A man receives medical attention when he is diagnosed with a peculiar condition; worms have infested his mind.
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Tag Archives: 2010
LIST CANDIDATE: BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2010)
Beyond the Black Rainbow won 2015’s reader-determined “List Candidate” tournament and was placed on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time. The official entry is here.
DIRECTED BY: Panos Cosmatos
FEATURING: Michael Rogers, Eva Allan, Scott Hylands, Marilyn Nory
PLOT: Within the depths of a mysterious, retro-utopian health clinic, a troubled psychologist attempts to treat a silent young woman with telekinetic powers, but she keeps trying to escape.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Weird story, weird characters, weird weird visuals: Beyond the Black Rainbow definitely has weirdness in spades. At times it is overly self-satisfied in its ambiguity, but overall it’s a strong psychological thriller that revels in the bizarre.
COMMENTS: Opening with a creepily soothing informational video reminiscent of something out of the Dharma Initiative, Beyond the Black Rainbow immediately sets a dark and cryptic tone. The kindly Dr. Mercurio Arboria believes he has created a center for peace, understanding, and mind-opening advancement of the human race. Years later, his haven seems deserted, with only the mute and magical Elena seen in its cells. She is quiet but tightly coiled, ready to burst both mentally and physically. She holds Dr. Arboria’s protégée Barry Nyle in deep sway, but her importance to the institution is unclear. Through a surreal and unforthcoming flashback sequence her connection to Dr. Arboria and Nyle is expressed, though her telekinetic abilities remain something of a mystery. Her eventual escape prompts Nyle to take serious action.
Writer/director Panos Cosmatos draws from trippy horror-thrillers of the 70’s and 80’s to create his mood, with flashes of Altered States, 2001, Scanners, and the like. The pace is measured, with asides to Nyle’s dreary home life paired with closer views into the stark, enigmatic complex of Arboria. White walls intersect in a maze of cells and hallways, black panels reveal hidden objects, colored lights and energy pyramids glow in the dark—all while eerie synthesizers pulse over the soundtrack. The close shooting style lends the film a claustrophobic, tense atmosphere that is increased as the visuals become stranger and more abstract. Psychedelic colors swirl and coalesce, while a cult ritual is acted out in severe black and white and uncanny slow motion. Mutants in latex suits roam the hallways, and, oh yeah, heads explode!
As supposed psychologist Barry Nyle, star Michael Rogers wears his own face like a mask—impenetrable and unreal. His manner is cool and calculated, whether he’s murdering his own mentor or talking to his confused wife. His sadistic, violent nature is fully revealed through physical transformation, resulting in a chilling slasher chase during the film’s climax as Nyle hunts down Elena. Elena herself starts off as a typical waifish victim, silent and impassive. As her anger and determination rise, she becomes more self-assured and by the end is definitely a character to root for, a new-age Final Girl who values her freedom more than her revenge.
Beyond the Black Rainbow is in some ways high-minded and inaccessible, but its gorgeous and dreamlike visuals combined with its haunting electronic score and intriguing premise make for an engrossing and all-around weird experience. Its horror-thriller undertones and 1980s influences are well-incorporated, though some of its actual story/script elements are messy.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: THE CORRIDOR (2010)
DIRECTED BY: Evan Kelly
FEATURING: Stephen Chambers, David Patrick Flemming, James Gilbert, Glen Matthews, Matthew Amyotte
PLOT: A young man is released from a psychiatric hospital and invites his childhood buddies for a weekend in a cabin in the woods to commemorate his mother’s passing.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Corridor leads to a weirdly horrific place, but the word that comes to mind when thinking of it is “solid.” Watching it won’t waste your time if your tastes run towards the uncanny, but it doesn’t belong on any “best of all time” lists.
