Tag Archives: Confusing

Canonically Weird (The List)

184. NINJA CHAMPION (1985)

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“The script… for one thing, it would be written in twice translated English. So we would be sitting there looking at it saying ‘what the hell does this mean?’ for one thing. And then Godfrey would sort of explain the plot, in his kind of hyper, babbling way, and then we’d sort of make it up on the spot and try to figure out for him what he wanted. Then they’d splice it together and really the only time I’d see what he was going for was when I’d see the thing in the dubbing studio when we’d come back a month later when it was edited. But even then, as you know, they really really don’t… make… sense. There’s the merest suggestion of a hint of a plot somewhere in there. But no, it was very much making it up as we went along.”–Actor Ed Chworowsky on the experience of working on Godfrey Ho movies

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Nancy Chan, Jack Lam, Bruce Baron,  Pierre Tremblay,

PLOT: Rose infiltrates a diamond-smuggling ring intending to kill the three men who raped her. Rose’s ex-lover George, an ex-Interpol agent, leaves his new wife to help her attain her vengeance. Meanwhile, another Interpol agent, who is also a ninja, gradually kills off other ninjas who, though a convoluted scheme, are behind both the smuggling operation and the rape.

Still from Ninja Champion (1985)
BACKGROUND:

  • Ninja Champion was selected to go on the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies in the 5th Readers Choice Poll.
  • The 1981 movie Enter the Ninja (with Sho Kosugi and Franco Nero) was a modest exploitation hit that introduced Western moviegoers to the concept of the stealthy Japanese assassin. In the early and mid 1980s there was a mini-craze for ninja movies, which producers Joseph Lai and Betty Chan and director Godfrey Ho attempted to cash in on by making dozens of movies with “Ninja” in the title. Ho’s methodology was to acquire older martial arts movies (some unfinished or unreleased) and shoot new footage involving ninjas, which would then be clumsily spliced into the older film to make a new movie. This filmmaking technique is known as “cut-and-paste,” and Lai’s Hong Kong-based IFD Films and Arts Limited released almost a hundred of them before the fad died out.
  • Godfrey Ho may have directed IFD movies under other pseudonyms, and sometimes cut-and-paste movies have been attributed to him although there’s no clear evidence Ho worked on them. The Internet Movie Database credits Ho with directing 119 movies. Of these, 50 incorporate the word “Ninja,” including such titles as Ninja the Violent Sorcerer, Ninja in the Killing Fields, Ninja Terminator, Clash of the Ninjas, Bionic Ninja, and Full Metal Ninja.
  • According to the website Neon Harbor, the base film to which Godfrey Ho added the ninja footage to create Ninja Champion was a Korean movie called Bam-eul Beosgineun Dogjangmi (translated as Poisonous Rose Stripping the Night).
  • Prolific, down-on-his-luck B-movie actor Richard Harrison contracted to make a few movies in Hong Kong for Ho; unbeknownst to him, the footage he shot was cut up and used in approximately twenty-one new pictures. He was sometimes re-dubbed so he could speak lines related to the new plot. In multiple movies (including this one) he plays an Interpol agent named Gordon who is seen delivering orders to field agents while speaking into a telephone shaped like popular comic strip cat Garfield.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Normally, you would say the image of two Caucasian ninjas engaged in a duel to the death while wearing headbands that read “ninja” would be hard to beat. In this movie, however, the unforgettable image has to be Nancy Chan’s topless scene, where the luminescence of her diamond-studded breasts makes the bottom half of the screen look like someone smeared Vaseline all over the lens.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: It’s two weird movies in one, as a ridiculous Korean rape revenge martial arts movie gets a Godfrey Ho makeover with an overlaid Interpol/ninja plot that turns the original from a baffling trifle into a truly deranged and nearly incomprehensible example of exploitation cinema.


Clip from Ninja Champion (courtesy of Mill Creek Entertainment)

COMMENTS: Ninja Champion doesn’t necessarily make it onto the Continue reading 184. NINJA CHAMPION (1985) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS (2013)

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DIRECTED BY:  and

FEATURING: Klaus Tange, Birgit Yew, Anna D’Annunzio, Hans de Munter

PLOT: Dan Kristensen comes home from a business trip to find that his wife is missing. His investigation into her disappearance leads him down an intricate rabbit hole of murder, sex, scopophilia, demonic possession, and, especially, confusion, as he moves within the impossible spaces of his mysterious apartment building.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: With its influx of surreal imagery, bizarre plot twists, aggressive soundscapes, and grunge-decadence sets, the weirdness of The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears is not in question. Its place on the List is hard to solidify, however, as its weirdness doesn’t quite compensate for the dragged-out pace, irrelevant script, and unnecessary repetition.

