DIRECTED BY: Danny Perez

FEATURING: The music of Animal Collective and a bunch of unknown actors.

PLOT:  Zilch.  ODDSAC is completely without narrative, or much coherence.  The only line of

dialogue is, “Yeah, he hates chocolate.  He hates everything but green beans,” spoken by a young girl with a southern drawl.  Oh, and there is a vampire.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  While it is certainly one of the weirdest pieces of film-making I’ve encountered in awhile, it is not a movie.  It is an extended performance art video piece for a new, unreleased Animal Collective album.  Although it has some very cool visuals and the weirdness never lets up during the 52 minute running time, I say the art form of music videos should be separate from a list of the best 366 weird movies of all time.

COMMENTS:  If you are familiar with the oddball musical stylings of Animal Collective, you would expect a visual album from these guys to be an “out-there” extravaganza.  Well… it is.  The film is a barrage of acid-fueled, kaleidoscopic visuals that may melt your retinas if you stare too long.  Like the band’s music, ODDSAC does not follow conventional structure in its visual montages.  At times, it is reminiscent of the experimental art films painstakingly crafted by Stan Brakhage in the early 1960’s. Whereas Brakhage was a pioneer in the experimental film field, Danny Perez is just really good at quick-cut editing and manipulating his visuals into a trippy panorama.  At an open-discussion forum after the screening of the film in Los Angeles, Perez and the Collective gang mentioned the influence of John Carpenter’s Halloween.  Say what?!? There are elements of horror interspersed with the craziness, but I don’t see any connection to a straight-forward slasher film.

The film is divided into 13 chapters.  Each segment features a different song, so essentially it is 13 music videos.  The first segment sets a tone of darkness and dread with the creepy song “Mr. Fingers,” which writhes its way around images of a towel-headed man with a red-painted face.  Ropes of fire rhythmically swing around him, brightly lighting the pitch black sky.  Elsewhere, a young woman claws into a wall, only to be immersed in a stream of oil that Continue reading CAPSULE: ODDSAC (2010) →