Tag Archives: Public domain

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Roger Corman

FEATURING: Jonathan Haze, Mel Welles, Jackie Joseph, Dick Miller, Jack Nicholson, Charles B. Griffith

PLOT:  Mild-mannered delivery boy Seymour breeds a new plant in an attempt to impress

Still from Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

his boss and the sexy cashier at his flower shop; the talking mutant Venus flytrap grows to extraordinary size, but only so long as it is fed a constant supply of blood and bodies.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not weird enough, though it certainly marches to the beat of its own drummer.  Filmed in two days from a quickie script by Roger Corman scribe Charles B. Griffith written on the fly to take advantage of some leftover storefront sets, Horrors was seat-of-the-pants filmmaking.  Aided by an inspired cast, the inherent quirkiness of the Faustian plant food fable shines through.  Often called the best movie ever shot in 48 hours, The Little Shop of Horrors is a fast, fun ride that every cinephile should check out at least once; it’s a triumph of imagination, dedication, and sheer luck over budgetary constraints.  It’s too bad it’s not a little bit weirder.

COMMENTS: “I’ve eaten in flower shops all over the world, and I’ve noticed that the places that have the most weird and unusual plants do the best business.”  That’s the sort of universe Little Shop of Horrors takes place in, one where minor characters stand by casually chomping on salted gardenias and handing out plot advice to the principals.  Set in a mythical Skid Row, “the part of town everybody knows about but nobody wants to see—where the tragedies are deeper, the ecstasies wilder and the crime rate consistently higher than anywhere else,” this is black comedy circa 1960.  Not only is murder made a joke, but more scandalous taboos like sadomasochism and prostitution are part of the fabric of daily life on Skid Row.  Man-eating plant aside, the movie’s greatest charm is the cast of crazy supporting characters that pop in and out of the story: the floral gastronome, Seymour’s hypochondriac mom, an unlucky woman whose relatives are constantly dying, two flat-affect flatfeet (broad spoofs of the duo from “Dragnet”), a pair of bouncy high school cheerleaders, a hooker who persistently tries to pick up a hypnotized trick, Continue reading CAPSULE: THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) →

Free Online Weird Movies, List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: MANOS, THE HANDS OF FATE (1966)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Harold P. Warren

FEATURING: John Reynolds, Tom Neyman, Diane Mahree, Harold P. Warren

PLOT:  Lost in the desert, a vacationing family seeks lodging from Torgo, who takes care of the place while the Master is away.

Still from Manos, the Hands of Fate (1966)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: With The Horror of Spider Island and The Beast of Yucca Flats already certified weird, it’s hard to argue that any movie could be ruled off the List solely because it was “too bad.”  But as painful as those movies can be to watch, the dreadfully dull and incompetent Manos is another kettle of stinky fish entirely.  Spider Island and Yucca Flats developed slight cult followings on their own bizarre merits, but for decades 1966’s Manos had been completely resigned to the grindhouse dustbin, only gaining notice after being featured on the bad movie-mocking cult TV show “Mystery Science Theater 3000” in 1993.  Like most misguided amateur efforts, Manos notches a few weird points from anti-naturalistic acting, incoherent editing and negligent continuity.  In the case of Hal Warren’s sole feature, the staggering ineptitude magnifies the movie’s strange little bumps until they become looming mountains; the story takes place in some uncanny desert that’s somewhat similar to our own world, but permeated by a dreamlike offness.  The question is, is that weird undercurrent enough to overcome Manos‘ dead air?

