Tag Archives: 2013

Capsules

CAPSULE: RETARD-O-TRON III (2013)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Roelwapper (editor)

FEATURING: Merrill Howard Kaelin (archival)

PLOT: A collection of grotesque video oddities, crazy b-movie clips, fetish porn, shock pieces, and public access embarrassments.

Still from Retard-O-Tron III

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Even if it weren’t primarily focused on the sick instead of the weird, there isn’t a high enough percentage of original material (maybe 10-15%?) in this mixtape to qualify for the List of the Weirdest Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: In my review of Sweet Movie I wrote, “…no one wants to see Sweet Movie for its political philosophy. We want to see beautiful women writhing nude in liquid chocolate, gold-plated penises, and uninhibited orgies that go far beyond our deepest desires.” Retard-O-Tron embraces that shortsighted anti-philosophy wholeheartedly, and to prove it they include, among other atrocities, a clip from Sweet Movie‘s food fight/orgy with bald anarchists spitting pasta on each other and puking while pretty Carole Laure watches on in a catatonic daze. This mixtape isn’t pitched so much as a movie or an artistic endeavor as it is a dare, like peeking at a hobo’s rotting corpse discovered under a bridge. For those who think they’ve seen everything and can’t get it up for regular sleaze anymore, here’s your chance to gaze at humanity at its filthiest and most debased, with puke porn, geriatric porn, midget porn, scat porn, fake bestiality porn, stupid people being exploited for your amusement, and general nastiness. Although it’s XXX-rated, the explicit fetish parts are generally hit fast rather than lingered over, because the movie aims to arouse your disgust, not your lust. Granted, it’s not all bad: a good portion of the offerings are actually absurd/weird rather than sick/depraved. Alongside Sweet Movie, readers of this site may also recognize surreal body horror clips from Funky Forest and insane eyeball-kaiju battles from Big Man Japan among the cooler, tamer bits. B-movie madness is also a big running theme; there is out-of-context oddness from Indonesian fantasy movies, and I recognized scenes from Lou Ferrigno’s Hercules, the golf-cart chase from Space Mutiny, and some “gotcha!” scenes from Night of the Demons 2 amidst the debris. One of the most unintentionally nightmarish segments comes courtesy of notorious Christian scare-film preacher Estus Pirkle (If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?), who describes paradise in ridiculously materialistic terms (he claims the heavenly city is fourteen-hundred times larger than New York City) before trotting out a dwarf woman confined to a wheelchair who belts out a surprisingly assured (if high-pitched) gospel number. The depressing, washed-out color, bizarre theology, and wide lapels on a powder blue suit mark this sermon as something that seems like it could only originate from the alternate reality of 1970s post-late show UHF filler. Although some of the video is edited into montages or otherwise altered (the wittiest bit is an anus superimposed over Tom Cruise’s face), for the most part the material is presented as is, in apparently random order. Although the anarchic flow of the material may be intentional—it keeps you off guard, and you’re always dreading that the next clip will come from a snuff film—it makes you long for the artistry of more artistically inclined found-footage specialists , who arrange their edits thematically and with a satirical vision in mind.

Besides porn and B-movies, the other major source of footage is cable access TV clips; these often fall flat (how many bad soul singers or Christian folksingers can you tolerate?) But public access also lends Retard-O-Tron III its most problematic segments, those featuring mentally disabled chef Merrill Howard Kaelin, who hosted an unhygienic amateur cooking show where he ruined dishes while muttering to himself and occasionally drifting off into deranged impressions and childlike bouts of giggling. That wouldn’t be too bad or offensive in itself, if Kealin were just left to do his thing and we were left to observe him as a case study in eccentricity. What’s upsetting is the sarcastic introductory narration supplied by the Retard-O-Tron staff: “Buried below the pedestrian boob could be found an underlying seething fury, a fury focused at the very curse of living and all that it had done to wrong and frustrate his character. There is soul, grace and power in each deliberate movement, in each syllable…”. Was this ironic commentary added because the mixtape makers really think it’s funny and the natural reaction to Kaelin’s antics? Or did they feel that the audience needed permission from an authority figure (the eloquent narrator) to allow themselves to lighten up and laugh at the disabled? Or did they think that just the Kaelin footage alone was insufficiently shocking, and it needed to be punched up with the taboo-breaking outrage of mocking the mentally deficient? None of the possibilities are flattering, and the inclusion of this commentary (which happens six minutes into the movie) reveals a hopelessly callous attitude that poisons everything that comes after. The entire project is thereafter infected with a heartless, sociopathic tinge that goes beyond the merely juvenile persona they hope to project. The essential problem with getting hooked on the shock aesthetic for its own sake is that once you’ve liberated yourself from the irrational “bourgeois” social restraints, you’ve got no way left to get your kicks except by shattering the necessary and rational ones, like respect for the less fortunate. Retard-O-Tron III‘s unthinking rejection of basic human empathy is what earns it its “beware” rating. With a few snips, it might have been a compilation 366 could endorse, if not champion; but although I can overlook (if not forget, dammit) the scene of a pretty Japanese woman vomiting dinner up all over her date’s upraised face, I can’t condone adolescent cruelty masquerading as wit.

Retard-O-Tron III can be bought from Cinema Sewer. It’s understood that the description above, and the “beware” rating, will tempt many of you to try this out. Hey, it’s your soul—you want to kill it, it’s none of my business.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…mind-melting mixtape madness… can you stomach the avalanche of sordid perversion and perpetual uneasy feeling this collection posits?”–Lunchmeat’s VHS Blog

(This movie was nominated for review by Roel N [the creator]. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this movie was provided by the distributor for review.

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE WICK: DISPATCHES FROM THE ISLE OF WONDER (2013)

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The Wick: Dispatches from the Isle of Wonder can be seen in its entirety (for free) at the movie’s home page.

DIRECTED BY: Tom Metcalfe, John Rowley

FEATURING: Tom Metcalfe, John Rowley

PLOT: A documentary on the London neighborhood of Hackey Wick, which claims to have a higher per capita concentration of artists than anyplace in the world (1 in 7 residents), and simultaneously a comic mockumentary about two bohemian filmmakers making a documentary about Hackney Wick.

Still from The Wick (2013)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: An odd and noble no-budget effort, but one of the weirdest movies ever? No, but nice try.

COMMENTS: John and Tom, the filmmakers behind The Wick, have a framed photograph of hanging on the wall of their dingy Wick flat. You might view that fact as either a hopeful sign of experimentation to come, or a warning of impeding narrative incoherence. Both guesses would be somewhat correct. This strangely conceived project, which somehow manages to come across as improvised and carefully planned-out at the same time, will appeal to a very narrow audience. It’s obviously aimed at the art crowd and most emphatically not at the mainstream. Viewers will lean something about the run-down neighborhood of Hackney Wick, its struggling artists, and the effect that the Olympics had on the area, although all of those subjects ultimately get slighted. John and Tom demonstrate the spirit of the Wick by doing rather than by telling, and the biggest audience for this film is anyone interested in DIY art, the creative process, or the pains and passions of microbudget filmmaking. There are two, or maybe even three or more, movies embedded in The Wick, and they don’t always play together nicely. It begins with a series of nearly silent sketches featuring John (the one with the handlebar mustache and occasional pipe) and Tom (full beard, long hair, umbrella) going about their daily routine in the Wick, which consists of sneaking onto a rooftop to listen to weather reports on a beat up radio. At night they sleep foot to head in a single bed; Tom reads a copy of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” each night before turning in. They have a series of note cards pinned to the bedroom wall, the first of which reads “scene one” and the last “epilogue,” with a dozen or so blank cards in between. The two are waiting for inspiration to strike, which occurs after twenty minutes have passed when Tom has a dream of becoming a naked giant and striding across the urban sprawl. Mild pantomime comedy bits (e.g. the guys forget their keys and have to go back to the flat) relieve these early bits, but this overextended opening, unfortunately, is easily the weakest part of the movie. John and Tom finally decide to create a documentary on the Wick “in the framework of an avant-garde adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest.'” “John describes it as an attempt to undocument the documentary,” Tom explains in voiceover. “I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I believe it sounds suitably provocative.” Studies of a half-dozen residents of the Wick follow, including a photorealistic portraitist, several conceptual/performance art weirdo types, an author who gives historical background on the area, and a young Australian man who’s shipped over to work on Olympic security detail while seeing the world. There’s about thirty to forty minutes of documentary footage altogether. The final segment of the film consists mostly of short comic scenes of John and Tom camping out in a pup tent (they’ve rented out their flat to Olympic tourists), eating beans over a portable stove, editing the movie on a laptop, and even doing the Foley work for the feature. There are a few more ambitious and planned-out bits strewn about here and there, including a farcical audio tour of the Wick that provides the movie’s biggest chuckles (“once home to Percy Dalton’s peanut factory, Hackney Wick is an area steeped in history…”) and a running subplot about Tom’s desire to impress his mother with the movie (“pray be lenient mum, for we tried, and surely that counts for something.”) As for the “Tempest” references, they are indeed spread throughout the movie, although to what purpose is never exactly clear. The Wick itself is Shakespeare’s island, we can guess, and as the orchestrators of this mirage, John and Tom share duties as Prospero (although most of the time they act more like the comic relief characters Stephano and Trinculo). But where are Miranda, Ariel and Caliban, and who is it that’s shipwrecked upon the Wick? The “Tempest” conceit never really gets going, while the realistic documentary portions feel out of place, and the mockumentary sections are only sporadically funny. Still, even when it’s not quite working as entertainment, there’s an inherent likableness to the movie, mostly because John and Tom (their personalities aren’t that distinct, and they almost function as a single character) come across as the kind of mates you’d like to buy a pint for, just so you can listen to them talk about their love of movies. Barely speaking or even moving for much of the run time, they nonetheless radiate a passionate confidence and belief in their strange little work that is endearing and humorously self-deprecating. If you can get past the dry opening, you may find lots to like in The Wick, and even a little to wonder at.

“Isles of Wonder” was the name of the production of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…without a doubt one of the oddest independent films I’ve watched, period. It’s also, in an acquired taste kind of way, quietly brilliant. And mad. And very, very odd.”–David Ollerton, The London Film Review