We’ll leave it to you to describe this… special… video for yourself. We’re just going to supply the background: this short film was created by commercial director and artist Nagi Noda for a short film compilation sponsored by Panasonic celebrating the Olympics. We haven’t seen the other nine films in the series (no one has for six years now), but we suspect that this poodle fitness video (a parody of fitness guru Susan Powter) was not quite what the corporate giant expected when they commissioned the project.
Tag Archives: Parody
CAPSULE: SATAN HATES YOU (2009)
DIRECTED BY: James Felix McKenney
FEATURING: Don Wood, Christine Spencer, Angus Scrimm, Reggie Bannister, Debbie Rochon, Michael Berryman, Larry Fessenden
PLOT: In this re-imagining of the “Christ-sploitation” films shown in churches and
probably a few Southern gynecologists’ offices of the 60s and 70s, we follow a young man and woman who make all the wrong choices in a haze of drugs, alcohol, and rock music while unknowingly under the influence of two demonic imps.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Satan Hates You, while initially very jarring in its lack of self-explanation, is a satisfying experience in terms of its Troma-esque shock horror and its acute satirical edge. But its freaky imagery leans too often on a bland naturalistic style that mars its individuality and chokes the weirdness out of the movie.
COMMENTS: Satan Hates You is a very hard film to place. Being a satire, a dark comedy, and a horror film is no ordinary pedigree, and Satan Hates You maniacally shifts from one of these genres to the next every few minutes. It is a wicked send-up of those fear-mongering Christian PSA films that pop into existence every generation about the dangers of doing ungodly things like having abortions and doing drugs. But it honestly doesn’t hit you that way when you watch it if you don’t do your research. The first time watching it, I felt this to just be a dark, meandering horror-comedy about two idiots who make a lot of bad choices. Director James Felix McKenney doesn’t really go out of his way to make this idea pop out at the audience with staples of the “Christ-sploitation” genre, like cheesy acting, an oversimplification of right and wrong, and loads of self-righteous condemnation. We are instead tossed quite objectively into these people’s lives, full of sex, murder, and self-sabotage, and don’t get dropped many hints that we’re supposed to be in on a joke.
Once one understands the idea, everything falls into place a little more, and it does Continue reading CAPSULE: SATAN HATES YOU (2009)
CAPSULE: UHF (1989)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
AKA The Vidiot from UHF
DIRECTED BY: Jay Levey
FEATURING: “Weird Al” Yankovic, Michael Richards
PLOT: Walter Mitty-style daydreamer George becomes manager of an independent television station, and his bizarre programming becomes a surprise hit.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: I wouldn’t begrudge Al his weirdness, but he means something more juvenile by “weird” than we do. UHF has an irreverent and independent spirit and takes a few turns into the decidedly offbeat, but it’s basically Al’s mildly skewed idea of mainstream comedy.
COMMENTS: UHF saw pop-parodist “Weird Al” shift his gentle satirical sights from hit singles to movies and TV. The framing plot is stock: likable ne’er-do-well comes to have responsibility for a failing enterprise and unexpectedly makes it a success, drawing the ire of soulless corporate powers who seek to crush him. While you won’t be surprised to find out the Weird Al wins the day and gets the girl back, the plot is just a frame on which to hang a series of skits and parodies.
Al tackles movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, the facetious Gandhi sequel Gandhi 2, and Rambo. Like his music videos, the satire is not exactly incisive (Conan the Barbarian becomes Conan the Librarian, for example), but that’s OK: Weird Al is in the business of making puns, not enemies. Film nuts will enjoy the subtler nods to This Island Earth, Network, and a real groaner based on Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The parodies of Eighties movies should have gone stale by now, but they haven’t, largely because Hollywood keeps recycling the same cliches twenty years later. You don’t need to have seen the original Rambo to recognize what’s being lampooned when the musclebrained hero’s automatic weapon’s causes bamboo huts to randomly explode. The TV skits, which for the most part stand on their own without requiring knowledge of long forgotten shows, are funnier and more inventive than the straight parodies; they allow Al to show off a more unique and absurd sense of humor. “Wheel of Fish” is a memorably ludicrous game show, and “Raul’s Wild Kingdom” (hosted from his apartment, where he investigates his ant farm and teaches poodles to fly) is another highlight.
Squeaky Emo Phillips, improbably cast as a shop teacher (!), gets off the film’s darkest and most hilarious line after an accident with a table saw. But the best of all is Michael Richards as a slow, mop-loving janitor whose children’s show (where the kid who finds a marble in a vat of oatmeal is rewarded by getting to “drink from the firehose”) becomes the station’s flagship hit. Richards steals most of his scenes and demonstrates some of the herky-jerky physical comedy that would make him beloved as Seinfeld’s “Kramer” in a few years.
