The Divide focuses on our disconnect with nature, and portrays our contradictory actions in a darkly comedic way.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 10/10/2014
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):
The Canal: A film projectionist suspects his wife of cheating, then discovers archival footage of a murder that took place in the house he now lives in. Another psychological horror in the “descent into madness” genre, this time from Ireland. Reviews have been favorable. The Canal official site.
Giuseppe Makes a Movie: Documentary about Giuseppe Andrews’ vulgar, boozy, super-low budget movies, cast with trailer-park residents and the homeless. This may be both the best, and the only, way for most people to see this Korinesque footage. Giuseppe Makes a Movie official site.
IN DEVELOPMENT:
“Twin Peaks” Season 3 (2016): We’re sure you’ve heard this already, but in case you’ve been in a coma the past week, but David Lynch and series co-creator Mark Frost announced that the cult TV series that brought surrealism into American homes in the form of a police-procedural soap opera will return. Pay network Showtime will be the series’ new home. Lynch will direct all the episodes, producing his first significant film work after a decade of semi-retirement. Sorry we’re late reporting the news, but if Lynch/Frost can wait 25 years between series, we can delay a few days before announcing it. Empire has a nice write-up.
NEW ON DVD:
Choking Man (2006): A shy, possibly schizophrenic Ecuadorian immigrant dishwasher falls in love with a pretty Chinese-American waitress and has animated hallucinations. Not sure why this forgotten indie from the director of that famous “a-ha” video is suddenly being re-released on DVD, but here it is. Buy Choking Man
Cult (2013): Three cute female pop idols end up battling a demon when they attend an exorcism as part of a reality show. According to the Twitch quote on the boxcover, it’s a “wacky found footage horror oddity,” which is the kind of thing we tend to look kindly on around here. Buy Cult
“The Female Gaze: Contemporary Films by Women from Around the World”: Box set of seven international female directed movies, from Film Movement. This is not the sort of thing that would normally catch our attention except for the inclusion of Madeinusa (2006), the story of an isolated Peruvian village where every year sins may be freely committed in the three days leading up to Easter—it’s sort of a Catholic arthouse version of The Purge. Buy “Female Gaze: Contemporary Films by Women from Around the World”
Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (2013): A child has his heart replaced by a cuckoo-clock at birth and is told he will die if he falls in love. This Burton-esque animated fairy tale from France is available from Shout! Factory in a DVD/Blu-ray combo pack (neither format sold separately). Buy Jack and The Cuckoo Clock Heart [Blu-ray/DVD Combo]
Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014): This time, the tornado full of sharks is in New York City, and the movie reportedly is more forthright in its comic intentions. The Sharknado movies (and SyFy’s seafood horrors in general) tend to be popular with people who discovered the concept of “so bad it’s good” five minutes ago; but will they have staying power? Buy Sharknado 2: The Second One
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Billion Dollar Brain (1967): M1 secret agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) goes up against a renegade Texas oil billionaire with a supercomputer who wants to incite a revolution in Latvia. If you ever wondered how a young Ken Russell would handle an assignment to helm a James Bond ripoff , this is your chance to find out. Buy Billion Dollar Brain [Blu-ray]
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996): Criminal lowlifes on the run hide out in a Mexican biker bar that just happens to be home to a tribe of vampires. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino‘s first collaboration was a cult success, but no word on how this Lionsgate Blu release differs from the previous Echo Bridge version (if at all). Buy From Dusk Till Dawn [Blu-ray]
Iguana (1988): After a shipwreck, a disfigured whaler makes himself king of the island and tyrannizes those who formerly mocked him. An nearly forgotten ( now out-of-print on DVD) drama-horror from the always unique Monte Hellman. Buy Iguana [Blu-ray]
Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (2013): See description in DVD above. Buy Jack and The Cuckoo Clock Heart [Blu-ray/DVD Combo]
Nekromantik (1988): Read our review. Seriously: the cheap grime of Nekromantik needs hi-def treatment? Stick to VHS if you just have to watch this trash. Buy Nekromantik (Blu-ray)
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.
