Here’s what we got next week: we’ll report on the high-octane sci-fi racing anime Redline (2009), struggle with the question of whether every boomer’s favorite psychedelic nightmare kiddie movie Willa Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) is “weird” or not, and Alfred will down the second in his”Boris Karloff’s Final Six Pack” series with House of Evil (1968). We’ll also be revealing the nominess for 2011’s Weirdcademy Awards (including a new category, “Weirdest Short Films”), so get your index finger ready to vote for its favorites (if you’re not already a member of the Weirdcademy, we’ll provide instructions for joining).
It was a pretty great week for weird search terms, though we’re still having difficulty plowing through about 1,000 queries a day (!) Soon, we’ll have to hire an intern just to read Google Analytics reports. First off, we are proud to announce that, according to search engines, 366 Weird Movies remains your number one source of information about “haunted by an apple” (the exact phrase). We have no advice for you if you’re coming here because you’re actually being haunted by an apple, but we appreciate the traffic anyway. But that’s not the only bizarre information Google believes we can supply you with! Tired of all those inferior guides and looking for “better pillow maturation videos”? Apparently, we can help! Looking for “dinosaur bras”? Us again! Of course, we specialize in weird movies, so it doesn’t surprise us that someone would think of us when looking for “movie where a lactating man drinking beer.” But our favorite Weird Search Term of the week is the poetically sleazy “naked massage with its relished mysteries.” Why just accept the mystery, when you can get naked and relish it?
Here’s the ridiculously long reader-suggested review queue: Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (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; Schizopolis; Strings; Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE→
Jenni Hiltunen has directed a number of shorts featuring crude and eccentric behavior. “Blink” is easily the least vulgar of these, but also the most surreal.
The Wicker Tree: Two missionaries travel to a remote Scottish town where the villagers still worship the old pagan gods in this re-make/boot/hash of the Certified Weird The Wicker Man (1973). It’s from original director Robin Hardy and brings back star Christopher Lee for a cameo, but early reviews suggest Hardy should have left the old gods sleeping. We’ll probably check it out anyway: could it be worse than the infamous 2006 remake with Nicolas Cage? The Wicker Tree official site.
VIDEO-ON-DEMAND:
Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie: The Cartoon Network cult comics get their own billion dollar extravaganza, but blow the entire budget on celebrity cameos by Jeff Goldblum, Zach Galifianakis, and Will Ferrell, among others. The plot has something to do with shrim [sic]. This will be released to theaters in early March, but you can rent the movie now. Rent Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie on Video-on-Demand.
The Wholly Family: Terry Gilliam‘s much anticipated short film is set in Naples and involves Fellini-esque clowns and the director’s typically visionary visuals. It was commissioned by a pasta company and is believed to run around 15 minutes; it’s available for a $3 rental from Gilliam’s official site. Rent The Wholly Family at Terry Gilliam’s official site.
NEW ON DVD:
Fascination (1979): This week, Redemption Video is remastering and re-releasing five of the seldom-seen, dreamlike erotic vampire films of the infamous Jean Rollin (a box set would have been nice, but we’ll take what we can get). Fascination, the most recent of this bunch, features ex-porn star Brigitte Lahaie as a bisexual vampire aristocrat with a scythe, and is one of the director’s most popular and well-received movies. Buy Fascination.
The Iron Rose [AKA Rose of Iron] (1973): A couple wander into a cemetery and can’t find their way out. There’s a vampire, Gothic atmosphere, and a clown delivering flowers to a grave. Buy The Iron Rose.
Lips of Blood (1975): An amnesiac man is reminded of his life as a vampire after seeing a his family castle on a poster. Rollins was nearly killed making this film when he dived into the sea to try to save a coffin prop and was struck on the head and knocked unconscious. Buy Lips of Blood.
The Nude Vampire (1970): This is the immediate followup to Rollin’s Rape of the Vampire (1968), the movie that kicked off the director’s mildly surrealistic, exploitative erotic vampire fetish formula. This one throws in interdimensional portals and a stag-headed man alongside the marquee vampire(s). Buy The Nude Vampire.
Shiver of the Vampires [AKA Strange Things Happen at Night] (1971): A honeymooning couple stay in a castle run by vampires. The usual nonsensical atmosphere and nude women Rollin fans crave. Buy Shiver of the Vampires.
Sister Mary (2011): We’re going entirely off the plot synopsis here, but this does sound weird: a homophobic cop teams up with a flamboyantly gay partner to stop a serial killing nun, and they end up uncovering a conspiracy by the Catholic Church. So it’s a homoerotic blasphemous comedy thriller; oh, and it’s listed as a musical, too. Starring Judy Tenuda (remember her?) as the serial Sister. Buy Sister Mary.
Restless (2011): In Gus van Sant’s latest, a boy obsessed with funerals (a la Harold in Harold and Maude) romances a girl with terminal cancer. Also, his best friend is the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot. We chose to skip this bit of sentimental quirky magical realism when it briefly played in theaters, but it might make for an OK rental. This offering is a DVD/Blu-ray combo pack. Buy Restless (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo).
Spellbound (1945): The new psychiatrist (Gregory Peck) at a mental hospital has amnesia and may actually be crazier then any of the patients; a glacial female doctor (Ingrid Bergman) helps him work though his repressed memories to discover a horrifying secret. So may of Hitchcock’s great movies tease us with near-weirdness; this flirtation is the director’s most serious, as Hitch actually hired Salvador Dalí to prepare the dream sequences. Buy Spellbound [Blu-ray].
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
Star Wars Uncut (2012): You may remember this project. Hundreds of amateurs and semi-professionals were invited to recreate scenes from Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). The resulting pastiche switches styles from one submission to another every 15 seconds, turning the completed movie into a disorientingly hilarious experience. Contributions range from relatively sophisticated animations to textspeak iPhone transcripts to people acting out the scenes using their pets, and it features more hairy guys playing Princess Leia in drag than you’d ever want to see in one lifetime. Worth a watch. Watch Star Wars Uncut 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.
*This is the first part of “Karloff’s Bizarre and Final Six Pack,” a series examining Karloff’s final films.
A lot of people have expressed the wish that horror icon Boris Karloff could have ended his career with Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968). But Karloff, on his last leg, pushed himself through six more movies, four of which were the Mexican films for producer Jack Hill and director Juan Ibinez. This last six pack of films is, by consensus, godawful. Why did Karloff do it? According to his biographers, the actor said that he wanted to “die with his boots on.” And he nearly did just that.
This series is not going to be a revisionist look at those six films. They are awful within the accepted meaning of the word. Several of them, however, are downright bizarre products of their time, which now might be looked at as examples of naive surrealism. The films are: House of Evil (1968), Fear Chamber (1968), Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), Cauldron of Blood (1970), Isle of the Snake People (1971), and Alien Terror (1971).
Fear Chamber ranks as one of the weirdest of the lot, and that is saying much. It begins with pseudo-torture of scantily clad women. The scene is soaked in garish sixties colors and a “bleepy” soundtrack. The various female victims are tormented by a goateed chap, wearing turban, sunglasses (in an underground cavern), white gloves, and black turtleneck. With “all the macabre horror of Edgar Allan Poe” these poor sixties chicks are subjected to hot coals and boiling cauldrons.
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“The doll character had been working its way into my drawings since 1990. A lot of these things evolved from drawings. The drawing is coming from the subconscious, really, so you don’t really know why, or say ‘why am I drawing it’?”–Christiane Cegavske on the DVD commentary to Blood Tea and Red String
DIRECTED BY: Christiane Cegavske
FEATURING: With one minor exception, all characters are silent animated puppets
PLOT: A group of aristocratic white mice commission rodentlike creatures with beaks (called the “Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak”) to create a doll for them, but once the puppet is fashioned the Creatures refuse to give it up; instead, they revere it and sew an egg they find floating in a creek inside its torso. The mice steal the doll and take it to their lair, so the Creatures set out on a journey to recover it. Along the way they meet a frog sorcerer and a spider with a human face, and everything changes when the egg inside the doll hatches.
BACKGROUND:
The film took 13 years to make, with Cegavske animating perhaps 10 seconds a day. Many of the models and effects used show up in the director’s 1992 short Blood and Sunflowers.
Cegavske intends for Blood Tea and Red String to be part of a trilogy, and in 2011 she announced the second part of the project, titled Seed in the Sand. She estimates this installment will take five years to complete.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Blood Tea is bizarre throughout, and many will be attracted to the psychedelic splashiness of the sequence where the Oak Dwellers eat hallucinogenic berries and see morphing pink and green leaf patterns overlaid on the courtyard garden. For my money, though, things are at the weirdest when we climb inside the dark mouse hole and watch the well-dressed vermin pour bloody tea onto the lips of the lifeless doll while their skull-headed pet raven looks on.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A dialogue-free stop-motion animated fable done in the style of Jan Svankmajer, but with a darkly feminine spin, Blood Tea and Red String gently folds surrealism into its fairy tale structure to create a weirdly compelling world. It’s an inverted Alice, told from the perspective of mutant rodents, depraved white mice, and mystical frogs.
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Fear Chamber ranks as one of the weirdest of the lot, and that is saying much. It begins with pseudo-torture of scantily clad women. The scene is soaked in garish sixties colors and a “bleepy” soundtrack. The various female victims are tormented by a goateed chap, wearing turban, sunglasses (in an underground cavern), white gloves, and black turtleneck. With “all the macabre horror of Edgar Allan Poe” these poor sixties chicks are subjected to hot coals and boiling cauldrons.
