Tag Archives: Black and White

366 Underground

CAPSULE: THE POCKET FILM OF SUPERSTITIONS (2023)

1 Comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Tom Lee Rutter

FEATURING: Voice of The Shend

PLOT: A narrator elucidates various superstitions whilst they are presented on-screen, with both live actors and animation.

COMMENTS: Crank the understated cheek to eleven and put your brain pan in the oven set to “Regulo Brittania,” because here’s a documentary that’s so quirkily English it could pass as a scone-geared Big Ben clock crowning Queen Victoria. Squeezing Häxan through a blue filter and making heavy use of its “toffee” toned narrator, Tom Lee Rutter assembles a light-minded diversion covering all manner of mankind’s nonsenseries. Why does a bride want “something blue” on her wedding day? Where is the best place to look for faeries? And just what is “Devil’s Nutting Day”? All these questions, and more, are answered here.

You can come and go from this film, as it is broken into easy, bite-sized bits of trivia (and I mean that in the classical sense of the term), and it’s so compact it fits in your pocket for quick and easy consultation. This Pocket Film, by and large, is a documentary, or perhaps more accurately, a primer; but since its subject matter is nonsensical pre- and post-cautions for irrational dangers, it may best be viewed as an anthropological study. A silly anthropological study. The narrator guides the viewer throughout, offering both advice to the viewer and observations of the actions on-screen, these performed in grand early-cinema style by a large cast (including cameos from horror legends and .)

Having a fairly thorough personal knowledge superstitious troubles and solutions, the cinematic interludes—and the sage counsel from Shend, narrator-extraordinaire—all ring true. Most pertain to the Death and the Devil, and their various agents. Saint Agnes was new to me—along with her ritual of the “dumb cake” (Shend is silenced by an on-screen lady as he is about to explain; and for good reason: it is a dumb ritual, after all); and while I always know to cover my mouth when I yawn, I know now that it’s to block off my “soul hole,” thus preventing the Devil from sneaking inside of me. Around a third of the way in we meet a new font of information, the “Hand Maiden,” who gives a five-minute refresher on various hand gestures and their purpose (“Whenever in doubt, you can always use Jazz Hands!”)

With old and new “information,” The Pocket Film of Superstitions never bores, often tickles, and is always very, very British. It closes on the declaration, “we leave you to ponder the great weirdness of man,” having provided a good many explanations, of sorts, pertaining to some couple dozen irrational behaviors, reactions, and practices. Not a terribly long film—running for a sensible hour and a half—its breeziness wafts gently, and winkingly, over the viewer. And while it occasionally risks sailing into twee territory, Rutter holds the rudder just firmly enough to prevent Pocket Film from inducing true groans of regret.

The Pocket Film of Superstitions is currently on the festival circuit, and is expected to debut on streaming (and physical media?) by the end of the year or in early 2025. It next screens at the BUT (B-movie, Underground and Trash) Festival in Breda, the Netherlands, on August 29, followed by a date at the Amazing Fantasy Fest in Buffalo, New York in September. You can keep up with the schedule at The Pocket Film of Superstitions‘s official Facebook page.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It won’t be for everyone, but if you have an interest in superstition and folklore as well as a taste for English humour, The Pocket Film of Superstitions will be right up your alley. And for those who keep saying the genre needs something different, this is the kind of different it needs.” — Jim Morazzini, Voices from the Balcony (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE TWONKY (1953)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Arch Oboler

FEATURING: , Billy Lynn, Gloria Blondell, Janet Warren

PLOT: A mild-mannered professor has his world turned upside-down when a new television set purchased by his wife turns out to have remarkable abilities, and uses them to take control of his life.

Still from The Twonky (1953)

COMMENTS: Arch Oboler is a curious figure in the outer reaches of cinema history. His last-people-on-earth drama Five has been credited as the first movie set in a post-atomic-apocalypse world. His inexplicable zombie-village tale The Bubble was one of the more noteworthy installments in the most recent season of “.” His best-known credit is perhaps Bwana Devil, the very first color 3D feature in English to earn a commercial release. (The premiere was the occasion for this legendary photograph.) And all these tiny bits of notoriety are tinged with the harsh truth that film was not his outstanding medium. Oboler came to prominence in radio, drawing acclaim both for pre-World War II productions warning of the rise of fascism, as well as the shocking-for-its-time horror series “Lights Out.”

This preface is necessary to set up the essential contradiction of The Twonky: it is an undisguised attack on an entirely new entertainment medium, television, perpetrated in a competing medium by a man who came of age in yet another medium. Labeling television as a brain-warping incubus is a pastime that has never gone out of style, but when you know that the 1942 C. L. Moore-Henry Kuttner story upon which The Twonky is based portrays the title character as a radio, it’s fair to say that Oboler is not an entirely disinterested party. As far as he’s concerned, TV is evil. And he may be right, but identifying exactly what kind of evil is where The Twonky gets strange.

