Directed by Michael Langan, “Doxology” is an experimental head trip beginning and ending with verses from “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow” or “The Common Doxology”. This short contains floating carrots, dancing cars, and a tennis ball crashing into the moon. What more could you ask for?
Tag Archives: Experimental
SATURDAY SHORT: HALLOWEEN TRASH (2007)
What the heck is a Shaye St. John? From the evidence provided in this short, it’s a scary, androgynous mask wearing figure that likes to film itself verbally abusing passing trick-or-treaters, then remix the resulting footage to make it look like a low-grade acid trip. Or maybe it’s a robot? Maybe its My Space page would help?
Oh, and happy Halloween, you luscious piece of trash!
SATURDAY SHORT: SULTANA MEADOWS
“Sultana Meadows” is a fine example of the delightful, under appreciated shorts by Spike McKenzie. The unsettling images throughout this video are quite reminiscent of David Lynch, and paint a very weird and wonderful picture.
Relationships tend to slowly draw away our good side, and expose the bad. Mayhap you’ll have much in common with this journey into the bizarre.
For more of Spike visit his YouTube account. I strongly recommend his mock kids show, “Wonderbang Island”.
366 EXCLUSIVE: “9″
We are pleased to debut Alfred Eaker and Robbin Panet’s short film film “9” on the web. This is the movie they made for the 2009 48 Hour Film Festival. The rules of the contest festival are simple: every team has only 48 hours to complete the film, and each must incorporate three elements given by the festival : a character name, a line of dialogue, and a prop. Look for a character named “Professor Sherman Kane,” a ball, and the line “I’m not talking to you.”
Rather than making a straightforward short that looked like everyone else, “9” takes an experimental approach, becoming a sepia-hued exploration of domestic abuse through the generations, in a Western setting. The bizarre free-association poetry of John M. Bennet replaces traditional narration. It runs approximately seven and a half minutes.
Alfred’s description of the making of the film can be read in his Reflections on the 48 Hour Film Festival and the “9” Diary.
[Our license to display “9” has expired. We will inform you if this film is released, on DVD or otherwise, in the future.]
At the producers’ request, this film will not be released to YouTube or other video hosting sites, and will be available here for one month only. UPDATE: Because this film was reviewed and linked from Rogue Cinema, we are leaving the film up for another week, until October 12, 2009.
SATURDAY SHORT: “CROOKED (ORCUS) ROT”
“Saturday Short” (suggestions on a better title are welcome) is a new feature where we’ll be featuring a new (to us), full-length, weird short every Saturday. Shorts are selected by our new “shorts editor” Cameron Jorgensen.
This stop-motion animation by David Firth is just over a year old. David found a lot of the props he uses in this animation in his own backyard. Beware, most of his shorts are very creepy, and “Crooked (Orcus) Rot” is no exception. A lot of his work can be defined as dark humor while this would better fit under experimental. Musical score written by Marcus Fjellstrom.
For more of Firth’s work be sure to visit his site: http://www.fat-pie.com/
Filmmakers: if you have a short you’d like to see featured in this space, please contact us using the contact form.
BORDERLINE WEIRD: BAD BOY BUBBY (1993)
Bad Boy Bubby has been upgraded and placed on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time. Please read the Bad Boy Bubby Certified Weird Entry and direct any comments about the film to that page. Comments are closed on this review, which is left here for archival purposes.
DIRECTED BY: Rolf de Heer
FEATURING: Nicholas Hope
PLOT: Raised by his mentally ill mother with no knowledge of the outside world in what is
essentially a fallout shelter, middle-aged Bubby is suddenly released into a modern Australian society he can hardly comprehend, but must learn to fit into somehow.
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: Bad Boy Bubby has a unique tone that’s hard to capture, but the first words I’d choose to characterize it are “relentlessly offbeat,” rather than “weird.” Sadly, the existence of a Bubby—a child raised in captivity by a crazed parent—is not some weird invention, but is actually torn from today’s headlines. Although the incidents depicted often strain the bounds of plausibility (only briefly breaking them in the later reels), for the most part de Heer chooses to tell his story using a straightforward, realistic narrative style that makes us believe bizarre Bubby is a real person in a real world.
COMMENTS: Bad Boy Bubby is a film that moves slowly from deep darkness into light. It’s often shocking and depressing, particularly in that dingy first third, where Bubby’s unnatural relationship with his deranged mom in their claustrophobic basement hovel is made into a suffocating reality in which we are forced to share. The saving grace is that the movie always treats Bubby with true affection. Most of Bubby’s misbehavior, such as his tendency to shake a woman’s breast instead of her hand when he first meets her, comes out of childlike innocence. But even when Bubby’s truly, purposefully being a “bad boy,” we understand what he’s suffered—even though he doesn’t fully—and we remain firmly on his side. The script, which could have been ruthless to poor Bubby, rewards him (and the viewer) in the end, and the happy ending feels earned rather than tacked on.
Comic possibilities that were buried with Bubby in the dingy basement apartment emerge when Bubby escapes into the relative light of modern Australian society, but the movie never really threatens to become a comedy. Bubby’s gift for mimicry raises all sorts of Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: BAD BOY BUBBY (1993)
GUEST REVIEW: JESUS AND HER GOSPEL OF YES (2004)
Guest review by Kevin Pyrtle of WTF-Film
Here in Minneapolis there’s a strange little show [you’ll have to forgive me for not remembering the name of it] that plays the public access stations every week or so. It features a host of young talent who frolic in front of a blue screen in various stages of undress while ancient video effects are laid over top of it all in a random fashion. It goes on for an hour, reaching ever dizzier heights of incomprehensible nonsense and leaving you puzzled as to what, if anything, you were meant to take away from the experience.
All of the above could rightly be said for this Alfred Eaker film as well, which the director describes on the IMDB as ‘a surreal, complex, modern, psychedelic film retelling the life of Christ as woman and leader of the Gospel of Yes.’ The main difference between the two is that Jesus runs slightly longer, around seventy three minutes before the lengthy credits roll.
Complex it is, indeed – there’s never a moment [credits included] in which Jesus has nothing going on. We get endless loopy dialogue, re-interpreting the Gospel with frequent pop culture references and commenting on the various ills of contemporary society all the while. Not that there’s time to soak any of it in, as the words pile up in ungainly multitude and start to sound like inarticulate mush after a while. It’s akin to a rambling political address. I know that there’s a point to all of it somewhere, but the manner in which it’s put across leaves me with no interest in finding out what it is.
If interpreting the dialogue is difficult on its own, then the accompanying visuals make the task doubly so. Jesus is populated by an endless parade of excruciatingly bad visual effects that could have originated from the plugin archives of any prosumer video editing application. Most of them involve people doing random things while other people, through the magic of digital process photography, do random things in front of them. There is some interesting artwork on display [all credited at the end], but you have to look closely to even see it through the multiple layers of visual obfuscation. There is also some not-so-interesting artwork, much of which could have been accomplished in MS Paint.
Far be it from me to say that Jesus, in spite of its obvious faults, is not a creative enterprise. Creativity is one thing its producers obviously have in spades. There’s no telling how many long days and sleepless nights went towards its realization, making it all the more a pity that something easier to appreciate didn’t result. There’s some good substantive meat to the rambling narrative [like commentary on drug abuse, abortion, and sexual dynamics], but you have to dig through piles of aesthetically repellent gunk to find any of it. I doubt that most, regardless of their artistic sensibilities, will have the patience for it.
Jesus and Her Gospel of Yes is undeniably weird and original to the max, but its crude brand of no-budget shot-on-video mayhem just wasn’t for me. While I didn’t enjoy it, I have to admire that Eaker was at least trying something new here – a rare thing in these days of utterly barren mass marketed entertainment. I have a feeling that the world would be a far better place if even a hundredth of a percent of the box office earnings from the latest Hollywood action debacle was to find its way into the pockets of the Eakers of the world.
Jesus and Her Gospel of Yes is currently available exclusively for download at DownloadHorror.com.