This announcement came as such a surprise, we thought it’s worthy of its own post.

The Criterion Collection just pre-announced that their latest addition to their catalog of “important classic and contemporary cinema from around the world” will be Mark Region‘s 2009 experimental thriller After Last Season, which has been out-of-print and highly sought after since the original DVD run sold out. (We spotted a copy on E-bay recently; the asking price was over $200).

The lone film by the reclusive Region, After Last Season may seem like a strange edition to the Criterion catalog, but the art-house label has recently added the transgressive early works of John Waters to their catalog as they expand their range from stodgy art movies and begin to include more culturally significant cult films with edgy, DIY aesthetics.

These photographs (leaked onto the Internet by an unknown Criterion insider) are early boxcover mockups, not the finished product (which won’t go on sale until July 2020 at the earliest). Thanks to El Rob Hubbard for bringing them to our attention. According to the Criterion Collection website, the final release will have the following special features:

• New 4K digital restoration, not approved by Region
• The original trailer that rocked the Internet
• “Region Free”: a documentary attempting to track down the mysterious Mark Region (the name has long been suspected to be a pseudonym for Spike Jonze or another established director)
• “I’ve Never Been to That Town, but I’ve Been Through It”: a feature-length appreciation by Martin Scorsese
• New interview with star Jason Kulas
• A free copy of the trial animation software used to compose the special effects sequences (works on Windows 95 systems only)
• PLUS: An essay by IMDB entry Lloyd Nickell

After Last Season has been one of the rarest titles on our list of Canonically Weird movies, and we’re thrilled that the general public will finally get the chance to experience this… um… unusual film.

Only 68 movies left to Certify Weird! (That number is right, we didn’t miscount: see the explanation below).

Alfred Eaker kicks us off next week with a review of Flicker Alley’s new Blu-ray release of the short that birthed the fantastique, “A Trip to the Moon.” Then,  Bryan Pike updates you on the new existential  indie release It Takes from Within, Pete Trbovich knocks one out of the review queue with a shout-out to Britain’s The Shout (1978), and G. Smalley goes classic and retro with an examination of Jean Cocteau‘s surrealistic debut, Blood of a Poet (1930).

No fooling here: the quotes below are actual search terms weirdos used to find 366 Weird Movies this past week. First, the search for a “movie where man says etcettera” goes into our “can you narrow that down for me?” file. We would be remiss if we did not note the search for “lesbian girls and doll pul movies.com” (it was making sense until the “doll pul” arrived). Then we have a pair of perhaps related searches: a jazz cinema fan’s search for “sax films of 2012,” which might possibly be better found on the site “sax bandits.com”. Simple misspellings can sometimes lead to ambiguity: is the guy looking for “twin leaks 366 weird movies” actually looking for the David Lynch television series, or the pee fetish porn parody? A similar searching error led to our official Weirdest Search Term of the Week, “link floyd thé wool”. The misspellings are bad enough, but going out of your way to add an accent aigu to the “thé” that makes the search acutely weird.

On to the bit of business hinted at above: many of you have expressed dismay that the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made is nearing its end, and are afraid that your worthy favorites will not fit into the few remaining slots. If you fall into that category, we have good news: we’re removing some of the dead wood to make way for better choices. Obviously, when we started this List ten years ago, we were very different people than now. As you may have noticed with Alfred’s series on spirituality themed movies, we are (a little!) more mature than the crazy live-for-today 40somethings who started this List. We recognize that we made mistakes in the early days (and even in the later days), and canonized a few movies of questionable intent that didn’t deserve to be honored. What better day than Easter Day, 2018 to announce a culling of the List and the rebirth of a new one? We’re going to free up twenty-seven movie slots by canceling several of our rasher and more questionable choices. These entries have already disappeared from the sidebar list; we’ll detail them below, with an explanation for each film’s removal.

REMOVED FROM THE LIST:

3-Iron (2004) – With the sexual assault allegations against director Ki-duk Kim, we can no longer in good conscience allow him to be honored on our List.

Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

Sometime after midnight, when one would expect the President of the United States to be either resting up for a big day or burning the midnight oil prepping for a diplomatic meeting, Donald J. Trump was apparently cruising the Web, and came across a site that rubbed him the wrong way:

What prompted this attack against a small-traffic, niche cinema website devoted to surrealist and cult cinema, fields in which the President had previously shown zero interest? Apparently, it was an offhand comment by leftist commentator Alfred Eaker in his review of Suicide Squad that drew the Preisdent’s ire:

A few minutes later, after cruising the site a bit longer, the President chimed in with another, unexpected criticism:

The President was, of course, referring to the 1989 Bo Derek vehicle where she plays the trophy wife of ghost Anthony Quinn, who wants Bo to kill a younger man so he can possess his body and have sex with her again, and also advises her in corporate negotiations:

A weird movie (though not a very good one), but where does this have a bearing on the point at issue?

Naturally, all tweets were deleted within half an hour of posting. Fortunately we were able to save screenshots to prove that this bizarre rant did indeed occur.

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

Trailers of new release movies are generally available at the official site links.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Closet Monster: A closeted gay teenager and aspiring special effects artist must face his coming out anxieties with the help of a talking hamster voiced by Isabella Rossellini. Glen Dunks called it “[c]olourfully designed and with more than a hint of weirdness.” Official Closet Monster Facebook page.

Darling: A young woman goes insane while taking care of an old New York house; in black and white. Staring Jug Face‘s Lauren Ashley Carter. Official Darling Facebook page.

DVR ALERT – (SyFy Channel, Fri, 4/1, at 8:00 PM EST):

Dead 7 (2016): In a post-apocalyptic world, a cowboy, a samurai, a mime, and four others team up to fight zombies. The heroes are all played by ex-members of the Backstreet Boys, NSYCNC, and some more obscure boy bands. Proudly presented by the folks who brought you Sharknado. Dead 7 at SyFy channel.

SCREENINGS – (Spectacle Theater, Brooklyn, NY, tonight!, Fri., 4/1 at Midnight):

Final Flesh (2009): Read the Certified Weird entry! Those perverts at the Spectacle (and us) are the only ones keeping this Vernon Chatman absurdist experiment alive. Watch an amateur porn star breastfeed a 16-oz ribeye steak named “Mr. Peterson.” Final Flesh at Spectacle Theater (the embedded trailer is understandably NSFW).

FILM FESTIVALS – StraightJacket  Guerilla Film Festival (Everywhere and nowhere, 4/1-4/7):

Here’s an idea that’s probably overdue: an exclusively online film festival. No pesky plane tickets and hotel rooms for out-of-towners to buy, or even $3/kernel bags of popcorn. Each day of the festival, several new full-length films and music videos just show up online. The films are supposed to adhere to the “Pink 8” manifesto, which includes tenets like “no script” and “the cast must NOT know what your film is about,” though we’re not sure how strictly these rules will be enforced. The only thing we’ve heard of is Kelly Hughes‘ 1995 cross-dressing undead action film La Cage aux Zombies, which magically appears on April 3.

StraightJacket Guerilla Film Festival home page.

NEW ON DVD:

“Death Walks Twice: Two Films by Luciano Ercoli”: Due gialli from Ercoli starring “Susan Scott” (Nieves Navarro). In Death Walks on High Heels, she’s an exotic dancer fleeing a jewel thief; in the weirder Death Walks at Midnight, she’s a model who takes LSD and witnesses a murder that happened six months earlier. Buy “Death Walks Twice”.

Fascist Frauleins [AKA Airplays of Old] (1969): An Amazonian Nazi dominatrix with a transgendered m-t-f daughter kidnaps Allied airmen and keeps them in her torture chamber, where she feeds them hallucinogenic drugs and forces them to engage in “experimental” orgies. Bizarre, forgotten Nazisploitation made at the height of the psychedelic era, in black and white but with splashes of color (red for blood, yellow and pink spirals swirling onscreen during the hallucination sequences). Buy Airplays of Old.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

“Death Walks Twice: Two Films by Luciano Ercoli”: See description in DVD above. This is only available in a 4-disc set: 2 DVDs, 2 Blu-rays. Buy “Death Walks Twice”.

The Gong Show Movie (1980): A week in the life of “Gong Show” host Chuck Barris, featuring R-rated outtakes from the show arranged around a plot, of sorts. Not available on DVD, as it would be a cinematic crime to watch a visual spectacle of this magnitude in anything but the highest definition possible. Buy The Gong Show Movie.

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.