Tag Archives: Independent film

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: WRONG (2012)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , William Fichtner, , Alexis Dziena

PLOT: Dolph wakes up one day to find his dog missing; a mysterious Master Chang may have some information on the matter.

Still from Wrong (2012)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: With only two completed films under his belt so far, it’s already becoming obvious that musician-turned-filmmaker Quentin Dupieux is one of those auteurs whose vision is so defiantly offbeat that every movie he makes is likely to be a strong candidate for the list of the weirdest movies ever made. Wrong continues the absurd tradition Dupieux set in his debut Rubber, about a tire serial killer, only this time with even more focus on awkward, surreal comedy.

COMMENTS: Existential sad-sack Dolph has been having a rough time of it lately. It’s bad enough when you’re upset about losing a job at an office where the sprinkler system constantly soaks the workers, but to top it all off his beloved dog Paul has gone missing. His neighbor, a problem jogger going through a crisis of his own, is no help. His French gardener only has more bad news for him; his prize palm tree is suffering from an extremely odd disease. An unintentional romance with the girl who works the phone at the pizza delivery place only interrupts his attempts to telepathically connect with his dog. A detective who doesn’t want to see a picture of the missing pet but is obsessed with finding a stool sample isn’t very promising, but perhaps mystical entrepreneur Master Chang (played with irrational confidence by William Fichtner with a blond ponytail and an accent from nowhere) can help. Shaggy-headed Plotnik is surprisingly good as Dolph, anchoring us on our journey through this absurd world with his sincere bewilderment—although in one of the script’s arch meta-jokes, he accepts things like indoor rain at face value, while being completely confounded by incongruent details of pizza box logos. Even more important to the film’s success is his touchingly pure devotion to his missing mutt, which adds a note of genuineness to what would otherwise be a wry and arbitrary story with no emotional stakes. Although there is an ongoing plot, and each character has a unique arc and adheres to his or her own odd illogic, the movie is very digressive and inevitably feels a like a series of surreal sketch-comedy bits at times, almost as if Dupieux has been telepathically spying on the dreams of Monty Python cast members for ideas to fit into his dognapping script. Dupieux’s universe is like the comic world of , only turned up to 11, and with no philosophical pretensions. Wrong doesn’t arrive with the blindsiding strangeness of Rubber, but it does avoid a sophomore slump for the director, delivering unpredictable yuks along with an unexpected amount of heart. If this is Wrong, who wants to be right?

Dupieux’s upcoming project is titled Wrong Cops;he insists the story is unrelated to this film and the similar nomenclature occurs just because he’s “lazy with titles.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Answering the question ‘what’s weirder than a movie about a sentient car tire on a killing spree?’ Rubber director Quentin Dupieux gives us Wrong, a literal and figurative shaggy-dog story that takes its surreal kinks in stride.”–John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Caleb Moss, who explained it has “an intriguing mixture of deadpan absurdity and an eerie, low-key Lynchian undercurrent to the occurrences through out the film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ABCS OF DEATH (2012)

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Weirdest!(segments F, W, Z)

DIRECTED BY: Kaare Andrews, , & , Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, , Adrián García Bogliano, Xavier Gens, Lee Hardcastle, , Thomas Cappelen Malling, Jorge Michel Grau, Anders Morgenthaler, , Banjong Pisanthanakun, , , Jon Schnepp, , Timo Tjahjanto, Andrew Traucki, Nacho Vigalondo, Jake West, Ti West, , Adam Wingard,

FEATURING: Too many actors to list individually, and no one appears onscreen for long enough to qualify as “featured”

PLOT: 26 short horror films about death, each inspired by an assigned letter of the alphabet.

Still from The ABCs of Death (2012)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As you might expect from an anthology with a hefty twenty-six entries in a multitude of styles, it’s too uneven and not consistently weird enough for consideration for the List. That said, there are three very, very strange shorts here, and several others that nudge the weirdometer at least a little bit, which makes this worth a look-see.

COMMENTS: Rendered in a wild variety of morbid styles ranging from the avant-garde to the zany, these twenty six short films about death derive from a new breed of up and coming punk directors working in the diffuse genre that now loosely goes by the name “horror.” All the usual disclaimers about anthology films apply to The ABCs of Death, but this compilation faces an additional alphabetical hurdle: if A, B and C are all duds (and I say they are), the movie gets off to a slow start, and there’s nothing the editors can do about it. The order is locked in place and randomized, and the curators can’t impose any sort of flow on the show. The fact that each entry has to be unusually short (after the 11 minutes of end credits are subtracted from the run time we come out to four-and-a-half minutes per mini-movie) is more of a virtue than a drawback, since we aren’t asked to invest much time in the inevitable losers and failed experiments. The necessity for each director to hit hard and fast, with no time to build up true horror, led me to expect shock, gore, and cruel comedy to dominate over true terror. ABCs delivers on that score, but there was also a trend that make me wonder where horror’s head is at. Three out of the twenty-six entries—that’s 11.5%—prominently feature a toilet, and that’s not even counting the one that’s flatulence based. Has horror finally dug to the bottom of the bucket of viscera, and now there’s nowhere else to turn but the toilet to elicit cheap disgust? A more promising development, and one that’s much more to the point of this website, is that the exact same number of shorts (3, or 11%) were unabashedly weird-–suggesting that cutting-edge horror continues to be the last refuge for surrealism in pop culture. Before describing the three bizarre gems, we’ll mention a couple of odd, and not so odd, runners-up. “P is for Pressure,” set in a third-world country and involving a prostitute’s quest to buy an expensive present for her daughter’s birthday, is the omnibus’ only dramatic entry; although it has a morally sickening climax, it is authentically and unexpectedly touching. Though not written by Srdjan Spasojevic (who turns in an extreme but unmemorable riff on “R”), the violent and transgressive porn fantasia “L is for Libido” has a disturbing Serbian Film vibe (with a hallucinatory kick) that soils the mind. On the opposite end of the sexual spectrum, Catette and Forzani’s “O is for Orgasm” is a surprisingly beautiful and experimental explosion of color-filter eroticism that traffics in the concept of sexual release as “la petite mort.” In a normal compilation, “H is for Hydroelectric,” a Chuck-Jones-does-furry-porn style adventure in which an anthropomorphic Nazi stripper fox lures a British bulldog pilot to his doom, would be the WTF-iest entry. Here, however, it’s only an honorable mention, as that title is literally taken by “W is for WTF?” This is a study in surrealistic economy: initially appearing to be a self-aware parody, it quickly establishes a comic book mesh of Satanic gore porn, killer walruses, zombie clowns, and decapitated animators, then spins the images in a psychedelic blender for two gloriously insane minutes. “W” features miniskirted nurses and princess warriors in chain mail bikinis, but for gleefully adolescent gross-out sleaze, nothing beats Noboru Iguchi’s already notorious “F is for Fart.” It’s the tender tale of a lesbian schoolgirl that defiantly expresses a humanistic preference for the gas of an earthly lover over the vengeful flatus of God. “Fart”‘s motto is “let’s pass beyond the boundaries of good taste and become one together,” and does it ever achieve the first part, at least—this is a bad-taste stunner for an unstunable age. Still, top honors in the “weird” category go to Iguchi’s frequent collaborator Yoshihiro Nishimura, who continues to set himself apart as the brigade’s most inventive and audacious talent with ABCs’ capper, “Z is for Zetsumetsu” (“extinction”). A blond Nazi hermaphrodite fights a nude kung fu woman while a Japanese Dr. Strangelove comments on the action; it’s somehow inspired by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquakes, and there are satirical references to American imperialism, the nuclear power industry, and Japan’s own sense of racial superiority. A topless rendition of the 9-11 bombings may have Americans shaking their heads, but it’s hard to be too offended by something that resembles an insane sushi chef’s wet dream (multiple characters ejaculate rice). Whatever associations this stew of mad images raises in the Japanese consciousness, its bizarro bona fides are unquestionable.

Of course, we would have highlighted an entirely different set of segments if this piece had been written for a gorehound journal or a monster blog. One of the issues with what marches under the banner of “horror” these days is that it’s a loose confederation of disreputable interests that encompasses torture porn, black comedy, sick eroticism and experimental imagery alongside traditional stories of vampires, hauntings and madman. With two films prominently featuring pedophilia, and the aforementioned scatology and surrealism joining the expected blood and guts, ABCs‘ selections suggests that the modern horror genre is becoming a final resting place for the generally transgressive rather than for the terrifying per se.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Wow, what a weird, anarchic, energetic and exciting display, from claymation to puppetry to crazy postmodern collage to regular old live action!… I’ll take the movies that pissed me off too, if in some way they help make possible things as divergent and weird and exciting as Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s abstract, erotic ‘O Is for Orgasm,’ Simon Rumley’s grave and dramatic prostitution mini-melodrama ‘P Is for Pressure,’ and animator Jon Schnepp’s hyperactive every-genre-at-once ‘W Is for WTF?’ (probably my favorite of them all).”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE THEATRE BIZARRE (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Douglas Buck, Buddy Giovinazzo, David Gregory, Karim Hussain, , ,

FEATURING: , André Hennicke, Peg Poett, Virginia Newcomb, Enola Penny, Amanda Marquardt, Jeremy Gladen, Liberty Larson, Christopher Sachs, Nicole Fabbri

PLOT: In a dilapidated old theater, a macabre human puppet hosts six Grand Guignol-style tales of terror.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The Theater Bizarre is similar to other portmanteau horror anthologies, but speeds past them into the realm of the weird with colorful eccentric characters and bizarre story situations.

Still from The Theater Bizarre (2011)
COMMENTS: First-rate makeup, eerie sets and props, and racy, gory stories with unpredictable endings make The Theatre Bizarre a real standout in the genre of horror anthologies. When an emboldened patron of the dramatic arts (Virginia Newcomb) spots an open door to a decrepit told theater down a questionable back street, her curiosity gets the better of her. She enters, takes a seat, and is treated to a series of six sinister stories of sexual obsession and madness, hosted by an uncanny animated human puppet (Udo Kier). Attempting to cultivate his patron’s fear, the puppet presents each demented segment like a circus ringmaster exhibiting a freak show of abominations, with each tale more horribly harrowing and outrageous than the last.

When they meet “The Mother of Toads,” an unwary student of anthropology and his fiancee touring the French countryside are lured into the lair of changeling witch with an offer to peruse rare books. Suffering from an unusual condition, she has an ulterior motive and a strange design in store for both of them. The inquisitive pair are in for the cultural shock of a lifetime.

The psychological tension of unrequited love goes through the roof in “I Love You,” and reality bends and warps when a smothering but inadequate lover plunges beyond the bounds of reason when confronted by the prospect of a breakup.

In “Wet Dreams,” George Romero’s zombie movie makeup artist Tom Savini (who also directs) plays a Freudian psychologist and marriage counselor who turns the tables on a philandering client when he helps a couple step to the other side of the mirror to realize their darkest fantasies.

“The Accident” relates the story of a little girl learning the harsh realities of death after witnessing the aftermath of fatal traffic accident. This serious effort is neither macabre nor racy, and stands out from the other stories in The Theatre Bizarre for its dreamlike filming style and quiet contemplative atmosphere.

“Vision Stains” introduces a psychotic “experience junkie” who kills other women, drains the vitreous fluid from their eyes and injects it into her own to steal their memories. But when she chooses an “exceptional” victim, she takes a ride straight to hell.

Their addiction to elaborate confections cements an uneasy alliance between an oddball beatnik couple in “Sweets”. The glutenous duo’s precarious hold on their shaky union is challenged to the extreme when they join an exclusive club for twisted food perverts whose appetites are esoteric in the extreme.

As a whole, The Theatre Bizarre is a bit uneven. Its segments are diverse and feature unique directorial and writing styles, but each terror tale is memorable, colorful and over-the-top without being campy or silly. The Theatre Bizarre is a portmanteau-style anthology in the tradition of Creepshow or Tales From The Crypt; but with its adult themes and abundant nudity, it’s definitely not a children’s movie. Lurid, salacious, chilling, and bloody as hell, The Theatre Bizarre is the most memorable horror anthology I have seen to date.

All of the directors have done prior work in horror cinema: Richard Stanley (Dust Devil, Hardware), Buddy Giovinazzo (Combat Shock, Life is Hot in Cracktown), Tom Savini (the 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead), Douglas Buck (Cutting Moments), David Gregory (Plague Town), Karim Hussain (Subconscious Cruelty), and Jeremy Kasten (The Attic Expeditions, Wizard of Gore).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“These elements may be shocking and even bizarre. But, like a lot of midnight-movie provocations, they soon turn predictable.”–Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE RAMBLER (2013)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: ,

PLOT: A nameless man is released from prison and hitchhikes across the West heading for a job at his brother’s ranch, meeting absurd characters along the way.

Still from The Rambler (2013)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It’s a defiantly weird and dryly funny mix of dusty movie clichés and arthouse surrealism, set in that timeless, existential American movie desert where the cowboys and hobos of myth once roamed.

COMMENTS: The Rambler is sure to be marketed as a surrealistic horror film, which is a shame. I think people will enjoy this druggy road trip through the Weird West more if they go in with the mindset that they are attending a black comedy with horror bits. The title character—who is almost never seen without his rumpled cowboy hat, sunglasses, and a cigarette dangling from his lip—is a parody of every ultra-macho B-movie man-with-no-name existential outlaw since Clint Eastwood. When he briefly takes a job as a hobo boxer, he’s about to whip his shades off to fight his opponent (who, rather unfairly, has a nasty hook for a hand), but his promoter advises him to keep them on because they “look cool.” He’s so unflappable that when someone tosses a severed limb into his lap he brushes it away and shrugs nonchalantly. He’s a man of few words—mostly the word “no”—and at one point, when “the girl” presses him on his feelings, we see why, as he stumbles to put together a coherent sentence. His blank stoicism as he slouches his way through a world of redneck nightmares is a running joke; the only character who gets much of a reaction from him is the living corpse who pukes a gallon of yellow bile onto his face while he’s handcuffed to a bedpost, and even then the Rambler registers only mild annoyance (he also forgets to clean the crusty vomit off his face before he resumes hitchhiking, and wonders why no one will pick him up). The movie is so deadpan in its absurdity that it’s the sincerely intended horror sequences, like a trip to a family home that resembles a hallucinatory funeral parlor, that seem out of place. The movie’s final sequence grows from an effectively sick and squeamish nightmare notion, but arguably overplays it a bit, with the incessant screaming becoming annoying rather than horrific. The knockout oddball character is a mummy-toting professor who records dreams onto VHS, although he hasn’t quite perfected the technology yet. Lindsay Pulsipher is the sunshiny femme fatale (and horrific specter of commitment) who won’t stay dead and who haunts the Rambler throughout his psychedelic odyssey. Mulroney inhabits the title role like a suit of clothes that haven’t been changed for weeks. Given the picaresque, incident-to-incident nature of the movie, it’s necessarily hit-and-miss, but the road movie architecture serves the surreal format—there is just enough loose structure to keep us grounded, as we know the Rambler is on a journey with a clear destination in mind, even if we suspect it’s a mirage and settling down into a steady job as a cowhand goes against his rambling nature. When I attended Reeder’s debut movie, The Oregonian, almost a fourth of the midnight audience walked out before the ending. For The Rambler I only spotted a single early exit. With The Rambler‘s exploding heads, severed limbs, and corpse-eating dogs, the lack of flight into the aisles wasn’t because the material was less grotesque or shocking than the prior film’s notorious “rainbow pee” sequence. Perhaps it was because word of The Rambler‘s eccentricities had gotten around and the audience was better prepared this time, or maybe I simply saw the movie with a tougher-minded, more weird-friendly audience. I think the answer to the conundrum is simpler, though: The Rambler is a better and more watchable movie than The Oregonian, largely due to the abundant humor. If Reeder keeps improving his craft at this rate, he’ll have to abdicate his title as “the walkout king of Sundance.”

Throughout the movie the Rambler carries a guitar, although he rarely plays it, because, as he says, “I haven’t found a song yet.” Per Reeder’s post-screening statements, he based the character on the wandering hobo folksinger archetype, a la Woody Guthrie (the title itself might have been suggested by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, who always wore a cowboy hat). The Rambler has been picked up for distribution by Anchor Bay and is currently available on video-on-demand; it releases on DVD June 25.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Rambler just seems weird for its own sake and in love with cheap shock value… The overall effort comes off like a half-assed pastiche of the entire cult section of the old Kim’s Video on Bleecker Street.”–Steve Erickson, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: UPSTREAM COLOR (2013)

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UPDATE (3/5/2014): Upstream Color has been officially inducted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made. Here is the Certified Weird entry.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Shane Carruth, Andrew Sensenig, Thiago Martins

Upstream Color

PLOT: After a man known as the Thief drugs a young woman and steals most of her money, she loses her job and some of her memory, and needs to start an entirely new life; a year later she is romantically pursued by an incorrigible businessman, but their relationship is hindered by her traumatic experience and the enterprising man behind it.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Approaching the narrative in a dreamlike state, Upstream Color is a surreal and beautiful journey through lingering trauma, tinged with elements of science-fiction and romantic drama. Its convoluted, unstructured story is at first distancing, but the imaginative visuals, strong performances, and compelling use of sound make for a weird movie that’s also emotionally resonant.

COMMENTS: Opening with choppy shots of a mysterious drug operation involving white worms with unique mind-altering properties, Upstream Color devotes most of its first act to Kris (Amy Seimetz), a special effects coordinator who is knocked out, drugged up with a worm, and essentially taken hostage in her own home for a few days. The worm has a kind of brainwashing effect, allowing the Thief (Thiago Martins) to coerce Kris into signing away all that she owns. Left alone and discovering the living worm crawling around inside her skin, she is sonically drawn to a pig farm where the Sampler (Andrew Sensenig) cuts it out of her and harvests it for future use. She wakes up at home with no memory of the experience, and only an empty bank account and unemployment to look forward to. It is a deeply unsettling sequence, played out in short, calculated bursts that emphasize the strange and harrowing process of Kris’ mental infiltration. The Thief remains faceless and monotone while she unquestioningly follows his every command, which primarily involve making her repetitively perform mundane tasks as a means of keeping her weak and controlled.

Fast-forwarding: after things have settled down, Kris, with a new haircut and an unexciting job at a copy shop, is harsh and distrustful. Her first interactions with Jeff (Shane Carruth) are halting and unsure, choppy and without resolution, and as their relationship grows deeper their scenes together become repetitive and disjointed. Both seem to have confused memories. The soft-glow blur of their romance is cut through with an otherworldly hum that seems to take over Kris, and she and Jeff begin to realize there are greater forces at work here. Their unconscious repetitive actions echo each other, and they see connections in each other’s fragmented psyches. Through it all the Sampler watches them, maintaining the pig farm where he harvests the mind-altering worms, with each pig serving as some kind of psychic link to the humans he’s operated on. His stony, unreadable demeanor makes him an ominous figure, and his sound-gathering trips are fascinating while also somehow menacing.

Upstream Color is notable for its combination of different genre and story elements that are blended and transformed through Carruth’s innovative narrative and filmic techniques. Diffused light and extreme close-ups mix with quick-cut editing and microscopic natural wonders, along with some graphic medical procedures and animal abuse. The loving attention to sound—both effects and background score—is clear, effectively creating an at-times anxious and at-times comforting atmosphere. The film is composed of little details that may or may not be important, as the bigger picture gradually, partially reveals itself, so that every scene is equally gripping and enigmatic. While the story is often ambiguous, Carruth does not lose sight of his characters, and in fact the performance of Amy Seimetz as the central figure grounds much of the film. As a whole it is certainly obscure and utterly dreamlike, and most viewers will likely leave unsure of exactly what went on, but certain that whatever it was, it was beautiful.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 “To watch the haunting, disturbing ‘Upstream Color’ is to feel like you’re inside not one of your own dreams but someone else’s, a dream that’s both compelling and unnerving in ways you can’t put your finger on.” –Kenneth Turan, LA Times.