This ersatz TV set never actually plays a show, which you might think would be the malign influence we should fear. Instead, it initially seems to be a helpmate, lighting Conried’s cigarettes and producing counterfeit money to pay off a creditor. Soon enough, though, it begins to move into mental conditioning, limiting his diet and forcing him to listen to deafening military marches. Despite its appearance as a goofy marionette (the spindly legs and barely concealed puppet movements make it look like an ancestor to this), its actions soon become malevolent, dumbing down Conried’s college professor so that he can no longer speak confidently in his own area of expertise, and reducing any potential threat to a vacant shell who can only mutter “I have no complaints.”

I have complaints. Part of what makes it hard to feel the danger of the Twonky is that the minds it influences are already pretty loopy. Blondell’s bill collector is so committed to her job that she essentially moves into Conried’s house, deliberately taking over his bathtub to heighten his discomfort. (The film pulls back from the very real threat that the Twonky could kill her, substituting a silly offscreen comeuppance in which she is zapped out of her clothes and sent running down the street.) Lynn is portrayed as both an enlightened interpreter of the Twonky’s mission (he’s the one who helpfully defines a twonky as “a thing that you don’t know what it is”) and a dim bulb who can’t see danger directly in front of him, sending his football team and cheer captain into harm’s way. And then there’s Conried, who should be a contented intellectual whose world is upended by the idiot box, but instead is a nervous ditherer from the start. Curiously, he is both a big bundle of nerves and not nearly jumpy enough. Conried is renowned for his over-the-top vocal performances, including Captain Hook in Disney’s Peter Pan and Snidely Whiplash in Jay Ward’s “Dudley Do-Right” cartoons, but here in his first on-camera leading role, he’s a nudnik, unable to either play it straight or unleash the hounds. The character never develops at all, thereby diluting the power of his nemesis.

With its technological target, The Twonky ought to play like an episode of “Black Mirror” produced on the set of “The Twilight Zone.” It’s too restrained for that, though; it takes on the demon beast television, but in such an abstract way that you’re never really sure of the nature of the objection. There are glimpses of the real danger of the Twonky’s infantilizing servitude, suggesting a possible remake in which the villain takes the form of an AI chatbot. What we get, however, is the lightest of screwball comedies, complete with a doting wife, a raucous encounter with a blinkered dowager, and an astoundingly terrible and overbearing score by Jack Meakin that suggests the incidental music from “Leave It to Beaver” (but less weighty.) It’s enough to make you think that Oboler started out with a blistering attack on the new form of entertainment he feared and loathed, but the Twonky got hold of him and turned his product into pablum. The Twonky won’t put you off television. But it’s not doing much for movies, either.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“One of the oddest science fiction films of the 1950s, but still not very good… If it were scripted and directed by different people, you’d guess this was written as a more nightmarish, frightening picture but reconceived on set as a goofy comedy – it could have played like such unforgettable ‘living object’ Twilight Zones as ‘The Fever’ (the slot machine) or ‘Living Doll’, but actually comes off like Rod Serling’s occasional, horribly leaden attempts at light-hearted sit-com fantasy.” – Kim Newman, The Kim Newman Web Site

ADDITIONAL LINK OF INTEREST: Back in 2009, Don Coscarelli wrote of his affection for The Twonky at Ain’t It Cool News, which somehow survives (with its ancient web design) to this day.

(This movie was nominated for review by Alikhat. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SHE IS CONANN (2023)

2 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Claire Duburcq, Christa Théret, Sandra Parfait, , Nathalie Richard,

PLOT: Waking in the afterlife, Conann the barbarian recalls various stages of her life, and her relationship with the dog-faced demon who guides her destiny.

Still from She Is Conann (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: She Is Conann lives up to its high weird premise—six gender-flipped incarnations of pulp hero Conan(n) the Barbarian—and then some. At this point, it seems likely that anything Mandico sets his hand to will merit candidacy.

COMMENTS: Bertand Mandico loves women. He cast women in all the male roles for The Wild Boys, then set his sophomore feature After Blue on an all-female planet, and now creates a distaff version of Robert E. Howard’s pulp warrior. There are a tiny number roles in Conann; the only major one is played by a female (and at least one female character is played by a male). Mandico also could be accused of having (or exploiting) a lesbian fetish, although it seems the main reason his women have sex with other women is because there aren’t many men around. But there isn’t much sex in Conann (although there is some graphic kissing). Mandico’s casting of actresses in typically male roles has become his auteurial signature, analogous to the non-acting that populated ‘ early movies. The feminine skew is simply part of his worldview.

Conann is essentially an anthology film, a fragmented hero’s journey, with each individual incarnation of the barbarian capable of standing alone: most kill the previous decade’s Conann, directly or indirectly, before embarking on their own story. The first two Conanns inhabit what is basically a high fantasy world, though one where the all-female barbarian tribes wear modified gorilla costumes with wicked nipple hooks. But the story expands after that, seeing Conann take a job as a contemporary stuntwoman, then a fascist officer, and then finally as a post-apocalyptic patroness of the arts. Conann’s character changes—you could argue she becomes increasingly barbaric—but what really ties everything together is Elina Löwensohn‘s demonic Rainier, who strides through the film nudging an obscure prophecy along, frequently taking flash photographs of Conann’s exploits for posterity. Her dog mask is surprisingly effective, leaving room for her eyes to hint at some sinister intelligence, but muzzling her overall expressiveness so that he/she remains mysterious.

