2013

March 1, 2013 admin Leave a comment

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):

Molly’s Theory of Relativity: A female astrophysicist agonizes about losing her job and seeks counsel from relatives, ghosts and trick-or-treaters. No one seemed to like it much except for the New York Times‘ Stephen Holden, who praised it as a “surreal, post-Freudian gabfest.” Molly’s Theory of Relativity official site.

Stoker: Chan-wook Park‘s highly anticipated American debut stars Mia Wasikowska as a girl who becomes obsessed with her uncle after the death of her father; Nicole Kidman plays the crazy, sadistic mother. This psycho-thriller looks mildly weird, at best, but Park’s fans would be justifiably furious with us if we didn’t mention this one. Opening this week in New York, L.A., Toronto and Boston. Stoker official site.

War Witch [Rebelle]: A 14-year old girl is conscripted as to become a child soldier in a nameless African war, then is revered as a “War Witch” when the rebels decide she can speak to spirits. We’re not sure just how much magic is mixed in with the realism here, but there is an unavoidable Beasts of the Southern Wild vibe to the trailer. War Witch official site.

FILM FESTIVALS – Fantasporto (Porto, Portugal, March 1-9):

We love the taste of the programmers at genre showcase Fantasporto, as testified to by the fact that three of the festival’s “Grande Prémio” winners—Toto the Hero, Pan’s Labyrinth and Idiots and Angels—have made it onto our List of the 366 Weirdest Movies of all time, with more to come. This year’s slate of films, however, strikes us as less impressive than usual, maybe because so many of the movies comprising the program are older entries (one of the competitors has been out on DVD for five months already). Only two of the films below, Delirium and Vanishing Waves, are new to us. Still, we wish we were there.

Ace Attorney – Takashi Miike’s futuristic courtroom comedy is based on a video game and involves improbable hairstyles and ghost co-counsel.
Berberian Sound Studio – A neurotic British sound engineer used to working on quiet nature documentaries goes mad when he takes an assignment designing the audio for a 1970s Italian horror film.
Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same – We hate to stereotype, but cool weird b-movie title usually equals lame predictable parody.
Delirium – Surreal Ukrainian film about a psychiatrist treating a man who is obsessed with knots.
Iron Sky – Nazis from the moon invade Earth.
Vanishing Waves – A therapist becomes erotically involved with a patient in a coma when he uses an experimental technique to enter her sleeping consciousness.

Fantasporto official homepage (English).

NEW ON DVD:

Beyond the Clouds (1995): Four misty, dreamlike love stories connected by the linking device of a movie director (John Malkovich) considering his next project. Michelangelo Antonini began filming this, his last movie, at 83 years of age, but suffered a stroke during the middle of the production; the remainder of the work was completed by Wim Wenders. Buy Beyond the Clouds.

Chicken with Plums [Poulet aux Prunes] (2011): Read our capsule review. This visually spectacular romantic fantasy about the deathbed hallucinations of an Iranian concert violinist was overlooked by almost everyone else, but it was a favorite of ours. Buy Chicken with Plums.

Freaky Deaky (2012): The plot, adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel, involves two hedonistic brothers (Crispin Glover and Andy Dick), the detective who’s investigating a rape charge against one of them, two bomb-making radicals trying to extort money from the siblings, and other crazy characters. Despite bankable talent (Christian Slater also appears), this thriller with the tagline “crime is such a trippy thing” was apparently too eccentric for a distributor to pick up, and makes its debut on DVD. Buy Freaky Deaky.

Holy Motors (2012): Read our capsule review. 366 readers gave Holy Motors three Weirdcademy Awards (Weirdest Picture, Weirdest Actor, and Weirdest Scene); now that it’s on video it’s officially eligible for the List. You may want to see it. Buy Holy Motors.

The Master (2012): Read our capsule review. Joaquin Phoenix plays a rocket-fuel drinking postwar horndog who falls into the hands of a cult leader in this ambiguous existential exercise from Paul Thomas Anderson. Buy The Master.

“Midnight Horror Show: The Master Collection”: A bargain collection of contemporary microbudget fringe-horror, including Bane:An Experiment in Human Suffering, Crowbar: The Killings of Wendell Graves, The Defiled, Fast Zombies with Guns, Nina: Crazy Suicide Girl, One Hour to Die: You Have All Been Poisoned, and most importantly Lady of the Dark: Genesis of the Serpent Vampire. Going by the titles alone we are sure this collection is going to meet somebody‘s definition of “weird.” Buy “Midnight Horror Show: Master Collection”.

“Midnight Movies Vol 11: Mondo Triple Feature”: The shockumentary that started it all, the cynical and bizarre Mondo Cane, is paired with the even more exploitative sequel Mondo Cane 2 [AKA Mondo Pazzo] and Women of the World, which investigates such important women’s issues as hookers and live childbirth. All three movies were churned out by filmmakers Jacopetti and Prosperi in 1962 and 1963. Buy “Midnight Movies Vol 11: Mondo Triple Feature”.

“Midnight Movies Vol 12: Shockumentary Triple Feature”: More mondo madness from Italian muckrakers Jacopetti and Prosperi. Africa Blood & Guts exploits an entire continent while capturing stomach-turning massacres of both animals and humans; Goodbye Uncle Tom (in our reader-suggested review queue) is their only fictional work, a “documentary” about the slave trade in the American south; and 2003’s Godfathers of Mondo wraps things up with a retrospective look at the pair’s crazy career. Buy “Midnight Movies Vol 12: Shockumentary Triple Feature”.

Red Tears [AKA Monster Killer] (2011): Two detectives hunt a decapitating serial killer who turns out to have supernatural powers. More Japanese B-movie madness with a mashup plot mixing horror, martial arts, comedic violence, and police procedural. Buy Red Tears.

Suzune Genesis [AKA The Parasite Doctor Suzune: Genesis] (2011): Per distributor Tokyo Shock: “When your body is bursting with all kinds of erotic parasites, the only person that can save you is Dr. Suzune!” There’s no info on this one anywhere, but we suggest a blind buy based on that tagline. This is part one of a series continued in Parasite Doctor Suzune: Evolution. Buy Suzune Genesis.

Zombie Lake (1981): Nazi zombies rise from their aquatic graves to terrorize nude female volleyball players! Widely considered to be Jean Rollin‘s worst horror effort, this was co-scripted by the notoriously inept Jess Franco. Do not confuse with the even more hated Oasis of the Zombies, another zombie-nudie released in 1982 by (you guessed it) Jess Franco, which is also being released by Redemption this week. Buy Zombie Lake.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

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

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

Silent Hill: Revelation (2012): Read our capsule review. This pack also contains a 3D Blu-ray, DVD, digital copy and UltraViolet access. Buy Silent Hill: Revelation [Blu-ray].

Zombie Lake (1981): See description in DVD above. Buy Zombie Lake [Blu-ray].

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

The Penalty (1920): Read our capsule review. A legless Lon Chaney runs a crime empire in this, his debut feature.

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.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

THE CHASER (1928)

February 28, 2013 Alfred Eaker Leave a comment

The Chaser (1928) was Harry Langdon‘s second directorial feature for First National studios. His third and final feature, Heart Trouble (1928) is considered lost. The few who did see Heart Trouble claimed that it could have restored Langdon to prominence. However, by then First National had written their star off, canceled his contract and punished his risk-taking by yanking Heart Trouble. In most likelihood the studio destroyed all the copies.

In his review of Chuck Harter and Michael Hayde’s book “Little Elf: A Celebration of Harry Langdon,” Leonard Maltin writes: “Harter and Hayde are so pro-Langdon that they feel it necessary to disparage Frank Capra [who directed Langdon’s first film] at every opportunity… the authors take heavy-handed swipes at Capra at every opportunity, ignoring the fact that Langdon’s features did take a nosedive after the collaborators parted company. I remember sitting with an audience stunned into silence as we watched Three’s a Crowd and The Chaser when Raymond Rohauer first presented them theatrically in 1971. They are painfully unfunny. There were other factors that worked against these late-silent features aside from Capra’s departure, but Langdon was not destined to succeed as his own producer, as this book explores in detail.”

Maltin, in his turn, takes the tried and true route of putting Capra on a pedestal, while failing to grasp the nature of Langdon’s art as Langdon envisioned it. Neither of Langdon’s surviving features attempt to be typical period comedies. While Capra’s status as a consummate commercial filmmaker is well deserved, his numerous comments regarding European film, experimentalism, and film as an art form are embarrassingly sophomoric. Capra’s bourgeoisie elitism is so pronounced as to render useless his comments regarding Langdon’s aesthetic choices.

Still from The Chaser (1928) The European avant-garde and the Surrealists predictably had a better grasp on what Langdon was trying to accomplish. A revealing example might be found in Wheeler Dixon’s “The Films of Jean-Luc Godard.” Dixon writes that for the script of his film, Prenom: Carmen (1983) Godard cited Beethoven’s notebooks, Rodin’s sculptures and Harry Langdon as inspirations.

In his New Yorker review of The Chaser, Richard Brody writes: “as a director, Langdon was far more radical and original than Capra ever was, which accounts for the audience’s rejection of his films. Three’s a Crowd, from 1927, is a grimly Sisyphean comedy of a lonely man in quest of a family, and its slapstick brilliance is smeared with a mire of poverty that few dramas could rival. In The Chaser, Langdon’s directorial originality fuses remarkably with his unique performance style: he gives himself long, static, and obsessional closeups of a sort that wouldn’t be seen again until the rise of the overtly modernist cinema of the nineteen-sixties. It’s time to remember Langdon as a director, too.”

As with Three’s a Crowd, Arthur Ripley provided the story for The Chaser. The movie opens with wife (Gladys McConnel) berating Husband (Langdon) on the telephone. Husband claims to be at the lodge, but it is past 8:30! Wife’s Mother (Helen Hayward) joins her daughter in castigating Husband. Langdon’s camera lingers on Wife and Mother’s chastising for such an extended time, that it becomes progressively surreal, like a dissonant string duet. Langdon cuts to Husband, on his end, doing nothing for an elongated span of time. Eventually, Husband lethargically emerges from his lifelessness, but until then, the scene could almost pass for a still photograph. Actually, as we soon learn, Husband is engaging in voyeurism at a hedonistic party. Husband does not join in the activities himself. His lack of reaction on the telephone, coupled with his failure to join the party, strongly suggest an impotent character, an idea which will be reinforced later.

Wife and Mother go to court. Judge (Charles Thurston) denies a divorce and instead sentences Husband to 30 days of gender reassessment. Simply put, Judge forces Husband to be Wife for a month, while Wife gets to be husband. The inserts of newspaper headlines, announcing Judge’s sentence on Husband are intentionally childlike, as if culled from a dream.

From hère, The Chaser becomes postmodern.

Now parading around the house in a skirt, Husband (now Wife) sends Wife (now Husband) off to work.

A bill collector arrives, seeking a year-long overdue payment for a baby carriage. Wife calls Husband to ask. Absolutely not. We will not be needing it. The impotent Langdon is forced to return the familial dream.

After the amorous bill collector is sent a packing, the iceman cometh. After the iceman sneaks a kiss, Langdon decides on suicide. A long extended sequence on various methods of attempted self-destruction follows. When all else fails, go play golf with a buddy from the party.

Shorn of his skirt and adorned in his swashbuckling lodge outfit, Langdon reclaims his manhood with a near lethal kiss planted on a couple of bathing beauties at the golf course. This, of course, sends him back to Wife fully revived.

A sequence involving Husband mistaken for a ghost will later influence Stan Laurel.

