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Tetsuya Nakashima
FEATURING: Takako Matsu, Yukito Nishii, Kaoru Fujiwara, Ai Hashimoto, Yoshino Kimura, Masaki Okada
PLOT: A schoolteacher informs her class that that two of her students are responsible for the death of her daughter, and she has exacted revenge by secretly exposing them to a fatal disease.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Confessions offers an unusual mix of styles and goals: a brutal revenge thriller, a screed against the inhumanity of Japanese schoolchildren, a dark and twisted mystery, a gentle teen romance, and a meditative drama paced deliberately enough to make Ingmar Bergman jealous, all living side-by-side within the same film. On their own, none reinvent the wheel, but the resulting bouillabaisse is a creation unto itself.
COMMENTS: The very last word spoken in Confessions is “Kidding.” The word is wielded like a dagger to the heart. There have been no jokes told over the preceding 100+ minutes, and even moments of smiles have been laced with cruelty or cynicism. It’s the final opportunity for the movie to make clear its intentions, and this final utterance establishes once and for all that its blood runs ice cold.
That emotional intelligence is no one’s priority is made clear from the film’s opening gambit, in which nearly the entire first act of the movie is given over to a monologue by Ms. Moriguchi, the class teacher. Her raucous class ignores her announcement that this is her last day, and pays little heed to her mentions of her dead child and her dying husband. It’s only when she happens to mention murder that she finally gets their attention; they are intensely focused as she intimates that the culprits are in the room, and her revelation that she has spiked the class milk supply with AIDS-tainted blood sends them into a complete tizzy. It’s all disrespect until the stakes turn selfish, and Moriguchi stays cool and detached the entire time.
Confessions repeats this theme of heartless self-interest throughout: a mother abandons her child to pursue a career. Another is irritated at having to engage with a new teacher following Moriguchi’s departure: “She only cares about her own child, more than for her students.” Students are jealous of the media attention paid to peers who commit murder. Most tellingly, the two students responsible for the girl’s death react in equally selfish but wildly contrasting ways: one becomes feral and wracked with existential doubt, while the other doubles down on a sociopathic mindset, devising a plan to wipe out the entire school. Of course, there’s a dark irony in the later revelation that this homicidal endeavor is actually central to someone else’s vengeful scheme.
The confessions of the title are ostensibly the admissions by each of the major participants in the story concerning their role in the events depicted. But this is mostly a nod to the story’s origins as a novel, and a means of keeping the tale’s many twists and turns concealed—because confession suggests guilt, and that is something none of the characters feel for very long. In fact, Nakashima luxuriates in both the pain and the fury of his protagonists, frequently lingering in the moment through lovingly detailed slow-motion imagery (often accompanied by Radiohead songs to maximize the drama).
Confessions is an effective piece of cinema, but a grim and nasty work. It’s a cousin to the all-the-kids’-fault nihilism of Battle Royale or the nausea-inducing machinations of Oldboy. (The climactic revelation also brought to mind the notoriously bleak South Park episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” which itself has a lofty antecedent in Shakespeare.) It’s a terrifically acted, beautifully rendered world that almost actively discourages revisiting. Not kidding.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by hanul. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
![Confessions [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Zuc-lUhpL._SL500_.jpg)
- Best Director (Tetsuya Nakashima) of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010
- Best Film of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010
- Best Screenplay of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010