Tag Archives: Obscure/Out of Print

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LITTLE MURDERS (1971)

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“You get to the point where you’re, like, ‘I want someone to be sad, and I want to know that I’m responsible!’”– on living in New York City

DIRECTED BY: Alan Arkin

FEATURING: Elliott Gould, Marcia Rodd, Vincent Gardenia, Elizabeth Wilson, Jon Korkes, John Randolph, Doris Roberts, Lou Jacobi, , Alan Arkin

Still from Little Murders (1971)

PLOT: A photographer beaten down by the cruelty and indifference of modern life meets the optimistic Patsy, who has a history of “molding” her romantic partners.

COMMENTS: If the movies are to be believed, New York City in the late 60s and well into the 70s was a nightmarish hellscape, a place where morality was absent, cruelty was commonplace, and the fundamental rules of life could gain no purchase. It was a labyrinthine trap for visitors (see Neil Simon’s original The Out-Of-Towners), a hotbed of insanity amongst the residents (witness ’s crude Where’s Poppa?), and just an ungovernable mess on the whole (Death Wish, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Dog Day Afternoon, among others). How much the city has improved since then is in the eye of the beholder, but this period does seem to have been New York’s nadir.

So it goes in the New York of Little Murders. Muggings occur in broad daylight. Calls to the police are placed on hold. Lewd phone calls find you, wherever you may be. Electricity gives out at random times. No one on the subway bats an eye at a man covered in blood. The psychic trauma of just trying to get through the day is overwhelming; who cares about Vietnam, when a war hero can come home to be gunned down on the Upper West Side? These Manhattanites just suck it up and soldier on, but a lot of people are beginning to crack under the pressure.

Our central couple presents two very different ways to deal with this world. Patsy is the kind of person who dusts herself off after every setback. She’s not an optimist, exactly, but she is persistent. She has a history of “fixing” men who are probably homosexual, and then ditching them when they become too pliant. (She tells Alfred of her dream mate: “I want to be married to a big, strong, vital, virile, self-assured man… that I can protect and take care of.”) When her apartment is looted and ransacked, Patsy automatically begins a mental checklist of all the things she’ll need to do to restore her home. The one thing she absolutely cannot do is give up. “If you don’t fight, you don’t feel,” she insists, “and if you don’t feel, you don’t love.”

Alfred, meanwhile, has chosen to disassociate from everything. When confronted by muggers, he lets them have their way and slips into pleasant daydreams. The market for his photographs shifts from beautiful things to actual pictures of excrement, so he readily goes along. He insists upon omitting God from his wedding vows, but when his prospective father-in-law tries to buy off the officiant, he’s indifferent. Not feeling anything is his only protection, so when Patsy cajoles him into letting down his guard, it’s about the cruelest thing that can happen to him.

There’s no model for how to behave under these circumstances, as demonstrated by the three authority figures who share their wisdom. Lou Jacobi’s judge is a disgusted back-in-my-day type who insists that his immigrant ancestors’ persecution was integral to his success. (Amusingly, his harangue against the young couple continues well into a court case over which he is presiding.) Gould’s M*A*S*H cohort Donald Sutherland appears as a man of the cloth with no convictions whatsoever. The lasting marriages over which he has presided are happy accidents, while the failures are just the cost of doing business, and he shares this fact in the course of his own homily. Finally, director Alan Arkin shows up as a police lieutenant who has slipped into madness. By turns quivering with undirected rage and cackling maniacally, he sees conspiracy everywhere, and is as suspicious and demanding of victims as he is of suspects. What none of these authority figures are is helpful. It’s everyone for themselves.

There’s undoubtedly a version of this tale that plays out like a witty New York comedy of the Neil Simon/Woody Allen variety, but events keep conspiring to kill the comic buzz. The little indignities of big-city life are compounded by crime and cruelty, culminating in the most appalling tragedy of all, which ultimately tells you which of the two leads the movie thinks is right. In the face of this disaster, Little Murders ultimately proposes another way to cope: hurting others. The only thing that brings joy to Alfred and his newfound family is the opportunity to direct all of the sadness and anxiety and rage at another human being, and the laughter that ensues is emblematic of writer Jules Feiffer’s pessimism. People will ultimately make hostile choices, but they’re just trying to get through the day. Would you deny them this little pleasure?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Funny and frightening, Little Murders strikes a tone that few films attain. It certainly doesn’t look like many movie comedies… Godard at first expressed interest in the material, but ended up turning down the project. Even though he wasn’t involved with Little Murders, the film often suggests a kindred spirit with Godard’s late-1960s work.” – Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader (2017 revival)

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

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SVIDD NEGER (2003)

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AKA The Black Lapp

DIRECTED BY: Erik Smith Meyer

FEATURING: Kingsford Siayor, Kjersti Lid Gullvåg, Eirik Junge Eliassen, Thor-Inge Gullvåg, Frank Jørstad, Guri Johnson

PLOT: In the furthest northern reaches of Norway, three young men fight to win the affections of pretty Anna: Peder, a strong-but-stupid man-child who is favored by Anna’s murderous father; Ante, a young Black man who was found on the beach as an infant; and Norman, a disaffected Sámi who longs to forsake his heritage and travel abroad.