A small slice of Langdon’s late 1920 audience had stayed with him. However, the site of the star in drag, mistakenly believing he has laid an egg and attempting suicide, rendered them aghast. The Chaser sent Langdon’s dwindling audience packing.

Posthumously, Langdon had his defenders . The critic James Agee was among them. In his Life magazine essay, Agee wrote: “Langdon had one queerly toned, unique little reed, but out of it he could get incredible melodies. Whatever else the others might be doing, they all used more or less elaborate physical comedy; Langdon showed how little of that one might use and still be a great silent-screen comedian. Twitches of his faces were signals of tiny discomforts too slowly registered by a tinier brain; quick, squirty little smiles showed his almost prehuman pleasures, his incurably premature trustfulness. He was a virtuoso of hesitations and of delicately indecisive motions. He was as remarkable a master as Chaplin of subtle emotional and mental process and operated much more at leisure.”

Canonically Weird (The List)

138. DOGVILLE (2003)

February 28, 2013 Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies) 1 Comment

“To take ‘Dogville’ primarily as the vehicle for this [anti-American political] view, however, is to make it a much less interesting movie than it is… Mr. Von Trier offered, ‘I think the point to the film is that evil can arise anywhere, as long as the situation is right.’ It is the pervasiveness of that evil — the thoroughness of the film’s pessimism — that may seem most alien of all to doggedly optimistic American sensibilities.”–A.O. Scott quoting Lars von Trier in his New York Times article on Dogville

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Lars von Trier

FEATURING: Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany, John Hurt, Patricia Clarkson, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, Philip Baker Hall, Chloë Sevigny, Stellan Skarsgård, Siobhan Fallon, Blair Brown, James Caan

PLOT: Tom Edison, who fancies himself an intellectual and a moralist and dreams of becoming a writer, is bored with life in the tiny, isolated mountain township of Dogville, until one day he comes across a beautiful, refined young woman who is fleeing gangsters for unknown reasons. Tom falls in love with her and convinces the town to take the woman in and hide her; they agree that the woman, Grace, will do chores for the townspeople to earn her keep and gain their trust. But the more the self-effacing Grace offers to the people of Dogville, the more they abuse her forgiving nature, until they have turned her into the town’s slave; then, the men who were searching her out arrive…

Still from Dogville (2003)
BACKGROUND:

Dogville is the first movie in a proposed trilogy from von Trier entitled (ironically) “America: Land of Opportunity.” The second in the series, Manderlay (2005), was shot on a similar minimalist set, also narrated by John Hurt, and featured the character of Grace (played by Bryce Dallas Howard). Manderlay was not as well received and was a financial flop. The third film has not been announced. Von Trier refuses to fly and has never been to the United States.
Von Trier set up a reality-show style confessional booth next to the set where (sometimes disgruntled) actors could enter and speak to the camera. This footage was edited into the 52-minute documentary Dogville Confessions, which appears as an extra on some DVD releases of the film.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The shot of Nicole Kidman lying in the truck bed among the apples, seen through the transparent canvas, is probably the film’s most beautiful image. Dogville itself, however, is the film’s most memorable image: a single blank set, with house walls and gooseberry bushes indicated on the floor with chalk.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Think that maybe Dogville may not be such a weird movie? Imagine you are about to pop this DVD into your player when your friend with the most ultra-conservative movie tastes walks in the room and asks what you’re about to watch. You respond, “Nicole Kidman plays a saintly woman fleeing mobsters who’s taken in by a small American town and used as a sex slave. Oh, and it’s shot in a warehouse with the buildings painted on the floor.” If your friend doesn’t immediately leave the room muttering “sounds too weird for me” then congratulations! Your most normal friend is a complete and utter weirdo.