COMMENTS: A lot of bizarre things happen in The Corridor, but the strangest of all may be when mad Tyler, who stabbed his friend Everett in the hand during a psychotic break after his mother’s apparent suicide, is released from the mental hospital and invites his victim and three other friends to a snowbound cabin in the middle of nowhere for a memorial service for the deceased woman—and they accept. If you buy that, you’ll probably have no problem accepting the notion of a mystical corridor with rippling aurora borealis style walls that descends over the forest and grants a muddled omnipotence to anyone who enters it. The convention of the “cabin” genre is to isolate a small core of actors in the titular location and allow them to party and grate on one another’s nerves for thirty minutes before the carnage starts. Usually, the victims are quickly sketched stereotypes (or archetypes, as The Cabin in the Woods would have it), and here, too, we get the expected division between the social haves and have-nots: the jock and the jerk musician are the cool kids, picking on the brain and the dweeb, with the “nice guy” running interference between the two camps. The Corridor‘s characters, however, are a more grown-up gang of cabin fodder—rather than typical teens just trying to get laid and get blotto, they’re dealing with adult problems like stalled careers, starting a family, and the onset of male pattern baldness. The age shift results in richer dramatic context; the characters are better rounded, with more at stake and deeper histories that make the pranks and jibes they throw at each other reverberate with buried resentments. The opening is drawn well enough that you shouldn’t mind that the movie takes its time setting up the dynamic between the five men before beginning its descent into madness. When Tyler discovers the mystical hallway in the woods and starts seeing visions of his dead mother, the question arises: is his sanity backsliding because his meds are mixing badly with the booze his pals slipped into his juice, or are the voices he’s hearing really emissaries from another world? Don’t expect any unambiguous answers from the determinedly weird third act, where the Corridor grants those who stand within its halls strange powers, like synchronized nosebleeds, super hearing, and, most memorably, unsurpassed skill at rock-paper-scissors. The blood starts to flow and the script pulls a sanity switcheroo or two as the pace accelerates on the way to a reality-busting finale. On the whole The Corridor is a well written and acted affair that delivers a satisfying wallop of schizoid horror, and benefits from a low-to-mid budget that forces it to substitute psychological depth and narrative invention for special effects.
The Corridor is one of those movies that so far has divided audiences and critics. Festival reviewers were almost universally positive, contributing to IFC’s decision to pick up the film for its “Midnight” line of smart horror. Fright flick fans, on the other hand, showed a tepid reception to the film, perhaps because they were hoping for something with a little more gore and a lot less confusion from a “cabin” movie.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
LIST CANDIDATE: ATTENBERG (2010)
DIRECTED BY: Athina Rachel Tsangari
FEATURING: Ariane Labed, Evangelia Randou, Vangelis Mourikis, Giorgos Lanthimos
PLOT: A strange young woman tries to cope with her father’s impending death and her disgust at human sexuality with the help of her equally odd but extremely promiscuous best friend.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Because you can use the first scene, which begins with the least erotic lesbian kiss ever put on screen and ends with the two girls dropping on all fours and hissing at each other like cats in heat, to clear any unwanted squares out of the room.
COMMENTS: “If ever there was a possibility of escaping the human condition and living imaginatively in another creature’s world, it must be with the gorilla,” proclaims Sir David Attenborough from the TV screen—but that’s only because he never met Marina. The conceit in this study of the ineffable otherness of others is that we watch Marina and her friend Bella as if we’re watching a nature documentary about creatures whose rituals we can only dimly grasp, but not entirely understand. To remind us of that fact, the pair will break into weird dances of their own invention, or suddenly slip into animalistic hissing, spitting, and primal chest pounding. Yet, despite these alienating narrative techniques, we still manage to sympathize with strange Marina, thanks to Ariane Labed’s affectingly melancholy performance and confident direction which manages to keep the uncomfortably absurd from sliding into the merely laughable (as many commentators have pointed out, the girls’ dances are reminiscent of outtakes from Monty Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch, only with more crotch-grabbing). Even when the movie avoids experimentation and plays it straight, Marina is one odd bird. She believes herself to be asexual but forces herself to practice French kissing with her best friend, and eventually to seduce a visiting engineer (played by Dogtooth director Lanthimos). The resulting sex scenes are so painfully awkward they make losing your virginity on prom night a model of erotic smoothness by comparison. Marina’s deepest relationship is with her cancer-stricken father. There’s a naturalness and comfortableness to their conversations; it comes across that she’s been in the habit of confessing her bizarre thoughts—like the fact that she imagines her father naked, but without a penis—to him for years, and he’s been in the habit of gently steering her opinions into more conventional channels. When he dies, who will constrain her deranged imagination? If normality and integration into society is the goal for Marina, however, then her only friend Bella is a bad influence, encouraging her in her apparent dream of becoming an avant-garde choreographer for Martians. Bella’s very existence, and her devotion to Marina, is something of a mystery in Attenberg. She is Marina’s mirror image, reversed along the sexuality axis: where Marina imagines fathers without penises, Bella dreams of a forest of phalluses, then worries that “seeing genitals in your sleep is a bad omen.” Attenberg is at its best when it’s spying on these intriguing creatures and their shocking individuality. In those few occasions where it widens its lens to suggest a wider sociopolitical metaphor, as when the dying father pontificates about the death of the twentieth century, Greece’s future, and “petit-bourgeois hysteria,” we politely indulge the discourse as we would the observations of any dying man who’s being used as a director’s mouthpiece, but secretly wish Marina and Bella would get back to dancing like circus monkeys hopped up on fermented bananas. Although “normal” movie audiences will find the casual, naturalistic surrealism of Attenberg insufferable, around here we see it as a case where an infusion of welcome weirdness spices up what otherwise might have been a dreary drama about a disaffected daughter and her dying dad.
