Capsules

NORTH (1994): THE WEIRDNESS OF A COLOSSAL FLOP – A CASE STUDY

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When the Wizard of Weirdness benevolently gave each of us regular contributors the opportunity to pitch one movie onto the List—with no veto—the Present Author got away with Nothing But Trouble (1991). It’s a controversial pick, for sure. My reasoning was, why pick a movie that was probably comfortably fated to end up on the List sooner or later? You get an opportunity, you take it. There were a few shocked gasps and Greg, notably, nearly lost his lunch. For what it’s worth, the Good Bad Flicks podcast recently vindicated my fanny right out of purgatory on that movie. Me, Good Bad Flicks, and everybody on the set but and Chevy Sourpuss Chase stand alone in our crusade, even if apologetically.

Still from North (1994)

But it could have been worse. Throughout my time in the Weird Vineyards, I’ve had a devil on my left shoulder digging his pitchfork into my clavicle, maniacally whispering the name of JUST ONE MOVIE into my ear. “Nominate it, it’ll be hilarious!” When that veto-proof list slot came up, the screaming from my sinister side became deafening, but I resisted. Since the List is now closed, and I finally feel it’s safe to mention the name of the movie that no one on this site has dared to utter…

Got your HazMat suits zipped up? Got your clothespins on your nose? Got your handy jug of brain bleach ready? I shall prepare to utter its vile name. This is going to be good. This movie had an identical budget to Nothing But Trouble, and fared even a little bit worse. It’s a one-word title. It’s even a monosyllabic title. In fact, it’s a title that just so happens to be the name of a pretty famous primary compass direction.

North (1994) is one of the most notoriously spectacular failures in box office history. And make no mistake, this is NOT a List recommendation! North is just too terrible.

Like Nothing But Trouble, North had a jaw-dropping line-up of splurged comedic talent, a runaway budget, and a high concept that was a unique take on a familiar structure. It should have been a hit. So should Skidoo or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but these things happen.

Yet when you think about weird movies, you can’t long avoid North. How can you ignore ’s tush on a billboard, Jason Alexander as a pants-obsessed haberdasher, Kathy Bates as the last person to appear in blackface and have her career survive, Dan Aykroyd and Reba McEntire as a mom-and-pop duo performing a Texas hoedown about the death of their son, a Citizen Kane homage with a kid school newspaper editor making Jon Lovitz his suck-up toady, Alan Arkin as a manic motormouth judge holding court in a furniture store, Abe Vigoda getting put out to sea on an iceberg, and in multiple roles playing… nah, you’ll never believe me. All this, directed by the man who gave the world beloved classics like This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride.

The premise seems harmless enough: a kid divorces his parents and Continue reading NORTH (1994): THE WEIRDNESS OF A COLOSSAL FLOP – A CASE STUDY →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CRASH (1996)

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DIRECTED BY: David Cronenberg

FEATURING: James Spader, Holly Hunter, , ,

PLOT: The survivor of a violent car crash immerses himself in a hidden world of auto accident fetishists and the dangerous and masochistic lengths they go to in search of sexual gratification.

Still from Crash (1996)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: With three other entries, you can’t feel too bad about depriving David Cronenberg of another spot on our very full list. But Crash undeniably focuses on a very unusual kink, and treats its obsessive pursuers with respect and understanding.

COMMENTS: When Crash came out, the conversation inevitably focused on its central fetish. Given his filmography—a  CV. deeply fascinated with the horrors of the body—a tale of sexual adventurers who find carnal thrills in confronting the specter of mechanized death must have seemed like a natural match for David Cronenberg. But the literalization of the characters’ passions—both sexual and automotive—was almost destined to shock and offend, regardless of who was behind the camera. Talk of such an outré fetish sucked all the air out of the room, reducing Crash to a one-line précis: “that movie where people get off on car crashes.” (Eventually to be replaced by: “No, the earlier one; not the one that solved racism.”)

For anyone who went to the multiplex anticipating the sex-fueled romp that the controversy portended, it must have been a rude awakening indeed. Has there ever been a sadder movie about sex?  Crash‘s interests are not prurient, strictly speaking. The characters are deeply unsatisfied, sexually and in all other ways. It’s almost cliché by now to build a film around characters who “just want to feel something,” but Cronenberg earns it by investing in the emotional hollows of people who feel isolated and yearn for an experience that feels authentic and meaningful, no matter how transgressive or self-destructive.

Consider the vacant stares of the beautiful people that populate Crash, led by loveable freak-a-deek James Spader. His James Ballard (who, significantly, shares a name with the original novel’s author) has a gorgeous wife, a powerful job in the film industry, a modern-to-with-an-inch-of-its-life condo… and he is dead to the world. He and his wife trade tales of their infidelities in hope of getting a charge from the jealousy. It takes a fatal car wreck that leaves him seriously injured to jump-start his moribund psyche. He pursues it by hooking up with a fellow survivor of his crash, but finds even deeper connections through an obsessive photographer who masterminds a secret underground club of fellow auto-smashup aficionados who re-enact car crashes of the rich and famous. None of these other people seem any happier, desperate as they are to recapture a high that can only be achieved by risking life itself.

