Tag Archives: 2006

Capsules

CAPSULE: SLAUGHTERED VOMIT DOLLS (2006)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY:  Lucifer Valentine

FEATURING:  Ameara Lavey, Pig Lizzy, Maja Lee

PLOT: A bulimic teen makes a pact with the devil in this nonsensical odyssey of ICK!

Still from Slaughtered Vomit Dolls (2006)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite it’s feature length and small cult following, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls is not really a movie at all, just a collage of clips. It was not structured to make any sort of sense, nor does it seem intended to be taken seriously. Regrettably, there does not appear to have been enough thought behind it to consider that it might be a joke on the audience, as was the case with Andy Warhol‘s notorious Sleep (1963).  Of course, I wanted to write about it as a joke. I was going to begin with an intro stating something to the effect that I always try to recommend good cinema. But my conscience won’t let me play that joke on you. The movie is really that bad.

COMMENTS: Abused teen Angela flees home, is sheltered by a lecherous priest, and sexually exploited by all she meets. Think Candy (1968), by Christian Marquand and Buck Henry, based on Terry (Dr. Strangelove) Southern’s novelized parody of Voltaire’s Candide. Only with mangled vignettes, jump cuts, smash cuts, blood, simulated violence, gore, heaving breasts, full frontal nudity, incoherent babbling, dancing bears, Nazism, and of course vomit. Lots of it. Minus the clever plot of Candy. OK, just kidding about the dancing bears and Nazism, but suffice it to say, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls makes Doors lead singer Jim Morrison’s UCLA film studies student project look like Citizen Kane.

Anyway, back to the “plot” (or lack of it). Drug addicted, alcoholic, and repeatedly used as a sexual bucket, a fed-up Angela refutes all worldly good and makes a pact with Satan in return for His protection. It doesn’t work out well. After setting fire to the priest’s church, Angela descends into stripping and prostitution, spiraling ever more furiously hell-bound, with lots of blood, gore, heaving breasts, full frontal nudity, vomit of course, and—oh wait, we already covered that.

Yup. That’s about it. Eye gouge scenes, raving girls rolling on the floor in religious mania, and naked strippers whom Valentine recruited from the local roadhouse. Hot, deranged, tormented, supple, quivering naked strippers covered with red corn syrup, sticking their fingers down their throats and retching on a glass table positioned over an upturned camera.

Apparently Lucifer Valentine is a film student with access to cameras, lights, makeup, and little in the way of clever ideas. He set out to make the ultimate work of shock value pop “art.” As pop “art,” it does indeed reflect abstract expressionism via a survey of superficial contemporary counter-cultural values: sex, drugs, rock and roll, violence, and nihilism. But so does a drive though Southeast LA. Valentine certainly succeeded in making the most deliberately offensive, ridiculous, non-nonsensical picture he could.

Only my most proudly deviant weirdo friends will want to see Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, the first entry in Valentine’s Vomit Gore Trilogy. (Yes, that’s right, there are three of these movies. The next two entries are the 2009 ReGOREgitated Sacrifice, and Slow Torture Puke Chamber [2010]). Yow!

All others avoid at all costs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…everything on display here (including its at times ‘film-school-esque’ execution) seems all to deliberate. How can we shock? How can we be disgusting? How can we seem weird? How can we gain attention? When your viewer feels as if you were asking these questions during the ‘creative’ process, much of its potential integrity and/or effectiveness is lost.”–Lawrence P. Raffel, Monsters at Play (DVD)


Scenes from Slaughtered Vomit Dolls

Saturday Short, Shorts

SATURDAY SHORT: EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY (2006)

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Since the release of his Academy Award nominated short “Rejected” (2000), Don Hertzfeldt has become something of an Internet icon. The Internet Movie Database even dubbed “Rejected” the third most popular short film in Internet history.

While still keeping true to his darkly humorous style, Don used a slightly more serious approach when creating “Everything Will Be Okay”. Rather than child abusing balloons and self-aware bananas, this short tells the story of a man’s emotional breakdown.

Content Warning: This short contains some mildly offensive violence, humor, and language.

“Everything Will Be Okay” is actually the first segment in a three-part narrative. Together, it and the second segment, “I Am so Proud of You” (2008) have received many awards from various film festivals. The currently unnamed third segment is expected to be released late this year.

Saturday Short, Shorts

SATURDAY SHORT: WOFL 2106 (2006)

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With the success of his shorts “The External World” (2011) and “Please Say Something” (2009) in festivals across the globe, David O’Reilly has become a shorts director who is not so easily overlooked anymore. Although “WOFL 2106” may not be his best short to date, it is a great introduction into his work.

WARNING: A few complaints have been made about the sound in this video. It can be a little jarring, so if you have sensitive ears be sure to keep the volume a little lower than normal.

WOFL 2106 (HD) from David OReilly on Vimeo.

More from David O’Reilly can be found on his Vimeo profile in the link above. Keep in mind, though, that some of his material does contain strong language, some violence, and sexual content.

