Capsules

CAPSULE: CATERPILLAR (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Kôji Wakamatsu

FEATURING: , Keigo Kasuya

PLOT: Lieutenant Kurokawa loses all four limbs and is rendered deaf, dumb and disfigured during the Japanese invasion of China on the eve of World War II; when the Emperor declares him a “Living War God,” his wife Shigeko is ordered to care for the living torso, including fulfilling all her usual wifely duties.

Still from Caterpillar (2010)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite its perverse premise and its superficial similarities to the Certified Weird Johnny Got His Gun, Caterpillar isn’t that weird; instead, it’s an intense domestic drama about duty.

COMMENTS: Lieutenant Kurokawa is a monster. Scarred by the war, unable to hear or to speak (with great difficulty, he can sometimes painfully squeeze out a single syllable), he’s essentially a torso, an esophagus and a fully-functional phallus. Flashbacks reveal that the caterpillar, now revered as a god, was actually a moral monster long before his physique was carved up to match. The duty to care for the god-monster falls upon long-suffering partner Shigeko, who must feed him, wipe him, and cater to his suddenly insatiable sexual needs.  For the wife, the mangled Lieutenant combines the worst aspects of an infant and a spouse—completely dependent, demanding, and incoherent, but with no compensatory cuteness or tenderness. She lives alone with him in a one-room house of horrors. Yet, perversely, this disaster delivers an unexpected upside for the poor farm wife. She gains social standing in the village as the caretaker for a god. She is sure to wheel him out in his cart daily to shore up the morale of the rapidly depopulating village as all available able-bodied men are shipped to the front to help failing war effort (even as the daily radio broadcasts detail Japan’s magnificent martial victories). On the home front, Shigeko also eventually learns to enjoy the petty power she has to deny the god a little bit of rice or sex, becoming herself a mini-dictator of an empire consisting of one subject on a straw mat. Caterpillar starts slowly but draws you in to the compellingly claustrophobic dynamic between these two unlikely mates yoked together by fate and obligation. Shinobu Terajima’s performance as the wife is brave and sympathetic (she won many awards, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival), but Keigo Kasuya’s turn as the caterpillar is even more crucial to the film’s success. His ability to convey mute fury and desperation with just his eyes, stutters and howls humanizes his role as a symbol of national and domestic fascism. The film never becomes truly exploitative, but there is plenty of caterpillar/human sex, in multiple positions, to titillate the curious. The cinematography is mostly cast in a drab browns that are effective at evoking a backwater rural lifestyle but aren’t particularly pleasing to look at. The budget is obviously tiny: for events outside of the hut and the village, the movie mainly relies on archival footage, along with one war crime recreation with distracting CG flames superimposed over the scene. But the inherent horrific drama and Wakamatsu’s insistent indictment of unthinking duty overcome the cheapness, and Caterillar metamorphoses into an anti-authority parable worth paying attention to.

Like many Japanese directors, Kôji Wakamatsu began his career in the trenches making “pink” films before graduating to more serious features. His filmography contains some titles he’d probably prefer we forgot: movies with names like The Embryo Hunts in Secret, Diary Story of a Japanese Rapist, and Violated Angels. In the 1970s Wakamatsu began slipping more politics into his exploitation films, culminating in  United Red Army (2008), an entirely serious drama about the collapse of the Japanese radical movement in the 1970s, and in this film. Caterpillar was adapted from a 1929 short story by Edogawa Rampo that was originally banned as perverse and unpatriotic.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a sexually charged two-hander with blunt allegorical implications… Audience interest will be limited to Wakamatsu devotees and the kind of cult-oriented audiences who automatically perk up at the chance to see simulated amputee sex.”–Vadim Rizov, Boxoffice Magazine (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: TOMMY (1975)

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Scott Sentinella’s writing has appeared in “The Carson News”, “The Gardena Valley News”, “Animato”, “Videomania Newspaper”, “Cashiers du Cinemart”, Dugpa.com and ALivingDog.com.