Misleading original American release trailer for Dogville

COMMENTS: What director has a lower opinion of humanity than Lars von Trier? An acid moral parable, Dogville is almost weirdly ultra-rational, in Continue reading 138. DOGVILLE (2003) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: SHEITAN (2006)

February 26, 2013 Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies) 2 Comments

DIRECTED BY: Kim Chapiron

FEATURING: Olivier Barthelemy, Vincent Cassel, Roxane Mesquida

PLOT: Four young people agree to spend Christmas at the country home of a beautiful stranger they meet at a Paris club, but the oddball caretaker takes an intense and unhealthy interest in one of the crew.

Still from Sheitan (2006)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The adjective “weird” pops up a couple of times in reviews describing Sheitan, but we suspect that the misusage must be due to a lack of exposure to the truly bizarre stuff. Up until Sheitan‘s final act, there’s little—other than Vincent Cassel’s oddball performance—to suggest this French slasher lies very far outside of the normal range of teens-in-a-cabin horror. Unusual direction and a strange finish nudge Sheitan just barely into the weird column, but not enough to compete with the big weird boys.

COMMENTS: Honestly, despite a gonzo performance by an uncomfortably peppy Vincent Cassel, a steamy male-male-female threesome, and a startling final image, the thing that sticks with me most about Sheitan is how hateful its protagonists are. The movie starts with the fours youngsters at Club Styx, where the most emblematically despicable of the lot, Bart, is chilling out with drunken resentment. He finally works up the courage to make a clumsy pass at an understandably disinterested chick, then starts verbally abusing her when she rejects him. He sucker punches a Prince Charming who steps in to defend the innocent girl’s honor, spits in a bouncer’s face, and gets a well-deserved bottle upside his head. This, ladies and gentlemen, is our antihero, and he doesn’t get much more pleasant from here on out. He dreams about taking advantage of a female friend while she sleeps, kicks a goat, and blames everyone around him for all the bad karma he brings on himself. Although his buddies are shallow, sex-obsessed petty thieves, their worst quality is that they willingly remain friends with Bart. Bart is so abhorrent that when the clearly deranged groundskeeper Joseph (Cassel) of the house at which the gang has decided to spend Christmas Eve immediately emerges as Bart’s nemesis, we enjoy it. The perpetually grinning Joseph (Cassel’s jaw must have hurt like hell when he left the set each night) makes ambiguously homosexual suggestions to Bart, while at the same time constantly forgetting the boy’s name. The annoyance Joseph breeds in le bagge de douche whets our appetite to see these kids finally get bumped off in grisly ways (but warning: the obnoxious cast survives for far too long). There’s no doubt that this reversal of our expected sympathies is deliberate, or that it has the disquieting effect of tempting us to root for the “evil” character. As an experiment playing with the audience’s feelings and expectations, Sheitan is successful; that does not, however, make it pleasant watching these nitwits. There is symbolism along the way: religion, from the Garden of Eden to the birth of Christ, is referenced frequently and sometimes cleverly. And the fact that each of the feral French twentysomethings is from a different ethnic background—an African, an Arab, an Asian and a native Gaul—seems somehow significant. On the movie’s plus ledger, Cassel is possessed and magnetic, Mesquida is a sexy revelation, and the hallucinatory ending leaves us with some lingeringly sick imagery. Still, the thing I will remember about the movie is it’s painful vision of odious, amoral youth with horrible taste in music. This movie really hates young people, which is cool and all—hey, we all want those damn kids to stay off our lawns—but Sheitan goes just a little too far.

Sheitan is sometimes considered part of the “New French Extremity” genre of transgressive horror, along with movies like Marina de Van‘s self-mutilation feature In My Skin (2002), Alexandre Aja’s ultraviolent slasher Haute Tension (2003), and others. It’s Deliverance-style urbanites-at-the-mercy-of-peasants theme is reminiscent of the similarly unpleasant but far weirder NFE feature Calvaire (2004). Ultimately, Sheitan isn’t very “extreme”—you will see more blood in any typical Hollywood horror—but it shares the genre’s queasy pessimism about human nature.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…deeply weird, art-housey, nerve-shredding French horror…”–David Mattin, BBC (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Irene. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: A LIAR’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY – THE UNTRUE STORY OF MONTY PYTHON’S GRAHAM CHAPMAN (2012)

February 25, 2013 Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies) 4 Comments

DIRECTED BY: Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson, Ben Timlett

FEATURING: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, Cameron Diaz

PLOT: Fourteen different animation studios bring chapters of Monty Python alumnus Graham Chapman’s farcical written autobiography to life, with narration provided by Chapman himself (recorded before he snuffed it in 1989 at 48 years of age).

Still from A Liar's Autiobiography (2012)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s weird enough, but the appeal is too limited—it’s mainly Monty Python memorial fanservice.

COMMENTS: It begins (after thirty seconds of abuse) with Graham Chapman, or rather with a photograph of Chapman’s head digitally pasted onto a cutout of Chapman’s body, forgetting a line while onstage performing a live sketch. As the audience and his cutout co-stars grow restless at the awkward silence, the roof opens and helpful aliens beam the suffering actor up into a psychedelic Saturday morning kid’s show version of a spacecraft. It appears that the foregoing was all a hallucination, however, and after spewing a beautiful chunk of rainbow vomit into a gas mask as he’s being wheeled into surgery, Chapman begins reflecting on his childhood. He focuses on a (perhaps unreliable) early memory of being taken for a stroll through the wartime streets of a British city, calmly smoking his pipe as mom pushes his pram over the severed limbs littering the street. And that’s just the first ten minutes of this odd opus. At its best, A Liar’s Autobiography skips along from one insane sketch to another with the absurdist impatience of a good episode of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” Unfortunately, the script is rarely at its best, and things frequently bog down with scenes like Chapman’s memories of arguments over getting haddock or halibut during a childhood vacation; incidents that neither enlighten us about the enigmatic comic’s artistry nor, more importantly, make us laugh very hard. Chapman adds silly little jokes to his life story—such as the notion that his parents were disappointed when he was born because they were hoping for a “heterosexual black Jew with several amusing birth defects” because they “needed the problems.” This autobiography, however, probably could have used more substantial and ongoing lies, like a recurring supervillain nemesis, because a gripping life story does not emerge here: the movie plays more as a series of digressive comic essays loosely organized around Chapman’s personal chronology. The genesis and operations of Monty Python are largely passed over, though fans will catch some throwaway lines and references, and clips of some classic sketches are incorporated. None of the rest of the troupe are more than minor characters in the story. The two themes Chapman keeps returning to are his homosexuality (bisexuality, if he’d had a few drinks) and his alcoholism. From what appears onscreen, Chapman never struggled with his homosexual urges, but became a “raging poof” quite enthusiastically. Nor were his friends particularly shocked—though he does make Marty Feldman faint from giggling at his coming out party—so there’s no element of conflict to the movie’s sexual subtext. Alcohol proves a more fruitful antagonist, and scenes of hazy hotel room escapades with random groupies and a squiggly Edvard Munch-ian delirium tremens sequence add darker textures. What keeps Autobiography watchable even during its driest patches are, firstly, the constantly shifting animation styles, which range from a dingy variant on Pixar-style 3D to a blocky children’s storybook style to an experimental bits with partially translucent figures. The other thing that keeps you watching despite the lack of any compelling storyline are the completely off-the-wall bits that may pop up at any moment. A man walks out of a bomber cockpit and finds two lesbians making love in the cargo bay; Cameron Diaz voices Sigmund Freud as he analyzes the previous segment; Chapman rides in a roller coaster shaped like a penis past bizarre clumps of suspended breasts. Though not the funniest by a long stretch, Autobiography may be the most surreal project any Python was ever associated with, which is saying something in itself. Overall, this is an uneven piece, but regular readers of this site will surely find something to admire in it. Python fans will obviously want to check it out, although they also stand to be the most disappointed in its lack of probing insights into its central character.

The movie’s official site is worth a click; by answering an interminable series of silly screening questions designed to identify your level of (im)maturity, you can gradually unlock content from the film.