Tag Archives: Brad Dourif

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: WISE BLOOD (1979)

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DIRECTED BY: John Huston

FEATURING: Brad Dourif, Amy Wright, Dan Shor, Harry Dean Stanton, Ned Beatty, William Hickey, Mary Nell Santacroce

PLOT:  In a small Southern town, WWII veteran Hazel Motes  proclaims the foundation of his new Church of Christ Without Christ, but runs into obstacles including a deceptive preacher and his wily daughter, a simple young man who is determined to help by providing a Native American mummy, and a huckster who gloms on to Hazel’s pitch in pursuit of a quick buck.

Still from wise blood (1979)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Wise Blood pulls off the trick of translating the quirky voice and complex themes of Flannery O’Connor’s writing to the screen, delivering both the surrealism of her situations and the aspirational delusions of her characters in a way that’s faithful to the source material but fitting for the new medium. There’s a lot that an adaptation like this might leave by the wayside, but this one includes every audacious, blasphemous, ridiculous moment.

COMMENTS: I would never have expected to encounter as much John Huston in my tenure at 366 Weird Movies as I have, but a look at the last decade of his career reveals a man who was fiercely determined to do his own thing, but also savvy enough in the ways of Hollywood to play ball half the time in exchange for freedom the other half. So the man’s going to flirt with weird at about a 1:1 ratio. Stints behind the camera for Annie, Victory, or Phobia seem like down payments for more dedicated efforts like Prizzi’s Honor, Under the Volcano, or The Dead. Wise Blood definitely falls into the latter category, as the director waited patiently for his chance to adapt O’Connor’s first novel, undertaking more commercial ventures until his neophyte producers finally came up with the funding. Once he had it, he worked fast and affordably but without compromise.  

I almost feel like all I need to tell you is that it’s a grand showcase for Brad Dourif. A legendarily weird character actor, Dourif takes to a leading role with gusto. His Hazel Motes is an astoundingly meaty part, a character made up of vast contradictions and competing emotions that all somehow fit together logically. He rails against the unkept promises of organized religion, but becomes irate at the sight of false devotion. He yearns for connection to others, but recoils at anyone who would try to attach themselves to him. (He’s at his happiest with the prostitute whom he pays for her affections.) He tools around in a beat-up Ford Fairlane that even he seems to recognize is beyond repair, but he insistently defends its honor against any criticism. We will quickly learn that Hazel is a parfait of fierce pride and acute embarrassment, and the combustible mix only makes him more ardent in pursuit of a purer truth. Each setback heightens his intensity, each failure leads him to repeat with ever more determination.

Alone, Hazel might seem too weird to endure, but Wise Blood surrounds him with a murderer’s row of supporting players who demonstrate that he’s as much a product of his surroundings as he is his own mass of peculiarities. Stanton is a con man whose tongue drips with moral superiority, while granddaughter Wright hopes to use her skills of deception to trick Dourif into a marriage bed. Beatty has a small but crucial role as a sidewalk swindler who infuriates Dourif by not only being better at street preaching but using that talent to fleece the readily gullible masses. Most eccentric of all is Shor, a simpleton with a fascination for mummies and gorillas for whom no surprise revelation of the truth is ever a disappointment. And all this strangeness is just part of the fabric. Everyone’s weird, but no more so than the next guy.

Which points to Huston’s oddest and most successful trick: Wise Blood is a film truly out of time. Are we seeing O’Connor’s 1952, with the settings, costumes, and attitudes of a society still finding new footing after a world war? Or is this the Macon, Georgia of 1979, neck-deep in national malaise and taking an initial stab at a post-racial new South? Huston chooses not to choose, turning O’Connor’s characters into unwitting time travelers who occupy the physical present day but live in a spiritual yesteryear. It makes for a curious watch, but perfectly fits these people who long for change but refuse to be changed themselves.

It says something about both author and director that the final scene of Wise Blood, in which our protagonist’s unyielding principles lead him to his ultimate fate, is both sad and funny. Not bittersweet, but ruefully humorous. It’s the perfect coda to the tale of a man who refused to be relatable and never stopped wondering why he couldn’t relate. O’Connor and Huston were both one-of-a-kind artists, so it’s a lucky outcome that blending the two results in a movie that’s not much like anything else.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Wise Blood is based on Flannery O’Connor’s extraordinary first novel, which infused the conventions of Southern gothic fiction with fiery Catholicism and surrealistic wit. Huston takes to O’Connor’s hothouse style like a gambler to a royal flush. The inevitable results are the very essence of weird.” – Frank Rich, Time Magazine (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by future contributor , who said it “seems a must for the list in my opinion.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

CAPSULE: SONNY BOY (1989)

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DIRECTED BY: Robert Martin Carroll

FEATURING: , Brad Dourif, Michael Boston,

PLOT: A small-town band of desert criminals steals a car with a baby in the backseat; the evil patriarch orders him to be raised as one of them.

Still from Sonny Boy (1989)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It misses by a hair. Make no mistake, Sonny Boy is a unique, and weird, cult classic horror/comedy/genre-defying oddball. It is beautifully shot, marvelously acted, and defiantly marches to the beat of its own drummer. But its story is straightforward and linear, and it stays grounded mostly in reality. As hillbilly exploitation, it lies on a spectrum between Deliverance and Gummo. But at least 50% of its weirdness comes from David-Carradine-In-Drag, and we’ve seen much worse in any film.

COMMENTS: The opening prepares you in no way for what you’re about to see. David Carradine sings a folksy country number (written by him—we later see him perform it on the piano) that sounds like a homage to John Denver. This plays over helicopter shots of placid New Mexico heartland. Soon we’ll be seeing David in the cast, and are we in for a surprise. A minute after the credits, the infant child of two parents shot over a car-jacking gone wrong narrates, with a clown doll leering at us as the thief speeds away in their 1958 Lincoln Continental Mark III, and we find ourselves in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas territory. Welcome to Sonny Boy, enjoy your ride.

The carjacked baby ends up the adoptee of “Slue,” (Paul L. Smith,  who played “Bluto” in ‘s Popeye), the small town crime baron of Harmony, New Mexico, and his wife, David-Carradine-In-Drag (“Pearl”). Carradine dominates every scene he’s in–because that’s the Kill Bill guy in a dress, acting downright maternal. He gets more hilarious as the film wears on, turning gray and grandmotherly as Sonny’s life story unfolds. Slue’s flunkie apologizes—“I didn’t know nuthin’ ’bout no baby”—but Sonny’s fate is sealed when David-Carradine-In-Drag cradles him to his breast (?) and declares “This is MY baby!” Slue is a destructive man who blows up cars with a canon for fun, and his paternal instincts turn out to be equally warped. Slue and his merry band of henchmen live a post-apocalyptic existence, with TV sets stacked like Legos and junk cars dotting the landscape like grazing buffalo, amongst herds of roaming hogs.

We’re given glimpses of Sonny’s childhood in installments, including a birthday party with, yes, the infamous tongue-cutting scene. The festive balloons and animal masks lend the scene the eeriness of a cult ritual, which is about the right mindset for fans of this movie at this point. Sonny is raised as a psychopath-in-training, alternately dragged behind cars and staked out in a ring of fire. Eventually he is Continue reading CAPSULE: SONNY BOY (1989)

CAPSULE: THE EXORCIST III (1990)

DIRECTED BY: William Peter Blatty

FEATURING: George C. Scott, , Jason Miller

PLOT: A seasoned police lieutenant notices details of a recent homicide case that are eerily similar to those of a dead serial killer’s 15 year-old murder spree.

Still from The Exorcist III (1990)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  If The Exorcist III was about 30 minutes long, consisting of the most oblique, intense moments in the theatrical version, it may very well have been one of the most terrifying and bizarre films to emerge from the ’90s. This 110-minute crawl, however, somehow manages to find the mundane in supernatural goings-on and ritual murder sprees.

COMMENTS: A serial killer is on the loose, preying on the weak and the innocent in Washington, D.C., mutilating their bodies in the same grotesque fashion as The Gemini, a psychopath who was convicted and executed for his crimes 15 years ago. It falls to veteran police lieutenant William Kinderman to stop this madman before he kills again. Can he unravel the mystery in time, or will Kinderman be the killer’s next victim?

Oh… and there’s an exorcism. Did I mention that?

One could easily imagine the origin of the THIRD entry in The Exorcist franchise sounding like that of other famous horror icons’ origin stories: “locked away in an asylum until one fateful Halloween night”, “summoned from Hell into this dimension by unwitting pleasure-seekers”, and, perhaps most appropriately, “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs.” The execution doesn’t sound too pleasant, either; a vacated director’s chair is filled by the writer of the original film’s source material, the focus turned from Regan MacNeil to Detective Kinderman (!), and several studio butcher-block decisions radically alter the final product. But The Exorcist III is actually a bit more inspired than anyone expected it to be, which is what makes its place in horror history so complicated and its ultimate failure so frustrating.

This inspiration comes from writer/director William Peter Blatty, Continue reading CAPSULE: THE EXORCIST III (1990)

CAPSULE: MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE (2009)

DIRECTED BY: Werner Herzog

FEATURING: Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, , Chloë Sevigny, Udo Kier,

PLOT: The story of a young man’s mental breakdown is told in flashbacks as friends and family are interviewed by a detective outside the home where the killer is holed up with a couple of hostages.

Still from My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s twice as weird as Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Werner Herzog’s other 2009 offering, but only half as entertaining.

COMMENTS:  No movie in the world that could live up to the promise of the credit, “David Lynch Presents a Werner Herzog Film.”  My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is among those movies.  Based on a real-life case with the details changed drastically, the film begins with a gruesome murder then proceeds to explain the mystery through flashbacks and trips inside the diseased mind of the killer.  The main problem with the movie is that the answer we get for the slayer’s motivation amounts to little more than “because he’s nuts.”  There’s a top-notch weird cast here, but the performances are uneven.  With his intense eyes under a lowering brow and odd non-sequiturs, Michael Shannon (last seen ’round these parts as the paranoid insectophobe in Bug) is credibly crazed.  In fact, Shannon’s been acting so off-kilter since returning from a kayaking trip to Peru that fiancée Chloë Sevigny and pal Udo Kier don’t appear at all shocked to find themselves being interviewed by homicide detective Willem Dafoe outside the flamingo-pink home where the madman has holed up with two hostages.  Kier, who’s just replaced Shannon in his avant-garde production of the Oresteia because the actor was getting too excitable when asked to play the scene where he murders his mother, is more an outside observer of the man’s madness than a participant, so his cool, politely dismayed reaction to the tragedy is understandable and even a little amusing. On the other hand, it’s hard to figure out why Sevigny is going full steam ahead with honeymoon plans after Shannon tells her he sees Continue reading CAPSULE: MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE (2009)