Tag Archives: 2021

Miscellanea

YOUR VOTE DETERMINES THE WINNER OF THE (ACTUAL) 12TH ANNUAL* WEIRDCADEMY AWARDS

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*(Last year, we counted incorrectly and declared the 2020 contest the 12th annual awards, when actually it was the 11th annual. We’ve corrected that error. If the Academy Awards messed up like that, you can be sure they wouldn’t admit it!)

Once again, there is zero overlap between the Weirdcademy Awards and the Most Conventional Movie Awards dog-and-pony show hosted by Hollywood. Despite having movie stars and beheadings and beheaded movie stars, even The Green Knight proved too out-there for the Academy, just because of a few scenes of talking foxes and giants randomly wandering into the story. Why wasn’t Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon a Time nominated for best Animated Film (or at least given a Special Award for Longest, Most Confusing Title in an Animated Film)? Shinji has been fighting machines better and far more existentially than the Mitchells for over 25 years now. Keep an Eye Out was shut out of the contest for best International Feature Film, even though it waited patiently to debut here in 2021, despite being made in 2018, just so it could go up against recommend-a-cup-of-coffee-before-watching Drive My Car instead of competing with Parasite (or Roma, or even Another Round?) And hey, what about Titane—good enough for the brieheads at Cannes, but not for Hollywood?

Instead, we get to choose between biopics about the parents of famous people, remakes of 50s musicals and 40s film noirs, and non-Westerns without any six gun battles or barroom brawls. Power of the Dogs, indeed.

Yes, the Oscars are a joke, and everyone knows it. But you, my friend, you aren’t content with the same-old same-old. You want weird in your movies. The Weirdcademy Awards are for you, the moviegoer whose friends roll their eyes and sigh loudly when you suggest movie night should feature a flick about wearing a rubber suit with explosives hooked to his testicles during the radiocative samurai post-apocalypse.

Although the editors of 366 Weird Movies select the nominees from the pool of available movies, the Awards themselves are a naked popularity contest, and do not necessarily reflect either the artistic merit or intrinsic weirdness of the films involved. The Weirdcademy Awards are tongue-in-cheek and for fun only. Ballot-stuffing is a frequent occurrence. Please, no wagering.

The Weirdcademy Awards are given to the Weirdest Movie, Actor, Actress and Scene of the previous year, as voted by the members of the Weirdcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Weirdness.

Who makes up the Weirdcademy? Membership is open to all readers of 366 Weird Movies. If you can figure out how to vote in the poll, you are qualified to join. You can not be turned down because of your age, sex, religious affiliation, pronouns, vaccination status, or Joe Rogan podcast subscription. There is no requirement that you’ve have to actually see any of the movies listed before voting. You can vote for any or all categories.

Vote as many times as you like, but only once per day, please. We’ll keep voting open until March 27 at 12:00 Noon EST, so we can announce our results before the Academy Awards and steal their thunder.

Be sure to also vote for Weirdest Short Film of the Year. To watch all five nominees and to cast your vote, please click here.

Without further delay, we unveil the nominees for the 2021 Weirdcademy Awards after the break:

Continue reading YOUR VOTE DETERMINES THE WINNER OF THE (ACTUAL) 12TH ANNUAL* WEIRDCADEMY AWARDS →

Miscellanea, Shorts

VOTE FOR THE WEIRDEST SHORT FILM OF 2021

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It’s time for the 2021 edition of the Weirdcademy Awards, the premier (only) awards contest focused on weird films, chosen by weird film fans. That means shorts as well as features. We’ve collected all five nominees for 2021′s Weirdest Short of the Year together in one place, for ease of voting.  You can cast a vote for your favorite once every 24 hours until March 27 at 12:00 Noon EST. Cameron Jorgensen, 366 Weird Movies under-appreciated shorts Czar, discovered and selected these unusual films through his own research. This year’s slate includes public bleeding, a taxidermy musical, therapeutic schadenfreude, hypnotic barrel organs, and service industry trancing.

You can watch all the nominees in full below before voting (shorts may contain strong language, gross imagery, disturbing imagery, and artistic nudity):

“Book” by

“Eer” by

“Inland Empire” by

“Stuffed” by

“Tale of the Deaf” by


Capsules

CAPSULE: NEW YORK NINJA (1984/2021)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: John Liu/Kurtis Spieler (re-dub)

FEATURING: John Liu, voices of Don “The Dragon” Wilson, Leon Isaac Kennedy

PLOT: When his pregnant wife is murdered by thugs, a TV reporter turns vigilante to take down the gang of abductors responsible for his misery.

COMMENTS: ‘s mega-opus, Hitler: A Film from Germany, with all its intellectual musings, puppets, and art-housery was a highly enjoyable single-sitting film throughout its seven-plus hours. ‘s three-hour epic of mumbling bleakness, Hard to be a God, felt like a breeze. Heck, even Béla Tarr‘s meandering two-hour ennui fest Damnation felt a pleasure compared to the leaden hour-and-a-half of Vinegar Syndrome’s re(ish)-release of New York Ninja. There are times when an opinion may be deemed incorrect, and I admit that what you are about to read will come across to many as woefully misguided. That proviso provised, New York Ninja is one of the most wearisome movies I’ve ever endured.

The film’s backstory and re-creation make for an interesting tale. Back in the mid 1980s, John Liu toppled his directorial career by bankrupting his film studio during the production of New York Ninja. Back in the early 2020s, Vinegar Syndrome came into possession of some eight hours-worth of footage that had been shot for the project, and recreated the story from scratch, calling in a bunch of voice-over/dubbing heavy-weights. I tip my hat to Kurtis Spieler (the re-director) for his chutzpah and enthusiasm.

However, the resulting film is a trial by tedium. The story is chock-full of silly elements (not a bad thing)—plucky reporter lady, random kid-cum-acolyte, and whimsically attired New York City goons; and eccentric elements (a better thing)—a mysterious, effete baddie collecting women, and his Plutonium-cursed ex-CIA henchman, only seen without his bitchin’ shades when dosing himself with radiation. But the (bad) dialogue timing is all off, the silliness falls in that awkward too much/not enough layer, and from the original and re-do only one actor makes it out with respectability intact. (This being Leon Isaac Kennedy, who voices the police detective played by…? Someone.)

It is never my ambition to rain on anyone’s parade, particularly if it’s a low-budget parade with its heart in the right place. However, I could not in good conscience advise that anyone waste their time with this experiment. Whether or not the original New York Ninja would have been watchable is a mystery to remain unsolved until, perhaps, the hereafter, where all unfinished whack-o gems may get their time in the Heavenly lime-light. And I respect Vinegar Syndrome, both for their mission statement (saving old, oddball films), as well as trying their hand at this great re-jigging effort. Their ultimate goal was to recreate 1980s martial arts cheese. But left to age for four decades, this cheese has gotten too moldy to consider eating.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the movie packs in a lot of cult craziness: seemingly trying to bundle as much 80s movie madness into 90 minutes as it can…. It’s this manic energy and commitment to the absurd that makes ‘New York Ninja’ so much fun.” -Andrew Skeates, Far East Films (contemporaneous)

Top 10 Lists

TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES OF 2021

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After tomorrow, 2021 will be in the books. Despite starting off with an attempted coup and ending with a new superinfectious mutant virus, the past twelve months were actually a little better than 2020—and that shows you where we’re at. As long as we’re in the end times, with plagues and insurrections and heat waves at Christmastime and half of Facebook praying that a secret cabal is really directing all this chaos, we might as well enjoy a few weird movies along the way—even if they’re increasingly starting to look like documentaries.

Actually, for the purposes of weird movie accounting, we put 2021 to bed last month. Our annual movie calendar ends on the last day of November, to allow 366 Weird Movies Yearbooks to go out in December. We’re not missing out on much; usually, December releases are limited to extended universe entries and Oscar bait dramas.

Keep an Eye Out is Au Poste!As always, there were hard cuts at the bottom of the list. The penned surrealist noir The Show, in particular, caught us off guard with a late November Blu-ray drop. The conspiracy horror The Empty Man scored well with some of our staff, but came up empty in the end. The elegiac, absurdist sketches of ‘s About Endlessness were weighty and weird, but fell victim to more-of-the-same syndrome. ‘s eerily noisy Memoria certainly would have made this list, but it didn’t make it’s official debut until December. And of course, a couple of festival favorites bearing 2021 copyright dates—the whimsical dream auditing romance Strawberry Mansion and ‘s decades-in-the-making Boschian stop-motion hellscape Mad God—haven’t been distributed yet and will have to wait until a future year for consideration.

I personally finalize this list. The staff here has input, but I set the voting rules, create the universe of candidates, and break all ties. Therefore, if you feel that it’s a crime that Titane comes in at a lousy #4 instead of the #1 any idiot can see it so obviously deserves, I am the idiot to blame. When ranking, I use a secret proprietary formula that accounts for cinematic craftsmanship, the degree of surrealism/weirdness, and the perceived prestige in the weird movie community based on buzz and reader feedback, then I shuffle them into whatever arbitrary order I momentarily feel like without regard to any of that.

So, on to the official Weirdest Movies of 2021 List! As always, films are listed in random order—the weirdest of orders.

9. Undergods – Two corpse collectors link tales—sometimes via Continue reading TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES OF 2021 →

Top 10 Lists

TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2021: MAINSTREAM EDITION

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Here is my obligatory/traditional annual top 10 list of movies, ranked according to mainstream standards. In other words, weird movies are allowed on this list, but I attempt to rank the 2021 releases according to their general cinematic merit, intended for people who don’t specialize in the surrealer genres. Something like ‘s surrealist policier Keep an Eye Out can (and did!) make this list, but they will not automatically be catapulted to the top. Don’t worry, weird movies fared fine in this general list, as you’ll soon see—but stay tuned for the top 10 weird movies of 2021 tomorrow, where, when adjusted for weirdness, some of the same movies may show up in a different order.

I’ve been prioritizing the smaller/rarer/weirder movies in my screenings, so there are a fair number of contenders that might have made this list but for the fact that I didn’t have time to get to them in 2021:  Belfast, Cyrano, Dune, Encanto, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, Power of the Dog, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and West Side Story, among others. I expect to see all or most of these before awards voting season concludes.

Before the official top ten starts, here are 2021’s honorable mentions: About Endlessness, The Alpinist, Annette, The Beta Test, Cruella, Drive My Car, In the Earth, In the Heights, Last Night in Soho, The Nowhere Inn, Pig, Saint Maud, The Suicide Squad, and The Summit of the Gods.

10. Raya and the Last Dragon: Set in a mythical kingdom loosely based on Chinese mythology, this brightly animated Disney tale follows a girl on a quest to collect five pieces of a shattered gem to bring back dragons and stop a plague. The latest stop on modern Disney’s multicultural, female-empowered tour proves the formula still works, and the art direction is superlative as always. Raya seems likely to be overshadowed by Disney’s other big 2021 release, howver, Encanto (which I have yet to see).

Promotional image from Raya and the Last Dragon

9. Keep an Eye Out [Au Poste!]: Read our review. A long interrogation of an innocent man accused of murder is complicated by another accidental death. Beginning with the arrest of a man for conducting a symphony orchestra in his underwear, this strange and funny, dialogue heavy 75-minute surrealist goof with absurd deaths and time-travel paradoxes inside of flashbacks is ‘s most ian movie to date. This technically came out in 2018 in France but was not theatrically distributed in the U.S. until this year, so we’re counting it now.

8. Agnes: Read our festival review. A demon possesses a sister at a conservative Carmelite nunnery, causing a crisis of faith for one of the nuns. Well-made on a low budget and totally unexpected; it begins as a black exorcist comedy and satire of the Catholic Church, then lurches into melodrama and ends on a surprisingly sincere note. The whiplash tone change will alienate many, but it is justified by faith. It has its share of critical defenders, but you won’t see it on many other year-end lists.

Continue reading TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2021: MAINSTREAM EDITION →