“Everything we know, is everything it is not. And we become foreigners to our own familiarity.”
Chelsea Whitbread’s “Alienation” is heavily influenced by the style and techniques of surrealist Man Ray. Instead of watching, you will spend the next two minutes being watched, and it’s not a pleasant experience.
DIRECTED BY: Ingmar Bergman
FEATURING: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullman
PLOT: An artist is haunted by memories of his past. While isolated on an island with his pregnant wife, his demons catch up to him. Madness and delusion creep deeper into his mind as a gang of mysterious island dwellers intervene in the couple’s life. A secret, scandalous affair surfaces, and when supernatural forces intervene, the couple’s relationship and sanity is strained.
![Still from Hour of the Wolf [Vargtimmen] (1968)](https://i0.wp.com/366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/hour_of_the_wolf.jpg?resize=450%2C278 "Hour of the Wolf")
WHY IT SHOULD’T MAKE THE LIST: This is a tough film to decipher. The ending is certainly weird, but the lead-up to that point is too ponderous and ambiguous. Bergman is a master and his lone foray into the horror genre is an excellent piece of film-making; his artistry in delving into the lower depths of the human psyche is better established in his other well-known masterpieces, however.
COMMENTS: The older I get, the more I appreciate Ingmar Bergman films. There is something about Swedish movies that encapsulates human existence like no other country. Scenes are left dangling on a thread waiting to snap. The slow, or still, images can verge on monotony, but are usually necessary to convey the pathos of the souls here. Sometimes watching scenes slowly transpire is the best way to fully grasp how life can unravel around us. A scene in this film actually plays out for an entire minute with the main character staring at his watch to express how even sixty seconds can feel like an eternity. Time can sometimes lay heavy on a burdened mind. What I’m trying to suggest here is that Bergman is amazing at capturing exactly what it means to be human. We sin and regret, yet we still long for penance and understanding. Even when our existence feels loathsome, it sure is nice to have someone else around to share in our misery. Modern Swedish director Roy Andersson (You, The Living) knows this as well and, like Bergman, his films are wrought with longing stares of sadness. Both Swedes capture these depressing moments and bring them alive with precise balance and well thought out execution. Even dialogue is matter-of-fact. Nothing said in their films seems to be unimportant or drivel; it’s Continue reading CAPSULE: HOUR OF THE WOLF [VARGTIMMEN] (1968)
DIRECTED BY: Nikos Nikolaidis
FEATURING: Meredyth Herold, Michele Valley, Panos Thanassoulis
PLOT: An alcoholic detective searches for a lost love, presumably dead, and ends up acaptive of two psychotic women. The women (a mother and daughter) ceaselessly torture the helpless and incapacitated victim. He remains mute as they participate in bizarre sexual practices and flaunt their derangement, sometimes literally in his face.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Singapore Sling is one of the rare films where practically every frame is teeming with weirdness. The imagery, behavior, and even the strange nuances in the women’s dialogue are often over-the-top and perverse, yet even while the viewer is made to feel uncomfortable, there is an overwhelming desire to see what comes next. Just when you think it couldn’t possibly get any weirder it somehow manages to top itself.
COMMENTS: Singapore Sling is one messed up film. It is a twisted take on the film noirs that filled cinemas in the early part of the 20th century. Specifically, it pays homage to Otto Preminger’s stylish classic Laura (1944). I use the word homage very loosely here, however. The original film’s music theme is used sporadically throughout, the detective’s lost lover is named Laura, and the nutcase daughter has a painted portrait of herself like Gene Tierney’s Laura character. The similarities pretty much end there. Deviance always played a central part in noirs, but not anywhere close to the degree that is on display here. I have to smile thinking about a dolled up 1940’s socialite having a night out at the theater, dressed to the nines in her pearl necklace and pillbox hat, witnessing this vulgarity. “What is she going to do with that kiwi fruit”? Gasp!
Film noir translates to “black film” and Singapore Sling is the purest black possible. Actually, the black and white cinematography is surprisingly lush and almost seems too perfect for a film with this subject matter. The beautiful crispness works to its advantage and the film would not have the same impact if shot in color. The contrast of the blacks and whites are stark and sets the mood perfectly. If I have any quarrel with the movie it is with the decision to Continue reading RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: SINGAPORE SLING [Singapore sling: O anthropos pou agapise ena ptoma] (1990)
AKA Sex Maniac
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“Unless you regularly do mushrooms and go to Lady Gaga concerts with your good friend Crispin Glover, then watching Maniac is guaranteed to be the weirdest experience you have ever had.”–ad copy for the Rifftrax version of Maniac
DIRECTED BY: Dwain Esper
FEATURING: Bill Woods
PLOT: An on-the-lam vaudevillian kills and impersonates his mad scientist employer, driving himself mad in the process.
BACKGROUND:
.INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are lots of strange, unexpected sights to be seen in this time capsule of man’s freakish desires, but you won’t forget the cat’s eyeball.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Maniac promises to show us the life of a madman as a shameless pretext for delivering multiple shock scenes in an “educational” context, but the final product is so disjointed, feverish and crazily assembled that it seems to be the work of an actual madman.
COMMENTS: Most bad movies are just bad. A rare breed are so bad they’re “unintentionally” Continue reading 65. MANIAC (1934)
DIRECTED BY: Mike Schneider
FEATURING: Karl Hardman, Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea
PLOT: An animated recreation of the classic zombie film, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated features a number of talented animators filtering Romero’s original vision through their own artistic viewpoints, expressing the universal messages therein in their own mediums.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While aesthetically intriguing and at times very eerie, there never was much that jumped out as being incredibly weird about Romero’s zombie movie. Although it was the first of its kind in what is now a celebrated genre, Night of the Living Dead was always more of a message film than a meditation on the dead rising from their graves. This animated version does indeed add some visual quirks, but there is no real strangeness here.
COMMENTS: For fans of the zombie film, it doesn’t get much more better than the simple-yet-satisfying claustrophobia of the grandpappy of them all, Night of the Living Dead. More than a horror flick, this grainy 1968 indie is a meaningful, smart work of art that pushes the boundaries of what the genre is capable of and what it can stand for. So above any horror I can think of, this one definitely deserves an animated homage that explores it from a stylistic point of view. And Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated doesn’t disappoint in that department.
Using a cadre of young, experimental artists, this exercise explores the original movie nearly shot-for-shot with different styles of animation. The styles are incredibly varied: parts are simply still images, sometimes it’s a comic book-style series of cels, while at other times it takes on an anime quality. One artist takes the real footage from the film and animates over it to generate an eerie reality that blurs the line between realism and otherworldliness. The different mediums at work boggle the mind; whether it’s claymation, pencil sketches, Flash cartoons, or sock puppets, this project has something to evoke just about anyone’s personal aesthetic. It’s amazing what the creators do here to make you think of the movie in a whole new way. The different animators break from the stark reality of the original to steep the entire world in a haunting, eerie mood that was not there before. My favorite style, personally, is when they use the real life baby dolls to simulate some of the action scenes! It doesn’t fit well with the other styles to create that perfect sense of dread and the unknown, but it’s just too funny to leave out!
Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated is definitely a success in my book. The unsettling black-and-white animation combined with the oddly displaced archive voices of the original actors creates a mesmerizing experimental film that goes beyond the norm and pulls off something that few people have. The various styles of animation work fluidly together to pay homage as well as to press the boundaries of the original zombie survival template. My only complaint would be that the ending is the most clinical part of the film, when I thought it should be a bit more erratic in style. In those desperate moments before daybreak, Reanimated doesn’t hit any crescendo notes that the original did not already sound, making the last few scenes almost redundant if you’ve already seen NOTLD. That caveat, compounded with this film’s lack of utter weirdness, knocks Reanimated out of contention for a spot on the List, although it must be considered one of the more impressive movies released in2010.
If you’re a fan of the original, or just a lover of experimental animation, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated has something for you. It’s a very strong feature that builds upon Romero’s work with a love and a care that is both heartfelt and reverent. Despite its lack of general weirdness, it is still one of the better films in a year devoid of cinematic life, and a must-have for any fans of the zombie sub-genre.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: