Tag Archives: Extreme

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: SWEET MOVIE (1974)

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Sweet Movie has been upgraded to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time. This initial review is kept here for archival purposes. Please leave comments on Sweet Movie‘s official Certified Weird entry page.

Beware

DIRECTED BY: Dusan Makavejev

FEATURING: Carole Laure, Anna Prucnal, Pierre Clémenti,

PLOT: Two alternating stories: in one a virgin beauty queen escapes from her millionaire

Still from Sweet Movie (1974)

husband and his solid gold penis, while in the other a Socialist sea captain sails down an Amsterdam canal with a hold full of sugar and candy.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Any movie where a virgin beauty queen is frightened on her wedding night by her billionaire husband’s solid gold penis is certainly weird enough to qualify for the List. My hesitation in anointing it as one of the 366 most notable weird movies of all time my belief that this is a really bad movie—not just a grotesque and disgusting film, but an empty, morally bankrupt, and frequently dull one, as well. (Despite it’s Criterionization, Sweet Movie‘s uninspiring 6.3 rating on IMDB coupled with a mediocre 47% positive on Rotten Tomatoes supports my suspicion that it’s not a film many people can admire). Sweet Movie, which glories in loving depictions of urine, feces, puke and blood, is like an arthouse version of Pink Flamingos, only with a puffed-up self-importance in place of that movie’s radical humor. The film has its defenders, who are encouraged to speak up in the comments section—because it will take some convincing for us to honor this greatly reviled provocation with a spot on the List.

COMMENTS: Sweet Movie mixes shock aesthetics with an unfocused political polemic; like blood and sugar, the two strategies prove immiscible, and so it’s like getting two bad movies for the price of one. It starts out with a promising satirical idea. A chastity belt manufacturer is holding a beauty contest, the prize being marriage to the richest man in the world. The winning contestant, beauteous Carole Laure, even has a glowing hymen! In an unrelated plotline, a ship is cruising down a canal in Amsterdam with a bust of Karl Marx jutting from the prow; a man dressed as a Potemkin-era Russian sailor tries to get the attention of captain Anna Prucnal from the shore. The movie quickly goes off the tracks, however, when “Miss Monde” escapes from her Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: SWEET MOVIE (1974) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE BRIDE OF FRANK (1996)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Steve Ballot

FEATURING: Frank Meyer

PLOT: Frank, a mentally challenged old man with a speech impediment, kills various people he

Still from he Bride of Frank (1996)

meets as he searches for true love from a woman with large breasts.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As an authentic piece of goombah outsider art, The Bride of Frank is actually weird, but it’s also bad. And I mean real bad, not “entertaining” bad.

COMMENTS: The movie begins with a toothless old man tricking a five year-old girl into getting into his big rig, trying to get her to kiss him, then crushing her head under the wheel of his truck after she calls him a “dirty bum.” If that scenario sounds like can’t miss comedy gold to you, then you’re The Bride of Frank‘s target audience. All others will want to observe that “beware” rating. That opening scene of child molestation played for laughs does have the virtue of driving away most of the audience before the film can even get started; anyone who continues on past that point can’t pretend to be surprised by the senseless killing, simulated defecation, and sexual perversion that follows. Tonally, the opening, which makes us want to destroy Frank with fire, is a huge problem because it’s out of character with the way the rest of the movie wants to portray him—as a hideous-looking but childlike outcast, a la Frankenstein’s monster, who only kills bad people after they insult and reject him. To wit: Frank decapitates a nerd and relieves himself inside the corpse after being insulted at his birthday party, rips the face off a transvestite who tricks him into a sexual encounter, tears the eye out of a 300 pound exotic dancer and violates her corpse because she’s a tease, and so on. Yawn. Are we jaded yet? More conventional comic relief comes from the poetically obscene homoerotic/homophobic repartee between two of Frank’s coworkers, which is slightly amusing, but nothing you haven’t heard before if you’ve ever worked with Jersey teamsters on a loading dock. Frank, the weatherbeaten, dim, ex-homeless killer whose speech impediment is so thick he’s often subtitled, is played by real-life ex-homeless man Frank Meyer. Frank is like regular Edith Massey, except he’s not in on the joke. He’s not acting, he’s simply Continue reading CAPSULE: THE BRIDE OF FRANK (1996) →

Capsules, Essays

CAPSULE: A SERBIAN FILM (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Srdjan Spasojevic

FEATURING: Srdjan Todorovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Jelena Gavrilovic, Katarina Zutic, Slobodan Bestic

PLOT: An ethical and well-intentioned ex porn star collaborates with an Eastern syndicate to produce a series of art-house pornographic films, and is unwittingly ensnared in the serpentine morass of his film executives’ depraved madness.

Still from A Serbian Film (2010)


WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite the colorful controversy surrounding A Serbian Film, including claims that it is torture porn and even child porn, the movie is a straightforward—if transgressive—cross-genre thriller, a skillfully blended mix of mystery, horror and suspense elements.  Adventurous viewers who choose to watch A Serbian Film should seek the uncut version.  The controversial scenes are a crucial part of the plot.

NOTE: Director Srdjan Spasojevic was confronted by the international press and informed that his movie A Serbian Film is nothing more than thinly veiled torture porn, perhaps even child pornography.  He responded by asserting that the movie is in fact “a political allegory,” intentionally resplendent with metaphors for the historical, systematic repression of the Serbian people. For example, Spasojevic tells explains that the shocking baby scene “represents us and everyone else whose innocence and youth have been stolen by those governing our lives for purposes unknown.”

Is he being serious?  Or does he believe the most effective way to point out the absurdity of detractors’ allegations and deliberate misinterpretations is to posit an equally absurd response?  A thorough consideration of this controversy is beyond the scope of this review.  The viewer should watch the movie and judge for himself.  I present my own ideas regarding what I think the film discursively accomplishes in the addendum which follows the review.  Whether Spasojevic intends the film to deliver any of these meanings is a matter of speculation.  Despite what I think are some very good points made in the film, it’s my personal belief that he primarily set out to make an offbeat, tense thriller that was shocking enough to be sure to attract attention.  He succeeded.

COMMENTS: Lurid and grim, suspenseful and exciting, A Serbian Film is a well crafted, taut thriller that doesn’t insult one’s intelligence.  Sporting a chic visual signature and structured with a non-linear, temporally shifting plot, this sensational shocker fires off images that range from Continue reading CAPSULE: A SERBIAN FILM (2010) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: SOMEONE’S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Chad Ferrin

FEATURING: , Andrea Renda, Jon Budinoff, Ricardo Gray, Silvia Spross, Ezzra [sic] Buzzington, Elina Madison

PLOT: The spirits of two possessed serial killers who rape their victims to death stalk drug

Still from Someone's Knocking at the Door (2008)

abusing medical students.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  If you want unlikeable, unbelievable characters and prosthetic mutant penises, this is your movie; if you want something scary or meaningfully weird, however, look elsewhere.

COMMENTS: The strangest thing about Someone’s Knocking at the Door isn’t the variety of killer genitalia on display, but the bed-hopping, skin-popping residents of what has to rank as the Princeton Review’s number one medical party school.  Besides engaging in frequently fatal kinky sex, these medicos in training spend most of their time taking speed, booze, ecstasy, nicotine, Xanax, Oxycontin, nitrous oxide, and attending Halloween parties where the students egg each other on with cries of “chug! chug! chug!”  Fortunately for the kids, when one of their compatriots is killed via graphic demonic anal rape, the school’s hippie chancellor gives them the week off to grieve at the kegger of their choice.  The students also get high off of vials of experimental psychiatric drugs, while listening to snuff audiotapes so they can catch up on the back story.  (Only after shooting up do they think to look up the drug’s side effects, which include increased sexual appetite, hallucinations, and possible coma.  Oops!)  In a stroke of good luck for the audience, the kids are all perfectly detestable human beings, which means we don’t mind much when possessed serial killers from the 1970s somehow show up to rape them to death.  Jon Budinoff, in particular, never says a kind or sincere word and punches his dates when they don’t put out; he’s so loathsome it’s impossible to believe he could have any friends at all.  On the other hand we recognize as the film’s moral conscience when he objects after finding his socially inept buddy groping a half-nude, comatose female partier who may have stopped breathing (although he’s not so judgmental as to try to stop him).  Knocking is a movie that would love to be offensive, but it keeps tripping over its own silliness.  Ridiculous plot and lack of characterization aside, the movie is technically competent, and director Chad Ferris does put some interesting and occasionally very weird ideas up on the screen.  All of the backgrounds are earth tones or sickly avocados; the film has the color scheme of a 1977 kitchenette.  The genital prosthetics are genuinely nightmarish (the film focuses on the phallus, but the other sex gets its moment to, er, shine as well).  Psychotic episodes are effectively conveyed through stuttering editing that mixes alternate views of the present with brief hallucinations, scored to eerie electronic noises.  At one point, the sound effects even mimic a malfunctioning dial-up modem, a scarier effect than you might think.  And, look closely at the funeral procession for an unexpectedly bizarre surprise.  Other odd moments include a fleeing female who falls a modern record seven times (!) while covering a mere ten feet as she’s chased by a shambling but sure-footed killer.  (In her defense, she may have been thrown off by the fact that the soundtrack was blaring an upbeat indie rock tune instead of the expected shrieking violins).  Add a twist ending you’ve seen before and a strong moral against injecting experimental psychiatric medications for kicks, and you have a strange, if uneven, modern exploitation horror.  If grindhouses existed today, this is what would be playing there.  A mixture of time-tested horror clichés, careless scriptwriting, and mucho grotesquerie, Knocking features enough sex, violence and general outrageousness to save it from being boring, and enough stylistic innovation to (mostly) camouflage its derivative slasher story.  Fans of modern disgusto horror will open up gleefully for Someone’s Knocking at the Door, but others will want to turn off all the lights and pretend no one’s home.

A title credit sequence featuring a vintage shower of pharmaceuticals cut with grainy 1960s home movies announces that this is a movie aimed squarely at the horror/stoner crowd, the genre’s largest unacknowledged demographic.  In a clever exploitation-style marketing move, the poster and DVD cover features black censor bars not only over exposed naughty bits, but also over the actors’ and actresses’ eyes, giving the movie an extra aura of pornographic depravity.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…eschews the standards of the youth-horror genre, opting instead for something more hallucinatory.”–Michael Gingold, Fangoria (DVD)

Capsules

CAPSULE: SLAUGHTERED VOMIT DOLLS (2006)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY:  Lucifer Valentine

FEATURING:  Ameara Lavey, Pig Lizzy, Maja Lee

PLOT: A bulimic teen makes a pact with the devil in this nonsensical odyssey of ICK!

Still from Slaughtered Vomit Dolls (2006)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite it’s feature length and small cult following, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls is not really a movie at all, just a collage of clips. It was not structured to make any sort of sense, nor does it seem intended to be taken seriously. Regrettably, there does not appear to have been enough thought behind it to consider that it might be a joke on the audience, as was the case with Andy Warhol‘s notorious Sleep (1963).  Of course, I wanted to write about it as a joke. I was going to begin with an intro stating something to the effect that I always try to recommend good cinema. But my conscience won’t let me play that joke on you. The movie is really that bad.

COMMENTS: Abused teen Angela flees home, is sheltered by a lecherous priest, and sexually exploited by all she meets. Think Candy (1968), by Christian Marquand and Buck Henry, based on Terry (Dr. Strangelove) Southern’s novelized parody of Voltaire’s Candide. Only with mangled vignettes, jump cuts, smash cuts, blood, simulated violence, gore, heaving breasts, full frontal nudity, incoherent babbling, dancing bears, Nazism, and of course vomit. Lots of it. Minus the clever plot of Candy. OK, just kidding about the dancing bears and Nazism, but suffice it to say, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls makes Doors lead singer Jim Morrison’s UCLA film studies student project look like Citizen Kane.

Anyway, back to the “plot” (or lack of it). Drug addicted, alcoholic, and repeatedly used as a sexual bucket, a fed-up Angela refutes all worldly good and makes a pact with Satan in return for His protection. It doesn’t work out well. After setting fire to the priest’s church, Angela descends into stripping and prostitution, spiraling ever more furiously hell-bound, with lots of blood, gore, heaving breasts, full frontal nudity, vomit of course, and—oh wait, we already covered that.

Yup. That’s about it. Eye gouge scenes, raving girls rolling on the floor in religious mania, and naked strippers whom Valentine recruited from the local roadhouse. Hot, deranged, tormented, supple, quivering naked strippers covered with red corn syrup, sticking their fingers down their throats and retching on a glass table positioned over an upturned camera.

Apparently Lucifer Valentine is a film student with access to cameras, lights, makeup, and little in the way of clever ideas. He set out to make the ultimate work of shock value pop “art.” As pop “art,” it does indeed reflect abstract expressionism via a survey of superficial contemporary counter-cultural values: sex, drugs, rock and roll, violence, and nihilism. But so does a drive though Southeast LA. Valentine certainly succeeded in making the most deliberately offensive, ridiculous, non-nonsensical picture he could.

Only my most proudly deviant weirdo friends will want to see Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, the first entry in Valentine’s Vomit Gore Trilogy. (Yes, that’s right, there are three of these movies. The next two entries are the 2009 ReGOREgitated Sacrifice, and Slow Torture Puke Chamber [2010]). Yow!

All others avoid at all costs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…everything on display here (including its at times ‘film-school-esque’ execution) seems all to deliberate. How can we shock? How can we be disgusting? How can we seem weird? How can we gain attention? When your viewer feels as if you were asking these questions during the ‘creative’ process, much of its potential integrity and/or effectiveness is lost.”–Lawrence P. Raffel, Monsters at Play (DVD)


Scenes from Slaughtered Vomit Dolls