Tag Archives: Provocative

Capsules

CAPSULE: HAPPINESS (1998)

7 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Dylan Baker, , Cynthia Stevenson, , , ,

PLOT: An examination of the lives of three sisters, their extended families, and their neighbors reveals an elaborate network of secrets, sickness, perversion, and chronic unhappiness.

Still from Happiness (1998)

COMMENTS: Happiness presents a challenge to reviewers, but as difficult as is to write about, it’s not half as hard as it is to watch. Filled with reference to rape and pedophilia, along with near-constant mental cruelty and depression, the movie is one long trigger warning. Happiness doesn’t hold back; it always “goes there.” Side characters who initially seem like they might be oases of sanity and kindness turn out to be just as rotten inside as the principals. It is, technically, a black comedy, but the few grim jokes only highlight the nightmarishness of the character’s existence. The ironies only start with the title, a main character named “Joy,” and a soundtrack of schmaltzy soft-rock including Barry Manilow, Air Supply, and a version of “You Light Up My Life” performed by a Russian cabbie on the make. This is one dark movie.

With those warnings out of the way, the “must see” rating is warranted, for those with just a little bit of courage. Happiness is masterfully manipulative, totally assured in its execution, and totally ruthless in its worldview. The script is wicked and nuanced, the actors expert in nailing the difficult tone. It is a triumph of fearless cynicism; and yet, while it clearly hates its characters, it also oddly empathizes with them. They are allowed to feel guilt, suffering for their sins, while simultaneously being powerless to change their own destructive behaviors. This makes the movie as sad as it is scathing.

Happiness‘ alchemical majesty comes from successfully mixing strong emotions that should be incompatible. It’s not just the paring of comedy with dark situations. In truth, the movie isn’t all that funny, although it has a couple of conventional comedy moments (such as the psychiatrist zoning out while his patient complains that people find him boring, or Joy becoming a “scab” at an ESL program). Happiness‘ brand of bone-dry humor is really a precursor to contemporary anti-comedy, exemplified by an exchange between sisters Helen (Boyle) and Joy (Adams) that could be the movie’s comic manifesto. After Joy makes an innocent comment that Helen thinks is stupid, the elder sister bursts out in mock laughter, then consoles the younger: “Don’t worry,” she hisses, “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing with you.” Her sister’s confused response: “But I’m not laughing.”

Even more than its juxtaposition of humor and horror, the film succeeds by mixing its meanness with sorrow: Dylan Baker’s climactic tear-stained confession is simultaneously bone-chilling and heartrending. (The performances are uniformly excellent, but it seems odd that standout Baker never landed another major role: playing a child molester must be career suicide in Hollywood.) Happiness is, as noted, a very sad movie.

Is it a weird movie? I’d say no, although it is a unique one. Its unflinchingly downbeat, relentlessly derisive tone puts it well outside of mainstream entertainment. To the extent that we might claim it for the weird, it’s only due to its often exaggerated nature. Scenes play as the tiniest bit unreal: Bill’s conversations with his pre-adolescent son are perverted parodies of “Leave it to Beaver” chats. Catty conversations between the sisters are franker and more biting than they would be in reality. Horrible things are said in deadpan, and received with ambiguous expressions suggesting a mixture of alarm and bamboozlement. Detached artifice is pierced by real human emotion. That is not, in my mind, enough to get Happiness all the way to “weird” (though it certainly passes the “offbeat” marker); but at least I can see what the movie’s proponents are talking about.

Strangely, although it’s remembered by everyone who saw it and critically acclaimed, at the present time Happiness is nearly unobtainable. No streamer seems brave enough to take it on, the DVD has gone out of print, and it has never been issued on Blu-ray. I wouldn’t expect this sad situation to last forever. [EDITOR: The Criterion Collection picked up Happiness in 2024.]

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… funny, sad, sincere, ugly, tough, weird, occasionally horrifying.”–Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Magazine, 2016 reassessment

(This movie was nominated for review by “CheapSwillBill” who commented “A list of weird movies that doesn’t mention Happiness? That’s weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Happiness (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]

Happiness (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]
  •  
Check Price
List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: LEMORA: A CHILD’S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL (1973)

3 Comments

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Richard Blackburn

FEATURING: Lesley Taplin, Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith, William Whitton

PLOT: An innocent tween-age girl navigates a nightmare vision of post-Prohibition America in a search of her long-lost father, running into danger at every turn.

Still from Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1973)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Lemora is a movie that will remind you of Night of the Hunter (1955) and Return to Oz (1985),  in exactly equal measure. It takes the formula of an innocent child wandering in not-quite-tamed roadside Americana and turns it into “Goldilocks and the Zombie Apocalypse.” By the time we get to the title character, the uncomfortable psychosexual tones are no longer just a subtext, and we’re still not done sliding down the pit of creepy childhood fears.

COMMENTS: Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural is often touted as “a fairy tale for adults,” and that devotion to this theme makes it too difficult to treat fairly and yet far too close to an unqualified masterpiece to just ignore. First we have to yell [TRIGGER WARNING] because there’s sex stuff, and it involves minors. We don’t mean “barely underage jailbait,” we’re talking thirteen! Remember how Labyrinth (1986) plays on the idea of Sarah being a woman-child heckled by a grown fantasy ruler? Take that, subtract two years, change “goblin king” to “lesbian vampire queen,” and you’re in the right neighborhood. Second, we have to hedge a minor [SPOILER] tag in here, because while the movie is coy with revealing its ultimate genre tags, and every review of it screams “lesbian” and “vampire” in the opening paragraph, this movie is in a completely different universe from the Jess Franco style one would normally expect given those keywords. You will not be titillated. You will squirm with discomfort at the squirrely games this movie plays with your psyche.

Lila Lee (the late Cheryl Smith) is a 13-year-old church choir girl famous in her small town for her gospel singing. Surreally innocent in her golden hair braids and Christian upbringing, she is a foster ward of the church, raised by the Reverend Meuller [sic] (played by director Blackburn) because her real father is a 1940’s style gangster on the lam for murder. The Reverend isn’t shy about touting her ascension to grace from such unsavory beginnings in his sermons, delivered to a peculiarly all-female congregation. But we barely have this backstory established when Lila gets a letter from a correspondent named “Lemora,” with news of her father. He is supposedly on his deathbed and ready to reconcile with Lila before slipping away, bidding her to come visit and cautioning her to come alone. Lila packs a suitcase and heads out the door post-haste, destination “Asteroth.” If you’ve brushed up on your demonology, you can take that as foreshadowing.

Lila is scarcely on the road before we’re confronted with the seedy Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: LEMORA: A CHILD’S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL (1973) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: CANIBA (2017)

4 Comments

DIRECTED BY: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel

FEATURING: Issei Sagawa, Jun Sagawa

PLOT: Confessed cannibal Issei Sagawa monologues to the camera, his face often out of focus, and talks to his caretaker brother, who is revealed to be almost as deranged.

Still from Caniba (2017)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Caniba would make a list of the most disturbing movies ever made—easily. Its subject is a weirdo par excellence—in fact, he may be the world’s strangest living monster—and the film takes an experimental, offbeat approach to depicting him. Yet everything shown here is tragically real, and the effect goes beyond “weird” into “despairing.”

COMMENTS: Issei Sagawa, an intelligent but shy Japanese man studying French in Paris, killed and ate a female classmate in 1981. He spent five years in a mental institution in France and then was deported to Japan where, due to quirks of the judicial system, he was freed. Since then he has lived a marginalized existence, making a meager living off his infamy. He is now weakened by a stroke and holed up in a dingy apartment, cared for by his brother.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, Harvard-based anthropologist filmmakers, chose to follow up their arthouse hit Leviathan (an uncontroversial documentary about commercial fishermen in the North Atlantic) with this perverted provocation about Sagawa. Most of the movie is out-of-focus shots of the ailing cannibal, closeups of his twisted, trembling hands or his blank face as he delivers halting, unhinged monologues (“I know I’m crazy,” he confesses). When he talks at all, he speaks as if he’s in a trance, gathering the strength to push out each phrase, about five or six words per minute, with long pauses in between. We also meet his caretaker brother Jun, who eventually reveals some shocking fetishes of his own—leading one to wonder whether there is a genetic curse on the Sagawa clan, or whether Jun was driven mad by knowledge of his brother’s crimes. Old black-and-white home movies of the two show what look like happy, normal children.  Back in the present, we have a very odd pixilated porn sequence starring Sagawa, inserted without any context, followed by a tour through the manga he drew celebrating his crime. Jun is both fascinated and disturbed by the graphic drawings of the girl’s corpse and his brother’s erection when faced with it. “I can’t stomach this anymore,” he says, but continues turning the pages. Issei, distant as always, seems embarrassed, if anything, reluctant to answer the questions his brother poses. For the final scene, they bring in a prostitute (or groupie?) dressed as a sexy nurse to read the cannibal a bedtime story about zombies, then take the invalid demon out for a wheelchair stroll around the neighborhood. The end.

I am glad someone documented these two twisted specimens of humanity with minimal editorializing, but the result is no fun whatsoever, and offers no insight to their pathologies, making it a very difficult watch on multiple levels. It’s of interest to sick thrill seekers and serious students of abnormal psychology. You should know this movie exists. God help you if you watch it. There is no guarantee it will get a commercial release. The film seems destined to remain forever underground, where it probably belongs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A weirdo documentary…  strange and unpleasant…”–Dennis Schwartz, Ozus’ World Movie Reviews

Canonically Weird (The List)

347. GOODBYE UNCLE TOM (1971)

5 Comments

Addio Zio Tom; AKA Farewell Uncle Tom

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

“If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.”–Harriet Ann Jacobs, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”

DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: Uncredited actors, mostly Haitian

PLOT: A helicopter flies over a cotton field being worked by slaves in the antebellum south; two unseen men enter a plantation, and the matron of the family introduces them as “Italian journalists” performing an “inquest” into slavery. The time-traveling documentarians then take their camera into a slave ship, follow a slave trader, tour various plantations and slave auctions, and encounter Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Makepeace Thackeray, among other adventures. In a flash-forward, an African-American reads “The Confessions of Nat Turner” on the beach and imagines black militants breaking into white households and killing all the inhabitants with axes.

Still from Goodbye Uncle Tom (1972)
BACKGROUND:

  • In the 1960s and pioneered what came to be known as the “mondo” film (after the title of their first movie, 1962’s Mondo Cane [Dog’s World]). These “shockumentaries” documented bizarre behavior around the world, with a heavy emphasis on sex and violence: Cane contained scenes of Asians eating dogs and elderly people passing away in Singapore’s “death hotel.” Their final contribution to the genre was 1966’s Africa Addio, which chronicled turmoil in post-colonial Africa and included several scenes of political prisoners being summarily executed by paramilitary squads (along with footage of slaughtered hippos and elephants). Africa Addio was extremely controversial, and Jacopetti and Prosperi were even accused of racism for making it. Goodbye Uncle Tom, their first fictional film, was a response to those accusations: they wanted to make a movie that was clearly and unambiguously anti-racist, and chose American slavery as their subject.
  • The movie was mainly shot in Haiti, with some locations in the United States, after Brazil and several other countries refused to allow Jacopetti and Prosperi to shoot there due to their bad reputation. Production lasted for two years.
  • The film was recut several times for different markets; in its original American release, the Nat Turner-inspired coda was removed as too incendiary, fearing it might spark copycat murders or riots. (Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke agreed, theorizing that the movie was a Jewish conspiracy to incite a race war.)
  • The film was a financial and critical flop.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Your eye may be stunned by the acres upon acres of nude African flesh in the crowd scenes. We chose to focus on the final image, however; the modern black doctor squeezing the white boy’s beach ball until it pops, his fingers straining with a pent-up century’s worth of tension and rage, grinning maniacally.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Plantation helicopter; virgin seductress; afro-massacre

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This strange and audacious condemnation of American slavery, made by controversial Italian shockumentarians, is equal parts outrage and exploitation, with a side of absurdity. A time-traveling mockumentary full of rape, degradation, gore, and ambiguous moral outrage, Goodbye Uncle Tom is almost weirder in its conception and backstory than its execution.


An edited trailer for Goodbye Uncle Tom

COMMENTS: Beginning with a scene of documentarians flying their Continue reading 347. GOODBYE UNCLE TOM (1971) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

299. INNOCENCE (2004)

3 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

“A Truth thats told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent…”–William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Zoe Auclair, Berangere Haubruge, Lea Bridarolli, , Helene de Fougerolles

PLOT: A coffin mysteriously arrives at a girl’s boarding school; inside is Iris, a six-year old girl, wearing only white panties. Six other girls open the coffin, introduce themselves, and dress the new arrival in the school uniform: all white, pleated skirts, braided ponytails, and color-coded ribbons in their hair identifying their rank by age. As Iris learns the rules of the school from her elders and is trained in dance, older girls hope that they will be “chosen” by the Headmistress during her annual visit so they can leave the grounds.

Still from Innocence (2004)

BACKGROUND:

    • “Inspired by” German writer Frank Wedekind’s 1903 novella “Mine-Haha: or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls”. The novella was made again in 2005 as The Fine Art of Love: Mine Ha-Ha.
    • Director Hadzihalilovic is the wife (and former editor/producer) of Gaspar Noé, to whom the film is dedicated. (Hadzihalilovic also collaborated with Noé on the screenplay to the Certified Weird Enter the Void).
    • In 2015 Hadzihalilovic completed Evolution, a sort of companion piece to Innocence set on an island where all the children are male.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The big moment comes early on: Iris’ mysterious arrival in a coffin.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Coffin cuties; butterfly sex studies; train to adulthood

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Mining a calmly enigmatic vein of weirdness, Innocence is a graceful, and troubling, metaphor for childhood.


Clip from Innocence

COMMENTS: Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s notion of Innocence is an odd Continue reading 299. INNOCENCE (2004) →