This animation is just about as nerve-wracking as any documentary on the subject of factory farming.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 3/21/2014
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):
Falcon Song (2014): Judging from the trailer, it’s about a guitar-playing drifter who meets a telekinetic hottie who’s involved in a land dispute with the Masons. No one has seen it yet, but co-star Rainey Qualley, who’s Andie McDowell’s daughter, has movie star looks. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her show up in something more prominent soon. Falcon Song official site.
Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013): This documentary covers Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s failed attempt to adapt Frank Hebert’s cult sci-fi novel to the big screen (a task later completed less than admirably by David Lynch). This documentary is getting more buzz than Jodorowsky’s actual new release, The Dance of Reality, which suggests that the general public likes the idea of Alejandro Jodorowsky better than they like the reality. Opening in New York City this week, future dates unknown. Jodorowsky’s Dune official site.
Maladies (2012): A retired, mentally ill soap opera star (James Franco) loses his grip on reality and hears voices as he lives with his equally deranged sister. Directed by “internationally acclaimed multimedia artist Carter,” it has currently earned a o% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Maladies official site.
FILM FESTIVALS – Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, MI, Mar. 25-30):
Ann Arbor is the destination of choice for experimental filmmakers whose work is too academic, obscure and/or weird to screen at mainstream film festivals. As usual, we recognize almost none of the featured titles. The program that catches our eye is next Friday’s (3/28) “Animated Films in Competition” slate, which features a new stop-motion short from the Quay Brothers and “Sangre de Unicornio,” a Spanish-language cartoon about teddy bears hunting unicorns. We’re sure there’s other good stuff there, too. Why not go there and find it for us, Michiganders? Ann Arbor Film Festival home page.
IN DEVELOPMENT:
Forbidden Zone 2 (201?): After years of talk about a sequel to 1980’s trip to the groovy, cartoonishly Satanic 6th Dimension, the time for talk is over. Richard Elfman is putting his money where his mouth is… or rather, he’s putting your money where his mouth is, with a crowd-sourcing campaign on Indiegogo. Per the synopsis, an angry clown, interracial love affair, a princess in pasties, and an army of pinheads figure heavily in the new plot, along with an all-new score from brother Danny Elfman. The FZ fanbase is big enough that this one is certain to be funded; at this writing they’ve earned about a third of their $100,000 goal, with more than a month left to go. Forbidden Zone 2 at Indiegogo.
Once Upon a Time in Jerusalem (201?): A blasphemous gore comedy from Spain that will feature Jesus chopping up zombies and mutants with the skeleton of a giant fish. The trailer reveals an absurd level of carnage that approaches Tokyo Gore Police: Spanish splatterpunk. It’s an expanded version of the successful festival short “Fist of Jesus,” that featured the Messiah botching the resurrection of Lazarus and inadvertently creating a plague of zombies. Raising money via Kickstarter, they filmmakers are asking for an ambitious $150,000, and have raised $11,000 in pledges with a month and a half to go. Once Upon a Time in Jerusalem at Kickstarter.
NEW ON DVD:
“Is This a Zombie?” (Season 1) (2011): See description in DVD below.
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
“Is This a Zombie?” (Season 1) (2011): A teen is killed by a serial killer, resurrected by a zombie, then killed again by a chainsaw-wielding magical girl and resurrected as a female magical zombie… The plot description of this 13 episode gender-bending harem/zombie anime caught our eye in a week with few home video releases to consider. Buy “Is this a Zombie?” (Season 1) [Blu-ray/DVD Combo]
Mysterious Skin (2004): A teen who believes he was abducted by aliens tracks down a childhood pal, now a hustler in New York City, while investigating the source of his amnesia. This searing drama is generally considered Gregg Araki‘s best work. Buy Mysterious Skin [Blu-ray]
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
Broad Daylight (2004): More madness from Memphis’ John Michael McCarthy (Teenage Tupelo). This one is simple nostalgia: a recreation of Bettie Page-style burlesque loops (featuring garters and stockings, pasties and feather boas) shot in washed out 8mm Kodachrome color, set to psychobilly music. It’s still kinda weird. Watch Broad Daylight free on Youtube.
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.
TRUE STORIES (1986)
Ed. note, 12/2018: True Stories has been officially added to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies.
True Stores (1986) is one of the quirkiest and most original movies of the 1980s. That is not altogether surprising, since the Talking Heads were perhaps the most authentic and original rock band since Velvet Underground. Their concert film Stop Making Sense (1984, dir. Jonathan Demme) is justifiably considered to be the most perfectly filmed musical performance to date. That film, like the Talking Heads themselves, was birthed from the New York New Wave underground scene, with true-blue eccentric David Byrne as the front man, driving force, and genius of the group. The remaining members of the band supplied a down-to-earth quality which prevented Byrne from totally succumbing to art-school loftiness. Further proof lies in the Heads’ True Stories (1986), and more pointedly in the fact that post-Heads Byrne, while still compelling and clever, has been decidedly uneven in his work, and unable to retain that sorely missed folksiness he had with the band.
Byrne writes, directs, narrates and stars in True Stories and it is his congenial presence which edifies all the quaint idiosyncrasies inherent in American mythology. Byrne sheds his oversized dinner suit for a black cowboy hat, hops in a red convertible, and escorts us to the fictional Virgil, Texas just in time to celebrate its 150th anniversary. Not surprisingly, what follows is hardly a linear narrative. Rather, it is an anecdotal slice of postmodern myth informed by banality, fashion, and consumerism with Byrne as our gnostic Thorton Wilder guide. Although Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, True Stores never descends into all-too-easy cynicism. For the free spirited, Virgil is as easy to take as chocolate covered Talking Heads. Some, including the late Roger Ebert, claimed True Stories is not a musical. I disagree. Like any good musical, this film makes no claim towards pretentious realism. In Busby Berkeley‘s musicals, the directors always attempted to mask the eccentricities of the characters, and the choreographer. Byrne’s approach is to romance his characters, with the Talking Heads lip-synching to Byrne’s nine songs via good-humored abandon. The result is a refreshingly original choreography that gives the film its whimsical quality. The studio didn’t know quite what to do with True Stories and, predictably, nothing like it has been attempted since, making it a standalone effort with a texture solely of its time and place.
A young, awkward, and infectiously charming John Goodman plays a bachelor whose life goal is to get married. The “Wife Wanted” neon sign in his yard never seems out of place in Virgil. A preacher (John Ingle) begins his sermon with a discourse on Elvis, and you do know that those newfangled barcodes are going to be used by the antichrist? I recall very similar sermons from my own childhood in the 70s. True Stories astutely captures those beautiful, real moments of unintentional, inspired surrealism.
Among Virgil’s inhabitants are: a married couple who haven’t spoken in 15 years (Spalding Grey and Annie McEnroe, who are quite happy with the arrangement), the laziest woman in the world (Swoosie Kurtz), a pathological liar (the delightful Jo Harvey Allen) who claims Rambo was one of her sexual conquests, and R&B musician Roebuck “Pops” Staples and Mexican punk singer Tito Larriva (both of whom prove that Byrne and company are not Virgil’s only musical inhabitants).
There’s no evading the ghostliness that palls over True Stories, but it is as perfectly natural, edifying, and American an idea as Norman Rockwell providing illustrations for the National Enquirer.
CAPSULE: VANISHING WAVES (2012)
DIRECTED BY: Kristina Buozyte
FEATURING: Marius Jampolskis, Jurga Jutaite
PLOT: A scientist experimenting with a technology to allow people to enter the minds of others finds himself in ethical dilemma when he falls in love with his test subject: a young woman trapped in a coma.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Kristina Buozyte (and her co-writer and “Creative Director” Bruno Samper) are names to keep an eye on. However, Vanishing Waves, a slightly trippier (but much sexier) variation on Inception, comes up short of making the List of the Best Weird Movies: it’s weirdness is just an accent for its science fiction conceit.
COMMENTS: Made for about 1.5 million dollars, but looking much more expensive, Vanishing Waves is a literal head-trip that explores what it might be like to travel into someone else’s mind. With fractal effects morphing out of diffused white light and neural maps that twinkle like celestial bodies in the void, overlaid with a cellular geometry, the visuals portraying the boundary between one consciousness and another reminded me of a grayscale version of Enter the Void.
Once inside the mind of the other, however, scientist Lukas finds coma victim Aurora’s interior life to be a series of tableaux based on the real world, including a paradisaical beach, an empty opera house, and a wooden home that takes on an M.C. Escher by way of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari architecture. What Lukas sees inside Aurora’s head is clearly made of dreams, as when they observe a strange blue insect eating a pile of tiny globes, which it then excretes from its hindquarters, encased in a gelatinous casing. This is a strange image of primitive sexual biology, and Aurora—who doesn’t speak, as the verbal portions of her mind clamped down in the grips of her coma—has little more than the primal urge of sex left on her mind. Her first act on encountering Lukas swimming in the infinite ocean of her consciousness is to passionately soul kiss the stranger, an act which, predictably, gets Lukas hooked and wanting more.
The sleeping Aurora has no idea who Lukas is, and in her brain-damaged fugue state cannot imagine—at least at first—the existence of any other consciousness besides hers and his. Inside her mind is a perfect guilt-free, consequence-free world of erotic abandon, and we can understand why Lukas doesn’t explain the full depth of his discoveries to his fellow scientists, even if we don’t endorse his acts. The early couplings are playful, childlike and primal, an attitude reinforced by their infantile reactions to the dishes at an elaborate imaginary feast: they splash each other with soup and wine and spit the half-chewed blackberries onto their faces, savoring texture of the food against their skin as much as its flavor. As Aurora starts to slowly and instinctively rebuild her memories, their sexual Eden unravels. A dark, mysterious third party is glimpsed lurking in the shadows of Aurora’s mind, and, in the movie’s centerpiece sequence, an orgy of writhing, faceless bodies turns from a wet dream to a nightmare. When you get down to it, Lukas is a 21st century cyber-rapist, penetrating his victim’s mind, with the coma serving the same function as a roofie snuck into a drink. However much Lukas is obsessed with Aurora, this is not a what society normally views as a solid basis for a mature relationship. Can the pair form a meaningful mind-to-mind connection under these bizarre circumstances? And, given Aurora’s low-brain-activity condition, does she have any other practical suitors? These questions are left to the viewer to decide.
Specialty releaser Artsploitation Films views Vanishing Waves as the brightest jewel in their catalog, and presents it in an elaborate 2-disc set. There is no commentary track but there are both written and filmed interviews, a hidden (that is, unlabeled) slide show, and a “making of” video. The two extra-special extras are the film’s complete soundtrack and the entirety of Kristina Buozyte’s début film, The Collectress, a drama about a woman who has to film herself engaging in increasingly risky behavior because she can only feel emotions when watching them on video.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Tally Isham, who said it had “very good moments of dream-like weirdness.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
CAPSULE: HAIRSPRAY (1988)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: John Waters
FEATURING: Ricki Lake, Divine, Leslie Ann Powers, Michael St. Gerard, Jerry Stiller, Colleen Fitzpatrick, Deborah Harry, Sonny Bono, Shawn Thompson, Ruth Brown, Jo Ann Havrilla, Clayton Prince, Mink Stole, Pia Zadora, John Waters
PLOT: A plus-sized teen dance sensation campaigns for “Miss Auto Show” and agitates for racial integration in 1963 Baltimore.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There’s just a whisper of the old Trash Trilogy weirdness left in John Waters’ 1960s teen nostalgia movie.
COMMENTS: The first of two films John Waters made in the late 1980s with PG ratings and mainstream aspirations, Hairspray indulges in personal nostalgia for the once-and-future transgressive director. The tone is what you might call mock-saccharine. Set in Baltimore at the dawn of racial integration, much of the action takes place on the set of the local teeny-bopper dance show, where wholesome white suburban youths swivel their hips each afternoon to rhythm and blues hits from black artists, while the darker-hued children wait for “Negro night” to strut their stuff. Hefty “hair hopper” Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake) gets her shot at a tryout and turns out to be a huge crowd favorite, earning the ire of previous teen queen bee Amber von Tussle and her showbiz parents.
Hairspray isn’t a profoundly weird movie, but neither is it a straightforward one. The level of reality here is about the same as a Hollywood musical (and the characters do break into spontaneous choreographed dance routines), and, although it deals with serious racial issues, there is no more real conflict or danger here than in an Annette Funicello beach movie. The pro-integration teens are innocent and righteous, and the rigid old guard eventually withers in the face of their enthusiasm, leaving the good guys to celebrate at a sock hop while the bad guys pout in the corner.
But, while there’s none of Waters’ trademark nastiness on display here, his arch view of our tacky culture still shines through, especially in the outrageous wardrobes (a roach-studded dress), hairstyles (Debbie Harry sports two different ‘dos that no human being has worn before or since), and decor (the doe-eyed thrift-shop family portraits on the walls of the von Tussle homestead). There’s also the novelty casting: novice actress Ricki Lake (cast because she was the only fat girl Waters could find who could dance), blues singer Ruth Brown, celebrities fallen on hard times like Sony Bono and Pia Zadora, pop stars like Debbie Harry (who’s great as a nasty stage mom) and the Cars’ Ric Ocasek (as a Baltimore beatnik), Waters regulars like Mink Stole, and, of course, Divine (both in and out of drag). If that’s not enough outrageousness for you, there’s also Waters himself running around as a psychologist with a hypno-wheel and a cattle prod, trying to shock Tracy’s best friend Penny Pingleton out of her forbidden “checkerboard” relationship with the black Seawood. Throw in a wino serenade, a trip to a special ed class reserved for “hairdo scofflaws,” and teens doing “vintage” dances like the Roach, the Tailfeather and the Bug, and you’ve got yourself a movie that’s odd without being alienating. This is one of Waters’ most beloved films (admittedly, by a different demographic than the one that worships at the idol of Pink Flamingos), because his genuine fondness for the era and its naively idealistic teenagers comes through on the screen. Even Debbie Harry’s asymmetrical flip hairdo can’t outshine that.
Hairspray was adapted into a Broadway musical in 2002, and from there into a second feature film in 2007 (with John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Amanda Bynes, and others). The musical remake made more money than the original, but I can’t say I know anyone who’s seen it. The original lands on Blu-ray this month.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Hairspray (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51lnYnN-LjL._SL500_.jpg)