DIRECTOR: Ken Russell

FEATURING: , Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed , Eric Clapton, Elton John, Jack Nicholson, Tina Turner, Paul Nicholas, , Pete Townshend, John Entwhistle

PLOT: Captain Walker is missing and presumed dead in World War II, but when he turns up alive, his wife’s new lover kills him. Unfortunately, Walker’s son Tommy witnesses this, and the trauma leaves him deaf, dumb and blind. But Tommy can still play a mean pinball, and he becomes an odd messiah to an army of idol worshipers.

Still from Tommy (1975)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Because, with that story line, it’s a musical—literally a “rock opera”—and because Ken Russell stages every single scene like something out of a bad acid flashback.

COMMENTS: The Who’s original 1969 album, “Tommy” is wonderful to listen to, but its supposed story is impossible to figure out without, so to speak, illustrations. In this film, one of the first recorded in multi-channel sound, director Russell “illustrates”everything in the most garish hues possible—and that’s a good thing. This grotesque, excessive rock musical was clearly a predecessor to MTV, with its non-stop assault of insane imagery; Russell, not exactly the most subtle of filmmakers, is aided and abetted all the way through by an all-star cast. The Who’s lead singer, the great Roger Daltrey, inevitably plays Tommy with a vacant, blue-eyed stare, and belts every song to the back of the theater in the manner that made him famous (on the original “Tommy” album, his singing is much more low-key). Elton John, as the Pinball Wizard, parades around on stilts, while Tina Turner, as the Acid Queen, threatens to rip the screen apart with her intensity (although Paul Nicholas, as Tommy’s physically abusive Cousin Kevin, gives her a run for her money). Meanwhile, Eric Clapton as the Preacher, Keith Moon as the sexually abusive Uncle Ernie, Jack Nicholson (Ann-Margret’s old co-star from 1971’s “Carnal Knowledge”) as the Doctor, and Oliver Reed, as Tommy’s stepfather, are relatively subdued (and, yes, the last two are pretty terrible singers). Topping them all is Ann-Margret, in an unforgettable Oscar-nominated performance, as Tommy’s guilt-ridden mother. Obviously, Ann-Margret’s show tune-trained voice is really not suited to singing Pete Townshend’s music, but that only adds to the film’s strange appeal. Ann-Margret manages to be simultaneously brilliant and over-the-top (as she often is—see her Blanche Dubois in the 1984 version of Streetcar Named Desire), but when the part calls for her to roll around in baked beans and chocolate sauce, she doesn’t hold back. Then you have any number of frenzied images: Sally Simpson’s husband—a dead ringer for the Frankenstein monster, Tina Turner transformed into a giant hypodermic needle, Clapton preaching in a church filled with statues of Marilyn Monroe, Paul Nicholas burning Daltrey with a cigarette—this is a musical, all right, but it’s not exactly Meet Me in St. Louis. This version of Tommy may be bizarre to the point of self-parody, but anyone who’s ever seen the disastrous, but similar, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (produced, like Tommy, by Robert Stigwood), will understand the very special talents of the late Ken Russell.

Unfortunately, the Region 1 DVD (as well as the Blu-Ray) of Tommy has no extras, except for a paper insert describing the film’s “Quintaphonic” soundtrack. Luckily, the movie looks and sounds just fine.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Russell correctly doesn’t give a damn about the material he started with… he just goes ahead and gives us one glorious excess after another… Tommy’s odyssey through life is punctuated by encounters with all sorts of weird folks, of whom the most seductive is Tina Turner as the Acid Queen.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

Tommy - 50th Anniversary Edition 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray [4K UHD]

Tommy - 50th Anniversary Edition 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray [4K UHD]
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Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Don’t forget to vote for the Weirdcademy Awards!  Currently, surprise candidate Andy Lau (Detective Dee) is leading for Weirdest Actor; Leslie Pulsipher is rightfully running away with Weirdest Actress for being menaced by Muppets in The Oregonian; Melancholia‘s montage is barely beating The Oregonian‘s rainbow pee for Weirdest Scene; and The Tree of Life holds a slight edge for Weirdest Movie.  You can also watch all the candidates and vote for Weirdest Short Film of 2011; currently ‘s Snowballs leads, but it’s still anybody’s ballgame.

