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Apocryphally Weird

69*. FLAMING EARS (1992)

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Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche

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“In the year 2700, the year of the toads, ‘Asche’ was a burnt-out city.
Too big for its souls who banded together in dark basements.
It was an unrestrained wild animal,
ready to pee in Death’s face at any time.
And its residents were equal to it in every way.
Highly unlikely for a pure heart to survive.”–Flaming Ears introductory narration

DIRECTED BY: Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl, Dietmar Schipek

FEATURING: Susanna Heilmayr, Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl

PLOT: The lives of a comic book artist, a serial arsonist, and an extraterrestrial converge when Volley burns down the comix press. The artist, Spy, goes in search of vengeance, only to be beaten up by the bouncers at the club where Volley performs; Nun, Volley’s alien girlfriend, then finds Spy lying unconscious in the gutter and falls in love with her. Meanwhile, Volley develops the hots for her chauffeur, and a young girl graffitis the city with the image of a flower vase.

Still from Flaming Ears (1992)

BACKGROUND:

  • Scheirl and Pürrer became lovers in the 1980s and started making “lesbian punk home movies” in Pürrer’s Vienna apartment with a Super 8 camera and homemade props. They would later form the band Sta-Prestto make their own film soundtracks.
  • The Catholic symbolism in the film reflects the predominant conservatism of Viennese society at the time, in contrast to its very small punk scene of musicians and artists.
  • The soundtrack features the music of local punk bands, sometimes even capturing live performances. None of the music was formally licensed.
  • When Scheirl and Pürrer’s films toured women’s and feminist film festivals in the 1990s, the S&M content often proved controversial and sometimes led to walkouts.
  • The then-contemporary popularity of Fluxus theater led some viewers to assume Flaming Ears‘ outrageous style was a deliberate mockery of their performance art. This was not the intention of the filmmakers, who were simply expressing their punk aesthetic.
  • A. Hans Shceirl (Nun), also credited as Angela Hans Scheirl, is a transgender man who transitioned with testosterone in 1996. He later directed the infamous Dandy Dust (1998) and became a painter and professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s a lot of eye-catching and provocative imagery throughout Flaming Ears, with a plethora of unusual proclivities on display. But one of its most mysterious moments occurs when the otherwise unknown Blood suddenly shows up out of the blue to grant Spy’s rotting corpse the kiss of life. It’s confusing, oddly touching yet revolting, and emblematic of Flaming Ears‘ fairy tale combination of enchantment and grotesquerie. It’s also a major pivot point in the splintered narrative.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Erotic arson; the healing power of alien saliva

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: What isn’t weird about this movie? The two items listed above are only the very weirdest elements. There’s also furniture humping (with lighter fluid used as lube), an immortal alien whose severed limbs come back to life, and an oddly suggestive conversation about gardening cacti. With a rough and ready DIY aesthetic, Flaming Ears is art-house done No Wave-style. At any moment the live action can be interrupted by a stop-motion animated sequence, a prop, or a painting. In one memorable scene a cardboard cutout, with a cartoonish line-drawn face, replaces one of the actors. The dialogue is obscurely poetic and the futuristic setting thinly sketched, leaving the viewer on their own to figure out what exactly is going on, like an alien crash-landed on an unknown planet.

Flaming Ears re-release trailer

COMMENTS: Usually, films that take place in a future dystopia explain the reasons behind societal collapse, but Flaming Ears ignores Continue reading 69*. FLAMING EARS (1992) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ADOLESCENCE OF UTENA (1999)

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Shôjo kakumei Utena: Adolescence mokushiroku (Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence Apocalypse); AKA Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie

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DIRECTED BY: Kunihiko Ikuhara

FEATURING THE VOICES OF: Tomoko Kawakami, Yuriko Fuchizaki, Takehito Koyasu; , Sharon Becker, (English dub)

PLOT: Newly arrived at school, Utena finds herself in a duel for the freedom of the beautiful and mysterious Anthy, and must fend off multiple challengers while navigating her new-found betrothal.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: For an ostensible transfer of a popular TV series to the big screen, Adolescence of Utena delights not only in jettisoning any obeisance to its source material, but moves in strange and unpredictable directions. Whenever you think you’ve got Utena’s number, you definitely don’t, right up to its outrageous conclusion.

Still from Adolescence of Utena (1999)

COMMENTS: The first moments of this big-screen successor to the popular manga and TV series “Revolutionary Girl Utena” suggest a fish-out-of-water story, as the impossibly wide-eyed title character is led on a tour of the architectural wonder and human-interaction Petri dish that is the Ohtori Academy. Who will she meet? What will she learn? Who will become friends and enemies? A classic shōjo manga in the making. And as soon as those moments end, you can forget all about them, because Utena’s encounter with the cheekily devoted Anthy will shortly become the only thing of importance.

The two girls have an unusual meet-cute, with Utena wandering onto a flower-festooned platform and inadvertently instigating a duel for the rights to Anthy’s hand. It turns out this kind of  accidental heroism happens to Utena a lot; for such a powerful champion, Utena is remarkably unsure of herself. We soon learn why, but the careful crafting of her character lends great potency to her developing relationship with Anthy, empowering what could easily be reduced to cliché. A scene in which the two girls have to create life-drawings of each other, far from feeling obvious or superfluous, develops real romantic power.

All of this takes place in a lush and fantastic design that adds another layer of surrealism and wonder. The school is a wild mashup of Roman architecture and civic planning by M. C. Escher. Places and people are all decked out in a wild palette of colors, with heightened military costumes complemented by crazily flowing hairstyles of pink, magenta, and green. Director Ikuhara supplements these visions with intriguing abstractions, like the radio hosts who only appear in silhouette. Even when the plot and backstory become too dense to be certain you’re following, the visuals are never less than striking, often gasp-inducing.

Adolescence of Utena is already unusual, but the final third raises the bar significantly as our heroine begins to suspect that the universe is hiding a fundamental truth about its nature. She’s right, in a way that rhymes thematically with fellow 1999 release The Matrix; but where ’ Neo had to be flushed out of a simulation to find clarity, Utena makes her escape by turning into a uterus-shaped hot rod and doing battle with a city-sized monster car. It’s a remarkable visual, and it’s hard to undersell the surprise generated by the pivot the movie takes at this juncture. The film’s final image, with the two lead characters in a nude embrace and riding their sex luge into the horizon, is a fitting denouement for a film that has committed fully to following its own path.

Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie

Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie

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    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…for fear of spoiling the most wild moment in a film made up of wild moments, I would be very reluctant to say what happens in the film around the 65-minute mark, except in general terms, but it is both the most intensely, if fuzzily, symbolic event in the film, involving an extraordinary physical transformation that allows the full scope of Utena’s revolutionary potental to express itself… When it gets to the actual visionary moments, where Utena starts to perceive the greater world than just herself (and this is, basically, the arc of the plot: it’s a coming-of-age story, though one that has been buried deep below the expressive dream imagery), it turns into full-on surrealist explosions of roses, clouds, spaces defined purely in terms of line and shape with no sense of what kind of space they are, though they come across as fundamentally Gothic in their ancient weight and richness.”–Tim Brayton, Alternate Ending

    “A film of absolute beauty, it’s also the weirdest thing I have ever seen. Now that’s a pretty big statement, but I’ve racked my brain, and I can’t think of anything weirder… Yes it’s weird, but all of that weirdness is in the form of metaphor, allusion, and illusion.” – Stephen Porter, Silver Emulsion

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

    Apocryphally Weird

    59*. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1972)

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    Requiem pour un vampire, AKA Vierges et Vampires, Caged Virgins

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    “[M]ore than thirty years later, Requiem remains one of my favorite films. In my view, it’s a real naïve film, written naively without thought, almost automatic writing, without prior idea and above all without reflection. It’s nothing else but a simple stream of ideas out of an unconstituted imagination. It’s a real ‘B’ movie with all that that involves. No intellectual reflection, no intentional symbolism. Nothing but this free and disordered imagery which I care so much about.” —, “The Making of Requiem for a Vampire” (2005)

    DIRECTED BY: Jean Rollin

    FEATURING: , Mareille Dargent, Dominique, Louise Dhour, Michel Delesalle

    PLOT: Two teenage delinquents disguised as clowns escape unknown pursuers in a car; their getaway driver is gunned down in the chase. After escaping they remove their harlequin makeup and make their way across the countryside. They are eventually bitten by bats and wind up trapped in the medieval castle lair of a dying vampire and his minions.

    BACKGROUND:

    • Rollin’s script for his fourth film, written in two days in a stream of consciousness, evolved out of two scenes: the car chase through the countryside and the piano concert in the cemetery.
    • The first half of the film is nearly silent. Inspired by the pioneering adventure serials of Louis Feuillade, Rollin chose to emphasize the action sequences by keeping them mostly dialogue-free.
    • The art direction was inspired by surrealist painters Clovis Trouille and Paul Delvaux.
    • The dungeon scenes were filmed in the twelfth century Château de la Roche-Guyon, after the crew was evicted from their first choice of castle when the owner caught sight of the film’s nudity. Edmée, Duchess de la Rochefoucauld never saw the script; she agreed to rent her chateau for filming under the impression the story was, in Rollin’s words, “a sort of fairytale.”
    • The dungeon torture scene is ten minutes long, the minimum length of sleaze sales agent Lionel Wallman required in order to sell the film on the international grindhouse circuit. Wallman also donated the getaway car that gets shot to pieces and set on fire.
    • Interpol briefly investigated the film’s production after local gendarmes discovered the shot-up car with Belgian plates in a secluded patch of forest and assumed it belonged to foreign drug traffickers.
    • The cemetery scenes were filmed in a burial ground for medieval plague victims in Crèvecoeur-en-Auge, a small village in Normandy, believed by locals to be cursed.

    INDELIBLE IMAGE: Many fantastic scenes in Requiem haunt the mind (the vampire Erika playing the organ in a chapel to an audience of skeleton monks, the crimson torture chamber, the master vampire’s coffin in a green-glowing crypt), but the two main characters dressed as stock clowns stand out whenever they appear, whether in a golden field, a collapsing barn, or a cemetery at dusk.

    TWO WEIRD THINGS: Clown car getaway; vagina bat

    WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A car chase gunfight along a winding country road; a solitary food truck in the middle of nowhere; a motorcycle in an abandoned water tower; a chapel doorway glowing crimson in the dead of night. Requiem for a Vampire transitions from scene to scene with the abrupt illogical shifts of a dream, as the intrepid heroines traverse a deserted landscape freighted with mystery. Mysterious themselves, the girls transform from clowns to teenage outlaws with handguns in their miniskirts. It remains unknown quite how they’ve ended up here, who was chasing them, and even where “here” is.

    Trailer for Requiem for a Vampire (1972)

    COMMENTS: Disregard for normal narrative conventions (establishing the setting, introducing the characters) give Rollin’s films a Continue reading 59*. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1972) →

    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE COMING OF SIN (1978)

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    La Visita del Vicio;  AKA Vice Makes a Visit

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    DIRECTED BY: José Ramon Larraz

    FEATURING: Patricia Granada, Lidia Zuazo, Rafael Machado

    PLOT: An orphaned girl haunted by prophetic dreams becomes the maid of a wealthy young widow.

    Still from the coming of sin (1978)

    COMMENTS: If asked by a producer to make a “sexy movie,” not many directors would combine the unsettling atmosphere of Belgian weird fiction with the Tenebrism of the Spanish Baroque, and then mix it all up with an ancient Greek myth about bestiality. José Ramon Larraz does just that. The tale of Pasiphaë provides the surreal imagery; the painting of Diego Velazquez the light and shadows; and the setting, an isolated country manor house, is straight out of Thomas Owen, along with the film’s shockingly violent conclusion.

    Trianna (Zuazo) suffers from a recurring nightmare. An orphan without any family, she ends up working for Lorna (Granada), an eccentric and independent widow living alone in the remote countryside. When Lorna asks Trianna about her dream, she says there’s a man on a horse and he frightens her, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. They drop the subject and soon fall into a cozy domesticity which eventually develops into a full-on Sapphic relationship.

    When the subject of her nightmare appears in real life—a nude young man riding a black horse bareback—he terrifies Trianna (and tramples the rose bushes in the process). Trianna greets him with a double-barreled shotgun. “That’s no reason to shoot somebody,” Lorna tells her.

    Lorna insists Trianna’s nightmare results from her fear of sex and/or men; she has books that will explain it all to her, but illiteracy saves Trianna from having to read volumes of pop psychology. Instead, she visits the local fortune-teller, who asks why she even bothered to come, since her fate is sealed. Trianna is the devil’s child; and if she and the man on the black horse ever become a couple then someone will die.

    After this disturbing revelation, the young man on the horse becomes a regular guest at Lorna’s house; she insists he learn some manners, so he begins wearing pants when he joins the ladies for tea. Eventually Chico (Machado) becomes the lover of both Trianna and Lorna, despite Trianna’s fears. Though Chico wants Trianna, Lorna begins aggressively pursuing him, unbalancing their fragile love triangle.

    In between orgies, they visit the local museum, a nightclub where two female dancers perform a tango, and Lorna convinces Trianna and Chico to pose half-naked together for her latest painting. Lorna insists the pair would make a fine couple, even as she continues her clandestine visits to Chico’s shack down by the river. To make her assignations, Lorna passes through towering reeds, a landscape vividly described in Owen’s “The Conquered Beauty and the Troubadour,” wherein gunshots obliterate the post-coital calm of a summer afternoon.

    Larraz started his artistic career as a comic book illustrator, and Spain’s then-restrictive censorship laws drove him to other parts of Europe. He turned to directing films after a chance meeting with Josef von Sternberg in Brussels, where Larraz also met Owen, friend of Jean Ray, the author of the novel Malpertuis. The influence of these two men shaped the course of Larraz’s idiosyncratic film career. The Coming of Sin was made in Spain upon his return at the end of the Franco regime.

    In interviews, Larraz claims that every one of his films is actually a Thomas Owen story. Larraz wears this inspiration on his sleeve, but anyone who hasn’t read Owen’s work won’t recognize him as Larraz’s muse, and he’s never mentioned in the credits. Owen was a fan of old dark house stories (one of his collections is titled “Les Maisons suspectes”), and Larraz clearly shares this obsession. His first film, 1970’s Whirlpool, takes place in an isolated house outside of London, where the protagonists get up to artsy, sexy, and occasionally murderous menages á trois, as they do in The Coming of Sin.

    In Owen’s stories uncanny events fracture mundane life. Old mansions reveal to strangers worlds unto themselves, where the normal rules of everyday existence no longer apply. The Coming of Sin exists in numerous cuts and under a plethora of titles (S&M scenes were excised from some versions, or augmented with hardcore footage in others), but Owen’s themes are the focus in Larraz’s original. When Trianna and Chico intrude upon Lorna’s den of solitude they set in motion the hand of fate.

    The films of Larraz (AKA J. R. Larrath) are admittedly something of an acquired taste. Like and , his pacing can be slow, the scenery repetitive, the amateur acting impeded by stilted dialogue. He had the makings of a genuine auteur; his film Symptoms was England’s submission to Cannes in 1974, where it received favorable notice from French audiences. Despite that success, Larraz primarily worked in low budget Eurotrash productions, his wild imagination sacrificed to excessive sex scenes and gore at the behest of producers. But no matter how cheap or sleazy the film, Larraz always retained his artist’s eye, and he speaks in his own voice, a unique downbeat tone with a heart of weird fiction hidden at the core.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    ‘…another Larraz offering that is almost weirdly suffused with a near hallucinogenic, dreamlike ambience, despite some of the more shocking aspects of the visuals.”–Jeffrey Kauffman, Blu-ray.com (Arrow box set)

    Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin ) [ Blu-Ray, Reg.A/B/C Import - United Kingdom ]

    Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin ) [ Blu-Ray, Reg.A/B/C Import - United Kingdom ]
    • Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool /
    • Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz
    • Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio
    • Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin
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