182. SPIDER BABY (1967)
“In pinning its narrative to a weird family’s desperation to keep its own shadow from touching the outside world, Spider Baby anticipated a score of disparate works… Regardless of what may have inspired it or what subsequent films it may have influenced, Spider Baby remains very much its own animal. Set as it is off to one side of the real world, there’s a timelessness to the film, whose freshness remained sealed in during its decades languishing in obscurity.”–Richard Harland Smith
DIRECTED BY: Jack Hill
FEATURING: Lon Chaney, Jr., Jill Banner, Beverly Washburn, Sid Haig, Carol Ohmart, Quinn Redeker
PLOT: Merrye Sydrome is a “rare degenerative disorder,” the result of generational incest, which causes mental regression back to a primordial state and… cannibalism! The three Merrye children are the last of the Merrye line, cared for by their genteel chauffeur Bruno (Lon Chaney). Together they live relatively peacefully in a dilapidated Gothic mansion, until distant relatives and a sleazy lawyer arrive.
BACKGROUND:
- Although made in 1964, Spider Baby was not released until late 1967, financial difficulties being the primary delay. Director Jack Hill relates that in his first meeting with potential distributors, his entire audience bolted for the exit door within twenty minutes of the screening.
- Originally, the film was titled Cannibal Orgy: Or, The maddest Story Ever Told, but when picked up for distribution, producer David L. Hewitt changed it to Spider Baby. To add more confusion, it was given yet another title for the drive-in circuit: The Liver Eaters.
- Jill Banner was only 17 in this, her film debut. Following Spider Baby, Banner she was moderately active in television and, shortly before her death, she was romantically involved with Marlon Brando. Unfortunately, her life and career were cut short when she was killed by a drunk driver in 1982.
- Hill was so proud of Spider Baby, he planned a sequel, Vampire Orgy. However, the film’s numerous post-production struggles effectively ended those plans.
- In 2004 Spider Baby was adapted into a successful stage musical, which still plays in large cities.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Veteran character actor Mantan Moreland has a brief field day spoofing his old “spooked black man in haunted surroundings” character as he gets invited to play in Jill Banner’s chilling version of “itsy bitsy spider.” The sight of the dead postman hanging out the window, a victim caught in Virginia’s web, inspires a arched eyebrow from Lon Chaney Jr., and from us.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The weirdness of Spider Baby is guaranteed right from the opening credits, with a hoarse Chaney singing: “This cannibal orgy is strange to behold/In the Maddest Story Ever Told!” He is not exaggerating.
Jack Hill discusses Spider Baby for “Trailers from Hell”
COMMENTS: Attempting to describe Spider Baby, critics often compare it to the Little Shop of Horrors, “The Addams Family,” and Eraserhead. Continue reading 182. SPIDER BABY (1967)
181. THE DANCE OF REALITY (2013)
La Danza de Realidad
“I want to make cinema that loses money, cinema that forces me to look for work in other mediums. Filmaking for me is sacred. Films should have a purpose, to open our consciousness.”–Alejandro Jodorowsky
DIRECTED BY: Alejandro Jodorowsky
FEATURING: Brontis Jodorowsky, Pamela Flores, Jeremias Herskovits, Alejandro Jodorowsky
PLOT: Alejandro Jodorowsky is born to Jewish Ukrainian parents in Tocopilla, Chile; his Communist father Jaime models his appearance on his idol Josef Stalin, and his mother Sara only communicates through operatic singing. Jaime decides he must assassinate Ibanez, the fascist dictator of Chile, and eventually becomes the tyrant’s trusted groomsman. Meanwhile, Sara teaches Alejandro religion and how to cope with being a Jewish outcast in a Latin nation with fascist sympathies, while Jaime is captured, tortured, and has a religious conversion before returning to his wife and family.
BACKGROUND:
- Though clearly fantastical, many of the elements of The Dance of Reality are autobiographical. The film was shot in Tocopilla, Jodorowsky’s childhood home.
- This was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first feature film since 1990’s (relatively mainstream) flop The Rainbow Thief. He was 84 years old when Reality was completed.
- The documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune was indirectly responsible for Dance of Reality being made, because it put Jodorowsky in contact with his former producer Michael Seydoux, who put up a million dollars to get the project started.
