Tag Archives: Extreme

List Candidates

BORDERLINE WEIRD: VISITOR Q [Bijitâ Q] (2001)

Due to popular demand, Visitor Q has been re-evaluated and certified weird, and the review has been updated to a full entry. This initial review is left here for archival purposes.

DIRECTED BY: Takashi Miike

FEATURING: Ken’ichi Endô, Shungiku Uchida, Kazushi Watanabe, Jun Mutô, Fujiko

PLOT: A bizarrely dysfunctional Japanese family—dad is a TV reporter on haitus after

Still from Visitor Q (2001)

being sodomized by interviewees on camera, mom is a heroin addict and part-time hooker, son is bullied at school and beats his mother at home—becomes even stranger and more antisocial after a mysterious stranger shows up in their home.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: It’s bizarre indeed, but Visitor Q is more interested in grossing out its viewers than it is in weirding them out.  It’s more a shock movie that’s incidentally weird than a weird movie that happens to be shocking.  The film doesn’t lack for surreality, or its own peculiar kind of quality within its type, but it seems to fit more comfortably into the shock genre than the weird genre.

COMMENTS:  Watching Visitor Q, I found myself wishing Miike had the courage to make the hardcore porn fetish movie that he really wanted to make, instead of pulling his punches by wrapping the psychological nudity in gauzily transparent strips of art and satire.  After all, the movie’s prime showpieces are father-daughter for-pay incest, sodomy by microphone, insanely copious lactation, rape, and necrophilia, all shown with as pornographic a level of explicitness as Miike could get away with (there is genital fogging, though unfortunately in a key scene there is no anal fogging).  In a virtually unshockable age, it would have been truly audacious for the bad-boy director to make an out-and-out porn film without artistic pretensions; as it is, by sprinkling his fetish video with a little redeeming surrealism, all Miike risked with the project was being hailed as the Japanese Passolini.

Visitor Q doesn’t lack either for weirdness or technical quality.  Starting with the latter, Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: VISITOR Q [Bijitâ Q] (2001) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: ANTICHRIST (2009)

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Antichrist has been promoted to the List of the 366 weirdest movies of all time. This page is left here for archival reasons. Pelase go to 72. Antichrist for more in-depth coverage of the film and to make comments.

DIRECTED BY: Lars von Trier

FEATURING: William Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

PLOT: After the death of their only child, a therapist takes his grieving and anxiety-ridden wife to a retreat in the woods to face her irrational fears; when they arrive, nature itself seems determined to drive them both mad.

Still from Antichrist (2009)

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Actually, von Trier’s troubled and troubling Antichrist is almost a shoo-in to make the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies.  Though the graphic torture-porn (and plain old-fashioned porn) elements have stolen the headlines and alienated viewers, at bottom this is von Trier’s spookiest and most mysterious film, a trip deep into the heart of darkness, and one the viewer may have as difficult a time returning home from intact as the characters do.  The irrational horror of von Trier’s vision is only magnified by the sense that you aren’t so much watching a filmic depiction of madness as watching a director going insane in real time, before your very eyes: he seems to lose control of his story as it progresses, turning the climax over to his internal demons for script-doctoring, before reasserting some measure of control of his material in a surreal epilogue.  While worthy of consideration, Antichrist finds itself in the same situation as the Coen brothers A Serious Man; we’re not going to officially certify it for the List until it receives its home video debut and we have a chance to scrutinize it more closely than is possible in a cinema.

COMMENTS: Lars von Trier desreves to be roundly criticized for burdening Antichrist with approximately four transgressive, shocking scenes: not because such sights should never be shown, but because these tasteless displays dominate our experience and force every viewer (and reviewer) to deal with them first and foremost.  Their sole artistic function are to serve as obstacles to appreciating the grim beauty of the remaining film.  Whether their inclusion is a calculated act by a prankster director, or a lapse in judgment resulting from psychological impairment (von Trier claims to have written the script as self-therapy to help him deal with a crippling bout of depression much like the one suffered by Charlotte Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: ANTICHRIST (2009) →

Guest Reviews

RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: FEED (2005)

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DIRECTED BY: Brett Leonard

FEATURING: Alex O’Loughlin, Patrick Thompson, Gabby Millgate, Jack Thompson

PLOT: A psychopathic opportunist known as a “Feeder” enables bedridden, morbidly obese women to grow even more grossly overweight, to the point of immobility. As their caretaker, he keeps them alive, but gradually feeds them to death. All the while, he films them for a pornographic website and runs a deadpool based on their life expectancy. An Australian detective hacks the website and tracks the webhost to Ohio.

FEED

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: I found Feed to be one of the most interesting  horror movies that I have seen in awhile. It is not great art, but it is entertaining if one is not offended by the grotesque. Many find it too disturbing and repulsive to watch, and it is delightfully weird. Of course, I am a very sick girl in need of psychiatric help. (That’s OK—I have plenty of medicine).

COMMENTS: Feed mixes mystery and suspense with a horrifying topic. It is  about a detective trying to unravel the enigma of a disturbingly perverse Internet fetish network. An Australian police investigator named Patrick Thompson (Jackson) travels to Ohio to find the source of what appears to be a clandestine Internet site for enthusiasts with a fetish for morbidly obese women, referred to as “gainers.” They are steadily fed a high calorie diet by the site administrator, Michael Carter (O’Loughlin) known in the industry as a “feeder.” The cop suspects that the bedridden women, some weighing over 500 pounds, are being held captive.

The investigator tracks down and confronts the feeder at his residence, but cannot find the clandestine set where the victims are confined. He does discover in the course of his investigation that women featured on the site end up as missing persons. He eventually discerns that Carter is literally feeding the women to death and feels compelled to locate the transmission site at any cost, regardless of U.S. law. The grotesque nature of the case, which leads the cop to analyze his own psycho-sexual dysfunctions, causes him to begin losing his sanity. In pursuing the feeder, he begins breaking the law himself with no regard for the consequences.

The feeder is a sexually tormented psychopath who is always a step ahead of his nemesis. He taunts the investigator while carrying out a far more devious and twisted scheme than the Aussie cop could ever suspect, including fattening up his own sister for the site. As the cop becomes entangled in this world of perversion, both he and the feeder start displaying inconsistent character traits. Their personalities disintegrate as they clash violently and a no-holds barred, high stakes cat and mouse pursuit ensues.

Feed is a graphic, fictitious film inspired by actual contemporary fetishes, and it ends as perversely as it does unpredictably. It delves into such dark unpleasantries as homosexuality, cannibalism, and incest, with graphic depictions of sex and extremely morbid nudity.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…genuinely perverse throughout, packed with nudity and deviant sex . . . the whole affair has the queasy air of a freak show, though to be fair, Leonard clearly employs the material as a direct challenge to the viewer’s own prejudices and as a tool for exploring notions of societal acceptance and hypocrisy, and of the fine line between abuse and consent.” -James Mudge, Beyond Hollywood

Capsules

CAPSULE: NEKROMANTIK (1987)

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DIRECTED BY: Jörg Buttgereit

FEATURING: Daktari Lorenz, Beatrice M.

PLOT:  A necrophiliac who works for a corpse disposal service loses his job, his perverted girlfriend, and finally his mind.

Still from Nekromantik (1987)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Although Nekromantik is indisputably weird—not simply in its bizarre concept, but in its numerous nightmare digressions from linearity—it can’t be recommended as a viewing experience.  It’s a badly made, tedious parade of revolting and nihilistic imagery with no ambition other than to shock the viewer.  When the film does utilize weirdness, it does so shallowly and irreverently, solely in service of its intent to disturb.

COMMENTS:  Like sex, inherently shocking imagery in film can be used well, to explore the human experience, or (more commonly) it can be used badly and exploitatively.  The ironic celebration of evil in A Clockwork Orange disturbs the viewer deeply, but the purpose of the film isn’t to shock us; it’s to provoke us into thinking more deeply about the problem of evil by forcefully confronting us with the paradox of free will.

Too many artists, however, have noticed that offending huge numbers of people is a far easier way to draw attention to themselves than working hard at their craft and creating something thoughtful and meaningful.  Sometimes, artists get confused and adopt a simple logical fallacy: much great art, like Nabokov’s “Lolita” or Buñuel‘s Un Chien Andalou, has shocked and offended large numbers of people; therefore, the purpose of great art must be to shock people.  (This artistic disorder is commonly known as “John Waters Syndrome”).  Most shocking art, however, is made with a more cynical hand, made with the artistic integrity of a freakshow proprietor.  This is the category into which Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik falls.

Un Chien Andalou opens with a shot of a woman’s eyeball being slit by a straight razor, juxtaposed with a shot of a cloud passing in front of the moon.  The image is shocking but artistic, suggestive and numinous.  Nekromantik opens with a shot of panties dropping and urine streaming onto the grass; the image is banal, and, besides breaking Continue reading CAPSULE: NEKROMANTIK (1987) →