Tag Archives: Post-apocalyptic

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE BED SITTING ROOM (1969)

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The Bed Sitting Room has been promoted to the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies Ever Made. This post is closed for commenting. Please make all comments on the official Certified Weird entry.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Michael Hordern, Rita Tushingham, Richard Warwick, Arthur Lowe, , Marty Feldman, Spike Milligan, Dudley Moore,

PLOT: After the Bomb falls, a family who lives on a still-functioning subway train travels to the surface in search of a nurse for their pregnant daughter.

Still from The Bed Sitting Room (1969)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: This absurd anxiety nightmare about the Bomb could only have come out of the Swinging Sixties; it’s one of the weirder relics of an era when filmmakers felt it was their patriotic duty to laugh in the face of the imminent apocalypse.

COMMENTS: The Bed Sitting Room began its life as a one-act play, written by comedian Spike Milligan and John Antrobus in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that time, at the height of Cold War paranoia, nuked-up powers were playing games of chicken with each other and worldwide nuclear annihilation seemed inevitable. In the average person’s eyes the world and its leaders had gone insane, and who better to depict the inevitable aftermath of our self-destructive impulses than Milligan and his “Goon Show” squad, under the cheerfully absurd direction of A Hard Days Night‘s Richard Lester? The results are a ridiculous apocalypse the likes of which has never been depicted on screen before. Looking like it was shot in a Welsh garbage dump, with heaping mountains of discarded boots and crockery and the police flying through the sky in a burnt-out VW bug attached to a balloon, the movie anticipates the junkyard visuals of post-apocalyptic films to follow. Tonally, however, Bed Sitting Room is miles away from the cutthroat scavenger worlds of Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog; it’s Theater of the Absurd performed by vaudevillians. The jokes are almost feather-light, contrasting with the inherent horror of the situation. “I’m not eating,” complains a patient. When the doctor asks why, he answers matter-of-factly, “can’t get the stuff.” In another scene a lonely recluse asks “would you do for me what my first wife did?” to a nervous middle aged woman who’s fallen into his fallout shelter. Having no choice, she reluctantly agrees, and he hands her pots, pans and teacups to throw at him as he dodges them shouting “she means nothing to me!” The movie is full of corny Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE BED SITTING ROOM (1969) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: BELLFLOWER (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Evan Glodell

FEATURING: Evan Glodell, Tyler Dawson, Jessie Wiseman, Rebekah Brandes

PLOT:  Two jobless, hard-drinking college-age kids struggle with relationships as they

Still from Bellflower (2011)

spend their free time building flamethrowers and post-apocalyptic cars out of their favorite film, The Road Warrior.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Try telling people that a movie about the boozy, hallucination-ridden adventures of two slacker dudes who build mad muscle cars in hopes they can rule when Armageddon arrives doesn’t strike you as very weird, and they’ll look at you like you’re crazy.  But you’re right; at bottom, Bellflower is pretty ordinary (for the indie scene, that is).

COMMENTS:  Don’t be fooled by the marketing; despite the references to The Road Warrior, the flame-spewing hot rod centerpiece, and a brutally violent ending, for the most part Bellflower is indie mumblecore drama at its most relentlessly talky.  It’s hard to figure out how to take the movie, because it’s unclear how much of the script is deliberately delusional, and how much is merely myopic.  Thanks to a jumble of flashbacks and fantasies that fill the film’s final fifteen minutes, we’re not sure exactly how tragically Woodrow and Milly’s doomed love resolves, but a more subtle strangeness creeps in long before that.  Bellflower takes place in a Southern California suburb where everyone is over 21 and under 30 years old.  No one who lives there has ever heard of words like “school” or “job” (when Milly asks Woodrow what he does, his answer is “I’m building a flamethrower”), but they all have endless invisible lines of credit to pay for rent, booze, surplus car parts, and munitions.  It’s the perfect movie for anyone who has ever daydreamed about taking off for Texas on the spur of the moment in a car with a dashboard whiskey dispenser (Milly observes “it’s like a James Bond car for drunks!”) to eat truck stop meatloaf on a dare; it’s a dream of endlessly extended adolescence.  On the one hand, the entire story hangs on to plausibility’s cliff by just its fingernail; but on the other hand, it’s presented with hardcore realism—bad beards, overlapping slacker dialogue, and all.  Consider, for a moment, the following exchange.  After Woodrow is struck by a car, possibly sustaining brain damage, his loyal pal Aiden tells him, “you were pretty messed up, mumbling all sorts of weird crap.”  Woodrow asks: “Was it awesome?”  Aiden: “No, dude, it wasn’t awesome!”  This is an egregious example of typical Bellflower dialogue (I didn’t count words, but I wouldn’t be that shocked to hear that 1/10 of the words in the script were either “dude” or “awesome”).  It sounds like it should be a sly comment on the vacuous vocabulary of youth, but there’s little obvious humor or insight to suggest either satire or subcultural self-reflection; it seems aimed at trying to capture “the way people really talk.”  Woodrow and Aiden are obsessed with the “Mad Max” movies and look to Lord Humungous as a role model, but they’re way too cool to believe the apocalypse is literally coming (that would be a different movie).  They’re just extreme, photogenic fanboys with way too much free time on their hands with which to build awesome muscle cars.  It’s possible the entire movie—and not just the apocalyptic, romantic finale—is meant to be nerdy Woodrow’s self-aggrandizing, psychotic hallucination, but the film gives every indication of wanting to be taken seriously as an earnest romantic drama.  In reality, geeky tinkerers Woodrow and Aiden would be delusional dweebs, more Gyro Captains than Lord Humungouses, but Bellflower seems eager to convince us they’re actually awesome lady killers who melt the panties off hot hipster chicks.  To which I can only say: seriously, dude?

As much as I had problems with Bellflower‘s script, which never nails down a sure attitude to its characters’ lives, the technical aspects of the film (especially Joel Hodge’s cinematography) are excellent for a first feature.  Technical types will love this YouTube video the crew put up explaining the “ghetto-rigged” homemade camera they built for the shoot.  This is the equipment everyone will be using to shoot films after the apocalypse.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A weird mix of John Hughes and ‘Mad Max’… with the sunburned intensity of a high-summer fever dream.”–James Rocchi (festival screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: BUNRAKU (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Guy Moshe

FEATURING: , Gackt, , , Ron Perlman

PLOT: Set in a post-apocalyptic future that outlaws guns but promotes copious amounts of sword-heavy battles, Bunraku follows two mysterious lone strangers—a card-playing cowboy (Hartnett) and a pacifistic Japanese warrior (Gackt)—as they strive to take down the all-powerful crime lord (Perlman) who controls the city.

Still from Bunraku (2010)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The visuals are stunning and innovative and the effects are wildly impressive, but the cookie-cutter sci-fi/western tale and clumsy script hold it back from approaching true Weirdness.

COMMENTS: Introduced by a gorgeous animated sequence involving puppetry (which is also the only time the film’s title comes into play), Bunraku takes place in a type of future many films have already established. There was a world-wide nuclear war, everything was destroyed, and human beings build the world back up to create a lawless, decrepit landscape where everyone fights all the time.  The all-knowing, presumably winking narrator is upfront about what type of story this is, making cracks about the type of mysterious loners always found in places like these.  This self-awareness pervades the script and certainly makes the film more digestible.

The set-up and story don’t make a lot of sense, with bouts of under- and over-exposition that either confuse or bore.  Hartnett’s Drifter is stiff and stern, with no emotion and no reason for the audience to care about him.  Gackt’s Yoshi is likable enough (and magnetically androgynous), but like Drifter he’s so enigmatic there’s barely any character left for the actor to embody.  They’re one-dimensional archetypes to the fullest extent of the word, but Moshe seems fully aware of this. Woody Harrelson brings some levity and charisma to The Bartender, a friendly but heartbroken working man who doesn’t take sides but finds himself pulled into Drifter and Yoshi’s war against Nicola (Perlman), the vicious and world-weary “Woodcutter.”  Demi Moore is extremely out of place as the crime lord’s resentful woman, but her role is small enough.

Luckily there is plenty to distract from the weak characterization!  Bunraku is chock-full of fascinating visuals and downright exciting fight scenes.  The lighting is over-saturated and the locations are highly stylized, with cut-paper backgrounds and a few Caligari-esque sets.  A sizable chunk of the running time is devoted to intense action sequences, with an inexhaustible amount of literal Redshirts ready to be killed by our heroes (led by Kevin McKidd as Killer #2, easily the weirdest character in the film) in elaborate group scenes.  There are fistfights, swordfights, polefights, circusfights, axefights, and one cool car chase. The effects are excellent, transitioning from comic-book style animation to CG enhancements to miniatures with a believable flow.

For all its thrilling action and memorable visuals, Bunraku suffers from an overcomplicated yet under-explained plot and an inexcusably long running time.  It could easily have lost 30 minutes and become tighter, better paced, and more enjoyable.  The writing is hit and miss, with some really sly moments that show Moshe’s self-awareness and sense of fun, and others that are over-serious and dull.  Aside from its looks, the film doesn’t do anything different but it doesn’t mean to, so it’s forgivable.  It’s just a fantastical, stupid romp with the colors of a 1950’s musical and the stylized gore of a Frank Miller comic.  What’s not appealing about that?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Extremely cool-looking in the manner of ‘Sin City,’ but clumsily staged, slackly acted and mind-numbingly dull, Israeli director Guy Moshe’s English-language fantasy is set in a future when guns, and apparently coherent conversations, have been outlawed.”–Lou Lumenick, New York Post (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

92. A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975)

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“I’ve been offered 25 films since then. I haven’t directed another picture. Once you’ve done A Boy and His Dog, everything else kinda pales.”–Director L.Q. Jones

Also released as Psycho Boy and His Killer Dog, and on video as Mad Don (to cash in on the unexpected celebrity of Don Johnson and the success of Mad Max)

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: L.Q. Jones

FEATURING: , Tim McIntire (voice), Susanne Benton,

PLOT: Vic roams the post-apocalyptic desert wasteland with his telepathic dog Blood, who has the ability to sense the presence of human females.  Blood finds a woman for Vic in an underground bunker; as Vic is about to rape her, a band of marauders come upon them, and Vic and Blood fight them off.  The woman gives herself to Vic willingly but later sneaks away; Vic follows her to her strange underground world, leaving the badly wounded Blood behind on the surface.

Still from A Boy and His Dog (1975)

BACKGROUND:

  • A Boy and His Dog was adapted from Harlan Ellison’s novella of the same name.  Ellison began the screenplay but ran into writer’s block, and director Jones and producer Alvy Moore completed the script.
  • Jones wrote the film’s infamous last line.  Ellison has gone on record as “despising” the final dialogue.
  • Director L.Q. Jones was better known as a character actor (usually a heavy) in westerns, appearing in small roles in five films by Sam Peckinpah among his 150+ acting credits.  This is one of only two feature films he directed.  He appears as a cowboy in the film-inside-the-film.
  • Blood, the dog in the film, was played by Tiger, who also portrayed (in one episode) the family pet in the “Brady Bunch” television show.
  • Ellison continued the adventures of the post-apocalyptic pair in the (now out-of-print) graphic novel Vic and Blood: The Continuing Adventures of a Boy and His Dog .

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The setting and ideas of A Boy and His Dog are more memorable than the imagery, but the clown-faced residents of underground Topeka worm themselves into the memory.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A Boy and His Dog gives us two weird worlds for the price of one: a scorched earth surface roamed by sarcastic, hyper-intelligent telepathic dogs, and an underground society of impotent totalitarian mimes.  Either vision on its own might have been weird enough to get this movie onto the List, but put them together and you’ve got something radically unique.


Trailer for A Boy and His Dog

COMMENTS: A Boy and His Dog may be the weirdest “buddy” movie ever made, thanks to the Continue reading 92. A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975) →