Courtesy of the Online Film Critics Society.  Our votes and comments appear at the bottom of the post.

“The Tree of Life, which led the Online Film Critics Society nominations with seven, was the big winner at the 15th Annual Online Film Critics Society Awards. The film took home the prize for Best Picture as well as trophies for Best Director (Terrence Malick), Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain), Best Editing and Best Cinematography. No other film won more than one award.

The other three acting winners were Michael Fassbender winning Best Actor for his performance in Shame; Tilda Swinton’s work in We Need to Talk About Kevin won the award for Best Actress; and Christopher Plummer received the Best Supporting Actor prize for his work in Beginners.

The full list of winners of the 15th Annual Online Film Critics Society Awards:

Continue reading 15TH ANNUAL ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY AWARDS (WITH OUR VOTES AND COMMENTS) →

Welcome to 2012!  We’ll get in the swing of the new year by rededicating ourselves to that long-neglected reader-suggested review queue.  First off, on Monday we’ll belatedly weigh in on the Serbian Movie controversy, with a long discussion/analysis from the always-opinionated Pamela De Graff.  Next off, we’ll finally welcome seminal weird filmmaker Kenneth Anger to the 366 discussion with a survey of The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. 2, and in-depth coverage of one of the five films on that set (but which one?)  Finally, we’ll take a look at Roger Corman‘s The Terror (1963), made in 24 hours, with Jack Nicholson and Boris Karloff wandering around on leftover castle sets trying to think up a plot on the spur of the moment.

It was an anemic week in weird search terms; people were likely staying indoors and celebrating the holidays with loved ones instead of typing randomly deranged search strings into Google.  Looking for Weirdest Search Term of the Week candidates, we’re forced to fall back on old standbys like “women breastfeeding horse” (believe it or not, we field requests for ladies breastfeeding various types of livestock at least once a week).  A bit more unusual is the search for “mustard disturbing weird movies.”  “How to intimidate your paranoid schizophrenic weird creepy sleezy neighbour so they leave” was a phrase that made perfect logical sense, yet still struck us as peculiar advice to seek from a search engine.  We’ll give our vote for Weirdest of the Week to “pornographic movies in the celebrations, in fact,”: it was a weird enough query anyway, but adding the superfluous “in fact” at the end pushes it over the edge of oddness.

Speaking of the reader-suggested review queue (which we’ll be cutting down by three items next week!) here’s how it currently stands: A Serbian Film (next week!); The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. II (for Lucifer Rising, among others—next week!); The Terror (next week!); Kairo [AKA Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…

Not much going on this week as the studios tend to their holiday hangovers.  See you in 2012!

IN DEVELOPMENT:

Swet (est. 2012):  A conspiratorial musical horror satire (?), or something like that.  We only know writer/director Matthew Reel (Jessicka Rabid) promises it will be “a lot flashier and crazier than anything I have done in the past.”  Starring the familiar face of Damon Zex, alongside Damon (Reflections of Evil) Packard.  Swet Facebook page.

NEW ON DVD:

Fish Story (2009): Japanese movie about how a punk rock single from 1975 saves the world from destruction by a comet in 2012.  Not much information on this one but the synopsis does sound weird, plus it’s from “the team behind The Native Duck, the Foreign Duck and God in a Coin-locker” (!). Buy Fish Story.

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Horrors of Spider Island (1960): Read our Certified Weird review!  Since it’s in the public domain, it was only a matter of time until someone put this so-bad-it’s-weird misogynist fever dream up on YouTube.  Watch Horrors of Spider Island 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.