A self-indulgent thrill-seeker goes for a stroll in his brand new car.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 10/4/2013
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):
Argento’s Dracula 3-D (2013): A 3-D version of the Dracula story from revered horror icon Dario Argento. The pre-release bashing of this troubled production has been going on for years, since the first uninspiring teasers were released; let the post-release bashing begin. Dario Argento’s Dracula official Facebook page.
Bad Milo! (2013): Psychotherapy reveals the source of Duncan’s stress: a killer demon named Milo has taken up residence in his lower intestine. Simultaneously available on video on-demand
IN DEVELOPMENT:
Kafka (1991) director’s cut: Steven Soderbergh may have “retired” from making new feature films, but he hasn’t retired from making old ones. He’s reworking his own Kafka, his uneven sophomore feature that starred Jeremy Irons as Franz Kafka confronting the Illuminati. Word is it will be a major reworking; new footage was shot at the time he was making Side Effects (2013). Since Kafka has never been out on DVD, we’re looking forward to seeing this new and (hopefully) improved version reaching a larger audience. Read more about the Kafka director’s cut at Indiewire.
CROWDFUNDING:
Dollhouse (est. 2014, if funded): The story of the rise and fall of child star Junie Spoons, told using custom made dolls. Writer/director Nicole Brending promises it will be “psychologically surreal” and contain doll nudity. If there’s also doll twerking, we’d be willing to kick in a buck. Dollhouse on Kickstarter.
NEW ON DVD:
100 Bloody Acres (2012): Two brothers find themselves running low on the corpses they need to make their organic fertilizer, until they find three stranded motorists. This Australian horror-comedy reportedly puts a bloody new spin on familiar ideas, and the Twitch reviewer called it “completely bizarre.” Buy 100 Bloody Acres
“Movies 4 You – Timeless Horror”: The main attraction here is 1958’s I Bury the Living, a Twilight-Zone style sleeper about a cemetery caretaker who discovers he has the power to make people die by placing a pin in a map of their burial plot. Rounding out the set are the silly The Snake Woman (1961), the British horror-mystery The Four Skulls of Johnathan Drake (1959), and “One Shot” William Beaudine‘s abysmal The Face of Marble (1946). Buy “Movies 4 You – Timeless Horror”
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012): An impressionistic, experimental, partially-animated portrait of a young artist and his desire for a beautiful woman. Probably the weirdest movie ever “presented by” Jay-Z. Buy An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
The Room – Audience Reactions Documentary (2013?): According to the ad copy: “will give you a prove what did happen 10 years ago; how audiences reacted to The Room by Tommy Wiseasu with passion and good will; contrary to some media.” C’mon, this has to be a joke—right? Unlike The Room
The Wizard of Oz (1939) (75th Anniversary Edition): Read our capsule review. With only one special feature (a new making-of documentary), this 75th Anniversary edition is a downgrade of the 70th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec [Director’s Cut] (2010): In 1911 Paris, author/adventurer Adèle Blanc-Sec deals with a recently hatched pterodactyl. The Blu-ray “director’s cut” reportedly includes a brief nude scene that was not in the original DVD release. Buy The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec [Director’s Cut] (BluRay/DVD/Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]
The Wizard of Oz (1939) (75th Anniversary Edition): See description in DVD above. Also available in a Blu-ray 3D 
NEPOTISM CORNER:
“The Mortal Triptych: Meeting Death in Three Elegiac Horror Films”: Frequent contributor Jesse Miksic wrote an article on approaches to death and grieving in dramatic horror films for berfrois.com; one of his three case studies is the Certified Weird Don’t Look Now. Read the complete article here.
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
Attack of the Monsters [AKA Gamera vs. Guiron] (1969): Two hot female aliens kidnap young boys, assisted by their pet monster, the knife-headed Guiron. Fortunately, flying nuclear turtle and friend of all children Gamera is on the case. Probably the most ridiculous of all the Gamera movies, which is saying something.
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.
BILL MORRISON’S SPARK OF BEING (2010)
Spark of Being can be watched in its entirety for free on IMDB.
Spark of Being (2010) is an example of an artist resisting an aesthetic anchor. Bill Morrison‘s films are often categorized as non-narrative and experimental, so the idea of this artist tackling such a perennial chestnut such as “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” leads us to wonder exactly how he is going to deconstruct such a familiar narrative. Throwing out all preconceived assumptions, Morrison pays homage to Mary Shelly and makes her Gothic creation fresh again with a startlingly literal interpretation. Indeed, Spark of Being may be one of the most faithful cinematic adaptations of the book to date.
Using found footage, Morrison teams with jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas and his electric sextet, Keystone, to illustrate Shelly’s tale. Douglas is an eclectic trumpeter who once worked as a sideman with the John Zorn ensemble Masada. With an original score that is simultaneously mercurial and animated, it is hard to imagine a more perfect composer for Spark of Being.
A frequent (and sometimes justifiable) criticism in films this textured is that the style becomes so all-important the end result is a viewer deprived of a heart to identify with. In short, often, a human element is missing. Morrison has referred to this film itself as “the Creature,” and given the agonized condition of footage chosen, Morrison’s creature may be the most pathos-laden performance of the character since Boris Karloff. One can only imagine the painstaking process it took in assembling Morrison’s creation into a cogent psyche, imbued with personality as predominant “presence.” A popular comparison might be the collaboration between James Whale and Claude Rains in producing a personality-driven Invisible Man (1933), but Morrison’s approach is more innovative, while still being true to the author’s tenets. Douglas’ music provides an informative touch of flesh stretched over the cranium supplied by archival footage from Ernest Shackleton’s film of an Antarctic expedition. As in the novel, the film opens here in the segment titled “The Captain’s Story.” The viewer steps with the Captain in his interaction with creator and created and the unfolding tragic drama.
Through laboratory footage we meet “A Promising Student” and adopt his sense of ambition and wonder. Educational footage and decayed nitrate, which looks hauntingly like an intensely animated closeup of an Emilio Vedova canvas, bring “The Doctor’s Creation” to violent life.
In “The Creature Watches” antiquarian city crowds, desolate landscapes and achingly lonely images of a child endow the creature with a Chaplinesque essence. The psychedelic beauty of “The Creature’s Education” is extended and sublime. The heartbreaking “Observations Of Romantic Love” segues into the bitter sting of ‘The Doctor’s Wedding” and the inevitable dejection of “The Creature in Society.” In “The Creature Confronts His Creator,” the new Adam dares to accuse a negligent father, and in “The Creature’s Pursuit” it is God who is tried and condemned. A justifiable patricide is, perhaps, the greatest burden of all. It is the stuff of horror, even nearly 200 year old horror served up in our own mythological consciousness.
154. VIDEODROME (1983)
“My early drafts tend to get extreme in all kinds of ways: sexually, violently, and just in terms of weirdness. But I have to balance this weirdness against what an audience will accept as reality. Even in the sound mix, when we’re talking about what sort of sound effects we want for the hand moving around inside the stomach slit, for example; we could get really weird and use really loud, slurpy, gurgly effects, but I’m playing it realistically. That is to say, I’m giving it the sound it would really have, which is not much. I’m presenting something that is outrageous and impossible, but I’m trying to convey it realistically.”–David Cronenberg on Videodrome
DIRECTED BY: David Cronenberg
FEATURING: James Woods, Deborah Harry, Jack Creley, Sonja Smits
PLOT: Searching for the next level of violent and pornographic entertainment, CIVIC-TV president Max Renn discovers a pirate broadcast called “Videodrome” that depicts the torture and killing of nude men and women in an undisclosed location. Renn is thrilled by what he sees as the future of television, a savage show with no plot, characters, or budget, but his interest in in the program becomes more personal than professional as he watches it with radio personality Nikki Brand and develops his own taste for sadomasochism. Meanwhile, Renn explores the origins of “Videodrome” and its connection to media prophet Professor Brian O’Blivion, whose lectures about the relationship between the human mind and televisual media suggest “Videodrome”’s influence over Renn goes much deeper than he realizes.
BACKGROUND:
- David Cronenberg’s inspiration for Videodrome came from his childhood experiences of watching televisions pick up distant, distorted signals after the local stations had gone off the air. He imagined what it would be like to see something obscene or illegal on the screen, and he wondered whether he would turn away from the sight or keep watching.
- CityTV, a Toronto-based independent television station that controversially broadcast softcore porn movies late at night in the 1970s, was the inspiration for Videodrome‘s “Civic TV.”
- Special makeup effects designer Rick Baker began work on Videodrome shortly after winning the Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Makeup, the first award ever given in that category. He was awarded for his work on the film An American Werewolf in London.
- The character of Professor Brian O’Blivion was loosely based on Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher of communication theory. McLuhan is famous for coining the phrase “the medium is the message,” echoes of which can be seen in Videodrome. Cronenberg may have been a student of McLuhan’s at the University of Toronto.
- Videodrome was a box office bomb, earning only $2 million at theaters (it cost $6 million to make). It has since become a cult film.
- At the time of this writing Universal Pictures lists a Videodrome remake as “in development.”
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Videodrome is full of unforgettable scenes, from Max Renn inserting a gun into his stomach to Barry Convex’s death by cancer-inducing bullets, but it is Renn’s sexual encounter with his television that best captures the hallucinatory, philosophical, and disturbingly erotic aspects of the film. After watching footage of Nicki Brand strangling Prof. O’Blivion, Renn is drawn to his television by Brand’s playful but insistent voice, as her lips grow to fill the screen. Soon, Renn is close enough to reach out and touch the device, which throbs and grows veins under his fingers like an engorged organ. Between rasps and sighs, the television says, “I want you, Max,” as Renn caresses its frame, becoming more aggressive and aroused. The screen begins to bulge under Renn’s groping hands as he leans forward, his face disappearing into the screen’s disembodied lips while they slurp and moan in ecstasy. Though Brand initially seduces Renn, by the end the television has become the willing object of his lust. Renn is not a passive observer of the screen, nor is his television a lifeless machine. Rather, Renn’s craving for the television enters the device and animates it, infusing it with so much desire that it is able to desire Renn in return. This giving of life to the mechanical captures Videodrome’s most salient theme, the idea that technology is not separate from humanity but instead represents an expansion upon the human form, a “new flesh” that may either subjugate or liberate us all.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Videodrome ((Videodrome is used in three senses in this essay. When italicized (Videodrome), the word means the movie directed by David Cronenberg. “Videodrome” is placed in quotes to signify the pirate broadcast Renn watches. When not in quotes or italics, Videodrome refers to the abstract entity or idea of the Videodrome.)) is weird from the moment it introduces its titular snuff program, not just because of the violence it depicts but also because of the characters’ casual acceptance of that violence. Renn and Brand’s unreserved fascination with the “Videodrome” broadcast places them in an alternate moral universe, one where murder is simply the next step for television; the viewer is displaced from his or her own ethical reality.
That disorientation only increases as Videodrome takes hold of Renn, inducing horrible visions that further loosen his and the viewer’s grasp of what is real. In those hallucinations, Renn is subjected to brainwashing and disfigurement that warp him on a mental and physical level, shaking the sense of himself that is his most basic link to the real world. In one scene Barry Convex forces a videocassette into the vaginal slit that Renn has grown on his stomach, adding overtones of surrealism and rape to the story. It is an assault on not just the body and the mind but also on reality, an experience that shatters the protagonist and the viewer in a way few other films can match.
Original trailer for Videodrome
COMMENTS: Near the beginning of Videodrome, a talk show host asks, “Don’t you feel [violent and sexual] shows contribute to a social climate of Continue reading 154. VIDEODROME (1983)
LIST CANDIDATE: THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS (1966)
Uccellacci e Uccellini
DIRECTED BY: Pier Paolo Pasolini
FEATURING: Totò, Ninetto Davoli
PLOT: A wandering father and son meet a talking raven on the road.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It is, indeed, quite weird, with Totò and his young companion passing from one absurd scenario to another as they walk down life’s metaphorically dusty path. The main problem with the movie, however, is that it seems very much a product of its time and place: which is to say, not merely the 1960s, but Italy in the mid-1960s, and not merely 1960s Italy but 1960s Italy as seen through the eyes of leftist intellectuals of that period. For all its supposedly timeless and mystical talk about class and religion, I’m not sure this movie has traveled well in its long journey to our era.
COMMENTS: Casting the famous clown Totò (the Italian equivalent of France’s Jacques Tati or Hollywood’s Charlie Chaplin) as an amoral bourgeois tramp in a nonlinear Marxist/Surrealist adventure may have been a coup and a stroke of genius in 1966, but it’s a move that doesn’t register with a modern international audience—jokes lose their force when they have to be explained via a footnote. Similarly, it’s sort of funny when, in the middle of the movie, intertitles pretentiously inform us that the talking raven represents “a ‘left-wing intellectual'”; but then they confuse us by adding “…of the era preceding Palmiro Tagliatti’s death.” Who wants to have to pause the DVD to jump on Wikipedia and discover that Tagliatti was the head of the Italian Communist party from 1927-1964? (You can see his portrait in footage from his funeral that Pasolini splices in at random at the end of The Hawks and the Sparrows). Much of the flighty Hawks seems like an in-joke made for people who are long dead now, which is a bit of a shame, because Pasolini’s pair of clowns do encounter some universal themes on their journey from and to nowhere. The meat of the movie is a flashback to the time of St. Francis, who tasks Fra. Totò and apprentice with bringing the Gospel to the “arrogant” hawks and the “humble” sparrows. Against all odds, through months of prayer and chirping and hopping about, the monks appear to accomplish the feat, only to watch a bitter punchline undo all their good work. The movie feels complete at this point, but there are still 45 minutes to go, so Totò and son return to the modern world, where they get involved in various land disputes as both the exploiters and the exploited, and join up with a wandering carnival for a while before ending up by competing for the affections of a roadside slut. The movie’s messages are encased in the candy shell of Totò’s slapstick, with lots of mugging for the camera, absurd little dances, and sped-up chase scenes. Pasolini’s parable seems, at first, to prophesy that Marxist ideas of equality will eventually triumph and bring about the ancient Christian vision of the brotherhood of man that the Church has failed to achieve in centuries of work. But, given the the raven’s final hopeless failure to convert Totò and son, perhaps he isn’t so naïve about equality’s prospects in this bird-eat-bird world.
I must confess to having a personal disaffinity for the works of Pasolini; it’s hard to explain why. To me, he always seems like an intellectual who has turned to cinema, not a natural born filmmaker. One of his movies is even entitled Theorem, for God’s sake. The irrational came naturally to directors like Luis Buñuel or Andrei Tarkovsky, but when Pasolini wants to fly beyond reason, I always see his wings straining. He’s still a huge figure in cinema, and something of his deserves to be on the List of the weirdest movies ever made, but what?
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: