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PAT TREMBLAY’S TOP 10 (+) WEIRD MOVIES

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Pat Tremblay is the director of the bizarre and sadly unreleased psychedelic experiment Heads of Control: The Gorul Baheu Brain Expedition (2006).  His second feature film, the post-apocalyptic Hellacious Acres: The Case of John Glass, is currently on the festival circuit: it will be  screening at the Oldenburg Film Festival in Oldenburg, Germany Sep. 14-18, followed by an appearance the Sitges Film Festival (in Spain) in October.

OK, I got asked by Greg (the mastermind behind this AMAZING website, from which I’ve discovered many gems I had never heard of) to do this top 10 weird movies and thought, yeah, I’d love to contribute, ’cause I like weird stuff, and I even like to do weird movies myself!  But I realized that my memory often doesn’t serve me too well, and my choices might not be weird enough…  Anyhow, this is what it came down too, and it could easily change, but this now and so is this list!

In no particular order:

1. I really like Harmony Korine and I couldn’t put down my finger on which movie I prefer between Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy and Trash Humpers… So I’m already breaking the rules already by assembling down those three into one whole bizarre package…

Still from Xavier: Renegade Angel2. Although it’s a TV series and not a film, I really dig “Xavier Renegade Angel”, completely mental material that’s extremely funny.  Trippy, surreal, 2-cent philosophy striking down your brain with a hammer of  retarded genius.  A must.  From the guys who brought you the conceptual porn experiment Final Flesh and the extra-funny series “Wonder Showzen”.

3.  Jodorowsky is up the ladder with The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre, which I watched again just recently.  It still holds up as a masterpiece, just as the former does.

4.  A few weeks ago I saw Things (1989), recently re-released by Intervision. Wow, this is mind blowing z-grade amateurism that destroys and defies so many cinematic “rules” that it becomes this a total weird-ass entity of the 5th dimension, or something close to that! You can’t fake that. It winds up being a beautiful piece of outsider art in its uniqueness.

5.  The ” : The Triggers Compilation” DVD collection.  Redundant madness, Continue reading PAT TREMBLAY’S TOP 10 (+) WEIRD MOVIES →

Capsules

CAPSULE: HEADS OF CONTROL: THE GORUL BAHEU BRAIN EXPEDITION (2006)

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BewareWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Pat Tremblay

FEATURING: Neil Napier, and amateurs who answered a newspaper ad

PLOT: Pharmaceutical molecules visualized as alien beings travel inside the mind of a

Still from Heads of Control (2006)

man afflicted with dissociative identity disorder and collect various “personalities,” who are examined as they perform monologues in front of surreal computer generated backgrounds.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s not released.  But even if it were released, it’s too uneven to qualify for a list of the 366 Best Weird Movies, although it would definitely have a shot at a list of the weirdest movies ever made regardless of quality.

COMMENTS: Before beginning the description of Heads of Control, I must explain why it earns a “beware” rating.  Normally, I reserve the “beware” badge for movies that are badly done, or even, in some cases, movies that are morally bad.  Heads of Control, however, meets neither of those criteria; although it’s cheap and uneven, it is quite competently mounted and the experimental impulse behind it is admirable.  Here, the rating is given due to the simple fact that this movie is so far out, so much like a performance art piece, that will only appeal to a very small slice of the most dedicated avant-gardists, or to those looking for the ultimate micro-budget drug trip film.  This experiment requires work on the viewers part to watch, and anyone looking for something remotely resembling a normal narrative movie is going to be hugely disappointed.

With that intriguing warning out of the way, just what is Heads of Control?  It begins with the protagonist, Max, being attacked by river zombies; it quickly appears that this is a hallucination, as we see Max in a mental institution being shot up with drugs.  Soon, we are inside Max’s diseased brain, watching a pair of hooded creatures.  The subordinate journeys into the patient’s psychedelically appointed neurons to fetch various two-dimensional rectangles from his tangled neural networks, which the superior creature places into a floating computer monitor.  The pair then watch the results, which consist

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