Tag Archives: Grotesque

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: “HEN, HIS WIFE” (1990) / “PÂTÉ” (2001)

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The penny drops. The scales fall from the eyes. The curtain is pulled back. In any deception, there comes that moment when the delusion must be abandoned and the consequences of prevarication must finally be faced. Today we visit a pair of short films that live in that pivotal moment, and we find that exposing one truth can sometime bring another even darker truth to the surface.

The couple in Igor Kovalyov’s “Hen, His Wife” has a secret, although neither partner seems to know it. They seem quite settled and content: the wife runs about the house, cooking and cleaning, tending to their pet giant human-headed tardigrade, and generally seeing to all her blue-faced husband’s needs while he sits slumped in an easy chair. Not a well-balanced relationship, to be sure, but everyone seems quite happy. So it’s quite a spanner in the works when a traveling salesman drops by and, in the course of making his pitch to the sedentary man, feels compelled to whisper the awful truth: the wife is actually an enormous chicken. And wouldn’t you know, it’s kind of obvious when you actually stop and look at her. Evidently, the husband never has, and he suffers a complete meltdown, throwing her out and plunging into an emotional doom spiral. Why, the whole thing is enough to make him forget about the ladybugs crawling all over his face.

Kovalyov’s figures are uniformly grotesque, with misshapen features, huge folds of undulating skin, and unnatural colors. (It turns out to have been perfect training for his later role as co-director of The Rugrats Movie.) In that context, a 6-foot tall hen doesn’t seem such a bad thing to be, and she certainly isn’t the weirdest thing in the apartment. There’s a bitter humor in the way the husband views this whole situation as a terrible betrayal, even though there seems to have been no attempt whatsoever at concealment. That this of all things would be the breaking point is an intriguing conundrum.

It’s reasonable to view “Hen, His Wife” as an unsubtle metaphor for bigotry, as the husband’s outsized reaction would feel just as harsh if she had been outed as Jewish or an escaped criminal or a fan of Nickelback. Indeed, the salesman doesn’t so much leave as vanish in a puff of smoke, like a pernicious rumor. That might be too much to put on the shoulders of this slight, one-joke cartoon. That said, the wife’s return to see the fate of her beloved husband is authentically sad, and reminds us that love might conquer all, but only if we let it.

The truth in “Pâté” is obvious to anyone who cares to see it: the world is destroyed. That much is clear to children Otto and Vera ((Ty Arnold and Samantha Browne-Walters), who are dispatched into the wasteland wearing adult-sized environmental suits to harvest cockroaches as the only available food source. Unfortunately for them, their deeply damaged mother (Jane Culley) is living in a fantastical past where she remains the belle of the ball in costumes borrowed from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet production. Her selfishness is such that she will do anything to win the favor of the only man left alive. She’ll genuflect, she’ll dance, and if there aren’t any cockroaches left to serve for dinner, something else—or someone else—will have to do.

“Pâté” is an accomplished student film, with excellent production values and a well-earned sense of dread. (The short earned attention at Sundance, proving to be the calling card that earned director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo her sole feature credit, the psychological horror film After.Life.) It doesn’t really rise above its premise, though. For a film set in a future apocalyptic wasteland, there’s surprisingly little satire in “Pâté.” It’s about the dark twist that is foreshadowed early on, but even if you don’t discern where the story will be going (as the quietly grim Otto surely does), you’ll be waiting for that shoe to drop. The vibe is that of a particularly baroque episode of “Tales From the Crypt.” Still, it’s hard to deny that a story about adults reveling in their ill-gotten luxuries while handing the consequences of their sins to their children retains its cultural relevance. You just have to take that walk yourself.

Like the stubborn bigotry of the hen’s husband, the Mother’s selfish complicity in the ongoing cruelty of the world is troubling to behold. The state of denial will always be a suitable subject for drama, because a truth delayed is never a truth dispatched. It will always be waiting to surface, to pay back the damage with interest.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Hen, His Wife”: “This 13-minute animation, while engaging, is disquieting enough that one looks forward to its end even as one remains transfixed by what transpires. We would not advise watching it on acid, for though beautifully drawn and narratively intriguing, it is also queerly disturbing on the visual, emotional, and intellectual levels.” – Abraham, A Wasted Life

“Pâté”: “…a visual tour de force with its no-budget evocation of a once opulent future world.” – Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker Magazine

(“Hen, His Wife” was nominated for review by Jenn; “Paté” was nominated for review by Eric Smith. Suggest a weird movie or two of your own here.)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MÉCANIX (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Rémy Mathieu Larochelle

FEATURING: Julianne Côté, Stéphane Bilodeau

PLOT: One of the last surviving humans has discovered the embryo of the universe, and the hideous monsters who now control the world are desperate to keep him from using it to destroy them.

Still from Mecanix (2003)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The parade of unholy stop-motion concoctions gets our attention. The unflinching vision of a filmmaker in his only significant cinematic credit stokes our curiosity. But it’s those things in service of apocalyptic vibes and a story that is both bleak and somewhat irrelevant that pushes this film strongly towards consideration. It’s a movie beholden to nothing but itself.

COMMENTS: One of my favorite obscure novels is Future Boston, a shared universe by a collective of Beantown science fiction writers who imagined the fate of their city if the first alien contact was made smack dab in the middle of Boston Harbor. One of the significant characters in the book is Bishop 24, a mysteriously formal interplanetary overseer, resembling a gigantic praying mantis, who shepherds humanity into the galactic community. Interaction with the Bishop is described thusly: “The Bishop has a habit of moving in a quick, jerky fashion when his attention is distracted. This is unnerving to some people and has been known to cause epileptic seizures.” To depict the movement and bearing of a creature alien to us, the writer essentially describes classic stop-motion animation.

Rémy M. Larochelle undoubtedly recognizes this alien and uncanny quality. For his sole outing as a feature filmmaker, Larochelle unveils a rogues’ gallery of fascinating and appalling creatures. Shot in a dark sepia tone that makes every scene feel like deleted footage from a snuff film, Mécanix feels like a nightmare that the filmmaker was compelled to get out of his system any way he could, and 16mm stop-motion was the only tool he had at hand. Knowing that, he leans into both the imaginative potential and technical limitations of the technique; Mécanix features a remarkable variety of animated critters, looking variously like equine bipedal skeletons, bubo-ridden Buddhas, tree mermaids, wire-brush birds, and bad-permed llamas. Their appearances are already terrifying, but the hallmarks of their animation—spasmodic jerkiness, absence of motion blur—only heighten their disturbing nature. With flailing cable appendages and misplaced heads, they need only be themselves to be the stuff of bad dreams. Daniel Lagacé’s industrial sound design— an array of distorted clangs, whirrs, and whooshes—helps to give the varmints unnatural life.

Through interviews and key art, you can tease out the hint of a plot involving a lost embryo that, if found, will defeat the alien invaders and restore the promise of life to humanity. The live-action scenes exist primarily in service of this throughline. But the story is largely beside the point, as is demonstrated whenever humans and manipulated maquettes are called upon to share the screen. When they do so, the technique is most often a rudimentary split screen, with the actors standing carefully still while the monsters react dramatically to whatever plot development is presented to them. (It’s a reminiscent of the way Björk dances in front of oversized insects in her “Human Behaviour” video, although of course with none of her screen presence.) But the choice works because the aliens, in one of the few pieces of dialogue, explain the deadly power of emotion, so foreign and deadly to them that even the whiff of a flower could destroy them.

Larochelle knows this is only going to work if things get pretty gross. Early on, we watch a doctor search for the embryo by yanking out the innards of her few remaining fellow humans. Later, a man will invert the procedure by vivisecting an avian creature in an impressively effective piece of puppeteering. (In fairness, he’ll end up doing a little grisly self-surgery as well.) And the monsters often take themselves apart and reassemble for locomotion or conversation. None of this is frightening, exactly, but Mécanix is so viscerally broken and oozy that the effect is more powerful than a jump-scare. It all just feels so unfamiliar and not-at-all right.

Larochelle began working on Mécanix right out of college and spent four years filming and animating the piece. It’s a point in favor of his native Canada that a movie like this can not only be made, but even get funding from the National Film Board of Canada. At a lean 70 minutes, it still feels like it could use a little tightening. There isn’t much in the way of conflict: the aliens demand the embryo, the man steadfastly refuses to give it, and the finish has the whiff of anticlimax. But there’s no denying that Mécanix is a singular effort, one that combines animation technique and icky atmosphere in a form that resembles little before or since. You might say that it’s “unnerving to some people.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Imagine then if someone had rifled through Ray Harryhausen’s bins, scavenging for his discarded works. Those ideas that he deemed too weird to finish. Imagine too that this “someone” then took that weirdness and ran with it, stripping the designs back to their most basic forms, at times down to their wire frame maquettes. Such are the denizens of Larochelle’s world… this little slice of the bizarre is a beast that stands tall and one that more than holds its own…” – Andy Stewart, Nerdly

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

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SVIDD NEGER (2003)

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AKA The Black Lapp

DIRECTED BY: Erik Smith Meyer

FEATURING: Kingsford Siayor, Kjersti Lid Gullvåg, Eirik Junge Eliassen, Thor-Inge Gullvåg, Frank Jørstad, Guri Johnson

PLOT: In the furthest northern reaches of Norway, three young men fight to win the affections of pretty Anna: Peder, a strong-but-stupid man-child who is favored by Anna’s murderous father; Ante, a young Black man who was found on the beach as an infant; and Norman, a disaffected Sámi who longs to forsake his heritage and travel abroad.

Still from Svidd Neger (2003)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Like an episode of “Maury” transplanted to a remote patch of Norwegian tundra, Svidd neger is shocking, inexplicable, and gleefully inappropriate. With an ever-shifting tone and an unflagging desire to push buttons, this is a movie that is happily gross, joyfully surreal, and takes deep pride in zigging where others zag.  

COMMENTS: There is something that unites every culture, every group of people on this planet: having someone to look down upon. Racism, sexism, bigotry of every shade are built upon the notion that those people over there are deeply inferior to us, with no regard to how appalling we might be ourselves. As proof of the pervasiveness of this mindset, look no further than the living paradise that is Scandinavia. Those medically socialized fjord-huggers would appear to have created an equitably minded, affordably furnished standard of living for their people. But despite receiving high marks for livability, they have still found a ready-made pariah in the Sámi, an ethnicity in the northernmost parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and northwest Russia with their own language and culture. Sometimes known as Laplanders (a term which is now deemed pejorative), the Sámi people lived quite independently until the 19th century, when aggressive governments sought to assimilate them and wipe out their distinctiveness. While these policies have been rolled back somewhat (especially in Norway, where the Sámi have their own parliament), the disdain and resentment never really goes away. And that seems to be the basic sentiment behind Svidd neger: no matter how trashy people get, they can always find someone else to crap on.

And my goodness, the residents of this isolated outpost are supremely trashy. The root of all nastiness is Karl, Anna’s drunkard father who opens the film by drowning his philandering wife and casting her mixed race infant into the sea. Impressively, he only manages to get worse as the film progresses, as we learn about how his violent ways have affected nearly every other character. Naturally, his only interest in his daughter is her ability to produce a male heir to secure his “kingdom.” It also follows that he would throw his support behind Peder, an impressively stupid hunk of meat whom we see attempt to rape Anna twice and who spends the rest of his time fruitlessly masturbating or hopping gleefully on a broken tractor like a four-year-old.

It soon becomes clear that the only decent people in the film are outsiders, but they’re no angels. Norman, the Sámi who wants out, is so disgusted with being an outsider that he’s willing to trade-in to become white trash in another country. (His dreams of “Ammrica” revolve around drinking lots of Coke and dressing like a biker, complete with Confederate flag patch.) Meanwhile, Ante is already the ultimate outsider (he is the subject of the film’s title, whose least offensive translation is “burnt negro”), but he seems determined to become even moreso, adopting the language and attire of the Sámi, indulging a deep and abiding love for Dolly Parton, and sending out bottled messages to prospective new fathers.

On top of all these wild characters, director Meyer piles on crazy plot twists, full-blown musical numbers, elaborate fight scenes, and a deux ex machina that starts building during the opening credits. Along the way, he peppers scenes with amusing quirks and curiosities, but then just as quickly drops in something dark and disturbing. For example, Peder’s deluded mother meets her end in a horrifying impalement, but then is left to flail about hilariously like a wind sock. The score often matches the schizophrenic tone of the movie, jumping from light pop to dramatic orchestration to tinges of bluegrass in rapid succession.

Somehow, despite the extreme circumstances and the extreme reactions to them, everyone seems to get roughly what they deserve, which says a lot about how well Svidd neger delivers its parade of the idiotic and the grotesque. Like its awful protagonists, the movie is easy to look down upon as crass and disgusting. Yet it somehow wins out in the end.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This movie is not for everyone! It’s the sickest, most twisted and weird movie to ever have been made in Norway.”–Nordic Fantasy

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

Capsules, List Candidates, Shorts

CAPSULE: HARPYA (1979) / APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BOBBY YEAH (2011)

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Weirdest!(both films)

“You can do anything in animation” is a truism, a promise of unlimited potential that is frequently untapped beyond a surface-level dive into the unusual. Enough people stumble at “the animals can talk?” issue to make it unfair to expect more. However, it is also true that those filmmakers who are willing to go deeper into the realm of the possible do so with gusto. And so we arrive at a pair of short films that readily embrace the horror that ensues from making the wrong choice.

Raoul Servais’ legend in animation circles is due in large part to 1979’s Harpya. (The film won the Palme d’Or for short films at that year’s Cannes Film Festival.) The tale of a man who saves the life of a horrible-beautiful creature, only for it to methodically destroy his life, is a very simple demonstration of cause and effect.

When he intervenes to stop what looks like a cold-blooded murder, the action seems noble and moral. His decency continues when comes home with the near-victim, a giant, feathered, bare-breasted creature, but his good intentions immediately backfire. The house guest eats everything, denying the man even a morsel, and when he attempts to leave, the monster eats his legs for good measure. Even when he manages to distract the beast and escape the house, she pursues him and takes his food once more, leading him to attempt to murder her himself. It’s like a horror version of One Froggy Evening.

Servais’ technique is what lifts the movie into the rare air of our consideration. Using a method of his own invention, he shot live-action footage and projected animated settings onto the film using clear sheets. The result is something like a daguerreotype given life.

There’s a troubling undercurrent of misogyny in the film, however. In fairness to Servais, this is not explicit, but inherent in the mythological character he is invoking. (For his own part, Servais has described Harpya as a parody of a vampire tale.) If anything, it presents the danger of reading too deeply into a story; the harpy functions quite sufficiently as a movie monster, but it’s all too easy to infer a manifesto. In my research, I found at least one review that unironically celebrated the film as an attack on the shrewishness of women, which is pretty awful but speaks to the power of the piece.

Robert Morgan’s Bobby Yeah is less likely to garner sociological blowback, but only because it’s so much more obviously grotesque. Where Servais’ harpy was a lone example of a disgusting supernatural, everything in Bobby Yeah is bloody or slimy or both. That includes our ostensible protagonist, a bunny-eared, troll-faced creature who makes trouble for himself by literally pushing other people’s buttons.

The little rabbit guy is a classic protagonist who keeps stumbling from one terrible situation into another. Of course, he’s hideous, but he earns a tiny amount of sympathy by being the least hideous thing in the film. At every turn, he confronts a new bruised and twisted creature, often displaying unmistakably phallic characteristics and ready to attack the bunny guy for his most recent misdeed. (The film is replete with symbolism, particularly sexual, but it has significant impact even before you start to delve.) It’s an unrelentingly anxious 23 minutes, replete with violence, body horror, and building dread.

The eyes are often the giveaway in CGI animation, the evidence of unreality that disrupts the sense of reality. In Morgan’s production, the eyes have the opposite effect: disturbingly realistic eyes that peer out of misshapen doll faces, wall ornaments that resemble pizzas, and koosh-ball-headed serpents that stare out with unnerving authenticity. While the production design may seem to earn the title of “grossest film of all time,” it should be noted that the physical revulsion is easily matched by the psychic discomfort that lingers. Bobby Yeah isn’t just gross; it’s gross in very powerful ways.

As noted, you can do anything in animation, but what’s interesting is when a filmmaker really wants to do anything. Servais and Morgan both tap into primal fears that by turns intrigue and appall. Harpya packs a lot of horror and surrealism into its eight minutes, but it’s ultimately too slight to earn a place in the Apocrypha. Bobby Yeah, however, has the advantages of being longer and more viscerally unsettling. It’s a genuinely transcendent and transgressive work, and it’s worthy of future consideration as a candidate. Both movies, though, have a lengthy half-life in the brain, showing how a burst of animation can easily take up residence in your scared, scarred soul.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘…a fantastic surreal film…” – Dr. Grob’s Animation Review on “Harpya”

“…the stuff of surreal nightmares. It just goes to show that there are fertile imaginations out there creating weird and wonderful worlds for us to explore.” – Jude Felton, The Lair of Filth on “Bobby Yeah”

(“Harpya” was nominated for review by Absanktie and “Bobby Yeah” was nominated by Russ. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)