- Brontis Jodorowsky is Alejandro’s son; he plays the director’s father in Dance of Reality. (In 1970’s El Topo, Brontis played the son of the mystical gunfighter played by Alejandro). Another of Jodorowsky’s sons, Adan, scored the music, and his wife, Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, did the costumes.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Choosing a most memorable image from an Alejandro Jodorowsky movie is like choosing the most important note in a Beethoven symphony. We went with the image (from the film’s finale) that was also selected for the movie’s poster: young Alejandro, dressed in his bright red fireman’s uniform, strides across a dock lined with life-sized black and white cardboard cutouts of Tocapilla’s oddball inhabitants: a fat prostitute, an armless beggar, the tattooed Theosophist. Always one to acknowledge his own artifice, Jodorowsky makes sure that the stagehands are partially visible behind their character shields.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If given his own way, Alejandro Jodorowsky will never make a normal or predictable movie. He certainly does not in this psychosurreal autobiography that features an ocean’s worth of sardines raining on Tocapilla’s shore, a fireman’s emblem that comes to life to suffocate its wearer, and a woman who cures her husband of the plague through her holy urine.
Original trailer for The Dance of Reality
COMMENTS: Mystical moviemaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has always held that cinema is sacred, and weirdophiles and midnight movie cultists have Continue reading 181. THE DANCE OF REALITY (2013)
CAPSULE: GHOST IN THE SHELL (1995)
DIRECTED BY: Mamoru Oshii
FEATURING: Voices of Atsuko Tanaka, Akio Ōtsuka, Iemasa Kayumi (original Japanese); Mimi Woods, Richard George, Abe Lasser (English dub)
PLOT: In 2029, a government cyborg tracks down a terrorist hacker nicknamed “the Puppet Master,” who has the ability to “ghost-hack” to possess cyborgs and brainwash humans.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The plot is so intricately confusing that it approaches the surreal, and the visionary animation occasionally verges on the hallucinatory; but once you really dive into it, you’ll find that at bottom Ghost is nothing especially weird: just good, hardcore science fiction. Director Oshii has done weirder.
COMMENTS: Ghost in the Shell begins with a political assassination of an accused terrorist hacker after police who have just stormed the building under the direction of a secretive government agency are held off by a diplomat asserting political asylum. The naked female cyborg dangling tumbling past the skyscraper window blasts his head off so good that we catch sight of the victim’s spinal cord sticking out of his headless body. That’s the kind of story we have here: a complex plot punctuated by bursts of graphic sex and violence. (Smooth Barbie-doll cyborg crotches get around Japanese taboos against depicting pubic hair or genitalia, although it’s never quite clear why female agents need to do so much of their jobs in the buff). The mix of fantasy and fanservice are très anime, although to its credit, Ghost is less exploitative and far more thoughtful than most of its kin. In between firefights and car chases, conflicted heroine Major Motoko Kusanagi delves into questions of what it means to be human—or cyborg; whether, for example, resigning from Section 9, which would involve decommissioning her titanium-reinforced skeleton and augmented brain, would change who she was, or return her to who she is.
The plot involves diplomatic intrigues between countries that don’t yet exist, turf wars between underground intelligence agencies we don’t know (“don’t forget, we’re Section 9” says one helpful Section 9 agent to another), and speculative cybernetic technology the viewer is largely required to figure out on his own. By design, the movie never directly explains the central concept of a “ghost” to us—is it a natural human brain, an “augmented” cybernetic brain, or a pure artificial intelligence? Or is it simply whatever inhabits and motivates a body (the “shell”)? Despite this obtuseness, the plot is ultimately comprehensible, with a couple of watch-throughs and a study of either the original manga (which contained thirty pages of footnotes explaining Ghost‘s sociopolitical and technological background) or an online wiki set up for this purpose.
Despite not explaining too much, Ghost keeps our attention. For some, it will simply be the beautifully drawn scenery, trippy Akira-inspired synthetic tribal soundtrack, and ample action breaks that enable them to float by without wholly grasping the plot. Others will be thrilled by the challenge to engage intellectually with the story and to deduce the nuances of a data-obsessed future setting that becomes more and more believable with each passing year. Regardless which camp you fall into, Ghost in the Shell is an invigorating animation for the mind and eye.
Ghost in the Shell has gone through numerous home video iterations, most of which failed to satisfy its picky fanbase. A “2.0” version released in 2008 updated some of the graphics and the soundtrack with the latest digital effects (and predictably alienated purists, which anime fans tend to be). The 2014 “25th Anniversary Edition” (questionable arithmetic there) Blu-ray release comes from Anchor Bay; the video remastering is praised, but there are naturally complaints about the complete lack of on-disc extras (it does contain a nice booklet with several essays). The 1998 Manga Video DVD release
Dreamworks Studios has plans for a live-action adaptation of the original manga in the works, with Rupert (Snow White and the Huntsman) Sanders to direct.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: