Tag Archives: Comedy

Capsules

CAPSULE: BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN (2021)

Leave a comment

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

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Katia Pascariu, Claudia Ieremia, Nicodim Ungureanu

PLOT: Scandal erupts as a young teacher’s homemade sex tape leaks online.

Still from Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021)

COMMENTS: When a movie starts with hardcore imagery of a pornographic nature, you know you’re in for a wild ride. Bad Luck Banging is an emblematic work that put its creator, Radu Jude, on the map as one of the most controversial, subversive and uncompromising visionaries in the current cinematic landscape. It also dramatically changed our perception of contemporary Romanian cinema: by revealing a completely different direction than the social realism associated with the Romanian New Wave, it laid the groundwork for even more ambitious cinematic achievements like Dracula (2025).

After the brief albeit graphic introduction, the movie divides into three distinct parts. For the first, we follow our teacher protagonist, Emi, around Bucharest as she buys groceries and runs errands. The  almost documentary-like pacing of this section may not be ideal for casual viewers. The camera takes its time revealing  cacophonies and pathogens of the heroine’s urban environment. It’s a subversive “city symphony,” with Bucharest portrayed as it is, not in a celebratory light. It’s a subtle yet caustic commentary on the ethos of a post-industrial consumerist society.

Then, the second section begins. It is an interlude of sorts, disrupting the main narrative while taking the form of an abecedary and a collection of anecdotes and fun facts. Its playfulness and essayistic nature remind the viewer of and the experimentation of the in general. At the same time, it expresses a deeply cynical view of humanity, and especially of Romania.

The third part—slightly longer than the two before it—focuses on an official meeting between our teacher and frustrated parents regarding the online leak of the teacher’s homemade erotic videos, which transforms into a trial of sorts, with every parent acting as an archetype of Romanian society, judging our protagonist’s deeds. Each, from a leftist intellectual to oppressive figures representing the Church and the Army, express long-established opinions, mostly of the conservative kind. Taking place in an enclosed space, the whole segment maintains theatricality, with corresponding lighting. In the end, three possible endings are proposed (let’s just say that the last is the weirdest).

Music plays a major role, underlining the ironic moments. Paeans accompany atrocities, while battle hymns go along with pornographic imagery. Upbeat tunes signal the transition between parts. And let’s not forget M. A. Numminen’s catchy yet seemingly random Wittgenstein-based song “In Order to Tell” (1970) in the closing credits.

Bad Luck Banging can be discussed today not only as a satiric view on western society’s pathologies, but also as a relic of the Covid era. Everyone wears masks and social distancing is all around the news.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s a methodology combining the horrific with the absurd, blending academic inquiry with farcical social critique, à la Buñuel.”–John Kupecki, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn [Blu-ray]

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn [Blu-ray]

  • Region A Blu-ray

New starting from: 36.97 $

Go to Amazon
It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UNITED TRASH (1996)

1 Comment

aka The Slit

Weirdest! 

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

DIRECTED BY: Christoph Schlingensief

FEATURING: Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad, Joachim Tomaschewsky, Johnny Pfeifer, Jones Muguse, Thomas Chibwe

PLOT: The wife of a gay German UN commander stationed in Africa gives birth to a child who is declared the new messiah; when an accident causes the boy to be horribly injured and endangers the UN mission, an escalating battle for power arises between the power-hungry commander, a religious leader who has declared war on the Vatican, and a chieftain who is attempting to actualize his dream to ride a ramshackle rocket into the White House to kill the American president.

Still from United Trash [AKA The Slit] (1996)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Movies can be weird, they can be strange, they can be bizarre, but it’s rare to come across a movie that is actually insane. Under the trappings of satire on a global scale, United Trash offers a critique of international affairs forged in the crucible of late 20th century daytime talk shows. There is not a single character in the film who isn’t as awful as they can be, nor a situation that is not plussed to become the most grotesque version of itself. So many fluids are spattered across the screen, everyone is subject to abject humiliation, and not a single institution fails to be undermined. Rarely has a film’s contempt for its subjects been so blatant and so complete, nor has a commitment to the most base appeals for a laugh been pursued so vigorously.

COMMENTS: In a career cut appallingly short by cancer, Christoph Schlingensief racked up a remarkable number of achievements, including staging a Wagner opera at the Bayreuth Festival, making plans to build a performing arts center in Burkina Faso, and curating a retrospective of his art that was staged posthumously at the Vienna Biennale. In cinema, he created a trilogy of films exploring the trauma caused by both the rise of Hitler and the process of German reunification. (The last of those, Terror 2000, also sits in our Reader Queue.) And in the middle of all this, he directed a film in which Udo Kier paints himself in blackface, dons a skirt made of bananas, and dances like a monkey in front of an audience of Africans while stroking the center banana aggressively. It’s an extraordinary career.

United Trash features one of the most game casts I have ever seen. There’s not an ounce of shame among the lot of them. They got the note that subtlety would be punishable by death, and they responded by going furiously over the top. Keir leads the way with his relentless prissiness, matched by a frequently naked Natividad raving maniacally about her lack of sexual satisfaction. They are surrounded by actors working just as hard to win the title of Least Restrained Performance, including a Hitler-mustachioed doctor/rocket scientist, an amoral, sexually ravenous, Vatican-hating priest, and Keir’s absurdly bewigged, unexpectedly jacked, child-molesting Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UNITED TRASH (1996) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CAN DIALECTICS BREAK BRICKS? (1973)

Leave a comment

La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?

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

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: René Viénet

FEATURING: Hung- Liu Chan, Ingrid Yin-Yin Hu, Jason Piao Pai

PLOT: Alienated proletarians, trained in kung fu, fight against their bureaucratic oppressors.

Poster for "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?" (1973)

COMMENTS: What if a typical kung fu flick was transformed through voiceover into a subversive and radical wanna-be manifesto? Such an anarchic romp could only come from France. But let’s take things from the beginning.

Some definitions should be clarified. Dialectics is a product of the Situationist movement, a group of anti-capitalist artists and thinkers, known cinematically mostly through Guy Debord’s documentaries. Like a lot of spoofs—What’s Up Tiger Lily? (1966) and In Search of the Ultra-Sex (2016) come to mind—this movie takes preexisting material and subverts its meaning through clever use of voiceovers.  The Situationists call the exact technique used here “détournement”, and it could be better defined as a reappropriation in a new and ideologically subversive setting. It is a recontextualization of images so that new meanings, radically different than previous, are produced: a practice commonly used in  postmodernist art of the later half of the twentieth century until our own time.

With the theoretical background of this movie specified, what is it really about? The plot revolves around a commune of proletarian martial artists defending themselves against alienation and their evil overlords. These overlords are not simply your typical evil Western capitalists, but we can trace references to the Soviet Union’s nomenklatura as well. They in fact represent of every possible state, even of those that hypocritically claim to defend the rights of the proletariat.

A main character emerges from the crowd, a typical hero who becomes the focus of the narrative, a man who sets his noble ideals against the bad guys. What is atypical of the genre , though, is that while the choreography of fighting plays out, our characters indulge in deep conversations about class struggle, the abolition of masters, and Wilhem Reich‘s writing, among other subjects. Through voice-over an “essential”  bibliography is mentioned, too, which one of the most unexpected and weirdest elements of the movie.

Don’t worry, though. This is not a heavy movie. Sexual jokes and self-aware irony prove its unwillingness to take itself too seriously. In fact, Dialectics isn’t much more than a funny gimmick. It surely has an appeal for fans of cult cinema, but it is not essential viewing for anyone interested in the Situationist movement. On the other hand, if you enjoy this kind of absurd humor—and the eccentric idea of a martial arts show about the class struggle—and would like to view something similar, albeit in a contemporary setting, try to find the French TV show “Machine” (2024) created by Thomas Bidegain and Fred Grivois.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“An obnoxious and hilarious stunt from 1973…”–Eve Tushnet, Patheos (streaming)

(This movie was suggested for review by Comrade Faustroll, who said “The filmmakers strike the right balance of meaning what they’re saying enough to be really weird, but joking enough to keep it interesting.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)