It’s time for the 2018 edition of the Weirdcademy Awards, the premier (only) awards contest focused on weird films, chosen by weird film fans. That means shorts as well as features. We’ve collected all five nominees for 2018′s Weirdest Short of the Year together in one place, for ease of voting. You can cast a vote for your favorite once every 24 hours. February 24 at 12:00 Noon EST. Cameron Jorgensen, 366 Weird Movies under-appreciated shorts Czar, discovered and selected these unusual films through his own research. This year’s lineup includes revelations from noodle-slurping clowns, pretzel-loving monsters, psychedelic drugs that kick in at the worst possible time, ugly cats, and men who blame women (and Rick) for their personal failings.
“Interface | Episode 11 | Revelation” by u m a m i
We didn’t get to fly out to Park City this year for the Sundance festivities (our budget has never allowed for trips to Park City), the rival Slamdance Festival was kind enough to offer us a handful of digital screeners to create a virtual fest in the 366 Weird Movies home offices. So, while I didn’t get the full audience experience watching these underground films—chuckling with fellow patrons at the antics of these onscreen loonies while the scent of popcorn wafts through the darkened room—at least you won’t have to hear me complain about trekking through Park City’s sub-zero temperatures to see them (I watched them via Chromecast in front of a roaring gas fireplace clutching a glass of beer, thank you very much).
Obviously, we focused only on movies we thought sounded somewhat weird, ignoring the vanilla dramas and documentaries that make up the bulk of the programming. All of these films will have debuted by the time you’re reading this, but if you’re in Park City and you still want to catch them, Dollhouse and The Vast of Night play again on the 28th, while “Slip Road” can be seen on the same night in the “Anarchy Shorts” section. A Great Lamp and “Finding the Asshole” play again on the 29th (and “Asshole” is also now available to everyone online), while “Butt Fantasia” encores on the 31st.
So, while “major” critics are salivating over Sundance’s latest dramas about attractive young white people grappling with their mommy and daddy issues, we’ll show you what’s going on in the underbelly of Park City, where the weirdos congregate to screen their latest experimental offenses about unattractive young white people grappling with much weirder mommy and daddy issues.
Speaking of weird mommy issues, first up in our queue is Dollhouse: The Eradication of Female Subjectivity in American Popular Culture (don’t worry, the scary pseudoacademic title is part of the joke). Using an aesthetic borrowed from “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” and a sense of humor derived from “South Park,” Nicole Brending tells of the rise and fall of Junie Spoons, a child superstar a la Britney Spears or Miley Cyrus, entirely with children’s dolls. This project was a labor of love by Brending, who launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2013 that failed to reach its goal, but kept hope alive and managed to complete the film (for a reported budget of “no money”) five years later.
Even if it’s unpolished and uneven, that kind of personal passion usually results in something worth watching, and that’s the case here. Dollhouse provides steady chuckles and is frequently in very bad taste—especially considering that its mockumentary subject becomes a washed-up, drug addicted divorcee felon in her early teens. Among the John Waters-approved provocations are a pre-teen sex tape (with pixellated doll penis), dolls stuck with syringes, black men voiced by white women, Mapplethrope photos, and a vagina transplant/repossession. The Continue reading SLAMDANCE 2019 REMOTE COVERAGE→
A lonely skeleton looks to liven up his evening with some substance abuse, but the monkey in his head still appears to pour water out of his eye sockets.
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 Image Book (2018): Jean-Luc Godard takes images from films of the past, digitally alters them, and philosophizes in voiceover. More late Godard for cinema masochists (we’ll probably end up joining them). The Image Book at Kino-Lorber.
FILM FESTIVALS – Sundance Film Festival (Park City, UT, Jan 24-Feb 3):
The 2019 movie season officially kicks off with Sundance, where a hundred hopeful independent movies, including a few off-the-wall ones, come to vie for a handful of distribution contracts. In recent years, Sundance added the “Next” and “Midnight” screening sections to add some weirdness to the otherwise tame lineup of dramas about privileged white people and their problems (alternating with imported dramas about underprivileged brown people and their problems). This year, however, that hasn’t helped much, as there doesn’t appear to be a Sorry to Bother You or a Swiss Army Man lurking in the program. Maybe we missed them, though.
Here’s what we’ll be tracking in the coming months:
“Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared” – The latest installment in this ongoing popular but terrifying puppet show will screen as part of the Indie Episodic Program 1 collection of curated shorts Jan. 29-31.
Greener Grass – Seeing as how this is an extension of a Saturday Short we previously featured on these pages, we’re pretty certain it will be weird; we’re not sure how this idea can expand to fill 100 minutes, but we’re eager to find out. Playing in the Midnight category on Jan. 26, 29, 31, and Feb. 1-2.
Koko-di Koko-da – A Nordic fairy tale ” set within the nightmarish landscape between wakefulness and sleep” about a couple with relationship problems beset by “outlandishly distorted nursery-rhyme antagonists” while camping. Screens Jan. 25-27, 31, and Feb. 1.
“Now Apocalypse” – The first three episodes of a new Starz series from Gregg Araki about (who would have guessed?) oversexed young people in surreal situations début at Sundance on Jamuary 29, with an encore January 30.
Paradise Hills – A young woman wakes up to find she’s been imprisoned in a hoity-toity Victorian finishing school/reform school on an island; the best case scenario is that this “NEXT” feature turns out to be The Love Witch meets “The Prisoner.” Jan. 26-27, 29, 31, or Feb. 1.
FILM FESTIVALS: Slamdance Film Festival (Park City, UT, Jan 25-31):
Slamdance is Sundance’s punkier, sometimes (usually) weirder little brother, a low-budget alternative to the mid-budget institution. We’ll be reviewing a few that caught our eye a few days from now (with a bonus shorts reviews thrown in)…
Dollhouse: The Eradication of Female Subjectivity from American Popular Culture – Despite the imposing subtitle, this is a sometimes tasteless mockumentary showing the rise and fall of Junie Spoons, a child superstar in the mold of Britney Spears or Miley Cyrus, told with dolls. Screens January 25 and 28.
A Great Lamp – An experimental film, with animated and magical realist segments, following three alienated young men as they await a rocket launch. January 27 and 29.
The Color out of Space (end 2019/early 2020?): Nicolas Cage to star in an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft‘s “The Colour out of Space,” directed by Richard Stanley? Yes, we’ll buy a ticket, thanks. “Space,” Lovecraft’s 1927 tale of a meteorite which falls to earth and brings unspeakable horrors with it, has been (largely unsuccessfully) adapted for screen many times, notably as Die, Monster, Die! with Boris Karloff (not to mention all the ripoffs of the basic premise, like The Blob). SciFi4Me has the scoop.
NEW ON HOME VIDEO:
Best F(r)iends Vol.1 + Vol. 2 (2018): The Room‘s Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero reunite; Sestero plays a homeless man rescued by Wiseau’s corpse-robbing multician, and they go on a quirky road trip. The world gets almost four more hours of oddball Wiseau engaging in adventures described as “surreal” and “bizarre.” Blu-ray only. Buy Best F(r)iends Volume 1 + 2.
Next week we’ll bring you a little preview of three feature films (and a short or two or three) from Slamdance (see above), which may or may not be making their way to your screens soon. El Rob Hubbard will also knock another one out of the reader-suggested review queue with 1985s little-seen advertising satire Bliss. We’ll wrap up the week by announcing our nominees for the 9th installment of our annual “Weirdcademy Awards”—and open up voting to members of the Weirdcademy (that’s you, by the way). Stay tuned!
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.
FEATURING: Sy Richardson, Joe Strummer, Dick Rude, Courtney Love
PLOT: Three gangsters, with a pregnant girlfriend in tow, blow an assignment, rob a bank, and hide out in a Central American village ruled by a band of coffee-addicted desperadoes.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This silly, violent and absurd attempt at a Western comedy made by non-comedians doesn’t really work, except as a curio.
COMMENTS: The story behind Straight to Hell is that filmmaker Alex Cox had assembled a number of punk bands for a concert in Nicaragua, which had to be canceled due to political turmoil. With his schedule involuntarily cleared and time on his hands, he sat down with a guy named Dick Rude (!) and scratched out a movie script in three days, using the musicians and whoever was available on short notice as actors. The result is a silly spoof, made on the spur of the moment, with punk rockers trying to be comedians. There’s a party vibe, and it’s clear that the cast and crew had a blast farting around in the desert. It’s equally clear that you will never have as much fun watching it as they did making it.
Sy Richardson (whom Cox had worked with before on Repo Manand Sid and Nancy) was one of the few actual actors available for the project on short notice, so the prolific character actor gets a rare featured role here, and makes the best of the opportunity. (Because he’s cool, black, and wears a suit and tie while brandishing a gun, he’s often pointed to as a precursor to Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules in Pulp Fiction). The Clash’s Joe Strummer is second-in-command, while Rude takes the role of the youngest and jumpiest of the gang. Courtney Love is Sy’s shrill, preggo girlfriend, who’s so effectively annoying that they effectively write her out of the script after the setup. Besides the main cast, Eighties underground culture aficionados can keep an eye out for cameos by the Pogues, Elvis Costello, Grace Jones, Jim Jarmusch, and even Dennis Hopper.
And yes, it is weird, although more in the vein of a spectacularly drunk Mel Brooks than of Alejandro Jodorowsky. The credits list a “sex and cruelty consultant” (a bit tongue-in-cheekly, since there’s not terribly much of either). What you do get it some attempted slapstick from musicians trying to be comics, scenes spoofing Once Upon the Time in the West and Cool Hand Luke, hard-to-understand accents (not only from the rotten-toothed Shane MacGowan), a Western hot dog vendor, a butler who serves coffee to desperate killers, a barrelhouse piano version of “Night on Bald Mountain,” a musical number (including “Danny Boy”) or two, and a long conclusory shootout to prune the cast (including a few extra bodies like Jarmusch who show up at the last minute to get mowed down). Perhaps the oddest touch of all are two brief shots of Ray Harryhausen-style animated skeletons: a wolf who howls at the moon and a human clutching a knife between its teeth. It’s like Cox bought a few seconds of unused footage from a Charles Band production and shoehorned them into his movie at random. Whatever charm Straight to Hell possesses comes from the fact that you seldom have any idea what will happen next.
The story is supposedly based on the Canonically Weird Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!—Cox went so far as to secure the adaptation rights—but the similarities between the two films are completely superficial. Remastered with new digital gore effects and re-released in a director’s cut in 2010, Straight to Hell is obscure, but Kino-Lorber’s 2018 edition with director’s commentary is actually its third appearance on DVD (it was released by Anchor Bay in 2001, and by Microcinema DVD under the title Straight to Hell Returns in 2010). The film is also available on Blu-ray or streaming outlets.
Even if it’s unpolished and uneven, that kind of personal passion usually results in something worth watching, and that’s the case here. Dollhouse provides steady chuckles and is frequently in very bad taste—especially considering that its mockumentary subject becomes a washed-up, drug addicted divorcee felon in her early teens. Among the 