Still from Svidd Neger (2003)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Like an episode of “Maury” transplanted to a remote patch of Norwegian tundra, Svidd neger is shocking, inexplicable, and gleefully inappropriate. With an ever-shifting tone and an unflagging desire to push buttons, this is a movie that is happily gross, joyfully surreal, and takes deep pride in zigging where others zag.  

COMMENTS: There is something that unites every culture, every group of people on this planet: having someone to look down upon. Racism, sexism, bigotry of every shade are built upon the notion that those people over there are deeply inferior to us, with no regard to how appalling we might be ourselves. As proof of the pervasiveness of this mindset, look no further than the living paradise that is Scandinavia. Those medically socialized fjord-huggers would appear to have created an equitably minded, affordably furnished standard of living for their people. But despite receiving high marks for livability, they have still found a ready-made pariah in the Sámi, an ethnicity in the northernmost parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and northwest Russia with their own language and culture. Sometimes known as Laplanders (a term which is now deemed pejorative), the Sámi people lived quite independently until the 19th century, when aggressive governments sought to assimilate them and wipe out their distinctiveness. While these policies have been rolled back somewhat (especially in Norway, where the Sámi have their own parliament), the disdain and resentment never really goes away. And that seems to be the basic sentiment behind Svidd neger: no matter how trashy people get, they can always find someone else to crap on.

And my goodness, the residents of this isolated outpost are supremely trashy. The root of all nastiness is Karl, Anna’s drunkard father who opens the film by drowning his philandering wife and casting her mixed race infant into the sea. Impressively, he only manages to get worse as the film progresses, as we learn about how his violent ways have affected nearly every other character. Naturally, his only interest in his daughter is her ability to produce a male heir to secure his “kingdom.” It also follows that he would throw his support behind Peder, an impressively stupid hunk of meat whom we see attempt to rape Anna twice and who spends the rest of his time fruitlessly masturbating or hopping gleefully on a broken tractor like a four-year-old.

It soon becomes clear that the only decent people in the film are outsiders, but they’re no angels. Norman, the Sámi who wants out, is so disgusted with being an outsider that he’s willing to trade-in to become white trash in another country. (His dreams of “Ammrica” revolve around drinking lots of Coke and dressing like a biker, complete with Confederate flag patch.) Meanwhile, Ante is already the ultimate outsider (he is the subject of the film’s title, whose least offensive translation is “burnt negro”), but he seems determined to become even moreso, adopting the language and attire of the Sámi, indulging a deep and abiding love for Dolly Parton, and sending out bottled messages to prospective new fathers.

On top of all these wild characters, director Meyer piles on crazy plot twists, full-blown musical numbers, elaborate fight scenes, and a deux ex machina that starts building during the opening credits. Along the way, he peppers scenes with amusing quirks and curiosities, but then just as quickly drops in something dark and disturbing. For example, Peder’s deluded mother meets her end in a horrifying impalement, but then is left to flail about hilariously like a wind sock. The score often matches the schizophrenic tone of the movie, jumping from light pop to dramatic orchestration to tinges of bluegrass in rapid succession.

Somehow, despite the extreme circumstances and the extreme reactions to them, everyone seems to get roughly what they deserve, which says a lot about how well Svidd neger delivers its parade of the idiotic and the grotesque. Like its awful protagonists, the movie is easy to look down upon as crass and disgusting. Yet it somehow wins out in the end.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This movie is not for everyone! It’s the sickest, most twisted and weird movie to ever have been made in Norway.”–Nordic Fantasy

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

37*. TEENAGE TUPELO (1995)

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“Everything Revealed! Nothing Explained!”–tagline for Teenage Tupelo

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: D’Lana Tunnell, Hugh Brooks, Wanda Wilson

PLOT: Voluptuous D’Lana Fargo is knocked up by local Tupelo singer Johnny Tu-Note. Her mother sets up an adoption, and Johnny wants her to get rid of the baby. D’Lana falls in with a group of “Man Haters” who are fans of stripper/sexploitation filmmaker Topsy Turvy, who is the spitting image of D’Lana.

Still from Teenage Tupelo (1995)

BACKGROUND:

  • Teenage Tupelo was the first (and only) original production released by Something Weird video. It was released directly to VHS but never made the transition to DVD, going out of print and becoming unavailable for decades.
  • Produced by legendary exploitationeer David Friedman, a longtime collaborator of who also produced such oddities as The Acid Eaters (1968) and Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S. (1975).
  • The film was shot on Super-8 for $12,000.
  • McCarthy’s adoptive parents appear as extras in the diner; their younger alter-egos are played by actors.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Almost certainly, you will remember the birth-of-a-baby scene (borrowed from the 1948 roadshow shocker Because of Eve). Even if you’ve seen a live birth before, it’s still shocking to see this sight casually shuffled into a narrative film context—and, accompanied by a tinkly music box rendition of “Frère Jacques,” it comes across as decidedly unwholesome. Viewer beware!

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Battered Johnny Tu-Note serenades vixen; chainsaw devil tattooist

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Teenage Tupelo plays like director McCarthy took Something Weird Video’s entire vintage VHS catalog, ran it through a woodchipper, and used the resulting pulp to sculpt his own phantasmagorical autobiography. It’s utterly unique, history’s first postmodern grindhouse film.

Trailer for the soundtrack release of Teenage Tupelo

COMMENTS: Not too many exploitation films open with an epigraph—even if it does come from a fortune cookie—but Teenage Continue reading 37*. TEENAGE TUPELO (1995)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CITIZEN DOG (2004)

Mah Nakorn

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Wisit Sasanatieng

FEATURING: Mahasamut Boonyaruk, Saengthong Gate-Uthong

PLOT: Pod moves to Bangkok, despite his grandmother’s warning he will grow a tail if he does so, and falls in love with Jin, a woman of serial obsessions—none of which involve Pod.

Still from Citizen Dog (2004)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: It begins with Pod losing his finger at his sardine-canning job (he gets it back later). It ends on a mountain of plastic bottles that dominates the Bangkok skyline. In between, it indulges in a subplot about an affair between a girl who’s either 8 or 22 years old and her talking teddy bear. Oh, and it’s also intermittently a musical. Citizen Dog takes a lot of lunatic swings, and still manages to remain a crowd-pleasing romance.

COMMENTS: Pod and Jin are each, in their own way, searching for a dream, while not realizing that they are living in one. Jin dreams of one day reading the book that fell out of the sky and landed on her deck, written in a language unknown to her; later, she is able to put that dream to one side to pursue an obsession with saving the planet via recycling. Pod, meanwhile, is introduced to us as “a man without a dream”—at least, until he encounters Jin and quickly falls in love. Jin drifts from dream to dream, risking devastation when her plans don’t turn out as she expects, while Pod drifts from job to job, too scared to commit to anything and declare his feelings. Meanwhile, both of them miss the magic of the world around them.

The viewer doesn’t make that mistake, however. Wisit Sasanatieng drenches his movie in some of the boldest color schemes ever ladled on the big screen. Pod leaves a country home where swaths of golden grass grow from russet dirt, waving against a painted backdrop sky with an eternally glowing sun, and lands in a busy Bangkok where he gets a job at a ruby and emerald colored sardine-processing factory where even the fish have pink eyes. The people who populate the city are even stranger than their visual environments: a zombie taxi driver, killed during one of the city’s periodic rains of helmets; an amnesiac obsessed with licking; a talking teddy bear, who’s also a chain smoker who falls on hard times and turns homeless. Don’t worry, there are plenty more crazy characters where those came from, along with breaks for musical numbers, sequences that are sped-up or which play out in lethargic slow motion, and a gecko sex scene. Citizen Dog never runs out of ideas to throw at the viewer; but for Pod and Jin, it’s all just part of everyday life in the big city.

In conventional terms, Citizen Dog fails as a romantic comedy, because it never convincingly shows how Pod wins Jin’s heart. Dreamy Jin is completely blind to Pod’s devotion up into the final scene, when she suddenly succumbs to a short sappy speech and a kiss. But who cares? In unconventional terms, the movie succeeds brilliantly; each part of the series of almost-unconnected vignettes is a miniature joke brilliant enough to keep you eagerly awaiting the next one, so that you don’t really notice (or care much) about Jin’s lack of romantic development.

Citizen Dog‘s blend of old-fashioned romance and digitally-enhanced surrealism often draws comparisons to Amelie (2001). Tonally, however, it more resembles ‘s Mood Indigo (2013), in that it creates a whimsically unreal but fully lived-in universe where absolutely anything can happen. The difference is that Citizen Dog remains lighthearted to the end, never succumbing to the darkness that envelops the moody Indigo.

The genesis of Citizen Dog is as odd as its story line. It’s an adaptation of a novel by Koynuch. But, in a twist, Koynuch’s novel was itself an adaptation of Sasanatieng’s original unpublished screenplay! Once Koynuch gave Sasanatieng’s collection of vignettes without a story a unifying theme of dreams, the director felt he could come back to the script he’d abandoned and turn it into a feature film.

Sasanatieng’s first movie, Tears of the Black Tiger, was a Spaghetti Western parody with vividly artificial visuals similar to Citizen Dog. Both movies were minor hits with film-festival followers, although Dog is the more accessible of the two. But none of Sasanatieng’s subsequent movies have made much headway in the West, although he is still active. Unfortunately, Citizen Dog is not currently available on home video or (although you might be able to find a used all-region DVD on Ebay or other sources—be cure to confirm English subtitles are included). Tears of the Black Tiger, on the other hand, is still easy to acquire.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“People are able to swap fingers, they can grow tails, teddy bears are able to talk and sometimes it rains helmets. And that’s just a small selection of the weirdness this films throws at you. None of these things are ever properly explained, they’re just a part of the surreal world the characters inhabit and have to deal with on a daily basis.”–Niels Matthijs, Screen Anarchy

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

CAPSULE: TIME MASTERS [LES MAÎTRES DU TEMPS] (1982)

AKA The Masters of Time

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DIRECTED BY: René Laloux

FEATURING: Voices of , Michel Elias, Frédéric Legros, Yves-Marie Maurin, Monique Thierry

PLOT: A boy is marooned on an alien world, and a space mercenary encounters many obstacles in his rescue attempt.

Still from Time Masters (1982)

COMMENTS: Like the younger brother of an overachiever, Time Masters has to live up to a mighty pedigree. Director Rene Laloux is already enshrined in these halls for Fantastic Planet, another Stefan Wul adaptation renowned for its trippy visuals and detailed alien worlds. Add in that Laloux’s collaborator this time around is the famed artist Jean Giraud—better known as Moebius—and it’s only natural to assume that the result will hit similarly mind-blowing heights. Alas, the comparison does the newer film no favors. Hamstrung by a plot stretched too thin and production levels of sharply varying quality, Time Masters plays like the Filmation version of its predecessor.

The film’s production seems to be part of the problem. Originally conceived for television, satisfaction with early work convinced Laloux to expand it into a feature film. Unfortunately, the budget did not expand in proportion, and a large percentage of the movie was outsourced to animators in Hungary. (So many co-producers were brought in that it can legitimately be called a Franco-West German-Swiss-British-Hungarian production.) It’s not hard to figure out which parts of the film were animated where; the adventures of Piel on the surface of the untamed world of Perdide are charming and delicate, with the boy interacting with fascinating creatures both friendly and vicious. Meanwhile, the crew on its way to rescue him is flat and inert, completely incapable of demonstrating any emotion, let alone matching the tenor of the vocal performances. Time Masters becomes a tale of two films.

The story isn’t helping matters, as it betrays the effort that goes into delaying the central goal. Having received a subspace message that a small child is all alone on a dangerous planet and in need of rescue, the response of the would-be heroes is to take their sweet time. Stopping to pick up a sage advisor, they go for an extended swim. An attempted mutiny by a deposed royal leads to a suspense-free prison break. The threat of interference by space cops is met with the breathless excitement of a board meeting. (That’s not a metaphor. They all go into an auditorium and talk it out.) You can almost feel the screenwriters making the “stall for time” gesture.

Time Masters is not without its charms. In fact, the cuter the creature, the more interesting they seem to be. Piel and his planetary menagerie are sweet and occasionally even adorable, although they are far outdone by a pair of faceless gremlins named Yula and Jad who offer a running commentary on the foolishness of those around them. They are the Threepio and Artoo of the piece, but they bring more punch than most of the humans do at their most emotive.

Time Masters is commendable as something original, featuring some dramatic visuals and culminating in an ending that is certainly bold, even if it doesn’t really pay off the story in any meaningful way. But there just isn’t a whole lot that happens, and what does happen isn’t compelling enough to be more than a passing fancy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Not that the ending betrays what has gone before, as it is suitably trippy and lightly mind-bending in its way, it’s just that until that point there’s a feeling that the film is tiptoeing around anything that might seem to heavy – basically, it looks like a kids’ film… It weaves a spell if you’re indulgent enough of its whims, which include that headscratcher of a finale.”–Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

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