COMMENTS: Hurling images of kinky sex, paranormal apparitions, and violent attacks before the viewer’s eyes, all edited in quick-cut fashion: The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears is quite the experience. Its filmmakers seek to unsettle and disorient, and at that they are certainly successful. Just as the regular-Joe protagonist is thrust into this impossible situation, the audience is taken on a strange and terrible journey that makes very little sense, and frustrates more than it entertains. As a whole the film is very scattered, peppered with moments of brilliance between overwrought segments of confusion. Cattet and Forzani seem to have opened up a big book of experimental film techniques and just took a stab at every trick they happened upon. Some sequences are marvelous, including a dream wherein Dan becomes stuck in a time loop, meeting and killing multiple versions of himself over and over. Another shows an older woman losing her husband to a sinister force in the room above the bedroom, as she is left with nothing to do but listen to the strange noises coming through the ceiling. Still another is filmed in a sort of fuzzy black and white time-lapse, as a woman is chased by an unknown demonic figure. Other sequences feel completely pointless, as various asides and barely connected subplots and characters appear and disappear on a whim.

This film never allows its audience to find their footing, but it also never really rewards the more loyal viewer for sticking around til the end. It was at first engrossing for its emphatic—almost combative—illegibility, bullying its way through numerous red herring plot twists and presenting an extreme giallo-throwback aesthetic. The sets are beyond beautiful, with most of the action taking place within Dan’s apartment building, surrounded by Art Nouveau filigree and deep, heady color combinations. The sheer number of bizarre happenings and nontraditional cinematic techniques employed is honestly impressive, but the constant flood of ideas eventually becomes tiresome, especially as the story (a term I use loosely here) proves more and more cyclical. There’s little momentum, and little payoff for a film that stretches very thinly over its 102 minutes. It’s clear the film would have worked better as a short, where Cattet and Forzani could have packed in all of their artsy grindhouse weirdness without wearing out their welcome. But for diehard giallo fans, it’d definitely be worth it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Formally experimental, headily disorienting and an aesthete’s wet dream, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears is a schizophrenic blend of arthouse and charnelhouse.” –Anton Bitel, Sight & Sound Magazine

Canonically Weird (The List)

165. NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR (1985)

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“When we were approached to do this commentary and you were asking me if I’d seen Night Train to Terror I was thinking back. I’d seen it about ten years ago and I thought, ‘yeah, I remember the wraparound with the New Wave band and I remember the stop-motion insect that’s in the second part coming up,’ and that’s all I could remember. Everything else was it was a bit weird and strange and I didn’t find it all that entertaining. But, I have to say I’ve changed my opinion, I’m a lover of Night Train to Terror.”–horror writer Justin Kerswell, on the Night Train to Terror commentary track

DIRECTED BY: Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, John Carr, Phillip Marshank, Tom McGowan, Gregg C. Tallas

FEATURING: Ferdy Mayne (credited as “Himself”), Tony Giorgio (credited as “Lu Sifer”), Gabriel Whitehouse, , ,

PLOT: God and Satan are riding on a train at midnight. Looking out the window, they watch three stories, and debate the eternal fate of the protagonists. All the while, a teen pop/rock band is acting out a music video in a nearby compartment.

Still from Night Train to Terror (1985)
BACKGROUND:

  • The first segment of this anthology film (“The Case of Harry Billings”) was an unfinished movie shot by John Carr. It was later released, without the director’s knowledge or input, as a feature titled Scream Your Head Off. In 1992 Carr shot additional footage and released his own completed version of the movie (now with Francine York as Marilyn Monroe!) titled Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars.
  • Night Train to Terror‘s second segment is edited down from the 1984 feature The Dark Side to Love [AKA Death Wish Club; AKA Gretta; AKA Carnival of Fools] (also directed by John Carr), which is available in its uncut form on the Vinegar Syndrome DVD as an extra.
  • The third tale is a compressed version of the 1980 horror Cataclysm (co-directed by Phillip Marshank, Tom McGowan, and Gregg C. Tallas).
  • According to Night Train producer/director Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, none of the films used here had found distributors at that time, and some additional scenes were shot for each sequence using stand-ins. The stop motion animation sequences in the second and third segments were also added specifically for Night Train to Terror.
  • Phillip Yordan, who is credited for the screenplay to Johnny Guitar (1954), wrote Night Train (and also wrote each of the three movies edited into this anthology). Yordan was a three-time Academy Award nominee who received a 1954 Best Writing nod for Broken Lance. However, Yordan also worked as a front for blacklisted writers during the McCarthy era, so it is possible that he did not actually write all of the screenplays with which he is credited in the 1950s. His son Byron lip-syncs and breakdances in Night Train to Terror.
  • Some older reviews describe the first and third segments as switched from the order they appear on the DVD/Blu-ray; presumably this is the order the stories were shown on VHS.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a movie that’s caked in blood and gore, surprisingly enough the most memorable image is of the wholesome lip-syncing teenage band dressed like extras from Flashdance, hopping around, pretending to play instruments, and breakdancing in a train compartment that looks like a suburban living room, while the impassive conductor silently makes his rounds. Of course, in this case the indelible image is inextricably linked to the indelible sound, as the hormonal minstrels belt out their catchy-but-mocking hook: “Everybody’s got something to do—everybody but you.”

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Inspired by the box-office success of horror anthology movies like Creepshow (1982) and Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Night Train to Terror tries to hop a ride on the omnibus gravy train. Rather than shoot new stories specifically for this movie, however, the producers decided to save time and money by cutting unreleased full-length features they already owned the rights to into twenty-five minute segments. Needless to say, the results of this hacksaw editing, which consistently sacrifices narrative for nudity and gore scenes, are incoherent. The expository sequences with a hammy God (“I shed my mercy on them, as I do the gentle rain”) and hammier Satan (“there is no evil so vile which man will not plunge himself into”) on a cosmic train judging the characters adds an additional layer of bizarreness. But, it’s the upbeat teen New Wave band shooting a music video in the next train compartment that sends the movie off the tracks and plunging into a void of pure weirdness.


Blu-ray trailer for Night Train to Terror

COMMENTS: “I can laugh and cry at the same time,” explains God. He may have learned that trick by watching Night Train to Terror. If you mix Continue reading 165. NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR (1985) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: EVANGELION: 3.0 YOU CAN (NOT) REDO (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Hideaki Anno, Mahiro Maeda, Masayuki, Kazuya Tsurumaki

FEATURING: Megumi Ogata, , Yuko Miyamura, Akira Ishida

PLOT: 14 years after the cataclysmic events of the previous film, humans are barely surviving on a barren earth. Evangelion pilot Shinji Ikari wakes up from a coma to find himself at the center of a war for the planet’s future.

Evangelion-3.0-Big-Rei

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though this is the weirdest so far of the Evangelion reboot movies, it can’t really be recommended out of context of the other films. The series’ mixture of convoluted plotting, infuriating ambiguity, and biblical skewering is bizarre enough to make it recommended anime viewing, if not List-worthy on its own.

COMMENTS: In a gutsy narrative move, Evangelion 3.0 completely upends the established structure and tenuous stability of the first two films, introducing a host of new ideas and assigning new roles to major characters. It begins by immediately throwing the audience into the action, offering no introduction for the great space battle populated by Evangelion units, a massive experimental hovercraft, and horrific space angels. (Not that it matters, since the sequence is jaw-dropping even without context.) Shinji—and thus, the viewer—awakens to a confused, damaged world completely without the false sense of security found in the previous installments. Everyone is scarred, everyone is scared, and no one will give Shinji a straight answer, so he is batted about between these warring factions without any explanation as to what is going on. For the most part only newcomer Kaworu (a fellow Evangelion pilot with his own troubled past) seems interested in even talking to him, and the two quickly forge a deep bond that seems to replace all of Shinji’s questions as opposed to answering them.

With so many new plots and subplots and a steadfast refusal to explain almost anything, this movie is as infuriating a watch as it is compelling. For once I was sympathetic towards the whiny, ineffectual character of Shinji because his confusion and self-centered moaning were completely justifiable: for him, everything is terrible and nothing makes sense, plus everyone he’s ever loved is either dead or not speaking to him. Due to the utter lack of exposition, the visuals become paramount, and the animation and design are truly a sight to behold: colorful and kinetic during action sequences, broad and at-times painterly during still moments. The intricate technological design, impressively cinematic settings, and thoughtful character design are all at their height here, and the animation bests that of the first two films.

It is in many ways a disorienting experience, piling on so many strange ideas and characters, referencing events and concepts that are never given much elaboration, but Evangelion 3.0 manages to be intellectually engaging as well as emotionally intense. The events of the previous entries are necessary to understand the full impact of this film’s events, especially the characters’ relationships and, of course, the “Third Impact” that destroys most of the earth. While it is typically frustratingly obtuse, there are certain moves forward in plotting, certain mysteries solved. Of course, for every question answered a thousand more rise in its place, and there are still so many unresolved or untreated issues. Shinji ended the film just as much a self-absorbed brat as before, so involved with his own actions that he sort of neglected to notice how his new co-pilot had become a central, destructive figure in this whole mess. So the audience is left with as much knowledge there as Shinji himself, who never stopped to ask what was going on because he was too busy whining. As usual.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Once upon a time in the ’60s, a critic would have known exactly what to say: that the gorgeous, cacophonous anime sound-and-light show ‘Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo’ should only be watched in an altered state. That would be a serviceable approach to a film that too often substitutes obfuscation for complexity, to relax and drift along on the often-spectacular, pulsating visuals.” –David Chute, Variety

Capsules

CAPSULE: KING OF THORN (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Kazuyoshi Katayama

FEATURING: Brina Palencia, Patrick Seitz (English dub)

PLOT:  A group of randomly chosen global volunteers are cryogenically frozen to escape a petrification virus, but wake up to a world overrun by monsters.

Still from King of Thorn (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: King of Thorn falls afoul of the anime conundrum: because we expect every Japanese sci-fi cartoon to look like a nightmare we had after eating expired sushi and make as much sense as a script where William Gibson and David Cronenberg alternate lines of dialogue, “weird” is actually “normal” for this subgenre. We could technically fill up all of our 366 slots with these efforts, but we reserve spots on the List for animes that are either highly influential, are that go above and beyond in the craft of WTF-ery. King of Thorn is a weird movie by anyone’s standards, but it lacks that extra level of brilliant insanity necessary to stand out from the pack in its crazy genre.

COMMENTS: “What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense!” one character tells another near the climax of King of Thorn. “I don’t want you to understand,” responds the accused. “It’s better that way.”

By this point in the story, the first time viewer might assume that response is the screenwriter’s personal confession. For nearly two hours the script has been juggling multiple plot hot potatoes like a worldwide virus, an apocalyptic doomsday cult, an advanced bioweaponry corporation, intrusive dreams and flashbacks, super-powerful artificial intelligences, correspondences to the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty,” and complex, psychologically rich backstories for the main characters, but as we reach the dramatic showdown it appears that all of these balls have been dropped in favor of a psychedelic explosion of mumbo-jumbo mysticism. Anyone who saw the movie in theaters without the benefit of the rewind button would be totally flummoxed by the plot; rest assured, however, that this complicated story does ultimately make sense, although it may take you two passes through the story to parse it all out.

Things start out simply enough: the world is threatened by a fatal virus, christened “Medusa” because its victims turn to stone. One hundred sixty infectees from around the world are randomly chosen to be frozen in a cryogenic chamber housed in a Scottish castle, to be awakened only once there is a medical cure for Medusa. The first big twist comes when the one hundred sixty awake; the cryonic chamber is overgrown with huge, thorny vines, the facility is abandoned, and the skies are full of mutant bats that make quick work of most of the crew. Seven manage to escape down a side tunnel, only to encounter larger and more bloodthirsty beasties prowling the interiors of the castle. The survivors are a heavily tattooed convict, a black American cop, an architect, an Italian senator, a Japanese teenager who left her identical twin behind, an orphan boy who’s convinced that the castle’s monsters come from his video game, and a nurse who quickly assumes a role as the boy’s surrogate mother. As the plot thickens, it turns out that almost everyone has a secret identity or a deep dark secret; whenever one of the characters turns out to be exactly who they seem to be, it’s a huge shock. One by one, the survivors die off during a midsection of the film that plays  as an almost nonstop chase/battle scene, interrupted by clues that only deepen the mystery. Where did the monsters come from? Why does the little boy instinctively know where to go? How long have they been asleep, and why did they wake up? What happened to A.L.I.C.E., the supercomputer that was supposed to be taking care of them as they slumbered?

Rather than answering these questions, King of Thorn keeps piling on more and more as its body count mounts. Reality melts away as the survivors penetrate the castle’s inner sanctum and the director breaks out the lysergic eye candy with fantastic vistas of floating castles, thorny vines entwining like Jack and the Beanstalk with a bondage fetish, and hallucinatory sequences with characters doubled and tripled and giant faces peering down from the ceiling. The visuals are impressive throughout, from the opening scene of a doll-like petrified woman plummeting from a skyscraper and shattering on the streets of New York to picture postcard shots of the Scottish countryside, but the finale pulls out all the stops. No matter how confused you get, King of Thorn satisfies the eye; after a second viewing, or at least a review of some key scenes, you should find it satisfies the mind as well.

King of Thorn has everything a sci-fi anime fan could want: psychedelic visuals, non-stop action, a convoluted, mindbending sci-fi plot, and Japanese schoolgirls in ridiculously short skirts. And yet, the movie has so far failed to gain a huge cult following among the otaku. Unimpressed anime fans raise two objections to Thorn. The first—“the manga was better”—is predictable and inevitable. The second complaint is unexpected, coming from a class that generally worships at the altar of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira: Thorn is just too confusing. Of course, that criticism has no effect on us at 366 Weird Movies; to us, “confusing” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 “With a little tighter writing and a clearer exposition of the film’s central conceit, not to mention its somewhat bizarre climax, this piece could easily be ported over into a live action feature with someone like Guillermo del Toro, James Cameron or even Gore Verbinski at the helm… As it stands, you may be occasionally (or even more than occasionally) a little confused by King of Thorn, but it’s virtually guaranteed you won’t be bored.”–Jefferey Kaufman, Blu-ray.com (Blu-ray)