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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LIVE FREAKY! DIE FREAKY! (2006)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: John Roecker

FEATURING: Voices of Billie Joe Armstrong, Tim Armstrong, Theo Kogan, Kelly Osbourne, Davey Havok, Asia Argento, John Doe, Jane Wiedlin

PLOT: A denizen of a future, post-apocalyptic landscape discovers an account of a narcissistic cult leader and his murderous spree in Hollywood in the latter half of the 20th century. 

Still from Live freaky, die freaky! (2006)

COMMENTS: A line of defense of bad comedians is to complain when they get called on the carpet for telling offensive jokes that punch down. “Don’t be so offended,” they love to say. So it’s not an auspicious start for Live Freaky! Die Freaky! to kick off with a title card that warns us, “Rated X, not for the easily offended.” It’s a litmus test. If you’re in any way put off by what follows, you have no one to blame but your own uncool bleeding heart. Because giving offense is very much the order of the day.

Make no mistake, writer-director Roecker wants so very badly to shock you with his profane irreverence. Live Freaky! is a bouillabaisse of slanderous characterizations, insulting stereotypes, cheeky musical numbers, and puppet gore. It’s a parade of sub-“Davey and Goliath” animations naughtily saying the dirtiest things they can think of, and then winding up covered in blood. Everyone fails every possible variation of the Bechdel test because everyone endlessly boasts about their depraved sex practices (and one character indulges himself even after death). The meet-cute between the film’s lunatic messiah and one of his aspiring acolytes is a lengthy scene of explicit stop-motion doll sex while singing a jaunty music hall tune. It’s the creation of someone who saw Team America and concluded that the way to make that film’s notorious sex scene funnier would be to just do more of it. 

I suppose Live Freaky! is a bold example of not really caring about anything at all. From the moment we see a live-action post-apocalypse vagrant unearth an old copy of Healter Skelter (sic), we’re launched into a looking-glass version of the Charles Manson story where the inexplicably charismatic miscreant may be bad, but at least he’s a man of the people. His victims are portrayed as even worse: drug-addled, sex-obsessed, vulgar and dismissive of anyone who isn’t rich or famous like they are. Oh, wait. I’m sorry. Did I say Charles Manson? Of course I meant Charles Hanson. Absolutely nothing to do with that other fellow. In fact, you can tell that the filmmakers have done their due diligence removing any trace of the Manson family’s rampage,  because while the names may all seem familiar, they’ve cleverly replaced every first initial with an H. Yep, this story is about Sharon Hate and her friends Hay and Habigail. Totally different. You can’t possibly sue them. It’s all 3-D chess with these guys.  

The movie openly embraces a punk aesthetic, which is presumably why the voice cast is comprised of several major figures from the punk rock scene, led by Green Day front man Billie Joe Armstrong essaying Charlie through what feels like a Redd Foxx impression. He’s joined by Tim Armstrong (no relation) from Rancid, John Doe of X, plus friends from Good Charlotte, AFI, Blink-182, Tiger Army, White Zombie, Lunachicks, and the Transplants. (Also Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Go’s, which is just depressing.) And then they hand this collection of punk all-stars a series of lame songs without an ounce of punk in them. And aside from their punk bonafides, the other thing cast all have in common is that none of them can act. Every line is delivered as if it was the only take of a script received five minutes before recording. The closest thing we have to a professional actor, Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter Kelly, plays her grotesquely vain socialite with the same snooty, over-enunciated whine throughout. The best analogy for the cast I can think of is a bunch of friends who come over to help you move. Everyone’s there to lend a hand, but they’re really just there for the pizza.

This kind of thing is tolerable in a show like, say, South Park because the creators are such committed libertarians. Yes, they’re bomb-throwers, but their targets are usually the high and mighty, the terminally humorless, and blinkered illogicians. There’s a brief glimmer of satire in Live Freaky! in a 20-second scene where the prosecuting attorney bemoans the degeneracy of Charlie and his crew, and then celebrates all the money he’s going to make off the book he’s writing about the case. But that’s it. Who is the movie really out to take down? Hollywood, maybe, although not any Hollywood that bears relation to life as lived by actual human beings. The rich? They’re not so much worse than the murderous, dumpster-diving poor. No, there’s no real target here, except the audience. Basically, the filmmakers are just hoping someone will take offense. They want the glory of having ruined someone else’s day. Well, mission accomplished.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This 2003 [sic] film is a weird concept, done in a weird way and done with a weird sensibility.  Nothing about this feels normal… To quote a great man, ‘This movie sucks!'”– Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro

(This movie was nominated for review by Sam, who called it “Pretty terrible, but incredibly weird!” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KUSO (2017)

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BewareWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Flying Lotus (credited as “Steve”)

FEATURING: Bethany Schmitt, Ouimi Zumi, Iesha Coston, Zack Fox,  Shane Carpenter, George Clinton, , voice of

PLOT: Survivors of an L.A. earthquake are stricken by disease and experience bizarre events.

Still from Kuso (2017)

COMMENTS: “Kuso,” the Blu-ray’s liner notes explain, is Japanese for “shit,” and you’ll see plenty of kuso in the course of Kuso. The film opens with a shot of maggots wriggling in trenches spelling out the film’s name, followed by a shot of a jerking seismograph. That intro segues into the opening sequence, in which two straight-laced white news anchors reporting on an earthquake are interrupted by a black man in putty-makeup who performs a free jazz scat explaining that “no one will save you” (among the more coherent lines). Then the kuso-show begins in earnest.

The brief earthquake mention is about all the context we get for the segments that follow, which are intercut together and interspersed with surreal (and usually obscene) collages and animations. There’s a couple with a pus-based love life, a flatulent bald kid in a dunce cap who finds a giant anus in the woods, a woman who loses her baby in a hole, a stoner girl who lives with two fuzzy Muppet creatures with TV monitor faces (and who has an exceptionally tasteless date rape/abortion subplot), and a man who undergoes scat therapy to cure himself of his fear of breasts. It’s not clear that all of these characters live in the same universe, except on one occasion when two of them meet and converse in a doctor’s waiting room.

None of the individual stories have much structure or go anywhere interesting, and none of the individuals have any characterization beyond their surface deformities. The lack of storyline and of characters of course contribute to Kuso‘s surprising dullness, but there’s also the lack of variation in the suffocating atmosphere: there’s no real humor, no joy, just endless darkness, cruelty, and a fetishistic focus on disease and bodily fluids. There’s no tonal contrast in the film, which is surprising for a director who’s a musician. It’s no symphony, but instead the cinematic equivalent of a 90-minute bass solo.

There is so little African-American surrealism out there that it’s a crime that this lump ends up as one of the more prominent examples of the form. The film seems pointless, never applying its vision to any end beyond the most juvenile variety of shock possible. It depicts a world of cruelty and disease unrelieved by any sort of thought or emotional investment. That is a sort of vision. But it has nothing to do with Flying Lotus’ anarchic but groovy and joyful music, which is experimental and challenging but harmonic—unlike Kuso, which is a harsh blast of formless noise. Because Lotus is so talented, I hope that he will aim higher in future filmic excursions, and that one day we’ll look back at this movie as a lonely misfire in his artistic catalog. But as it stands, Kuso does a great disservice to weird films. , and their brethren often shock, but you never doubt that deep down the fillmakers actually like people. Kuso has nothing good to say about our species, and actually appears to actively hate humanity—including, by extension, its audience.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…inevitably whets the appetite of people who 50 years ago would have been lining up for their 10th viewing of ‘Mondo Cane’ — the sort of audiences forever on the lookout for something weirder or more extreme to make them go, ‘Ewwwww!’ Those viewers, as well as some among the habitually-stoned, will constitute the primary fans of this first feature… Everybody else is going to want to take a wide detour around this insufferable mishmash of interwoven segments — aimless in themselves, even more so as a whole — almost entirely concerned with bodily functions and bodily fluids.”–Variety (festival screening)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Dan M.”, who said “I’m assuming somebody else has already suggested it but there you go.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SUBSTANCE (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Coralie Fargeat

FEATURING: , Dennis Quaid,

PLOT: An aging actress loses her job as hostess of an aerobics show on her 50th birthday and is recruited into trying a bizarre underground “anti-aging” substance, with instructions and regimens that must be followed precisely to avoid unwanted side effects.

Still from the substance (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: In the third act, an unhinged black comedy emerges from the carcass of what to this point had merely been an odd, satirical horror movie.

COMMENTS: Incredibly, just about everything in Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore film—which mixes sledgehammer satire and comedy with clean ian interiors, squicky Cronenbergian body horror, and a third act tonal shift often described as “bonkers”—works. It’s a message movie that doesn’t spare the blood and guts or the leering nudity (the movie is of the view that you can’t satirize the male gaze without indulging it). The cinematography is ace, the soundtrack on point, the practical effects astonish, it never drags despite a almost 2.5 hour runtime, Qualley appears to be the most beautiful woman in the world, Quaid hams it up delightfully as an empty-suit corporate cad, and has never given a better performance. It’s both elevated horror and degraded horror, equally indebted to the art-house and the grindhouse, and it never goes halfway when it could instead go to twice the length you expect.

The high concept plot gives Fargeat space to make lots of obvious—but funny—jokes about men reduced drooling idiots when confronted with a beautiful woman, and why women might lust after that kind of power. We are a superficial species, after all. That’s why we fall for blatantly Faustian bargains, as when Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle is offered the opportunity to create a “better version of herself” by picking up a packet of suspect medical gear from a back-alley beauty supply company. Set amidst L.A.’s glitz, the script addresses our obsession with surface beauty, but as it intensifies it peers deeper into human psychology. Sure, youth and beauty is associated with fame and success, but it’s also the inverse of decay and death: even slowly fading beauty like Elisabeth’s is a reminder of mortality. The scenario also invites concepts of split personality and addiction (there are a lot of needles here, and literally self-destructive behavior). Besides the satirical jibes at such follies, The Substance offers a good deal of heart and empathy. Moore reveals her (gracefully) aging body to public scrutiny in an uncomfortable nude scene, and is compensated with a wonderful scene in front of the mirror as she desperately attempts to achieve an impossible ideal of female beauty, despite the fact that it’s obvious to everyone but herself that she’s more than glamorous enough for the occasion.

The Substance‘s first two acts take place in an exaggerated reality that allows it to focus solely on satire and psychology. Just about everyone other than Moore and Qualley act like caricatures (Quaid is the lynchpin here). Why is the substance apparently offered to Elisabeth for free? Why are network TV aerobics programs so lucrative and influential? How does Sue manage to build that secret room, and why is there no super in her million-dollar apartment? What are the chances either Elisabeth or Sue are always the featured image on the billboard right outside her own window? And just how in the hell is this Substance supposed to work, in a biological/continuity of consciousness sense? You take everything on faith: details that are irrelevant to the main characters’ psychological realities are simply ignored. But your ability to suspend disbelief is shattered in the third act, which is a pure B-movie nightmare hallucination. The practical effects, which previously recalled Cronenberg, now look like a blend of Screaming Mad George’s work on Society,  Toxie from The Toxic Avenger, and something out of a freak movie—in fact, the entire finale resembles something that might result if Henenlotter were given a multi-million dollar budget for stage blood and access to an crack cinematographer. Even with those hints, the results are nothing you could possibly anticipate.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…while the film’s escalating weirdness eventually spirals out of control in the final sequence—it’s not quite camp; it’s more like John Waters- or Lloyd Kaufman-style trash—I was certainly never bored during the 140-minute runtime.”–Sonny Bunch, The Bulwark (contemporaneous)

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: I BOUGHT A VAMPIRE MOTORCYCLE (1990)

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DIRECTED BY: Dirk Campbell

FEATURING: Neil Morrissey, Amanda Noar, Michael Elphick, Anthony Daniels

PLOT: Slacker motorbike enthusiast Noddy buys a bike, discovering almost too late that evil has infused the machine.

Still from I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle (1990)

COMMENTS: There’s something to admire about movies that get right to the point. In this respect, I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle gets off to an auspicious start: within the first 10 minutes, a Satanic priest calls out to his underworld master, a low-rent biker gang attacks the cult with a crossbow, the cult leader spills his last drops of life-sustaining blood into the tank of a 1974 Norton Commando 850, and a dullard named Noddy overpays for the damaged and now-possessed chopper as a fixer-upper for twice what he’s willing to admit. Action from the jump, with stakes in place and more conflict sure to come… and then the movie takes its foot off the gas. Comedy-horror is a perfectly legitimate mix, but I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle has a hard time getting either of the two to work on their own, let alone coalesce.

The central premise resists a 100% serious approach. After all, the title promises a vampiric motorbike, and it does not exaggerate. The demon hog goes dormant during the day, deploys a pair of piercing tubes that aim unwaveringly at a victim’s jugular, steadfastly steers away from crosses, and has an intense aversion to garlic. (It tries to kill a woman merely for ordering extra-garlicky prawns.) Sound like any undead creatures you know? But that strange notion of a murderous moped is only as successful as the ability to make you think it’s an actual (actual, actual) vampire motorcycle, and the film has absolutely no idea how to make the titular vehicle look menacing. True, the way it evolves to take on more of the characteristics of its supernatural avatars, such as the broken headlight that resembles bloody fangs or the handlebars twisted into devil horns, is somewhat amusing. But then the damnable crotch rocket moves, and the whole illusion falls apart. Even when it’s committing the most deadly atrocities (such as feeding on and then bisecting a candy striper at the hospital), it lumbers around like a lame puppet, in much the manner of a certain hellspawn earthmover I won’t name. Sure, it can spawn spikes and spinning blades whenever it needs to, but when you watch it galumphing through a gymnasium like an underpowered Rascal, it loses a lot of its menace.

If the movie can’t fully commit to its horror, it possibly overcommits to the impulse toward gross-out comedy. In the anything-for-a-joke spirit, we get poles rammed up keisters, we get once of the worst-executed bar fights in cinema history, and most importantly, we get Noddy’s Toilet Nightmare. After imagining and awakening from a terrible dream about a re-animated head, he immediately conjures up a new nightmare in which his own bowel movement first calls out to him, then leaps from the commode and tries to force its way down Noddy’s throat. So that’s a cinematic milestone achieved. For enduring such an indignity, you instinctively want to feel bad for Noddy, except that he’s a real prat. He lies, he cheats, he’s super lazy, and he repeatedly demeans his girlfriend Kim, even as the motorcycle leers at her leather-clad posterior. Incidentally, Kim is played by Morrissey’s actual wife Noar, so there’s some weird relationship issues on display. In addition to the objectification and the verbal abuse, the script calls for draping the Jewish actress in crucifixes. Apropos of nothing, the pair divorced a year later.

I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle has an odd sense of tone, careering from silly to serious in random and unexpected ways. It’s the kind of film that will go for an obvious joke like naming a funeral home “De’Ath and Sons,” and then turn around and hire Anthony Daniels, C-3PO himself as I live and breathe, to play it straight as a biker priest who doesn’t let the loss of all the fingers on his right hand get in the way of a full-throated exorcism. To be clear, it’s completely fine to try for a mix of screams and chuckles, but neither of them work particularly well here—they just call attention to strange choices that fall short of the mark. That’s what makes the film a weird watch, but also a disappointing one. Once you get the bike started, you’ve still got to finish the drive.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“No beating around the bush: this is a weird-ass movie!… The Film also goes off on weird diversions- like a random, gross-out Dream Sequence- and is arguably too silly at times.” – Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro

ADDITIONAL LINKS OF INTEREST: It’s all well and good to hear from movie reviewers like your humble correspondent, but discerning customers like yourselves want to hear from the people whose opinions really matter: motorcycle writers. Enjoy the review from Pete Brissette at Motorcycle.com or take in the analysis by Jason Marker over at RideApart.

(This movie was nominated for review by Karolina. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

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FANTASIA 2024: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CHAINSAWS WERE SINGING (2024)

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Mootorsaed laulsid

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DIRECTED BY: Sander Maran

FEATURING: Karl Ilves, Laura Niils, Martin Ruus, Janno Puusepp,
Rita Rätsepp

PLOT: Tom and Maria meet and fall in love after each has had the worst day of their lives, not knowing events are going to turn for the even worse when they cross paths with a chainsaw-wielding cannibal.

Still from The Chainsaws Were Singing (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Oof, feeling lazy here, so from this wide menu I’ll proffer, “refrigerator-bound bukkake god” and “throat-piercing lesbo-hedgehog.”

COMMENTS: One-hundred and eighty hours of footage, then a three-hour first draft, and then landing just shy of the two-hour mark: Sander Maran obviously has a song to sing, inspired by his love of pleasantly idiotic comedy musicals. This story of two lost souls coming together is more than reminiscent of Cannibal! the Musical, but is also very much its own thing. At its Fantasia screening, the hoots, hollers, and theater-wide laughs in response to the odd touches and permeating sense of eccentric madcap made its qualities as entertainment clear.

I would like to start by telling you about Jaan, a gaunt goof who meets the hero whilst passing by in his car. Stopping for this hitchhiker, he laments that his love of the act (of hitchhiking, of course) is thwarted by his being too ugly to be picked up by passersby. Jaan has something to say at every situation, rambling from one topic to another at times with a speed matched only by his ever changing costume. This quirk is on decreasingly subtle display, as somewhere around the mid-way point the audience can delight in his “dextrous” changing of the duds mid-conversation with other characters. He has a string of bad luck, too: just about every vehicle he exits during Chainsaws Were Singing ends up exploding violently, always hucking a flaming tire at his feet. Supernatural, or not, Jaan’s presence on camera guarantees something silly, strange, and usually both.

Chainsaws Were Singing also manages a number of unexpected tonal shifts. When the heroine is trapped in the basement of a sinister family, Maran shifts the film’s gears on a dime, and for some fifteen minutes showcases some real, menacing, straight-up horror when introducing the evil matriarch. Horror lampoonery veers into broader lampoonery, such as when Maran introduces the mysterious man, Cobra, whose absurd tale about the wartime death of his fifteen year old brother (in some conflict between Portugal and Sweden) could pass for a monologue.

Returning to my earlier laziness, I’ll wrap up here with a, “C’mon, everyone” coda. There is gore galore, silly comedy, ill-fated lovers, Quixotic questing, finger-food, dark pasts, gore galore, your friendly Wandering Gun Man, breezy musical numbers (“Tapa Tapa Tapa!”), tension, massacres, more gore galore, and, as I’ve already mentioned, a very helpful lesbo-hedgehog. In his cross between The Sound of Music and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Maran offers everything you could want in a wacky and weird genre frolick.

[Cue Orchestra.]

Wait, stop.

Down your instruments; I forgot to mention the bukkake.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“While there will be an audience for this type of exaggerated surrealism, the film’s quirky scenarios, parody-type approach to storytelling, and crude humor won’t be for everyone.” – Emma Vine, Loud and Clear Reviews (festival screening)