In 2005, Ken Tipton made a labor of love; an indie film called Heart of the Beholder, regarding the true story of the initial video release of Last Temptation of Christ and the effects it has on a family who owned a small video chain in St. Louis, Missouri during the 1980s.
The CFD, Citizens for Decency, arrived when the owners of the chain chose to carry Martin Scorsese’s controversial film. These God-loving red, white and blue, flag- waving Americans came out in droves to harass, bully and literally threaten their employees, family, business, and life.
These are the same Americans who undoubtedly burned Dixie Chick albums when that group criticized God’s ambassador here on earth, little George W, and are the same Americans who still visit the Heart of theBeholder website telling Mr. Tipton and company that they are going to hell while undoubtedly pleasuring themselves at the thought of the filmmakers frying for all eternity. Heartof the Beholder is a damned important, desperately needed film.
Although Heart ofthe Beholder got good reviews and even won some festival awards, predictably, no distributor would touch it. One would surely think that the making of the film would have brought in some support, perhaps from Temptation‘s producers, Scorsese, etc. Continue reading HEART OF THE BEHOLDER (2005) & THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988)→
PLOT: Two high school delinquents find an undead young woman and use her as a sex slave.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST:Deadgirl is weird by virtue of its highly unconventional subject matter, which is treated in as matter-of-factly as a conventional drama. It’s also better than you might think; Deadgirl is one of the best necrophilia-themed movies I’ve seen.
COMMENTS: When I read any description of a horror movie that includes the words, “teenager” or “students,” it stops me in my tracks, and I groan in disappointment. However, it was conducive to the plot of this horror yarn that the two antagonistic protagonists be just that.
The pair are working class high school misfits. (I must note that they are little more working class than the jocks and cheerleaders at most high schools, who stridently compensate for their ordinariness by engaging in meaningless make-work activities and ardently conform in order to raise their perceived social status.) The two boys in this film are misfits only in the sense that they aren’t on the football team. Like all teenage boys (and girls, let’s be honest) they are also dying of horniness.
Rickie (Fernandez) predictably covets a cheerleader possessing no redeemable qualities, who is saving herself to be date raped by the captain of the football team some drunken Homecoming night. One afternoon, his friend J.T. (Segan) convinces him to skip class to drink beer in an abandoned insane asylum. Where else?
“The story functions, of course, on several levels, political, sociological, philosophical and, what’s most important, on a dreamlike psychological-symbolic level.”–Stanley Kubrick
PLOT: Alex is the leader of a small gang of violent, thrill-seeking youths in England sometime in the indefinite near future. After a home invasion goes bad, his “droogs” betray him and his victim dies, and he is sent to prison. The government selects him to undergo experimental Pavlovian conditioning that makes him violently ill when he becomes aggressive, then releases him onto the streets as a “reformed” criminal, only to find he is helpless to defend himself when he encounters his vengeful former victims.
BACKGROUND:
A Clockwork Orange is an adaptation of the critically acclaimed 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess. Burgess was ultimately unhappy with this treatment of his novel, because in his intended ending for the story, Alex voluntarily reformed. This final chapter of redemption had been excluded from American prints of the novel—the version Kubrick worked worked from—at the request of the American publisher. Kubrick’s version ends with evil triumphant. Although Kubrick had not read the final chapter of the novel before beginning the film, he later stated in interviews that he would not have included the happy ending anyway because he thought it rang false.
The title—which is not explained in the movie, only glimpsed briefly as a line of text on a typewritten page—comes from an expression Burgess overheard in a bar, “as queer as a clockwork orange.”
Burgess created the elaborate fictional jargon Alex uses by mixing elements of Russian and Slavic languages with Cockney slang. Much of his original dialogue found its way into the movie.
A Clockwork Orange was Stanley Kubrick’s next project after his previous weird masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It was also young star Malcolm McDowell’s first feature role after starring in a 1968 weird film, Lindsay Anderson’s If…
A Clockwork Orange was the first movie to use Dolby sound.
The movie was released in the United States with an “X” rating, and was later cut slightly and re-released in 1973 with an “R” rating.
The film was blamed for several copycat crimes in Britain and Europe, notably, a gang rape in which the rapists sang “Singin’ in the Rain” during the assualt. Kubrick, an American who lived in the United Kingdom, was also reportedly stalked by some deranged fans of the film. For these reasons, Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange from distribution in Britain, both from live screenings and on video. The self-imposed ban lasted until Kubrick’s death.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: A Clockwork Orange filled with as many iconic images as any film of the last fifty years. Scenes like the one where Alex and his costumed droogs walk cockily through a deserted city in slow motion have consciously or unconsciously been copied many times (compare the similar slo-mo shot of the uniformed gangsters emerging from their breakfast meeting in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs). Probably the most instantly recognizable image is the opening closeup of Alex’s sneering face, wearing a huge false eyelash one one eye only. I selected another memorable Malcolm McDowell closeup, the one of Alex as he’s undergoing the Ludovico technique, with wires and transistors attached to his head and metal clamps forcibly holding his eyes open so he cannot look away from the violent images on the screen, because it works as a perfect ironic metaphor for a film we cannot tear our eyes away from.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although the plot is simple, and realistic in its own speculative way, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is so hyper-stylized with its bizarre poetic language, sets, costumes, music, broadly exaggerated performances, and the improbable karmic symmetry of the plot that it seems to take place in a dream world or a subconscious realm. The action, which takes the form of an ambiguous moral fable, occurs in an urban landscape that’s familiar, but fabulously twisted just beyond our expectations.
“In BEGOTTEN, a time is depicted that predates spoken language; communication is made on a sensory level.”–E. Elias Merhige
DIRECTED BY: E. Elias Merhige
FEATURING: Actors from the experimental theater group Theater of Material
PLOT: A man sitting in a chair disembowels himself with a straight razor. A woman materializes from underneath his bloody robes, and impregnates herself with fluid taken from the dead body. She gives birth to a convulsing, full grown man, and mother and son are then seized and tortured by four hooded figures bearing ceremonial implements.
BACKGROUND:
Each frame of film was painstakingly manipulated to create the distressed chiaroscuro universe of the movie. According to the technical production notes, after the raw footage was shot, “…optimum exposure and filtration were determined, the footage was then re-photographed one frame at a time… it took over ten hours to re-photograph less than one minute of selected takes.”
It has been reported that the film was inspired by a near death experience the Merhige had after an automobile accident.
Critics from Time, Film Comment, The Hollywood Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and New York Newsday each named Begotten one of the ten best films of 1991. Novelist and photographer Susan Sontag called it one of the ten best films of modern times.
After Begotten, Merhige went on to direct the music video “Cryptorchid” for Marilyn Manson (which reused footage from Begotten) before landing a major feature, Shadow of the Vampire (2000)–a horror film about the making of Nosferatu, starring Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck and John Malkovich as Murnau.
Begotten is intended as part of a trilogy of films. A second film, Din of Celestial Birds, which deals with the idea of evolution rather than creation, has been released in a 14 minute version that is intended as a prologue to the second installment.
After its brief run in specialty arts theaters, including stints at the Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian, Begotten received a very limited video release, first on VHS and then on DVD. Merhige explains that this is because he does not believe that these formats are truly capable of reproducing the look he intended for the film:
There are so many arcane, deeply intentional uses of grain, light and dark in that film that it is closer to Rosicrucian manuscript on the origin of matter than it is to being a “movie”…. When I finished the film I never allowed it to be screened on video because of how delicately layered and important the image is in conveying the deeper mystery of what the film is “about”… this is why it is no longer available on DVD until I find a digital format that is capable of capturing the soul and intent of the film. My experiments in BluRay have been promising.
Nevertheless, a (bootleg?) Begotten showed up again on DVD in 2018.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The painfully graphic image of “God disemboweling Himself” with a straight razor–shot in the grainy, high-contrast black and white–is not easily forgotten.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A minimalist, mythic narrative of grotesque, ritualized suffering enshrouded in astonishing abstract avant-garde visuals and a hypnotic ambient soundtrack. Love it, hate it, or admire the technique while criticizing the intent—everyone admits there is nothing else quite like it in our cinematic universe.
“[Producer] Jeremy [Thomas] knew [raising money to make Tideland] would be difficult, particularly because the film is very, very weird.”–Terry Gilliam
DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam
FEATURING: Jodelle Ferland, Brendan Fletcher, Jeff Bridges
PLOT: Jeliza-Rose is a nine year old girl with an active imagination who is being raised by a pair of junkies. When her father spirits her away to a lonely, dilapidated farmhouse, then takes an extended “vacation” on heroin, Jeliza-Rose is left to her own devices. She retreats into an intricate fantasy world where her four doll’s heads are her closest companions, but reality is scarcely less bizarre than her imagination: her neighbors are a witch-like one-eyed woman with an unhealthy interest in taxidermy and a childlike mentally retarded man who also lives in his own fantasy world.
BACKGROUND:
Tideland was adapted from a critically praised novel by Mitch Cullin; ironically, this faithful movie adaptation was critically panned.
Gilliam made Tideland while on a six month hiatus from directing the big-budget commercial fantasy, The Brothers Grimm (2005).
Tideland was a commercial disaster, earning less than $100,000 in its initial domestic run.
According to Gilliam, the French distributor did not want to screen this film at Cannes because there is a scene involving farting, which the French find objectionable.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Many will remember Jeliza-Rose’s doll’s heads, who make memorably fantastic appearances in an underwater house and flying about inside a man’s ribcage. But the more indelible image, because it’s repeated so many times, is the view of the broken down farmhouse in front of amber waves of grain. The look was inspired by the Andrew Wyeth paining “Christina’s World,” and, though unacknowleged, also from the 1990 film The Reflecting Skin (which had an almost identical look as well as an eerily similarly child protagonist). Gilliam often emphasizes the tall gold grass towering over tiny Jeliza-Rose’s head, as if it were surf and she was living in an undersea world. This ubiquitous aquatic imagery helps to explain the title “Tideland“.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Gilliam has described the movie as a cross between “Alice in Wonderland” and Psycho, which sounds weird enough on its own terms. He pushes the envelope of weirdness even further with his trademark visual flair for phantasmagorical set pieces, for example, with a gloriously imaginative sequences of Jeliza-Rose falling down a rabbit hole full of tumbling syringes. But even if the audience wasn’t planted firmly inside the skull of the 9-year-old heroine, peering out onto this grotesque world through her child’s eyes, the scenario would have been weird, as the world of Tideland is peopled by grossly exaggerated lowlifes who live out their lives on the lonely fringes of plausibility.
In 2005, Ken Tipton made a labor of love; an indie film called Heart of the Beholder, regarding the true story of the initial video release of Last Temptation of Christ and the effects it has on a family who owned a small video chain in St. Louis, Missouri during the 1980s.