All in all, UHF is a meandering, light-hearted series of gags in an Airplane! vein that makes for a pleasant enough afternoon matinee. The PG-13 rating is for some silly cartoon violence. Other than that, it’s sweet, sex and swear-word fee, and appropriate for older kids, who will eat up the booger humor.
“Weird Al” sold millions of parody records in the 1980s (redoing Michael Jackson’s #1 hit “Beat It” as “Eat It” and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” as “Like a Surgeon.”) Hoping to cash in on Al’s already fading popularity,UHF was intended as a summer blockbuster by Orion studios, but the movie critically savaged and tanked at the box office. Orion went bankrupt soon after. The film later became a huge hit on VHS and DVD. It’s not nearly as bad as the cold-hearted critics initially claimed (Roger Ebert called it “the dreariest comedy in many a month”), or as hilarious as the Weird Al cultists who made it one of the best-selling videos of all time would have it. Instead, it’s diverting spoofery for the ten-year-old inside all of us that should keep you amused for 90 minutes.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Vooshvazool.” Suggest a weird movie off your own here.)
![UHF - 35th Anniversary Edition 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray [4K UHD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51alw-odIRL._SL500_.jpg)
- UHF: 35th Anniversary Edition [4K UHD]
CAPSULE: ARMY OF DARKNESS (1992)
DIRECTED BY: Sam Raimi
FEATURING: Bruce Campbell
PLOT: Following the events of Evil Dead II, Ash finds himself flung backwards in time into a medieval land, where his failure to retrieve the Book of the Dead enables evil forces to muster a massive army of stop-motion animated skeletons.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Evil Dead II struggled mightily to obtain its weird credentials, and just barely qualified for its weird badge thanks to the “cabin fever” sequence in the middle portion of the film. In the third entry of the “Evil Dead” trilogy, director Sam Raimi distills what he thinks is the popular essence of Evil Dead II, emerging with a concentrated dose mixing ghoulish comedy with a stiff shot of badass working class hero Ash. Weirdness was discarded as a waste product, although traces remain.
COMMENTS: The beginning of Army of Darkness rewrites the tale of how Ash came to be recognized as the “Chosen One” at the end of Evil Dead II, but consistent storytelling (along with respect for the laws of physics) has never been a high priority in this series. Since the midpoint of the second film, Raimi’s Evil Dead emphasis for the trilogy has been comedy, and Army of Darkness is tongue-in-cheek from start to finish. As an action/comedy/fantasy/horror hybrid, Army of Darkness pulls in too many directions to hang together as a story, much less integrate itself with the rest of the series, but the manic energy is a lot of fun, and the film does work on a scene-by-scene basis. The flick dips into the Three Stooges tribute well even more than Evil Dead II did; in one funny scene, every orifice on Ash’s face is invaded by skeletal fingers from still buried corpses, despite his best defensive maneuvers (our hero never learned from Curly’s mistakes—don’t introduce your tongue as a new target by sticking it out in triumph after successfully blocking the dual finger eye poke). Gags aside, the comic momentum overwhelming comes from Bruce Campbell’s Ash, who has transformed from a much abused punching-bag for macabre forces into an arrogant, wisecracking hero. Campbell adopts just the right campy, parodic tone when reprising hit action catchphrases like “Groovy” or fresh favorites like “Just me, baby.” Ash’s overweening, usually unjustified bravado is the comic binding that keeps the scattershot script from blowing away in the wind. For fans of weirdness, the best bits are the hallucinatory scenes after Ash takes refuge from a shakycam assault inside a windmill: for unexplained reasons, he ends up by menaced by a gang of tiny Ashes in a “Gulliver’s Travels” parody, then sprouts an Evil Ash from his shoulder. These scenes take place at approximately the same stage in the movie as the “cabin fever” sequences did in Evil Dead II, and may have been intended as one of the many, many nods to the previous film. Another high point is the army of stop motion animated skeletons (a tribute to Ray Harryhausen). Each member of the bony horde is brilliantly individualized and detailed; particularly striking is the martial band, beating drums made from skulls and playing flutes fashioned from arm bones. Overall, Army of Darkness is a worthy, if commodified and popularized, sequel, and a solid roller coaster for fans of fantastic film who aren’t hung up on logic.
Army of Darkness was the transitional film for Raimi between campy experimental films like Crimewave and Evil Dead II and purely commercial fare such as the Spider-Man series. The large scale battle and professional action scenes in Army seem almost like audition reels for making a Major Motion Picture.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: