A houseplant keeps humans as flesh, meat, muscle, and bone houseplants.
Tag Archives: Black Comedy
35*. BUFFET FROID (1979)
AKA Cold Cuts
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.”–André Breton
DIRECTED BY: Bertrand Blier
FEATURING: Gérard Depardieu, Bernard Blier, Jean Carmet, Geneviève Page, Carole Bouquet
PLOT: Soon after telling a man in the Paris subway about his fantasies of committing murder, Alphonse discovers the man dying with Alphonse’s own switchblade in his chest. Rushing home, he teams up with a police inspector and a hapless criminal who confesses to killing Alphonse’s wife. The trio goes out into the world, confronting both a variety of people who wish to kill them or to be killed by them.
BACKGROUND:
- Writer-director Bertrand Blier won the César (France’s Oscar) for Best Writing for Buffet Froid. The film was also nominated in the cinematography, editing, and production design categories.
- Buffet Froid feels very Buñuelian, even more so since Blier cast two actresses who had previously worked on Luis Buñuel films: Geneviève Page and Carole Bouquet.
- Bernard Blier (Inspector Morvandieu) is the director’s father. It was his third appearance in one of his son’s films.
- The role of the man harassed by Alphonse in the subway is played by an uncredited Michel Serrault, who is probably best known as Albin in the original La cage aux folles.
- The opening scene is set in the Metro station at La Défense, which now sits directly underneath the monumental La Grande Arche building in the Parisian suburbs.
- The film was not released in the United States until 1987. American critics were fiercely negative.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: It’s tempting to select the terrific jump cut when the leading trio is informed that they need to relax, and suddenly find themselves convalescing in front of a rustic cottage in the woods. But for a singular image, there’s great spectacle in the moment when a policeman responds to an emergency call only to find that he himself is the victim. His wide-eyed horror at being ushered into his deathbed while a string quintet assembles to serenade him into the great beyond is unforgettably hilarious.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: The widow moves in; assassin gets a head start in the water
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Buffet Froid is epic in its underplaying. Forget consequences; it posits a world where crime doesn’t pay because it doesn’t matter. The body count wouldn’t be out of place in a Hollywood thriller, but a strange combination of fear of dying and reluctance to be caught underlies everything. It’s telling that Alphonse doesn’t lose his cool when he finds his own knife sticking out of a dying man, or even when he discovers his wife’s murder (and murderer). No, it’s only when a man tells him bluntly, “Accept your responsibilities and I’ll be on my way” that he stops dead in his tracks. Buffet Froid depicts a world gone mad, but in the most controlled way possible.
Trailer for Buffet Froid
COMMENTS: Buffet Froid lays out its premise almost immediately. Continue reading 35*. BUFFET FROID (1979)
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BEAU IS AFRAID (2023)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Ari Aster
FEATURING: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Armen Nahapetian, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane
PLOT: Anxiety-ridden Beau is scheduled to take a trip to see his domineering mother, but it becomes a nightmare as the universe conspires against his success.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Ari Aster takes a break from elevated horror to film three hours of gonzo black comedy that captures what I imagine hour 36 of a nonstop meth binge must feel like: a tsunami of paranoia, hallucination, and self-loathing that seems like it will never end. It’s an experiment in excess that few directors ever get the chance to indulge in—a gamble that could make or break a career, or be forgotten and seen as an outlier oddity in an auteur’s oeuvre years down the road. Whatever it is, assisted by an (as always) all-in Joaquin Phoenix, Aster seizes the opportunity to present the type of big budget freakoutshow we’re unlikely to see again for a long time. It’s a weird movie happening; see it now, so years down the line you can brag to the next generation of weirdo cinephiles that you caught Beau on the big screen.
COMMENTS: I don’t think the new pills Beau’s therapist prescribes him at the beginning of the film are working. They may even be making things worse. Not only does the fact that they must be taken with water raise problems (and plot points) for a patient with an obsessive anxiety disorder who lives in a tenement with iffy plumbing, but we don’t really know much about how Beau sees the world before the medication switch. Afterwards, the city Beau sees around him looks something like Taxi Driver a few weeks before everyone flees town and officially signs up with a Road Warrior gang. The street on which he lives throngs with homeless ruffians, including a head-to-toe tatted thug who particularly has it out for Beau. The urban terrors are so hyperbolic that we can’t for a second buy that Beau exists in our world (little nuggets like a soldier who died in a non-existent campaign in Caracas suggest an alternate reality). By the time Beau discovers a bum clinging to his bathroom ceiling, we realize that we’re trapped far, far inside his paranoid mind, and the omnipresent threats we see through his eyes aren’t all there.
Like a symphony (maybe Bernstein’s “Age of Anxiety”), Beau Is Afraid is structured in four movements (with interstitial interludes flashing back to Beau’s boyhood). Between the beginning of his journey and his return to his childhood home, Beau makes two major stops along the way: first, at the home of a kindly couple played by Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane, then with a community of theatrical vagabonds who dub themselves the “Orphans of the Forest.” The film’s opening has an After Hours vibe, as an unbelievable run of bad luck—a stolen key, an apartment lockout, a naked stabber—conspires to keep Beau from setting out on his dreaded reunion with his mother. The last Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BEAU IS AFRAID (2023)
CAPSULE: KICK ME (2022)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Gary Huggins
FEATURING: Santiago Vasquez, Ramone Armstrong, Matthew Stathas
PLOT: A guidance counselor has a rough evening in Kansas City, KS when he agrees to attend a karate session with a troublesome student.
COMMENTS: The pedigree of the “dream quest” is probably as old as the art of story-telling. The logic of dreams is peculiar: situation A leads to situation B leads to situation C, and so on; each link in the chain has a logical connection, but when you take a step back and look at it as a whole, the events make little sense. Much to this guidance counselor’s dismay, his evening is no dream. Its manic and unsettling events are jarringly remote from his plans, and when viewed in its totality, one can’t but wonder how this nightmare hangs together.
Santiago Vasquez (Santiago Vasquez) is a guidance counselor residing in Kansas City, MO. He begins his day with an amiable professionalism as resolute as his grin is toothy. He is having difficulty with an intelligent but wayward student, Luther (Ramone Armstrong), who is in trouble with both the school authorities and a local thug named “Blitz” (Matthew Stathas). Despite a prior engagement at a talent show in a local church, Santiago agrees to attend a karate class with Luther. But after the lesson is interrupted by Blitz’s goons, bloody mayhem ensues.
Huggins probably likes his hero, but seems to have a lot of anger. Kick Me overflows with oddball violence foisted upon its oddball cast. Santiago endures countless humiliations (violent ones) as he travels near-naked through the wild nighttime of down-at-the-heels Kansas City (KS) : a squicky encounter with some clients of “RVlove.com”, a furtive pitter-patter through a derelict mall where a gored man is unable to die, a run-in with a wizened hobo by his huff-bag tree, all culminating with a boss-fight on the church balcony with Blitz. Blood, blood, blood is everywhere; at least in Kansas City, KS.
Hit Me isn’t quite my kind of movie, but I know who its audience is, and also know there are plenty out there who will get a kick from this Odyssian journey through mayhem. Huggins is often unkind to his creations, but somehow avoids coming across as cruel. His sense of humor helps a great deal (my favorite example being the closing credits referring to a character as the “Malled Man”), as does his filmmaking prowess. Tension builds masterfully in the would-be disaster sequence after Santiago buys a bunny, and the loping cinematography slips lackadaisical giddiness into the fore when Santiago and a co-worker toke up in back of a gliding pick up truck. Santiago shouts and squeals and fights and kills—and though there are an impressive number of three-legged dogs wandering these mean streets, the counselor’s nightmare spares them further injury.
Kick Me next plays at the Panic Film Festival in Kansas City on April 19 (already sold out). For more, see our webcast discussion with writer/director Gary Huggins.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING (2022)
Fumer fait tousser
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
Smoking Causes Coughing is currently available for VOD rental.
DIRECTED BY: Quentin Dupieux
FEATURING: Gilles Lellouche, Anaïs Demoustier, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra, Vincent Lacoste, voice of Alain Chabat
PLOT: A Power Rangers-like group of heroes goes on a team building retreat and tells campfire stories; will the world end before they can solve their issues?
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: A group of avengers named the Tobacco Force destroys their enemies by shooting them with smoke and giving them cancer. A large fish tells a story about a young man who, after being involved in an industrial shredder accident, becomes a pair of lips in a pail of gore. For these and many more absurd instances, Smoking Causes Coughing could be a shoo-in for Apocryphal status.
COMMENTS: Quentin Dupieux’s newest film, Smoking Causes Coughing, is superficially about the Tobacco Force, the “coolest avengers in the world,” according to one of their in-film fans. Power Rangers meets Danger 5, the Tobacco Force regularly saves the world from rubber-suited monsters. Recently, however, they have been having problems with insincerity and individualism. To come together as a team before meeting their ultimate nemesis, Lézardin, their boss (a rat puppet who constantly drools green slime) assigns them to a team-building retreat. There they tell stories around a campfire, and the movie becomes an anthology, returning to the Tobacco Force between stories.
As the team sits around the fire, a young girl appears and tells a story. Later one of them catches a barracuda in the lake and, yes, the barracuda tells a story. The stories are the highlight of the movie. They are inventive, twisted, existential jokes. They are also often gory.
Dupieux does not stray from his absurdist existentialism. For instance, in the first story a woman puts on a “Thinking Helmet” that promises to purify the mind. A few minutes later we are in a deadpan slasher, as if to say that if a person knows the truth, they will not be able to abide the way things are.
The pace throughout is steady but not quick. Scenes that seem too long or even pointless add to the sense of ennui and to questioning life in general. Some elements are completely unexpected—absurd, silly, and sometimes mind-boggling.
Their boss, the Chief, is the only puppet in the film; he would feel right at home in Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles. He’s utterly disgusting and also unbearably attractive to every woman in the movie. Perhaps a comment on power? Perhaps simple absurdity.
This movie is not going to change anyone’s mind about Quentin Dupieux. If you enjoyed his previous films, you’ll likely enjoy this one. If you didn’t, well… you get the point. But if you haven’t seen anything by him, and you’ve made it this far into this review, then maybe you’ll dig it. It isn’t revelatory; it’s just an existential absurdist good time.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: