Canonically Weird (The List)

153. CLEAN, SHAVEN (1993)

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“With Clean, Shaven, I really tried to examine the subjective reality of someone who suffered from schizophrenia, to try to put the audience in that position to experience how I imagined the symptoms to be: auditory hallucinations, heightened paranoia, disassociative feelings, anxiety. Hopefully the audience would feel at the end of it like how it must be to feel that way for a lifetime and not just eighty minutes…”–Lodge Kerrigan

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Peter Greene, Robert Albert, Jennifer MacDonald

PLOT: Peter has been released from a mental hospital, but he still suffers from near constant auditory hallucinations and paranoid thinking. Insulating himself from the outside world by taping newspaper over his car windows, he drives through New Brunswick, Canada, searching for his lost daughter Nicole, who was adopted after he was institutionalized. As Peter hones in on Nicole’s location, he is simultaneously being hunted by a detective who believes that the schizophrenic is responsible for the murder of a girl about his daughter’s age.

Still from Clean, Shaven (1993)
BACKGROUND:

  • Lodge Kerrigan’s first film, Clean, Shaven took two years to complete filming, as the director was always running out of money. The film was eventually completed for under $70,000. It has grossed far more than that.
  • Kerrigan’s inspiration for the film was a college friend who was afflicted with schizophrenia.
  • In 1994 Clean, Shaven screened at Cannes in the “Un Certain Regard” category alongside movies like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and ‘s Faust.
  • Although he is very good here in the type of intense and challenging part that usually wins awards, this role did not catapult Peter Greene to stardom. He did, however, land small parts in two of the 1990s greatest hit movies: Pulp Fiction (where he plays Zed, the cop who colludes with the pawnshop owner) and The Usual Suspects (an uncredited bit part).
  • According to reports, Kerrigan turned down early offers that conditioned a distribution deal on his editing out the fingernail scene.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: It’s hard to argue against the infamous “fingernail” scene, the gruesome moment that made festival audiences scream, squirm, hide their eyes, and sometimes stand up and head for the exits. When I think back on Clean, Shaven, however, what I remember are the shots of telephone wires streaming along to the sound of Peter’s buzzy personal soundtrack of distorted voices and static; the images reflect the miswired disorientation of Peter’s brain, mirrored in the scary external world racing by outside his car window.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This movie traps us inside the mind of a madman. We are assaulted by his auditory hallucinations, and, like him, we can’t be sure whether what we see and experience is real, or a product of a tormented imagination. The schizophrenic sound design is superlative; this may not be the weirdest movie you’ll ever see, but it’s definitely in the running for the weirdest movie you’ll ever hear.


Original trailer for Clean, Shaven

COMMENTS: Lodge Kerrigan makes movies about people you’d cross the street to avoid bumping into: the homeless, prostitutes, the mentally ill. Continue reading 153. CLEAN, SHAVEN (1993) →

Shorts

SHORT: THEODORE OF THE ABSURD (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Brad Glanden

FEATURING: Brad Glanden

PLOT: Told almost entirely through stills, this is the story of a struggling filmmaker who tries to get a musical romance made in an alternate world where movie producers are only interested in 7-hour-long abstract films about feet.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Too short and light, but it’s a promising debut film.

COMMENTS: Theodore of the Absurd takes its inspiration from .’s Chafed Elbows, both in form (a narrated series of black and white stills) and tone (comedy as done by the Marx Brothers, if they’d been beatniks). Even the title of a story-within-the-story (“Clammy Ankles”) alludes to this influence. Fortunately, the majority of the jokes seem like the could have come out of one of Downey’s early scripts, too, although they do tend more towards literary puns (“I’m sorry I let my avant-garde down”) than Sr.-style non-sequiturs. The movie’s central gag is a world where experimental and mainstream tastes have been inverted, so director protagonist Theodore can’t get anyone to back his romantic musical because they are confounded by the concept that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Theodore eventually falls in with underground Bohemians who dabble in representationalism, but he boots his big chance to impress the hipsters when he includes a Stan Brakhage scratch-on-the-film montage in his narrative film, leading to charges of conformism. Theodore follows its own artistic path, lobbing satirical bombs at both popular art and the avant-garde. The movie argues that the artist who deliberately tailors his work to fit the expectations of edgy elitists isn’t any more genuine than the sell-out who panders to popular tastes. There are also several songs, which aren’t exactly showtune quality but are amusing. A ditty about two sickly lovers who find each other contains the lyric, “She was a girl with acute sinusitis/He was a boy who had chronic fatigue/He wasn’t bothered by her gingivitis/She didn’t mind his venereal disease.” We think Theodore is a worthy tribute to Downey Sr.’s legacy; you can judge for yourself, as we’ve embedded the film on the page above (it’s only thirty minutes long).

Theodore of the Absurd is Glanden’s MFA Thesis Project. The movie has its own website that includes commercial parodies that didn’t make it into the film and a couple of well-thought-out academic essays about the avant-garde.

Capsules

CAPSULE: RETARD-O-TRON III (2013)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Roelwapper (editor)

FEATURING: Merrill Howard Kaelin (archival)

PLOT: A collection of grotesque video oddities, crazy b-movie clips, fetish porn, shock pieces, and public access embarrassments.

Still from Retard-O-Tron III

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Even if it weren’t primarily focused on the sick instead of the weird, there isn’t a high enough percentage of original material (maybe 10-15%?) in this mixtape to qualify for the List of the Weirdest Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: In my review of Sweet Movie I wrote, “…no one wants to see Sweet Movie for its political philosophy. We want to see beautiful women writhing nude in liquid chocolate, gold-plated penises, and uninhibited orgies that go far beyond our deepest desires.” Retard-O-Tron embraces that shortsighted anti-philosophy wholeheartedly, and to prove it they include, among other atrocities, a clip from Sweet Movie‘s food fight/orgy with bald anarchists spitting pasta on each other and puking while pretty Carole Laure watches on in a catatonic daze. This mixtape isn’t pitched so much as a movie or an artistic endeavor as it is a dare, like peeking at a hobo’s rotting corpse discovered under a bridge. For those who think they’ve seen everything and can’t get it up for regular sleaze anymore, here’s your chance to gaze at humanity at its filthiest and most debased, with puke porn, geriatric porn, midget porn, scat porn, fake bestiality porn, stupid people being exploited for your amusement, and general nastiness. Although it’s XXX-rated, the explicit fetish parts are generally hit fast rather than lingered over, because the movie aims to arouse your disgust, not your lust. Granted, it’s not all bad: a good portion of the offerings are actually absurd/weird rather than sick/depraved. Alongside Sweet Movie, readers of this site may also recognize surreal body horror clips from Funky Forest and insane eyeball-kaiju battles from Big Man Japan among the cooler, tamer bits. B-movie madness is also a big running theme; there is out-of-context oddness from Indonesian fantasy movies, and I recognized scenes from Lou Ferrigno’s Hercules, the golf-cart chase from Space Mutiny, and some “gotcha!” scenes from Night of the Demons 2 amidst the debris. One of the most unintentionally nightmarish segments comes courtesy of notorious Christian scare-film preacher Estus Pirkle (If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?), who describes paradise in ridiculously materialistic terms (he claims the heavenly city is fourteen-hundred times larger than New York City) before trotting out a dwarf woman confined to a wheelchair who belts out a surprisingly assured (if high-pitched) gospel number. The depressing, washed-out color, bizarre theology, and wide lapels on a powder blue suit mark this sermon as something that seems like it could only originate from the alternate reality of 1970s post-late show UHF filler. Although some of the video is edited into montages or otherwise altered (the wittiest bit is an anus superimposed over Tom Cruise’s face), for the most part the material is presented as is, in apparently random order. Although the anarchic flow of the material may be intentional—it keeps you off guard, and you’re always dreading that the next clip will come from a snuff film—it makes you long for the artistry of more artistically inclined found-footage specialists , who arrange their edits thematically and with a satirical vision in mind.

Besides porn and B-movies, the other major source of footage is cable access TV clips; these often fall flat (how many bad soul singers or Christian folksingers can you tolerate?) But public access also lends Retard-O-Tron III its most problematic segments, those featuring mentally disabled chef Merrill Howard Kaelin, who hosted an unhygienic amateur cooking show where he ruined dishes while muttering to himself and occasionally drifting off into deranged impressions and childlike bouts of giggling. That wouldn’t be too bad or offensive in itself, if Kealin were just left to do his thing and we were left to observe him as a case study in eccentricity. What’s upsetting is the sarcastic introductory narration supplied by the Retard-O-Tron staff: “Buried below the pedestrian boob could be found an underlying seething fury, a fury focused at the very curse of living and all that it had done to wrong and frustrate his character. There is soul, grace and power in each deliberate movement, in each syllable…”. Was this ironic commentary added because the mixtape makers really think it’s funny and the natural reaction to Kaelin’s antics? Or did they feel that the audience needed permission from an authority figure (the eloquent narrator) to allow themselves to lighten up and laugh at the disabled? Or did they think that just the Kaelin footage alone was insufficiently shocking, and it needed to be punched up with the taboo-breaking outrage of mocking the mentally deficient? None of the possibilities are flattering, and the inclusion of this commentary (which happens six minutes into the movie) reveals a hopelessly callous attitude that poisons everything that comes after. The entire project is thereafter infected with a heartless, sociopathic tinge that goes beyond the merely juvenile persona they hope to project. The essential problem with getting hooked on the shock aesthetic for its own sake is that once you’ve liberated yourself from the irrational “bourgeois” social restraints, you’ve got no way left to get your kicks except by shattering the necessary and rational ones, like respect for the less fortunate. Retard-O-Tron III‘s unthinking rejection of basic human empathy is what earns it its “beware” rating. With a few snips, it might have been a compilation 366 could endorse, if not champion; but although I can overlook (if not forget, dammit) the scene of a pretty Japanese woman vomiting dinner up all over her date’s upraised face, I can’t condone adolescent cruelty masquerading as wit.

Retard-O-Tron III can be bought from Cinema Sewer. It’s understood that the description above, and the “beware” rating, will tempt many of you to try this out. Hey, it’s your soul—you want to kill it, it’s none of my business.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…mind-melting mixtape madness… can you stomach the avalanche of sordid perversion and perpetual uneasy feeling this collection posits?”–Lunchmeat’s VHS Blog

(This movie was nominated for review by Roel N [the creator]. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this movie was provided by the distributor for review.

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR 9/6/2013

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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.

SCREENINGS – (Los Angeles, CA, Sep. 11-12):

The Keep (1983): Nazis reluctantly seek the help of a Jewish historian to re-imprison a demon they have accidentally released from his fortress prison. This strange synopsis, combined with the fact that this seldom-screened Michael Mann movie has never been released on DVD, makes this a major curiosity for Los Angelinos to check out. Details on The Keep screening at Cinefamily.

FILM FESTIVALS – TOROTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Toronto, Ont., Can., Sep. 5 -15):

As you can see from the list below, TIFF has become the North American destination for sub-blockbuster films, including weird ones. We found a ton of intriguingly bizarre nuggets hidden in TIFF’s massive film buffet, and that’s excluding shorts (with one important exception) and movies that already debuted at other festivals, such as ‘s Borgman, the Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary, ‘s Only Lovers Left Alive, and ‘s Why Don’t You Play in Hell? If we’re lucky, half of the potential gems listed below will emerge from this festival with reasonable distribution deals:

