To ensure his survival, Mathieu must continually come up with unorthodox ways of keeping himself on someone else’s mind.
Content Warning: There are many brief segments in this short containing lewd and violent imagery.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 1/2/2015
Our weekly 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 (LIMITED RELEASE):
Li’l Quinquin (2013): A bumbling inspector investigates a bizarre murder—body parts found stuffed into a cow—in a small French town. This four-part French miniseries from Bruno Dumont is being released as a 200-minute (!) theatrical feature; it’s been compared to Twin Peaks, and Variety called it “wonderfully weird.” Playing at Lincoln Center in Manhattan and probably nowhere else. Lil’ Quinquin at Lincoln Center.
SCREENINGS – (Television, Turner Classic Movies, Sat. Jan 3, 2:00 AM EST):
Nothing Lasts Forever (1984): Set your DVRs for this ultra-rare screening of this long-buried absurd comedy about a concert pianist who decides to become an artist and eventually lands on the moon. Written and directed by “Saturday Night Live” writer Tom Schiller, it includes cameos by Dan Akroyd and Bill Murray (as a lunar bus conductor). TCM Underground does a great job of obtaining rights to these presumed-lost movies; very soon after they screened Skidoo for the first time in over forty years, a DVD turned up. Fingers crossed for this one. Thanks to L. Rob Hubbard for the heads up. Nothing Lasts Forever article at Turner Classic Movies.
NEW ON DVD:
Tusk (2014): Read our review. We thought Kevin Smith‘s attempt to remake The Human Centipede as a Kevin Smith movie produced very mixed results—now you can judge for yourself. Buy Tusk
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Tusk (2014): See description in DVD above. Buy Tusk [Blu-ray]
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.
BEAUTIFUL FILMS: BLACK SUNDAY (1960)
This is the first entry in 366 Weird Movies’ List of “Beautiful Films.” Consider this a sub-category; one that takes neither beautiful nor weird at face value, but openly views these two descriptions as genres which often go hand-in-hand—far more than one might imagine.
I will continue this list throughout the new year, and am open to suggestions from readers or peers in adding titles.
Black Sunday (1960), AKA Mask of Satan, marked Mario Bava’s directorial debut after twenty years as a cinematographer and uncredited assistant director. This Gothic fairy tale, (loosely) inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Vij (faithfully adapted as Viy), proved the ideal launch for a director who began life as a painter and son of a cinematographer. Additionally, Black Sunday was the first true starring vehicle for Barbara Steele, making her the first (and, to date, the only) authentic female horror icon. Although both Bava and Steele had long careers following this, neither would ever make as good a film.
Bava’s painterly credentials serve his cinematography well: the forests, crypts, and castles are drenched in lush black and white. Mists, cobwebs, and rotting trees, filtered through Bava’s lens, compose a sensuous ruin. Setting a pattern that he would follow for the rest of his career, Bava’s visual storytelling is far more innovative than is the narrative, which is solid, but routine and simplistic enough to have spawned a plethora of imitators. Contemporary audiences will likely find the story less appealing than 1960 audiences did, in part due to its many offspring, and in part due to its its status as a homage to the Universal horror classics. Black Sunday is put over with such distinctive vigor that few will be concerned by its familiarity.
The casting of Steele is primarily a visual choice. Pauline Kael describes her as “looking like Jacqueline Kennedy in a trance, playing both roles in such a deadpan manner that makes evil and good all but indistinguishable.”
Although never given a role which proved her actor’s mettle, Steele stood apart from cinematic “scream queens” in using her physicality to both seduce and frighten audiences, perhaps best summarized in Bava’s extreme closeup of her acupunctured face during an erotic resurrection, which is quite possibly the most pronounced scene of its kind.
Georgio Giovanni’s art direction cannot be underestimated in making the film a highly influential cult hit that gave birth to an entire school of European filmmaking.
Kino’s uncut Blu-ray edition boasts a sumptuous transfer that finally does justice to Bava’s chiaroscuro lighting. It also, thankfully, restores Roberto Nicolosi’s original, intensely innovative score, along with several minutes of deleted scenes. The AIP version (buy
187. NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994)
“The ancients had visions, we have television.”–Octavio Paz (quote cited by Oliver Stone as one of his inspirations for making Natural Born Killers)
DIRECTED BY: Oliver Stone
FEATURING: Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Sizemore, Tommy Lee Jones, Rodney Dangerfield
PLOT: Mass murderers (and lovers) Mickey and Mallory stalk the Southwestern U.S., slaughtering innocents who cross their path but always leaving one victim alive to spread their legend. The television show “American Maniacs” tracks their adventures, and they have a large cult of followers. The pair are finally apprehended, but a live television interview scheduled to air after the Super Bowl gives them a narrow window to escape.
BACKGROUND:
- Natural Born Killers was based on a screenplay written by Quentin Tarantino, who was an unknown when the script was optioned for $10,000. By the time Oliver Stone was finished rewriting the script, so little of his original concept remained that Tarantino disassociated himself from the project. In the original script, “American Maniacs” host Wayne Gale was the main character, not Mickey and Mallory. Tarantino publicly stated that he was not disappointed with the direction Stone took the script, but simply felt that the finished project represented the director’s vision rather than his own. According to Jane Hamsher’s tell-all book about the production, Tarantino was upset that he was not allowed to purchase the rights back after he became a hot Hollywood commodity and tried to get the project scuttled behind the scenes, going so far as to tell Steve Buscemi and Tim Roth that he would never cast them in anything again if they accepted a role in the film.
- Stone originally conceived of the project as an action picture, a simple movie that he could produce as a break from his serious works of social realism, but the script turned much darker as he worked on it.
- Shot in only 56 days, but editing took almost a year. The ultra-fast pacing required almost 3,000 edits.
- According to Oliver Stone. 155 cuts were imposed on the movie by the MPAA in order to receive an “R” rating (a crucial imprimatur for commercial purposes, since many newspapers at the time would not advertise NC-17 or unrated movies). All of this material is restored in the director’s cut. Despite the large number of total cuts, the restored footage only amounts to about 3-4 minutes of screen time.
- A number of murders, mostly committed by teenagers, were said to be inspired by the film. In 1995, convenience store clerk Patsy Byers, who was paralyzed for life after being shot by a pair of young lovers who had dropped acid and watched Natural Born Killers all night on a continuous loop, instigated a product liability lawsuit against distributor Time Warner and Oliver Stone on the grounds that they “knew, or should have known that the film would cause and inspire people […] to commit crimes…” After a series of court hearings, the case was finally disposed of in 2001 on First Amendment grounds.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Natural Born Killers is about the power of images, making isolating a single frame from this nonstop barrage of psychedelic American carnage quite the challenge. Nonetheless, we located one picture which encapsulates the movie’s theme perfectly. Since Oliver Stone is not exactly noted for his subtlety, he garishly splashes his key insights over his characters’ tight tank-tops when a Navajo shaman sees the pair through spiritual eyes: words appear on Harrelson’s torso announcing him as a “demon,” then, even more tellingly, reading “too much t.v.”
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: As if the story was being viewed through a remote control with a stuck channel button where every station is fixated on telling the story of celebrity killers Mickey and Mallory, the visual style of Natural Born Killers changes every few seconds. Disorientation, the substituted and enhanced reality of manipulated images, is the baseline reality of this ever-shifting nightmare vision of an America trapped inside a banal, violence-obsessed TV tube.
Original trailer for Natural Born Killers
COMMENTS: There is no way to reasonably discuss Natural Born Continue reading 187. NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994)
10 WEIRDEST MOVIES OF 2014
Any year that features a new movie by Alejandro Jodorowsky is sure to be a banner year in cinematic weirdness, and 2014 certainly qualifies. It was also a banner year for the British Isles, which gave us four weird movies (three made by Englishmen and one by an Irishman, with one set entirely in Scotland and one in England in the 17th century). France chipped in two surreal movies, while Spain, Chile and Canada gave us one apiece. An Israeli director helmed the last weird movie. For the first time since we’ve been keeping this yearly list, no American movie made the list, although big name Hollywood actors— Jake Gyllenhaal, Jesse Eisenberg, Robin Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Fassbender—did dominate the slate, giving a false impression that the state of American strangeness is better than it actually is. In reality, in 2104 domestic producers shied away from surreality. In short, gentlemen, I am afraid we have a weirdness gap. America needs to start weirding it up once more, so we can return to being the weirdest nation on Earth (with apologies to the Japanese, who remain the weirdest populace on a per capita basis).
Besides the invasion of foreign surreality, the other big weird story of the year was the sudden increase in doppelganger sightings. These rare creatures inexplicably showed up in two of the year’s weirdest movies, as well as in three lesser films (+1, Coherence and The One I Love).
Besides the invasion of foreign surreality, the other big weird story of the year was the sudden increase in doppelganger sightings… oh wait.
Without further ado, here is our list of the ten weirdest movies of 2014, presented, as always, in random order—the weirdest of orders.
9. Under the Skin – Scarlett Johansson stars (and, yes, disrobes) as an alien sent to Scotland to pick up lonely men and take them to her loft, where she sinks them into a pit of black goo for reasons only space aliens understand (makes as much sense as anal probes, at least). She (it) gradually, and reluctantly, learns what it means to be human. In April commented “the action moves slowly, but is filled with wonderfully bizarre imagery and powerful space-y scoundscapes” and said it was “easily among the best of 2014, and may well turn out to be the weirdest.” It certainly does end the year among both the best and the weirdest.
10. Witching & Bitching [Las Brujas de Zugarramurdi] – Alex de la Iglesia must have been drinking henbane infusion when he came up with Continue reading 10 WEIRDEST MOVIES OF 2014