Tag Archives: Mindbender

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE NINES (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: John August

FEATURING: , ,, Hope Davis, Elle Fanning

PLOT: Three separate plot strands—about a self-destructive actor under house arrest, a writer trying to get his series past the pilot stage while being filmed by a reality TV crew, and a video game designer whose car breaks down in the middle of nowhere—intertwine in a mysterious way, with the same actors playing different characters in each mini-story.

Still from The Nines (2007)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Any doubts I might have had about considering this pretty good, pretty strange movie as a candidate for the List were allayed when I heard writer/director John August proclaim “we’re a weird movie, for a lot of reasons…” on the “making of” DVD featurette.  If the director deliberately set out to make a weird movie, who am I to refuse to consider it?  But, while August’s movie scores above average in terms of both quality and of weirdness, I’m not sure that it’s combined totals are high enough to inaugurate it as one of the greatest weird movies of all time, at least not on the first ballot.

COMMENTS: I have to be careful in discussing The Nines not to give away much more than you’d discover on your own by reading the blurb on the back of the DVD case.  When you pop the disc into your player, you can expect to see three different stories—“The Prisoner,” “Reality Television,” and “Knowing”—acted by the same core trio, each playing different roles in each tale.  Besides the actors, locales, song lyrics, a television series, and—especially—the number “9” recur in each of the divergent plot lines, drawing correspondences and reverberances between these various worlds.  There is a thread connecting each strand; and although the first two stories, at least, are engaging on their own terms, it’s figuring out that overarching plan that supplies most of the interest.  One thing that can be discussed (and praised) without spoiling anything is the acting.  Hope Davis plays, variously, a horny housewife, a conniving TV producer, and a hiker in the middle of nowhere; Melissa McCarthy tackles the triumvirate of a bubbly public relations expert, the mother of a mute girl, and herself, the “Gilmore Girls” actress.  But it’s previously unheralded Ryan Reynolds who’s the real revelation here.  As a dimwitted, Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE NINES (2007) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE ATTIC EXPEDITIONS (2001)

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This post was originally lost in the Great Server Crash of 2010; the article was partially recovered from Google cache, and the rest of the text was recreated. Sorry, original comments were irretrievably lost in cyberspace.

DIRECTED BY: Jeremy Kasten

FEATURING: Andras Jones, , Jeffrey Combs, Beth Bates, Ted Raimi

PLOT: Awakening from a dream to find himself on an operating table, an amnesiac is informed that he is a schizophrenic murderer who has been committed to a private institution and is now being sent to a halfway home—nicknamed “the House of Love”—to be rehabilitated.

Scene from The Attic Expeditions (2001)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The Attic Expeditions sounds echoes of some (better) weird movies: Jacob’s Ladder (in the way that the script offers different possible explanations for the protagonist’s hallucinations, and jerks the viewer back and forth between those theories) and Donnie Darko (in that it seems the director intended to tell a fantastical story that “made sense” on a literal level, but lost control of the story when he took it one paradox too far). An interesting, confusing, out-of-control picture, it’s as fascinating for its misses as for its hits. It falls just short of a general recommendation, but it is recommended to anyone interested in psychological, mindbending horror seasoned with heaping doses of confusion and who isn’t a stickler for great acting. This is the kind of curious, singular picture that could wind up filling one of the final slots in the List.

COMMENTS: Trevor Blackburn may be a schizophrenic murderer, or he may be an amnesiac sorcerer, or he may be the victim of an unethical psychological experiment; or he may be all three. It’s impossible to tell, especially since The Attic Expeditions is full of contradictions and contains segments where the timeline suddenly resets and the action repeats itself with slight variations. The mystery promiscuously throws out clues, but every possible explanation for Trevor’s woes seems chained to its own refutation. Trevor is an unreliable narrator in triplicate: he’s a definite amnesiac, a possible schizophrenic, and, to top it all off, his state-appointed guardian appears to be deliberately playing with his loose grip on reality. Psychiatrist Dr. Ek (played by Jefferey Combs as a variation on Herbert West as a pot-smoking, skin-popping headshrinker) uses Trevor as a case study for an experiment in Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE ATTIC EXPEDITIONS (2001) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: PSYCH: 9 (2010)

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DIRECTED BY:  Andrew Shortell

FEATURING:  Sara Foster, Cary Elwes, Michael Biehn, Gabriel Mann, Ryan James,

PLOT: A records clerk working the graveyard shift in a shut-down hospital has puzzling,

Still from Psych 9

ghastly visions that may or may not be connected to a string of murders and her own past. As she strives to interpret the unusual events, she becomes ensnared in the uncanny, plummeting into a morass of sick secrets, murder, arson and madness.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Psych: 9 sports a delightful, creatively non-linear plot. The story is conveyed via a reality-blurring mixture of flashbacks and delusions blended with the present.   Aside from the clever story-telling technique however, Psych: 9 is an otherwise conventional psychological thriller, with mystery and horror elements.

COMMENTS:  Roslyn (Foster) takes a night job sorting records in a defunct, mostly deserted, eerie old hospital. At work, a sleazy security guard (James) likes to leer, her nervous husband (Mann) likes to visit, and an off-kilter detective (Biehn) is taken to calling on her. Her only trustworthy ally is a shrink who is busy sorting records up on the fifth floor, and he’s somehow just a little bit too nice.

The detective is investigating a series of sensational hammer murders in the hospital’s creepy neighborhood, and the shifty-eyed husband, Cole, who drives a taxi, just happens to be in the vicinity every time the murders occur. Suspiciously, Cole can’t account for the whereabouts of, you guessed it, his long, sharp geologist’s hammer missing from his toolbox.

To make things even more coincidentally unsettling, Roslyn was born in the hospital where she now works and has some undisclosed issues about her past. Disturbingly, these past issues connect to troubling uncertainties about her present. Complicating matters, she starts seeing scary apparitions that may or may not really be there. Roslyn also has occasional daydream/nightmares. They are deepening in intensity and increasingly resemble psychotic episodes.

Roslyn does her best to maintain her composure by delving into her duties, and she has her Continue reading CAPSULE: PSYCH: 9 (2010) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: AFTER.LIFE (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo

FEATURING: , Liam Neeson,

PLOT: A funeral director must convince an accident victim that she is really dead.

Still from After.Life (2010)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: I took a look at After.Life to determine its weird potential, but aside from the macabre story, I found it be a fairly conventionally psychological thriller.

COMMENTS:   Despite the pretentious dot in the middle of the title, After.Life turns out to be a well-made, offbeat picture.  Christina Ricci, while no Ingrid Bergman, delivers a credible performance even though she is slashed with cherry red lipstick and alternately nude or scantily draped in a clingy, scarlet satin slip for most of the movie.

After a violent car crash, Anna Taylor (Ricci) wakes up on a slab in a mortuary (where else?)  Eliot Deacon, a psychic undertaker (Neeson) must talk her into cooperating with the embalming process and mentally preparing herself for the afterlife.

Blessed/cursed with the gift of second sight which allows him to see the spirits of the deceased, Deacon is exasperated that he must argue and wrestle with every one of his dead clients, none of whom are at first willing accept the reality of their deaths.  Conversing with Deacon, Anna, like her predecessors, refuses to believe she’s dead despite his assurance that she’s in transition to the spirit realm, and that he’s the only one who can help her make the leap into the uncertain beyond

While sill on the steel gurney in the embalming room, Anna has several sinister forays into the ethereal plain to which she is about to permanently transcend.  Frightened, uncertain, and unwilling to depart this dimension to venture into the next, she requires a good bit of coaxing from Deacon.  Anna is a hard case and she makes quite a fuss.  Deacon has his hands full dealing with her and she proves to be his most uncooperative stiff to date.

Matters are complicated when Anna’s mooky boyfriend (Long) shows up demanding to view her body for closure.  Deacon manages to run him off, but the pesky beau just can’t seem to stay away.  He becomes a fly in the pickling balm when he insists upon clinging to the Continue reading CAPSULE: AFTER.LIFE (2009) →

List Candidates

BORDERLINE WEIRD: SPIDER (2002)

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DIRECTED BY: David Cronenberg

FEATURING: , Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT: A disturbed man is released from a mental institution and sent to live in a halfway house. While there, he traces back to his childhood to remember a troubled past and the tragic events that shaped his current mental instability.

Still from Spider (2002)

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: To compile a list of the weirdest movies ever made, one would be hard-pressed not to include Cronenberg’s entire oeuvre.  Here, the director eschews the “body horror” that encompassed much of his earlier films and focuses solely on the deterioration of the mind. While this can be just as grotesque as horrors of the flesh, the journey can get so convoluted at times that the weirdness teeters on a fulcrum. Eventually, the confusion weighs too heavy and topples the weirdness into mere befuddlement.

COMMENTS: A cinematic pet peeve of mine was surely tested with this movie. Being American, I shouldn’t have to struggle listening to an English film (i.e., UK-Great Britain). We speak the same tongue, albeit with some slight variances in words and phrases. The cockney accents in this film can get so thick at times I considered reaching for the subtitle button on the remote. To make matters worse, the film focuses on the character of Spider (Fiennes) who mumbles and spews gibberish as a means of communication.  Actually, most of his conversations are only with himself. I loathe having to toggle the volume levels up and down. I had to do this for the duration of the film. Aside from this aggravation, Spider is not a bad film; nor is it a great one.

I loved the approach taken in the opening credits. Various textiles and walls are displayed artistically with corrosion and chipped paint, each frame containing a pattern or form that is open to interpretation. It is set up to resemble Rorschach inkblot tests used in the psychiatric field (I must be going mad myself because all I see in them are cool looking demons). These opening credits are effective because they prepare the viewer for a movie that deals with an imbalanced mind. What we perceive to be truth is certainly going to be skewed from the perspective of a protagonist with warped sensibilities.

Spider enters the picture slowly, exiting a train and returning onto the streets of  London. Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: SPIDER (2002) →