Capsules

CAPSULE: THE TEXTURE OF FALLING (2018)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Maria Allred

FEATURING: Julie Webb, Patrick Green, Maria Allred, Benjamin Farmer

PLOT: Some millennials with plenty of time and money skirt around different affairs with each other before it’s revealed that we’re watching a movie about some millennials with plenty of time and money who skirt around having different affairs with each other.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It pitches itself as “unlike any film that you’ve ever seen”. That is true: never have I seen something so bold in its combination of earnest pretentiousness and skull-sagging tedium.

COMMENTS: Recent experience suggests that among today’s millennialist youth, the trend of making movies that end up being about making movies is growing. Perhaps the would-be artistes grew up watching them and thought, erroneously, “That looks easy. I bet I can make something that impressive.” Flustered as I am at this moment, I just had the horrible realization that I wish I had just re-watched Paris Is Us instead of this one—and trust you me, I am fully aware of the ramifications of that errant thought.

The drama begins in Portland, Oregon—definitely not Seattle, Washington. Louisa (Julie Webb) is an aspiring film-maker and “love-skeptic” who finds herself, against her will, falling for quiet-but-blandly-hot pianist-composer, Luke (Patrick Green). In a parallel story, not-so-happy-with-his-wife Mike (Benjamin Farmer), an architect, is beginning a bondage-lite affair with a woman whose character was so hard to pin down I can only confidently refer to her by the descriptor “Blondie” (Maria Allred). As love chatter goes back and forth and up and down, each of the leads makes various compromises (?) and claws blindly toward an actual plot.

On at least two occasions I wrote in my notebook, “Big question: is this going anywhere?” And this was twice during a movie lasting a blip of an hour and a quarter. While watching various characters I had absolutely no interest in putz around and make emotional and social idiots of themselves, I was nearly relieved to find that I was watching one of them there “movie” movies. Turns out Louisa is writing a script, and lifting her lines from her interactions with Luke. But wait! No, it turns out that she’s actually fallen for the moody pianist (who is married, with children) on whom she’s basing a character. But wait! Louisa is just the role played by a character who seems to be an assistant to the real driving force behind this mess.

Maria Allred: I understand that making a movie is a very difficult undertaking. Furthermore, that your credits list includes, but is not limited to, director, writer, editor, producer, costumes, casting, designer, and art department forces me, despite my complete dismissiveness, to give you some respect. But perhaps you should take on a lighter workload next time. The Texture of Falling is, technically, a well put-together movie. But it is, almost objectively, a boring mass of bad dialogue, superfluous meta-twists, and somnolent acting. If your next Kick-Starter[efn_note]Kickstarter was mentioned on no fewer than 3 occasions.[/efn_note] campaign is for a movie with an actual plot, consider me on the hook for at least a one-hundred dollar donation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“How are these people connected? What’s real and what’s fantasy? But again, I run the risk of giving the impression that The Texture of Falling is compelling, which it is not. It’s 74 minutes of mediocre actors giving meek, low-energy performances while reciting clumsily written, faux-philosophical dialogue.” –Eric D. Schneider, Portland Mercury (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MANITOU (1978)

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366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: William Girdler

FEATURING: Tony Curtis, , Michael Ansara,

PLOT: Karen has a problem: there’s a zit on her back which is growing into a tumor that is the manifestation of a 400-year old native American medicine man, which will require the help of psychics, computers, and another medicine man to deal with.

Still from The Manitou (1978)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The late Blu-ray release caused a missed connection with the List, now closed. Otherwise, this movie combines the raving premise, bonkers execution, and deadpan seriousness that defines the finest of our so-bad-its-weird curations. The cacophony of an exploding typewriter, an indoor blizzard, a licorice spirit melting out of a table, and a frozen head crashing through a window ensures that everyone will have a favorite indelible scene.

COMMENTS: Today is a very special episode of Pete’s Punishing Picture Show, not the least of which because it touches on one of my favorite perversions side hobbies: collecting bad ripoffs of The Exorcist (1973). From Bollywood to Italian giallo, Exorcist rip-offs form their own genre; you can trace the demon shock wave of 1973 rippling through cinematic history around the world. The Manitou hides behind North American native hoodoo instead of Catholic demonology, but it can’t fool us; it follows the exact same structure act-for-act. Its chief innovation is that by late third act, it gets bored with retrodding Exorcist ground and opts to mix in some Star Wars instead, generously garnished with psychedelic space gloop from 2001: A Space Odyssey for good measure.

Wasting no time in trifling details like character development, The Manitou starts at a hospital as a doctor tries to explain the strange growth on the back of a patient’s neck. The patient is Karen (Susan Strasberg), whose estranged ex-boyfriend Harry (Tony Curtis) is a phony psychic making a living as a freelance Tarot card reader for wealthy widows. Just to nail a pin on how phony he is, he wears a Cookie-Crisp-blue wizard robe and a fake mustache that he peels off and pastes on a pillar en route to his tumbler of scotch at the end of a hard day’s work as a flim-flam artist. But when Karen consults him about her lump problem, he is confronted with real-life black magic, since all attempts to treat the lump with conventional medicine lead to everything going haywire. Harry makes the rounds of his not-fake psychic friends for a séance here and a consultation with a professor of native American studies (a well-cast Burgess Meredith) there, and eventually is led to the conclusion that the lump on Karen’s neck is a reincarnated 400-year old native American medicine man, who is possessing Karen as a parasitic host on his way to being reborn.

The evil influence of the Lump even drives a random client of Harry’s to levitate out of her chair and fly downstairs, killing her, a homicide never to be brought up again. Out of his league when confronted by reincarnated witch doctors, Harry has to drive out to a reservation to recruit John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara), a gruff medicine man who is also the most offensive racial stereotype in film since Mickey Rooney’s buck-toothed Chinaman in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The whole movie drowns in Disneyfied Injun-Joe buckskin clichés, as Singing Rock executes heap big pow-wow mojo (it involves rattling little leather drums a lot) to contain “Misquamacus,” the name of Karen’s manitou. Misquamacus devoted himself to the dark side of the medicine force, so his coming back is a bad thing. But come back he does, ripping a hole out of Karen’s back as he is birthed into a midget character resembling a slightly chewed cinnamon gummy bear. Misquamacus and Singing Rock spend the rest of the movie in a no-holds-barred Injun magic fight, turning the hospital into a frozen ice cavern straight off the planet Hoth and freezing cheerful nurses into meat popsicles, manifesting lizard spirits, and eventually transforming Karen’s hospital room into an outer space dimension with her bed flying in the middle of it. But Singing Rock marshals the forces of the hospital’s DEC-era computers (“White Man magic!,” he explains) to help in the battle.

As Singing Rock dispenses his medicine-man-wisdom-of-the-day about how the White Man pisses off nature spirits—shame on us!—we soberly realize the consequences of our faithless high-tech lifestyle. Actually, no, not a stinking minute of this movie makes sense, with none of it explained except via Tonto-logic. Nevertheless, it is done with strident deadpan seriousness all the way through; everybody involved seems smugly sure they’d have another Exorcist on their hands. While exteriors are gorgeously shot in San Francisco, the interior sets carries this studio-bound film into made-for-TV funk, feeling like the nuttiest episode of General Hospital ever made. The numerous special effects don’t date themselves to a minute past 1978, giving every “hadouken” laser blast in the medicine-magic battle a distinct early “Doctor Who” flavor. Insult to injury, Tony Curtis has never been so badly miscast. His streetwise Manhattan borough delivery demolishes every line he speaks. The Manitou is one of those movies where nothing works, and yet the entire 104-minute running time is hilarious entertainment that will never bore you for a second. It could be one of the greatest specimens of unintentional camp ever made. Just be sure if you get a zit on your neck, treat it with some Clearasil and take care of it the easy way.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The plot can easily be summarized, but first this announcement: If you happen to be drinking hot coffee at the present moment, please set your cup aside, because elements of the scenario might cause you to begin shaking with helpless laughter and you could spill the coffee on your rug, dog, cat, mate or newspaper.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, contemporaneous

The Manitou [Blu-ray]

The Manitou [Blu-ray]
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Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 4/26/2018

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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.