Canonically Weird (The List)

82. PAPRIKA (2006)

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“I think that within human nature, and within the human heart as well, there are a ton of absurd impulses and instincts. But you can’t express those things because society has created these rules that say that things can’t ‘warp’ like that. It’s a rule that maintains a sense of balance in the world. But when you’re restricted like that you tend to release these impulses within your dreams. Everything ‘warps.’ I think that in the past you were able to spontaneously experience such things within the framework of reality. I think religious ceremonies would be a good example of that. Now we don’t really have that. I think that if someone from prehistoric times saw Paprika they’d say, ‘That’s how it is!’ I think they’d be confused. ‘Why would you make a movie about such everyday occurrences?'”– on the Paprika DVD commentary (inspired by the scene where the balcony handrail spontaneously warps)

“I do feel regret that my weird visions and ability to draw things in minute detail will be lost, but that can’t be helped.”–from “Satoshi Kon’s Last Words”

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Satoshi Kon

FEATURING: Voices of , , Tôru Furuya, , Katsunosuke Hori, Toru Emori

PLOT: A group of scientists invent a device called the DC-mini that allows the user to enter the dreams of those who wear it; they are experimenting with the invention on mental patients as an aid to psychotherapy.  A prototype of the machine is stolen, and the team discovers that it can be used to wreak terrible mischief when one of their number starts spouting incomprehensible babble and jumps out of a window while believing himself to be dreaming.  The situation reaches an apocalyptic peak when the thief uses the machine to absorb others’ dreams, and eventually discovers how to make dreams cross over into reality.

Still from Paprika (2006)

BACKGROUND:

  • The movie was based on a 1993 novel of the same name by Yasutaka Tsutsui; at the time of this writing, the original novel has never been translated into English.
  • Tsutsui personally chose animator/director Satoshi Kon to adapt his work.
  • Kon began his career as a manga illustrator.  He died in 2010 of pancreatic cancer, having completed only four highly regarded animated feature films and the television series “Paranoia Agent.”  Although he was working on a new project at the time of his death, Paprika was his final completed film.
  • Kon finished the storyboards before the script adaptation was completed, then wrote the story to fit the images rather than the other way around.
  • Voice cameos: Kon and writer Yasutaka Tsutsui speak for the two mystical bartenders who appear in Paprika’s dreamspace saloon.
  • The film’s soundtrack was the first to be created using a Vocaloid: all singing voices are computer generated.
  • A live action remake is in development with an estimated completion date of 2013. Director Wolfgang Peterson has promised to tone down the weirdness for a mainstream audience, aiming to create something more like The Matrix than a surreal exploration of dream states.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The dream parade, which features marching refrigerators, a Dixieland frog band, porcelain dolls, the Statue of Liberty, confetti falling from nowhere, and more. This toylike promenade tramps through the film, through forests and movie theaters and the streets of Tokyo, growing larger and larger as it absorbs more and more dreams—and it’s as intense an accumulation of imagination as you’re ever likely to behold.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Near the end of Paprika, two characters turn to each other and stare in stunned, silent disbelief. They’ve just seen a giant naked girl grow to womanhood by inhaling an anthropomorphic smog monster. Watching Paprika‘s nonstop cavalcade of technicolor fever dreams should fix your expression into the same mask of bewildered disbelief long before that point.


English language trailer for Paprika

COMMENTS:  Having suddenly grown butterfly wings, Paprika finds herself pinned to a Continue reading 82. PAPRIKA (2006) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: M.O.N. (2006)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Brian Lupo

FEATURING: Leada Ghareaghadje, Lindsay Coffelt, Donovan Vincent Kit, Amanda Rivera, Joe Hammernik

PLOT: Four teenagers stranded in rural California are stalked by a serial killer called “M.O.N.”



WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Simply put, it’s just not weird; instead, it’s a rehash of clichés from other, better horror movies that aims for competence and misses its mark completely. A couple scenes (like the ending, where one of the victims watches a video of the killer, dressed as a clown, copulating with a mannequin) are slightly weird, but none of it is even remotely memorable.

COMMENTS: To borrow the classic line from Thomas Hobbes, this amateur no-budget horror movie is, alas, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” I guess I should append “mercifully” to the last item on that list, although M.O.N. manages to pack a surprising amount of nothing into its 67-minute running time. Whole minutes go by with nothing but the sound of screams, or the sight of characters stumbling in and out of forests. If you’ve ever wondered whether snuff films could be boring, here is your answer.

After a long pre-credits sequence involving a woman being gratuitously tortured, M.O.N. shifts its attention to a car full of high schoolers going down a wilderness road. The car’s lone male is of the “macho jerk” variety familiar to slasher film afficionados, and he has to utter lines like, “Hey, don’t mess around, that s*** ain’t funny. I’m telling you right now, if any hairy-a** animal tries to shoot a load in my a**, I’ll snap a d*** off.” Let it be known: acting and dialogue are not this film’s strong suits. After some more driving and yelling, a woman runs out of nowhere and gets hit by the car; a few more minutes of yelling and accusations later, the teens discover that the car won’t start.

So naturally, they split up and wander aimlessly around the spoooky countryside, then start getting killed off in slow, dull ways. These scenes share the same penchant for mindless, unfettered brutality as something of the Friday the 13th ilk, but without any of the redeeming talent or resourcefulness. The jump scares and random loud noises are all present and accounted for, but since M.O.N. has the production values of a suburban haunted house and is largely shot through shaky handheld camera, it fails to evoke anything but the occasional chuckle.

By far the film’s most successful sequence arrives late in the film, when one of the girls wakes up in the woods with her leg chained to a refrigerator and a camera sitting next to her on a tripod. Yes, the set-up is clearly a rip-off of Saw and yes, it goes on forever, but—especially when the girl starts talking to an unheard person she seems to think is in the fridge—the scene is both odd and economical in a way that the rest of the film direly lacks. It’s still not good, per se, but at least it’s intermittently entertaining.

I’d love to say that writer/director/producer/cinematographer/editor Brian Lupo had his heart in the right place when he made M.O.N., and the film does contain a few set-pieces that could become mildly creepy with a little more thought and money. On the whole, though, it’s grating, icky, mean-spirited, and incoherent. At least it’s short.