The movie plays out entirely on indoor theatrical sets—mist-shrouded barbarian wildernesses, a sleazy urban snake pit where a wall of Conann’s apartment hangs in the air unfinished, a tin-foil-lined Hell. Shot mostly in black and white, it occasionally shifts to soft, faded color. There is an unusual amount of squirm-inducing (though black and white) gore, and more than one example of the ultimate act of barbarity, cannibalism. These elements distance the film from the tasteful art-house circuit, while the experimental plot and portentous dialogue (“You’ve killed Europe! You can’t do that!”) alienates the average genre audience member. In his “incoherent” manner, Mandico discombobulates the viewer between masculine and feminine, monochrome and color, melodrama and farce, art and trash. For most, his technique is off-putting; for us, it’s invigorating,

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The lo-fi production design is often wondrous, the midnight-movie vibe is fetching, but the film is ultimately probably too much of a good/weird thing to sustain its running time — although, for the French writer-director’s fans, such excess is the key to his success.”–Tim Grierson, Screen Daily (festival screening)

She Is Conann

She Is Conann
  • Standard Edition
Check Price

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MICKEY ONE (1965)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Arthur Penn

FEATURING: , , Hurd Hatfield, Teddy Hart, Franchot Tone

PLOT: A small-time comedian in Detroit runs afoul of the mob and skips town, but remains drawn to the stage—and his longing for the spotlight finds him risking unwanted attention from his pursuers.

Still from mickey one (1965)

COMMENTS: A turning point in the annals of American cinema came when Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn teamed up to apply the iconoclastic stylings of the movement to a classic crime story of a protagonist on the run from a relentless pursuer. That legendary collaboration, of course, is Bonnie and Clyde. Which makes it interesting to discover that landmark film actually represents a second bite at the apple. Before Bonnie and Clyde could run, Mickey One had to crawl.

Ostensibly about a comic on the run from the mob, Mickey One is deeply uninterested in the details of its plot. (Beatty is never told explicitly what he’s done wrong, and his attempts to buy his way out of his troubles are not so much rejected as ignored.) Instead, we open with a montage of Beatty’s high-flying comedian living the high life, and then immediately descend into full-blown paranoia. He sets fire to all his identification, rips the satin piping off his tuxedo pants, grabs a seat in hobo first-class on the next train out of town, and quickly submerges himself in a series of the lowest-level jobs he can find, assuming the name that gives the film its title. 

At this point, Mickey One seems to be a story of a confident man forced to become weak but unable to pull it off. His fear is genuine; he immediately dashes out of a restaurant the moment he hears it might have mob connections, and he regards anyone who tries to interact with him with disgust and anger. And yet, watching his fellow hacks at the mic, he can’t deny the call of the limelight, and so he tries to walk the line between satisfying his need to perform and desperately trying to avoid sending up a signal flare to his pursuers. Trying to balance these contrary impulses is destroying him, and that’s the character study we’re here for. Beatty is all jittery energy and barely contained rage; he never really demonstrates any actual comic ability (a complaint Beatty lodged throughout the production), but he’s got the loose rhythms and the nervous energy of James Dean or young Paul Newman, never sitting still and chewing on his words like gum. He’s all exposed wiring.

But there’s a turning point when the film suddenly becomes about something else. In a tense sequence, Mickey is maneuvered into auditioning for an unseen impresario, a scratchy voice barking out orders from behind the harshest spotlight ever aimed at a stage. Mickey is utterly terrified that whoever it is in the darkness will end him permanently, but everyone else—his girlfriend, his agent, a persistent booker—all seem equally terrified of their fate if he doesn’t perform. And that’s when it starts to feel like Mickey One is an allegory. We’ve been treated to metaphor throughout the film. Car crushers devour tons of metal on the outskirts of town. The booking agent (played by Hatfield, who I can only describe as a poor man’s James Olson) has an office that’s entirely white and seemingly decorated exclusively in glass. Benevolent societies sing at street corners about the coming judgment day, while a street artist makes enormous mechanical constructions that are destroyed by the authorities at the merest hint of a malfunction. And then there are the voices, speaking to Mickey from behind blinding lights and through faceless cameras. It all hints at meaning something bigger, but this is the moment when Beatty seems to be dueling with nothing less than God itself. Small wonder that he would run at the first opportunity.

Mickey One feels like an ancestor to any number of future Warren Beatty showcases: the overconfidence of Shampoo, the raw paranoia of The Parallax View, the collision of crime and entertainment in Bugsy. And that’s no small accomplishment, to be a rough draft of a style of filmmaking and a type of character study that will be accomplished more successfully down the line. But it ends up being more of an augury than a film that stands on its own. In that sense, the film is very much like its hero in the final scene: eager to put on a show, but exposed to the elements and fearful of the reception that is destined to come.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“With its surrealistic, Felliniesque presence, ‘Mickey One’ is a stunning piece.”–Peter Stack, San Francisco Chronicle (1995 revival)

(This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Mickey One

Mickey One
  •  
Check Price