  • Airships – The first new  short film in three years is nine minutes of footage of dirigibles in anaglyphic 3D. Screening tonight, Sep 6., only, at 6:30 PM.
  • Asphalt Watches –  Two vagabonds take a road-trip across Canada, meeting eccentric characters like an ex-con who wants to put them through “intensive Santa training,” in this surreal and satirical Flash-animated feature. Sep 10, 12 & 13.
  • Attila Marcel – Triplets of Belleville animator ‘s first live-action feature evokes  and slapstick comedy; the protagonist is mute, but it’s a musical nonetheless. Sep 6, 12 & 15.
  • Bastardo – Tunisian film, described as a combination of film noir and magical realism, about a (literal) bastard who tries to wrest control of his neighborhood from gangs. Sep. 8, 10, 14.
  • Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari – This vignette film which explores the pagan feminism of the reclusive Russo-Finnish Mari ethnic group is currently in our reader-suggested review queue. Sep. 11, 12, 14.
  • 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. Sep 7, 9, 15.
  • Enemy – Another doppelganger flick, this one starring Jake Gyllenhaal, who tracks down a man he sees in a movie who looks just like him, with reality-bending results. Sep. 8-9.
  • A Field in England – ‘s latest movie sounds like it may be his weirdest yet: the story of soldiers during the English Civil War who accidentally eat psychedelic mushrooms while searching for buried treasure. Sep. 13-14.
  • Horns – An accused killer (Daniel Radcliffe) awakes one day to find horns growing from his head and people suddenly anxious to confess their secrets to him. Sep. 6 & 8.
  • Metallica: Through the Never – You may have seen the trailer for this 3-D mix of a Metallica concert film with some sort of post-apocalyptic roadie road trip; it looks pretty headscratching, and, sadly, Kontroll‘s directs.
  • Moebius – A tale of incest, castration and sadomasochism from ; not sure if it’s weird per se, but not something grandma’s going to be interested in. Sep. 12, 13 & 15.
  • People In Places – A series of absurd, “Buñuelian” sketches made by a Spaniard working on a microbudget. Sep. 6, 7 & 13.
  • R100 – A sadomasochistic sex comedy from about a businessman who joins a secret club that arranges for dominatrices to attack its members in public places. Sep. 12-14.
  • Real – Another post-Inception psychological thriller about a man entering the subconscious of another; this time it’s the mind of a comatose lover and the direction comes courtesy of .
  • Rhymes for Young Ghouls – Set on a reservation, the story concerns a teenage girl drug dealer getting revenge on a corrupt Indian Agent with the help of her dead ancestors. Sep. 9-10.
  • Soul – Described as a psychological thriller, the plot synopsis suggests this Taiwanese film is about two souls inhabiting the same body. Sep. 9-10, 14.
  • Story of My Death – The scenario is simply stated: it’s Casanova meets Count Dracula (literally). Sep. 5-6, 15.
  • The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears –  & return with another modern giallo. Sep. 11-12, 14.
  • Thou Gild’st the Even – A sick love story set in a Turkish village inhabited by a giant, an invisible woman, a man who can stop time, and other magical creatures. Sep. 8, 10, 13.
  • La última película – A remake of Dennis Hopper’s drugged-out disaster The Last Movie, about a filmmaker trying to make a psychedelic Western in Mexico. Sep. 10 & 12.
  • Witching & Bitching – ‘s latest sounds like From Dusk Till Dawn with witches; bank robbers fleeing a heist run into a coven in the woods. Sep 14-15.
  • The Wonders – A bartender/cartoonist is drawn into Jerusalem’s criminal underbelly when he discovers a kidnapped rabbi; the director describes it as “Lewis Carroll meets Carol Reed.” Sep. 8, 10, 15.

Curiously, there are exactly 366 new films screening at this year’s festival. We see what you did there, TIFF. You can expect to hear from our lawyers. Toronto International Film Festival official site.

NEW ON DVD:

Blancanieves (2012): This modern silent film retells the story of Snow White, set in the world of Spanish bullfighting in the 1920s. It looks a bit closer to The Artist than to , but we’d be thrilled if the powers that be release just one silent film per year. Buy Blancanieves.

“Elfen Lied” (2004): A beautiful mutant bred to be a military weapon escapes from her research facility and is hunted by the military. This 13-episode anime features nudity, gore and perversion and was described by some Internet sources as “weird” and “WTF.” Better be. Buy “Elfen Lied: Complete Collection”.

Extracted (2012): A heroin addict accused of murdering his girlfriend serves as the test case for a scientist who has invented a technique to enter people’s minds and observe their memories. It sounds like a budget version of Inception. Buy Extracted.

The Lords of Salem (2012): Read our capsule review. Rob Zombie’s attempt to do Rosemary’s Baby by way of is extremely uneven but may be worth a look for the curious. Buy The Lords of Salem.

“Movies 4 You: More Sci-Fi Classics”: The “classics” are ‘s work-for-hire The Amazing Transparent Man (1960), the creature-features Reptilicus (1961) and The Neanderthal Man (1953), and the severed-head hit (and List Candidate) The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962). The Brain disc actually includes a deleted scene (reportedly topless) as a bonus feature! Buy “Movies 4 You: More Sci-Fi Classics”. Buy “4-Film Collection: Dusk Till Dawn”.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996): See description in Blu-ray below.

Sharknado (2013): A tornado full of sharks; as the box cover proclaims, “enough said!” We’ve known about this film for some time, but, suffering from SFOMFS (Sy Fy Original Movie Fatigue Syndrome), we didn’t mention it. We never dreamed it would become a sensation. We will never again underestimate the popular appeal of mixing aquatic predators with natural disasters. Sharknado 2 has already been announced. Buy Sharknado.

Slacker (1991): Read our capsule review. We’re not sure if there are any differences between this two-disc Criterion Collection release and their 2004 two-disc edition, but copies of the previous version were getting harder to find, so a re-release (ahead of the Sep. 17th Blu-ray) is warranted. Buy Slacker (Criterion Collection).

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

“4 Film Collection: Dusk Till Dawn”: The original From Dusk Till Dawn was a bold mashup of nihilistic gangster film and b-horror movie from writer/actor Quentin Tarentino and director (teaming up together for the first time) that doesn’t really start working until the vampires show up. Like the rest of the world, we have not seen the two straight-to-video sequels, or heard of the documentary Full-Tilt Boogie that constitutes the fourth film in this set. This set spans two Blu-rays, but is special-feature free.

Blancanieves (2012): See description in DVD above. Buy Blancanieves [Blu-ray].

“Elfen Lied” (2004): See description in DVD above. Buy “Elfen Lied: Complete Collection” [Blu-ray].

“Horror Classics Double Feature: Re-Animator (1985)/ The Hills Have Eyes (1977): 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes, about a family terrorized by a clan of mutant inbred cannibals, was a drive-in hit for . ‘s transgressive 1985 black comedy Re-Animator is the gem here, however. Both features come with commentaries and special features (probably ported over from their respective DVD releases, though we didn’t verify that). Buy “Horror Classics Double Feature” (Re-Animator/The Hills Have Eyes) [Blu-ray].

The Lords of Salem (2012): See description in DVD above. This combo pack includes a DVD and an Ultraviolet copy. Buy The Lords of Salem [Blu-ray].

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996): Read our review. This Blu-ray/DVD combo pack replaces Universal’s insulting bare-bones release, and includes deleted scenes that were senselessly cut by original distributor Gramercy. DVD not sold separately. Buy Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie [BluRay/DVD Combo].

Sharknado (2013): See description in DVD above. Buy Sharknado [Blu-ray].

The Theatre Bizarre (2011): Read our review. No extras on this disc. Buy The Theatre Bizarre [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.

Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!