FILM FESTIVALS – Tribeca Film Festival (New York City, NY, 4/24-5/5):

Like SWSX, Tribeca is a mid-to-large sized festival that nestles in the cinema crease between Sundance and Cannes. Truly weird films rarely debut there, although every now and again something sneaks past the programmers. This year’s slate tilts towards documentaries, but we did notice s fashion horror In Fabric (which has been acquired by A24 and must be at the end of its long festival run) made the cut. A newly restored cut of Apocalypse Now (screening this Sunday, April 28) highlights the revival section. There are also a few minor curios for weridophiles: some psychedelic virtual reality displays (one is based on an ayahuasca trip, while another warns viewers to watch out for space llamas) and a shorts program specifically called “WTF” that’s “curated especially for late-night viewing.” We noted two new features that might be worth New Yorkers time and money:

  • Initials S.G. – A struggling Argentinian actor who resembles hooks up with an agent to try to salvage a career; programmers describe it as a “weed-induced head trip.” Screens 4/28-4/30, 5/5.
  • Knives and Skin – Paranoia and surreal happenings ensue after the disappearance of a sophomore at a suburban high school. Playing in the “Midnight” category 4/26-27 and 5/2.

Tribeca Film Festival home page.

IN DEVELOPMENT (announced/pre-production):

“Deadly Ten” (2020): Full Moon studios will be making ten movies late this year for an early 2020 release, and livestreaming behind the scenes footage as they are being made. I guess we’re most excited for Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama 2, although you’ve got to hand it to the genius who thought up the title The Grim Rapper. These are almost a year out from production, but they really want you to get excited now. It’s a unique gimmick if nothing else. Deadly Ten homepage.

NEW ON HOME VIDEO:

Hagasuzza: A Heathen’s Curse [Hagazussa] (2017): A 15th century woman in an Alpine village is (appropriately) accused of witchcraft. In theaters last week, this week on DVD/Blu-ray/VOD. Buy Hagazussa.

Under the Silver Lake (2018): Read Giles Edwards’ review. ‘s trippy and divisive conspiracy-noir bombed at Cannes and got a much-delayed U.S. release, followed a few days later by this appearance on VOD. Buy or rent Under the Silver Lake.

CERTIFIED WEIRD (AND OTHER) REPERTORY SCREENINGS:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). We won’t list all the screenings of this audience-participation classic separately. You can use this page to find a screening near you.

FREE MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

“366 Weird Movies: The Canon” (2018): OK, we just dropped this Wednesday, but we want to make sure you don’t miss Val Lewton’s hypnotic supercut of all 366 Canonized Weird movies. Be sure to show your appreciation on his YouTube page, he worked hard on this!

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE: Next week, “Penguin” Pete Trbovich exorcises the long-gestating review of William Girdler’s Indian-demon-fetus-on-Susan-Strassberg’s-neck horror The Manitou (now on Blu-ray); Giles Edwards looks at the new microbudget mindbender The Texture of Falling; and Gregory J. Smalley goes into the neglected reader-suggested review queue for the three-director horror feature The Signal (2007). Onward and weirdward!

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.

Miscellanea

MARCH MAD MOVIE MADNESS TOURNAMENT RECAP AND FINAL RANKINGS

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And your winner, and “official” Weirdest Movie of All Time is…

We must say, readers showed tremendous taste and knowledge in voting throughout the entire tournament. We feared there might be significant recency bias towards films released in the late 2010s, but you guys really went for the deep cuts. There were some surprises—we didn’t expect to see Suspiria (1977) in the Freaky 4—but the final Eraserhead (1977) vs. The Holy Mountain (1973) matchup was exactly what we would have hoped for.

You can see the entire progress of the tournament (play-in rounds excepted) here.

We’re not going to count up the total number of votes cast during the tournament, but with 292 votes in the finals and 388 in the semifinals, we’d conservatively guess we tallied over 10,000 mouse clicks and mobile taps during the entire tournament (well over 1,000 votes were cast in the play-in rounds alone). That’s a pretty significant amount of data.

We can use that data to create a very unofficial ranking of the popularity of all 366 movies in our Canon. Of course, we realize this enterprise is silly and ultimately somewhat arbitrary—but people love to list things, organize and rank them, and then argue about the results. That human tendency is sort of the basis for this site’s very existence.

So, after awarding the winner and runner up, we placed each movie in the tier it was eliminated in, and then rank them by number of votes cast in their favor, breaking any ties by the movies’ initial seeding (which was itself determined by a combination of number of page visits to our site and  IMDB rankings). And here’s the way they turned out, ranked from #1 to #366 in reader preference (remembering that the “least popular” movie here is still more interesting than 90% of what’s currently playing at the cineplexes):
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