We’ve collected all five nominees for 2013′s Weirdest Short of the Year together in one place, for ease of voting. Just click “continued” for a mini film-festival of weirdness. And be sure to vote for your favorite! (You can cast a vote once every 24 hours). Polls close March 2 at 1:00 PM EST. Last year there was much more voting activity in the feature movie category as opposed to the shorts category, despite the fact that all of the shorts were available for viewing. We suspect that this was because ten films was too many for most people to http://366weirdmovies.com/vote-for-the-weirdest-short-film-of-2013/consider watching, so this year we have cut down the number of nominees to a more manageable five. You have no excuse not to vote for your favorite! A special thanks goes out to Cameron Jorgensen, 366 Weird Movies under-appreciated shorts Czar, who discovered most of these films through his own research. This year’s lineup includes absurd comedies starring Hollywood actors, animated drug trips, gold-plated gangsters, scary antique puppets, and surreal satirical weirdness. Click below to view all the nominees and vote. Continue reading VOTE FOR THE WEIRDEST SHORT FILM OF 2013
SATURDAY SHORT: RAT PACK RAT (2014)
Sundance Film Festival has a knack for featuring shorts that test how much our stomachs can tolerate, and how absurd a storyline can get while still drawing in our empathy. Rat Pack Rat left me with a discomfort not dissimilar to Bobby Miller’s Tub, that premiered at Sundance in 2010. I probably won’t put myself through watching it twice, but I’m very glad I watched it once.
Content Warning: This short contains strong adult situations.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 1/17/2014
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.
FILM FESTIVALS – Slamdance (Park City, UT, Jan 17-23):
If your movie isn’t commercial enough for Sundance (see below), you can try exhibiting it at Slamdance, the punk-ier film festival running contemporaneously to its bigger brother. Although there are a lot of weird-looking works there this year, almost all of them are shorts, except for one feature scoop we’re highlighting below.
- Cheatin’ – Bill Plympton‘s latest weird animated feature is about a woman who, with a magician’s help, takes the shape of her paramour’s ex-girlfriends. Screening tonight, Jan 17, at 8:00 Central (hurry!), or catch it Jan. 20.
FILM FESTIVALS – Sundance (Park City, UT, Jan 16-26):
The 2014 movie season officially kicks off with Sundance, where a hundred hopeful independent movies, some weird, come to vie for a handful of distribution contracts. Here are the one’s we’ll be keeping an eye on:
- The Double – Jesse Eisenberg stars in this comic adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella about a man whose exact double suddenly appears and usurps his life. Screening Jan. 17, 18, 21 & 25.
- Frank – An aspiring musician joins a band led by an artist (Michael Fassbender) who always wears an oversized papier-mâché head. Jan. 17-19, 21, 25.
- The Girl from Nagasaki – An experimental version of “Madame Butterfly” with (judging from the stills) some scenes set in space or underwater. Jan. 21-13, 25.
- A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – An Iranian vampire romance set in a depraved urban netherworld, stylistically influenced by Spaghetti westerns. Jan. 19, 21-22, 24-25.
- Mr leos caraX – Documentary on the enigmatic Holy Motors auteur. Jan. 20, 22-25.
- Only Lovers Left Alive – Jim Jarmusch’s latest tackles vampires in love; with Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton (as vampires named “Adam” and “Eve”) and Mia Wasikowska in a rare villainous role. Jan. 21-22, 24-25.
- R100 – A sadomasochistic sex comedy from Hitoshi Matsumoto about a businessman who joins a secret club that arranges for dominatrices to attack its members in public places. Jan 18-21.
- The Voices – Marjane Satrapi‘s first American feature is a tale of murder involving a factory worker who takes advice from his talking cat and dog. Jan. 19, 22-23, 25.
- White Bird in a Blizzard – A girl is haunted by her mother’s unexplained disappearance years ago; not sure if this is weird, but director Gregg Araki‘s movies usually are… Jan. 20-21, 24-25.
Sundance Film Festival official site.
NEW ON DVD:
Plus One (2013): Teenagers find their doubles crashing the wildest party of the year in this doppelgänger thriller. From the director of the Last House on the Left remake; it didn’t get a real theatrical release, but The New York Times and the Village Voice both thought it had cult potential. Buy Plus One (+1)
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Buffalo ’66 (1998): An ex-convict (Vincent Gallo) kidnaps a moody teenage girl (Christina Ricci) to pose as his wife as he visits his family on his way to kill Scott Norwood for missing the field goal that cost the Buffalo Bills Superbowl XXV. This oddball character study with magical realist interludes has been quietly spanning time for the past 15 years, but unfortunately the Blu-ray arrives with no extras. Buy Buffalo ’66 [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.
THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED (1926)
Historians, film buffs, and Disney fanatics all cite Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) as the first animated feature. While it is the first animated feature as we Americans tend to think of animation, actually that “first” honor goes to a little known, innovative oddity from eleven years earlier. The Adventures Of Prince Achmed (1926) is a labor of love from the pioneering female German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger and her husband, Carl Koch.
What makes Achmed still unique 88 years later is animation entirely composed of cutout silhouettes. The result was one of the silent era’s most enchanting and captivating films. It is also a lucid reminder that the medium of film was at its most innovative in its infancy, before the rules were set and the mediums defined.
Reiniger lucked into a patron for her artistic efforts: Louis Hagen supplied her with enough film stock and financing to proceed with her project. Using scissors and black construction paper as her primary tools, Reiniger spent three years meticulously working in an attic on Achmed with a small crew that included her husband/cinematographer, Koch.
Influenced in part by Georges Méliès and Arabian Nights, Reiniger created a world of sensuous, exquisitely detailed beauty. The film has an almost surprisingly coherent and linear narrative, given that Reiniger was embraced by the European avant-garde. Unfortunately, the director had difficulty booking Achmed, and with the exception of Dr. Doolittle And His Animals (1928), the rest of her career was relegated to short films. There was work on a third feature, to be based on Maurice Ravel’s enchanting opera, “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges”; unfortunately, rights to the music could not be secured and the film was abandoned. The Adventures Of Prince Achmed is the only one of Reiniger’s films to date that has seen a home video release. Some of her shorts occasionally appear on television, but often in truncated versions. One such example is Doolittle, which has aired with added (and intrusive) voice over narration, coupled with woefully inadequate projection speeds. Fortunately, YouTube has been more respectful. The Star of Bethlehem (1921), Cinderella (1922), The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Papageno (from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”) (1935), The Magic Horse (1953), and Jack and The Beanstalk (1955) along with a short documentary of her work can all be found there. The documentary shows her storyboarding techniques and the almost rapid-fired speed at which she crafted her baroque figures.
There is a noticeable gap of activity in Reiniger’s filmography from 1938 to the early 1950s. With the rise of Fascism, Reiniger and Koch struggled to flee Germany. Although not Jewish, politically they leaned left, which marked them as subversives. Jean Renoir was among those who aided the couple, but they lived in abject poverty until finally being able to settle in England in 1949. Despite the initial financial failure of Achmed, Reiniger and Koch were respected in film circles and were able to be relatively prolific.
Achmed is of its time in its portrayal of the good guys as completely good, bad guys as completely bad, and the pretty girl as in need of saving (Reiniger’s later films frequently had biblical, Victorian, fairy tale, and operatic themes). Still, it’s put over so beautifully, even the most hardened cynics will hardly care. The color tinting renders the film a phantasmagoric smorgasbord of gemstones. Achmed is awash in emeralds, sapphires, rubies, garnets, aquamarines, amethyst, topaz, citrine, tanzanite, and fire opal.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed weaves interrelated narratives involving our protagonist, his princess sister, their Caliph father, an erotic heroine (who Achmed voyeuristically spies on while she is bathing), a flying horse, a malevolent shape shifting African magician, the Witch of the Fiery Mountain, dancing harlequins, sphinxes, terrifying demons, Aladdin, and the genie of the magic lamp. Locales include an exotic island, a majestic palace, Peru, and China.
Reiniger was master of her medium and an innovator. Every step through her unique world is an enchanting one.
160. ROBOT MONSTER (1953)
“[CROW T. ROBOT and TOM SERVO are complaining to JOEL ROBINSON that the incoherence of the movie Robot Monster is making them physically ill. JOEL kind of likes it.]
JOEL: No, you don’t get it. Isn’t it kind of weird? There’s, like, a guy in a gorilla suit, and he’s got a robot head, and inside he’s got kind of a bunch of clay. I mean, I’ve seen Dali paintings that made more sense than this movie does.
TOM: Yeah, but I think there’s a fine line between surrealism and costume store closeouts!
CROW: I don’t get it, Joel. Is it cool to make no sense? Is it hip to be vague?
JOEL: No, it’s not cool, but it’s surreal…”
–“Mystery Science Theater,” episode 107 (Robot Monster)
DIRECTED BY: Phil Tucker
FEATURING: Gregory Moffett, George Barrows, Claudia Barrett, George Nader, John Mylong
PLOT: Young Johnny is playing spaceman when he encounters a pair of archeologists on a dig. Later, he is struck by lightning, we see footage of dinosaurs fighting, and Johnny awakens in a future world where mankind has been wiped out except for his own family and a few surviving scientists. The remnants of humanity are being hunted down by a Ro-man, an emotionless alien with a gorilla’s body wearing a diver’s helmet.
BACKGROUND:
- Robot Monster was originally released in 3-D (which may explain why the producers thought floating bubbles were imperative to the story).
- The film was shot in four days, mostly in Bronson Canyon, with no interiors. It reportedly cost $16,000 to make (which would be about $140,000 in 2013 dollars). As bad as it was, Robot Monster reportedly grossed over $1 million in its initial run, even before it became a cult item.
- The inserted dinosaur footage comes from One Million B.C. (1940) and Lost Continent (1951).
- The music is by composer Elmer Bernstein, who was just starting his career. Bernstein would go on to be nominated for 14 Oscars, winning once.
- According to “The Golden Turkey Awards,” director Phil Tucker attempted suicide due to the negative critical reaction to Robot Monster. Although Tucker did try to kill himself after the movie was released, the idea that bad reviews drove him to it is likely to be wishful thinking on the part of Harry and Michael Medved. The story is usually repeated—with the kind of cheap irony that suggests an urban legend—as some variation of “upset over bad reviews, the director tried to shoot himself, but missed!” Bill Warren gives a more balanced account of the scandal in his 1950s sci-fi primer “Keep Watching the Skies!
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- Robot Monster is a mainstay on “worst movie ever” lists, including the Medveds “The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.”
- Included as one of the experiments of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (Episode 107).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The “robot monster,” with his diving helmet topped by a rabbit ear antenna, all perched on top of a shaggy Halloween ape costume—especially when he’s framed by the swirling soap bubbles arising from his atom-age alien technology.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: It’s the bubbles that put it over the top. An incompetent apeman alien in a diving helmet I can accept. Dialogue like “I must—but I cannot! Where on the graph do must and cannot meet?” is absurdly awful, but period-appropriate. The random appearance of battling dinosaur footage is common detritus when you are digging around in the scrapyards of cinema. But the unexplained presence of the bubble machine—a piece of equipment important enough to get its own mention in the opening credits—nearly breaks the weirdometer. Where on the graph do “apocalyptic alien invasion” and “happy little bubble machine” meet?
“Trailers from Hell” on Monster from Mars [AKA Robot Monster]
COMMENTS: Plan 9 from Outer Space has long been recognized as the ultimate so-bad-it’s-good unintentional sci-fi comedy of the 1950s, and Continue reading 160. ROBOT MONSTER (1953)