Next week we’ll dip into the reader-suggested review queue with a guest review of Ken Russell‘s shock-rock opera Tommy (1975); we’ll cover the Asian antiwar amputee sex flick Caterpillar (2010); and we’ll bring you a double-shot of Buñuel with the recently Criterionized Belle de Jour (1967) (Catherine Deneuve is a housewife with masochistic fantasies) and Simon of the Desert (1965) (about a saint who lives on a pillar).

We know why you’re reading this column.  It’s weird search terms you want, and it’s weird search terms you shall have.  We start off in porn corner, always a fertile source of deranged Google queries, with the search for “men licking awful porn.”  Speaking of awful porn, the following kink has to qualify as the least erotic fetish in all of sexuality: “sudicidal horse porn movie.”  We wonder if the first searcher would be satisfied seeing a picture of a man licking a DVD copy of the second movie.  Moving on to slightly less pornographic searches, we have to admit to being amused to see a quest to find that truly obscure film, “they saved hitler’s vagina.”  But this is a family website, and we can’t award our Weirdest Search Term of the Week to such perverted entries, however bizarre they might be.  Therefore, we award our weekly prize to the guy looking for info on “how do i use noir orangutan pills.”   Well played, sir!

Here’s the ridiculously long and ever growing reader-suggested review queue (as always, many more titles after the break): Tommy (next week!); The Bride of Frank; La Grande Bouffe; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves Started Small;  “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Freaked;  Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 2/3/2012

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A 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):

Kill List: A psychologically scarred hit man agrees to the proverbial “one last mission” and finds it ironically horrifying.  This off-the-radar British horror-thriller is drawing a lot of comparisons to The Wicker Man (something that didn’t happen for the “official sequel,” The Wicker Tree).  Kill List official site.

IN DEVELOPMENT:

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (June 2012 release):  The title tells all: this is a movie about the Great Emancipator freeing the undead from the curse of living death.  A silly concept, but the talent behind it makes it of some interest: Timur Bekmambetov (Nightwatch) is directing and Tim Burton is producing.  It’s being filmed in 3D, unfortunately.  No official site (yet).

NEW ON DVD:

Blubberella (2011): Another exercise in tasteful restraint from the inimitable Uwe Boll: a comedy about a fat, half-vampire superheroine who fights Nazis in WWII.  Boll gives himself a cameo as Hitler. Buy Blubberella.

Dream House (2011): Psychological thriller about a man who relocates his family to a suburban house where a murder once took place and starts seeing strange things, etc.  A troubled production which was virtually shelved by the Universal despite the presence of box office draws Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and in the cast.  The director tried to have his name removed. Buy Dream House.

The Mill and the Cross (2011):  Artist/director Lech Majewski brings Pieter Brueghel’s sprawling canvas “The Way to Calvary”—which set the Crucifixion in the painter’s own 16th century Flanders—to life, using CGI to overlap real actors with the artwork.  Maybe it’s not all that weird, but it’s certainly not normal.  Rutger Hauer stars as Brueghel and becomes the first actor ever to portray a Flemish painter and a hobo with a shotgun in the same year. Buy The Mill & The Cross.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Adaptation (2002):  Read our capsule review.  Nicolas Cage stars as twin screenwriters Donald and Charlie Kaufman in this seminal metamovie scripted by .  From bargain label Image Entertainment, so there are no special features. Buy Adaptation [Blu-ray].

Dream House (2011): See description in DVD above. Buy Dream House [Blu-ray].

The Mill and the Cross (2011): See description in DVD above. Buy The Mill & The Cross [Blu-ray].

Monkeybone (2001):  Brendan Fraser plays an underground cartoonist who meets his libidinal alter-ego, Monkeybone, in a coma in this Roger Rabbit-style feature mixing animated and real life characters.  It’s from Henry Selick, co-stars Whoopi Goldberg as Death, and is actually pretty nasty for a PG-13 movie. Buy Monkeybone [Blu-ray].

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

My Beautiful Girl, Mari (2002): Korean animation about a boy’s first love, with a girl who may be a spirit of some sort.  Critic were divided but it looks mildly weird (though audiences and critics used the word “confusing” instead).  Watch My Beautiful Girl, Mari 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.

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