Even if you’re enough of a go-with-the-flow kind of person to buy into the whole symphorophilic angle, Cronenberg manages to find a way to heighten the stakes for you, most notably through one of Vaughan’s acolytes, a crash victim in braces (Arquette) with a large scar on her leg that goes from being a visual simile of a vagina to a literal substitute for one. Of course, if you’ve watched James Woods turn his chest cavity into a gun holster, this may not seem that shocking to you. But where other Cronenberg films explore the human body through the lens of hallucination or horror-fantasy, Crash sets those filters aside. Yep, they’re really going to do it like that. Yep, they’re really going to revel in it.

And that’s probably what turned off so many people about Crash. There’s no shield, no veneer of artificiality to protect you from these people and things they will do to make a connection. They’re too weird to be normal, but not weird enough to easily dismiss, and certainly not the kind of “weirdness” the mainstream can usually handle, like being into super sexytime. As Cronenberg himself says, “I love to disappoint people.” Judging from the agony Spader and Unger radiate as their ultimate act of intercourse falls a mite short of true satisfaction, Cronenberg is a very happy man.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the result is so far from being involving or compelling, so intentionally disconnected from any kind of recognizable emotion, that by comparison David Lynch’s removed ‘Lost Highway’ plays like ‘Lassie Come Home.'” – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times [contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Kyle Conley. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 1/18/2019

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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.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

St. Bernard Syndicate (2018): A Danish businessman partners with an investor who’s just been diagnosed with A.L.S. in a scheme to sell St. Bernards to the Chinese. Sounds subtly strange at best, but Brian Orndorf of Blu-ray.com did claim it is “very funny at times, but also chilling and always interested in weirdness…” No official site located.

IN DEVELOPMENT (post-production):

Synchronic (2019?): and are back to work quickly after finishing 2017’s The Endless with another film in a loose reality-bending series hearkening all the way back to their debut, Resolution. (2014’s romantic fantasy Spring is the only outlier in their oeuvre.) This time the duo play New Orleans paramedics who encounter and investigate victims of a designer drug. Scooped by Dread Central (the article may contain a minor spoiler).

NEW ON HOME VIDEO:

Madeline’s Madeline (2018): Read our review. This arty and dreamlike coming-of-age story features one of the best (and most overlooked) acting debut of the year in Helena Howard, and came in #8 in our list of weirdest movies of 2018. DVD, Blu-ray and VOD. Buy Madeline’s Madeline.

The Plague Dogs (1982): This not-for-kids animated tale follows two hounds who escape from a research lab and are hunted down as potential carriers of the plague. Adapted by from a novel by Richard Adams (Watership Down), and in our reader-suggested queue. This new Blu-ray release from Shout! Factory includes both the theatrical cut and the director’s cut (previously unavailable in the U.S.) Buy The Plague Dogs.

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.

YOU LINK US! YOU REALLY LINK US!:

366 Weird Movies @ List Challenge –  “Darko” has created a checklist for the List at the popular “List Challenge” site. An easy way to check off how many movies you’ve seen from the 366 canon. We know of one person who scored 100%; if you like you can tell us your score. 366 Weird Movies FULL LIST.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

Next week we’ll continue to clean out our cupboards of old (but still quality) movie reviews. Shane Wilson brings you a popular one from the reader-suggestion queue in ‘s weirdly fetishistic Crash (1996); Pete Trbovich experiments with form in his “case study” of the Hollywood flop North (1994); and G. Smalley covers the better-late-than-never 2018 DVD debut of ‘ wild punk gangster western comedy Straight to Hell (1987). We’ll be taking off Martin Luther King day, so enjoy your three-day weekend (Americans). See you next week!

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920): Read the Canonically Weird entry! In case you missed it last week, here is a free version of the Expressionist horror classic, one of those silent movies loved by people who hate silent movies. The classical score is by Giuseppe Becce and the title cards are in the original German (so be sure to turn on subtitles by hitting the [cc] button).

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

APOCRYPHA

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An administrative announcement, just so the review above makes sense: we have completed the List of 366 Weird Movies, which henceforth will be referred to as “Canonically Weird,” or “the Canon.”

As previously announced, we will be continuing to honor other films, at a slower pace; once officially confirmed, these supplemental entries will be listed as “Apocryphally Weird,” or “the Apocrypha.”  Therefore, Umbilical World counts as an “Apocrypha Candidate.”

We’ll be using this terminology from now on. You can consider all former “List Candidates” to be converted to “Apocrypha Candidates” automatically. Now we return you to your regularly scheduled weirdness.

Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!