First with Dogtooth, and now with Attenberg, it appears that the economic and social crisis in Greece has put national filmmakers in a weird mood; or, at least, that’s what The Guardian believes. Regardless, Greek drama hasn’t achieved this level of weirdness since they were making up stories about guys ripping out their eyes because they accidentally had sex with their moms.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Gnosos, who described it as “another [G]reek weird movie.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
LIST CANDIDATE: MUTANT GIRLS SQUAD (2010)
DIRECTED BY: Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Tak Sakaguchi
FEATURING: Yumi Sugimoto, Suzuka Morita, Yuko Takayama, Tak Sakaguchi
PLOT: On her 16th birthday a bullied teenage girl discovers she’s really a half-breed mutant with
a claw for a hand; she joins up with others of her kind and must decide if she will help them destroy humanity and usher in an age of mutants.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: At least one of these new wave Japanese splatterpunk movies will eventually make the List; it’s just a question of which one can raise its head (or more appropriately, spout its geyser of blood) above the mad crowd. This entry in the cycle has the advantage of being a collaboration between three of the top talents in the sleazy subgenre—Noboru (RoboGeisha) Iguchi, Yoshihiro (Tokyo Gore Police) Nishimura, and Tak (Yakuza Weapon) Sakaguchi—as well as being bat-guano insane in its own right.
COMMENTS: You’ll probably know whether you want to see Mutant Girls Squad or not on the basis of the still above. Three of Sushi Typhoon’s top directors each handle a thirty minute chapter of this thinly-plotted, tripped-out triptych, and each is intent on outdoing the other in outrageousness. It’s a testament to the anything-goes interchangeability of the mutant-bioweaponry genre that you probably wouldn’t realize three hands were in this pie without being told; each of the directors promiscuously mixes up styles within his own segment, from teeth-chattering action sequences to absurd organ-oriented comedy to a terrorist music video medley mixing “Ave Maria,” calypso dancing, and suicide bombings. This filmmaking procedure may result in a certain level of discontinuity (schoolgirl Rin discovers and activates her mutant claw in the first chapter, and then goes through the mutant awakening procedure all over again in the succeeding segment), but that’s not too much of an issue in a style that makes comic books look like hardcore realism by comparison. The loosely sketched storyline involving a war between humans and mutants is just a clothesline on which the filmmakers hang as many “WTF?” moments as they can. To wit, you get soldiers equipped with masks that fire bullets from their noses; a baker ironically carved up into a baguette; a mutant pop with deformed nipples and genitalia; a flashback to a decapitated head on a birthday cake; a final boss with two giant boobs on either side of his head that shoot acidic milk; and so on, and so on. All this craziness becomes so expected, in fact, that it’s the quieter touches that stand out: in context, it’s actually more bizarre that the mutant cheerleader girl wears a bright yellow sweater reading “I [heart] Texas” than that she can extrude a chainsaw from her rectum. Of course, if you’re familiar with these movies at all, you know they’re not intended for anyone squeamish around blood and guts. Squad lives up to its forebears with all the expected exploding heads, absurdly abundant fountains of blood jetting from decapitated necks, and other demonstrations of the infinitely malleable meatishness of our all-too-frail human forms. Mutant Girls Squad‘s only real ambition is to zip from one outlandish, grotesque image to the next, and to do so as fast as possible so its audience never has the slightest opportunity to get bored. It achieves that ambition, but the effect is like scarfing down a pile of candy on Halloween; it’s tasty while you’re guzzling it down, but you might feel a little sick and guilty when the feast’s over. You also might feel that you’ve been robbed of a proper nutritious meal.
Since Meatball Machine essentially founded the mutant splatterpunk genre in 2005, Japanese studios have been churning out these chaep, absurdly bloody vehicles at the rate of 3-4 videos per year. In 2010 Nikkatsu Studios (makers of yakuza potboilers and pink films, and the company that infamously fired Seijun Suzuki for making movies that were too weird) spun off a sub-label called “Sushi Typhoon” to pump out these b-movies and market them to the lucrative Western market.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: