Tag Archives: Imagination

CAPSULE: CREATING REM LEZAR (1989)

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DIRECTED BY: Scott Zakarin

FEATURING: Jack Mulcahy, Courtney Kernaghan, Jonathan Goch

PLOT: Ashlee and Zack mysteriously share an imaginary friend, a being whom they must aid in a search for his medallion before the sun sets and the evil Vorock triumphs.

Still from Creating Rem Lazar (1989)

COMMENTS: This pint-lengthed movie hits above its weight in the realm of cringeful oddness. Filmed in the late 1980s, it has the hair extremes and the soft-n-smooth musical flair of a stone polished into a glassy spheroid. As a children’s movie, it features the inevitable amateurity found when young actors are thrust to the fore. Multi-cultural feel-good-ism gets an extended nod during a the protagonists’ Central Park encounter with a gang of flamboyant a-cappella greasers, who then move on to a hip-hop black fellow, with then a pair of fiddlers. And the aesthetics behind the titular hero’s ensemble might raise questions, were the viewer not struck dumb by the intense blue motif—blue lycra body suit, blue cape, and Rem Lezar’s mullet dyed blue to match. Creating Rem Lezar is a trial by Aghh, waltzing from one schmaltz piece to the next at a speed which leaves no room for the viewer to collect their wits. That said, presuming you can endure the vehicle, the various messages in this experiment are worthwhile.

Tykes Ashlee and Zach are day-dreamers, often in trouble at school and home for ignoring their surroundings in favor of spending time with a mutually manifested entity who comforts their fears and doubts. Rem Lezar’s creation—through sheer force of belief and cooperation by the youngsters—leads to many teachable moments. And despite his absurd appearance, Lezar has much wisdom to offer—to children in particular, and to people in general.

The pair of kids differ vociferously about how to overcome the challenge from the villain (an ’80s-FX malevolent head), prompting Lezar to calmly explain, “Differences of opinion are fine, and you have to stand behind what you believe. But you have to work together, and giving in a little doesn’t mean giving up.” Later, Zach complains about not fitting in, asking his hero why others have a hard time understanding him. Quite Socratically, Lezar asks the boy, “Why do you think others have a hard time understanding you?” This kicks off a moment of reflection on how comprehension needs to go both ways.

That, and many similar moments, left me with overall positive feelings about this little film. Every piece of advice on offer is sensible, thoughtfully phrased and communicated, and largely dispels the immediately preceding (and surrounding) obtuseness. There’s a lot of hate for this movie among reviewers, with much condemnation of the film’s alleged “creepiness.” This could hardly be further from the truth. Creating Rem Lezar often approaches insufferable, but I was relieved at how harmless the titular character proved to be, and delighted at how well-anchored the film is in regards to how we should treat one another. I only wish these sentiments hadn’t been buried under this mountain of expired cheese.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Rem, I suppose, could be a reference to REM, or rapid eye movement, the phase of sleep where we have our most vivid dreams. Given the film’s bizarre, dreamlike nature, this seems to make some sense. On the other hand, the only explanation I can come up with for the word “lezar” is that it is the Creole word for ‘lizard,’ which makes a great deal less sense, unless Creating Rem Lezar is less a bizarre, misguided attempt at an empowering children’s film and more a story of a Lovecraftian, shape-shifting, nightmare-reptile which invades the dreams of impressionable youths, masquerading as an amiable–if somewhat inappropriately friendly–superhero, in a wicked plan to sow delusion and madness in the minds of poor, unsuspecting children through mind-numbingly awful sing-songs.” — Derek Miller, BadMovieRealm.Com

(This movie was nominated for review by Emil Hyde, who called it “quite possibly the worst/best/weirdest ‘children’s’ film ever made” and went on to add, “It’s not quality like most of the films on the list, but it is baffling on every level”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

34*. THE PEANUT BUTTER SOLUTION (1985)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Rubbo

FEATURING: Mathew Mackay, Siluck Saysanasy, Alison Podbrey, Michael Hogan, Michel Maillot

PLOT: After suffering a terrible fright while exploring a derelict house, young Michael’s hair falls out, leaving him completely bald; possible salvation arrives in the form of a strange cure proffered by a pair of ghosts, which involves smearing a bizarre concoction atop his head. When an impatient Michael adds too much peanut butter to the recipe, his hair commences to grow wildly out of control. Not only does Michael have a new set of challenges associated with his uncontrollable coif, but he becomes the target of a dubious art teacher who covets the boy’s locks for the manufacture of magical paintbrushes. 

Still from The Peanut Butter Solution (1985)

BACKGROUND

  • Quebecois producer Rock Demers made his mark in the world of youth-oriented cinema with 1970’s The Christmas Martian, which was made to take advantage of Canadian tax breaks.  
  • The Peanut Butter Solution was the second of a planned dozen kids’ movies by Demers’ Les Production La Fete studio under the banner “Tales For All.” The success of the series earned the studio the moniker “Disney of the North.” 
  • The soundtrack includes two songs performed by future music titan Celine Dion. She was seventeen at the time, and these were her first English-language recordings.
  • The script began as a bedtime story director/co-writer Rubbo would tell his 6-year-old son.
  • Co-writer Vojtech Jasný, best known as director of The Cassandra Cat (1963), was a veteran of the .

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are many memorable shots of Michael’s ever-growing hair, but probably the most lasting is the contraption he is forced to devise to prevent the hyperactive follicles from killing him in his sleep, resulting in a ‘do that resembles one of St. Basil’s onion domes. 

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Way too much hair down there; paintbrush sweatshop

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: What doesn’t? The film starts out with an unusual premise, surrounds it with a cast of characters who act in ways that bear no relationship to the way humans behave, and then sends the story in random directions that only magnify the craziness. You’ve heard the hype; the buzz is justified. It’s exactly as strange as you think it will be, and then some.

Original trailer for The Peanut Butter Solution

COMMENTS: I don’t remember how many years ago it was that my Continue reading 34*. THE PEANUT BUTTER SOLUTION (1985)

210. HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994)

“We realized why Debora and I have such extraordinary telepathy, and why people treat us and look at us the way they do. It is because we are mad—we are both stark raving mad!”–Pauline Parker, diary entry

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Melanie Lynskey, , Sarah Peirse

PLOT: Pauline, a socially awkward young teen, finds a friend in Juliet, a new arrival at her girls’ school in 1950s Christchurch, New Zealand. Juliet is witty and has traveled the world, and together she and Pauline invent a rich epic about the royal family of the fictional kingdom Borovnia, complete with stories chronicling the dynasty’s adventures and clay figurines Juliet molds to represent the main characters. As their relationship grows closer and develops a sexual component, the girls shut out the rest of the world, living out a fantasy of shared hallucinations and referring to each other by invented names, until their parents grow concerned and try to separate them.

Still from Heavenly Creatures (1994)
BACKGROUND:

  • The story is based on a real-life murder that shocked New Zealand in the 1950s. The film’s voiceovers are direct quotes from Pauline Parker’s diaries.
  • After being released from prison, Juliet Hulme became a successful writer of mysteries working under her new name, Anne Perry. She publicly revealed her identity as Heavenly Creatures was being produced. Pauline Parker did not wish to be found, but was later discovered working with handicapped children.
  • After the film was released Perry stated that the two girls had never had a lesbian relationship, as had been commonly supposed, although this denial was not public information when Heavenly Creatures‘ script was written. Pauline’s diary entries clearly hinted at a sexual relationship, but these could have been a young girl’s confused fantasies.
  • Heavenly Creatures was a totally unexpected arthouse outing from New Zealand director Peter Jackson, whose previous works had all been outrageous exploitation films: the gory Bad Taste, the transgressive puppet show Meet the Feebles, and the zombie comedy Dead-Alive [AKA Brain Dead].
  • Nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar (where it lost, understandably, to Pulp Fiction).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The plasticine Borovnians, particularly the homicidal Diello, who decapitates a homophobic psychiatrist, among his other crimes.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: The Fourth World; deflowering hallucination; hideous Orson Welles.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Adolescent melodrama blossoms into mature tragedy in the delirious Heavenly Creatures. Odd, overdramatic lighting schemes and a flighty camera track two young girls’ trajectory from obsessive daydreaming to outright madness. Peter Jackson’s stunning, surreal realizations of the girls’ fantasies about celebrity heartthrobs and a kingdom of killers sculpted from clay put the film over the top.


Trailer for heavenly Creatures

COMMENTS: In 1994, if you imagined Peter Jackson directing a Continue reading 210. HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994)

LIST CANDIDATE: 7 FACES OF DR. LAO (1964)

DIRECTED BY: George Pal

FEATURING: Tony Randall, Arthur O’Connell, Barbara Eden

PLOT: A mysterious “Chinaman fakir” rides into a small western town of Abalone and shows the cartoonish townspeople a variety of colorful wonders to teach them that life is a mystery and a marvel. Still from 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Although a sappy message-movie about the power of imagination, any film that shows you a faun in cutoff shorts drawing out the lust in a priggish school teacher, and then minutes later unveils a mustachioed serpent telling his human likeness that the man is the most imperfect creature he’s ever seen, at least deserves some consideration for the List of the 366 best weird movies.

COMMENTS: “Ye ever see a catfish ridin’ on a yellow jackass before?”

Although at first glance 7 Faces of Dr. Lao is a contrived, tedious “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”-esque story of the purity and wonder of a young boy befriended by a whimsical fantasy-lander among the hee-hawing bumpkins and self-absorbed dowagers, that message gets lost in the excessive phantasmagoria that suffuses the film. We see a bunch of campy characters in western attire living contentedly in the realm of stereotype: there’s the domineering husband and wife (“No no, dear. I don’t mean to give you the jitters”); there are the bigoted goons (“only good Injun’s a dead Injun!”); then there’s tight-lipped prude of a librarian, Angela Benedict (“the section on courtesy and good manner is over there”), destined to fall in love with the blockheaded newspaperman, Ed Cunningham, who’s found a home among the plastic cacti and tumbleweeds. The solution to shake up these trite archetypes appears to be another one: a comedic white man playing a Chinese mystic, with a painful vehemence lacking in Sidney Toler’s Charlie Chan or ’s Fu Manchu. The sound of Chinese bells and Pipa strings replace the music of banjos and harmonicas. Dr. Lao shows up to awe and confound the Abalonians with a variety of disguises, including an organ-grinding yeti and a Medusa in a stop-motion-animated wig. Inside his circus tent (that’s much bigger on the inside, naturally) Dr. Lao turns women to stone and tells the sad futures of blithering widows. He opens his show with a stock footage barrage of fireworks that represents the colorful but tame cabinet of wonders. A wavering-voiced Merlin makes flowers grow instantly and an inch-long sea serpent swims in fishbowl. But then things get crazy: behind one curtain a seductive faun beguiles the librarian with a dizzying tune on the pan pipes, and behind another, the evil real estate mogul encounters a serpent with his face. After yokels pause their “What in Tom Thunder?!” astonishment or skepticism, we return to the strained message movie when Dr. Lao befriends a torturously acted little boy, Mike, in whom he sees an active imagination and appreciation for life. That sickeningly artificial message encapsulates the film, and dismisses the genuine weirdness of Lao’s creations.  However, stop-motion animator turned director George Pal seems far more interested in the lavish set pieces than teaching kids life lessons. The film most drastically diverges from kiddie-matinee flick with the sexual awakening of the librarian love interest who unbuttons her shirt, panting while the well-oiled faun twirls lasciviously. The film further ignores the corny confines of the message with a climax that includes a rocket-powered rain making machine and some drunk bumpkins fighting an ever-growing Lochness monster in the desert, all underscored by a soundtrack of anarchic bagpipes. When Lao leaves in a plume of smoke, much to the dismay of Mike, we’re left stranded with the Abalone bumpkins wondering: “What in the heck was that all about?”

But who is Doctor Lao anyway? Is he a whimsical Chinese guru capable of transforming into six circus entertainers, or is his “Chinaman” persona a role like all the others? At times he drops the “velly solly” accent when speaking to Mike, explaining that he talks in “whatever dialect the mood requires.” This statement explains his divine talent for manifesting himself in a form specifically attuned to whoever’s observing. It is only to Mike that he drops his cadre of disguises, because he sees no need for artifice in the presence of a boy fertile with imagination. His role as master of deception to the dull-minded Abalonians explains his need for fantastical disguises, but the reason for Dr. Lao’s brief stay in the middle-of-nowhere burg remains a mystery left unsolved, due to his seeming lack of effect on the town. Instead of leaving the Abalonians blessed with ability to see life as a circus despite their mundane lives, he leaves the desert ruffians dazed and spouting the same tiresome exposition as always. The only changes Dr. Lao makes in Abalone are galvanizing the townspeople to vote against selling their land to Stark, and chemically developing a romance between Ed and Angela. Lao has the power to catch fish in dry rivers and render the local bigots senseless (with the help of some twinkling music), so obviously he has some ulterior plan beyond running a fabulous circus. Why did he come? Why does he care about Abalone? Why does a man with supreme power charge five cents for fortune telling? Dr. Lao, false god or just brilliant entertainer, leaves us with only a phony moral and the memory of a phantasmagorical circus.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a curious concoction of superb effects and makeup (William Tuttle won the first ever Oscar for makeup design for his work here) and a schmaltzy, moralising tone that doesn’t immediately speak to all audiences.–Graeme Clark, “The Spinning Image” (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by kengo, who said that the movie “has a lot of weirdness in it.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

THREE TAKES ON ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)

Escape from Tomorrow has been promoted to the List. Comments are closed on this preliminary review; please visit the official entry.

We received an unprecedented three separate reviews of Randy Moore’s controversial surrealist satire Escape from Tomorrow, the independent feature which was shot guerrilla-style at Disney World and which many originally supposed would be unreleasable thanks to Disney’s notoriously aggressive legal department. We have decided to compile these three individual takes into one giant mega-post for your enjoyment and edification. So here’s everything you need to know about Escape from Tomorrow, at least for now…

DIRECTED BY: Randy Moore

FEATURING: Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez, Jack Dalton, Danielle Safady, Annet Manhendru, Allison Lees-Taylor, Lee Armstrong, Stass Klassen

PLOT: A day in the life of an American family vacationing at Disneyland… or Walt Disney World… or at least some Disney related theme park. Only the day starts out with Jim (Roy Abramsohn) getting a call from his boss, who tells him that there’s no job for him to return to. Things can only go downhill from there, but everything is filtered through a cheerful veneer. From a spreading cat-flu epidemic, to stalking teen-age girls, brainwashing by Park cyborgs, it just goes to show that “bad things happen everywhere”… even in the Happiest Place On Earth. (synopsis by L. Rob Hubbard)

Troubled family man Jim White and his family try to enjoy their final day in Disney World, but he becomes distracted by a pair of pretty French teenagers, blackouts, and visions of sinister happenings in the idyllic theme park. As the intensity of White’s visions grow, so too do tensions between him and his family, and soon it seems he might lose them and himself altogether to the weird power of Disney World. Would he really miss them, though, or does Disney offer him something better? (synopsis by Ben Sunde)

A middle-aged man (who looks an awful lot like a husky Tom Cruise) gets promptly fired via telephone amidst a family vacation to Disneyworld, and proceeds to break down mentally and physically with his family while he covertly follows two barely-legal Parisian teenagers during his waltz through the happiest place on earth. (synopsis by Ryan Aarset)

1. L. Rob Hubbard

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Aside from the accomplishment of actually shooting on Disney property completely in plain sight, the film’s subversive commentary on Disney’s hold on the collective imagination has a solid bite that has not been previously approached as directly as it is here.

COMMENTS: “Jim, listen to me. Don’t let your imagination run wild. It’s a transitional period.”

This is the first full sentence of Escape from Tomorrow, and it’s a key—if not the key—to understanding exactly what writer/director Randy Moore is up to in this groundbreaking film. Thanks to its impressive and unique origins, Escape from Tomorrow now occupies a spot analogous to that The Blair Witch Project held over a decade ago (leaving aside the latter film’s massive box office) in independent film. And, like Blair Witch, Escape is starting to encounter backlash in reaction to the hype that accompanied its debut at Sundance as “the best film that you may never get a chance to see.” Most of that backlash centers around a perceived lack of bite in the satire, and to criticism of the acting and filmmaking as “amateurish” and “just plain awful.” To each his own, but since most of the initial discussion centered around the film as a cause célèbre when it appeared to be waiting to be crushed by Disney’s corporate paw, now that it has been released with very little reaction from The Mouse House, some are feeling cheated that perhaps the film didn’t go as far as it could taking on Disney… that it’s a missed opportunity.

Still from Escape from Tomorrow (2013)Those who hoped for a harsh slash and burn attack on Disney and its park practices will need to seek satisfaction elsewhere, but those who feel that the satire is too soft and too on the surface are missing the point entirely. Escape from Tomorrow is a comic nightmare of the subconscious: “Lynchian” has been used many times in descriptions of the film. But Moore isn’t a -style surrealist; his take in presenting the paranoia and sexual tension that lurks in the corners of The Happiest Place On Earth is closer to the work of .

“Imagination” is a word that is repeated throughout Escape from Tomorrow, and it is the coin of this realm. After all, the whole function of amusement parks such as Disney World is to provide a playland. What could be better than having your playland already thought out for you—characters, scenarios, every little thing? Disney may not have been at it the longest, but they have certainly been very thorough in “imagineering” characters and places that have Continue reading THREE TAKES ON ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)