COMMENTS:  Abraham pleaded with God to save the city of Sodom from eradication via brimstone, if he could find only a few good men inside the city limits; similarly, I won’t condemn Manos as a completely worthless endeavor if I can ferret out just a few good things about it.  A brief recital of Manos‘ cinematic sins, however, makes the judgment look dire for this microbudget brainchild of a fertilizer salesman from El Paso, Texas. The issues begin with the film stock itself: Manos was shot with a hand-wound 16 mm camera that could only capture thirty seconds of footage at a time.  The camera was probably intended to be used by families making silent vacation films, and the results look exactly like home movies from the 1960s, complete with barely adequate, dull coloration and hazy definition.  Since the Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: MANOS, THE HANDS OF FATE (1966) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

68. HÄXAN [HÄXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES] (1922)

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AKA The Witches; Witchcraft Through the Ages

Must See

“Such were the Middle Ages, when witchcraft and the Devil’s work were sought everywhere. And that is why unusual things were believed to be true.”–Title card in Häxan

DIRECTED BY: Benjamin Christensen

FEATURING: Benjamin Christensen, Astrid Holm, Karen Winther, Maren Pedersen

PLOT: The film’s narrative segments involve the betrayals and accusations of witchcraft that destroy a small town in medieval Europe, and the monks who instigate them. Most of the film, however, consists of Christensen’s free-form discourse about the history of witchcraft and demonology.
Still from Häxan (1922)

BACKGROUND:

  • Christensen was an actor-turned-director with two feature films (The Mysterious X and Blind Justice) under his belt when he made Häxan.  He later moved to Hollywood, but he never recaptured Häxan‘s magic, and most of his subsequent films have been lost.
  • The film spent two years in pre-production as Christensen researched scholarly sources on medieval witchcraft, including the Malleus Maleficarum, a German text originally intended for use by Inquisitors.  Many of these are cited in the finished film, and a complete bibliography was handed out at the film’s premiere.
  • In the 1920s and afterward Häxan was frequently banned due to nudity, torture, and in some countries for its unflattering view of the Catholic Church.
  • Some of the footage from this film may have been reused for the delirium sequences in 1934′s Maniac (along with images from the partially lost silent Maciste in Hell).
  • In 1968, a truncated 76-minute version of Häxan was re-released for the midnight movie circuit under the title Witchcraft Through the Ages by film distributor Anthony Balch, with narration by William S. Burroughs and a jazz score.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The scenes set at the Witches’ Sabbaths are overflowing with bizarre imagery.  The most unforgettable example is probably when the witches queue up and, one after another, kiss Satan’s buttocks in a show of deference.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: In making Häxan, Christensen dismissed the then-nascent rules of classical filmmaking and turned it into a sprawling, tangent-filled lecture based on real historical texts.  This already makes the film unique, but the use of ahead-of-its-time costuming and special effects in order to film a demonic panorama right out of Bosch or Bruegel, and Christensen’s irreverent sense of humor as he does it, is what makes it truly weird.

Scene from Häxan (1922)

COMMENTS: In 1922, even before the documentary had been firmly established as a Continue reading 68. HÄXAN [HÄXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES] (1922) →

Canonically Weird (The List), Free Online Weird Movies

65. MANIAC (1934)

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AKA Sex Maniac

“Unless you regularly do mushrooms and go to Lady Gaga concerts with your good friend Crispin Glover, then watching Maniac is guaranteed to be the weirdest experience you have ever had.”–ad copy for the Rifftrax version of Maniac

DIRECTED BY: Dwain Esper

FEATURING: Bill Woods

PLOT:  An on-the-lam vaudevillian kills and impersonates his mad scientist employer, driving himself mad in the process.

Maniac (1934)


BACKGROUND:

  • Dwain Esper was a successful building contractor who, it is rumored, only got into the movie business when he came into possession of a cache of filmmaking equipment that was abandoned in a foreclosed property.  He worked outside the film distribution system, taking his exploitation movies on the road and showing them in rented venues, accompanied by lurid advertisements promising forbidden fruit for “adults only.”  Esper obtained the rights to Tod Browning’s Freaks from MGM for a song, and took the movie on the road with his other exploitation hits.  Other films he directed or produced had titles such as Marihuana, the Weed with Roots in Hell and How to Undress in Front of Your Husband.
  • Made outside of the Hollywood system, Maniac was not subject to the Hays Production Code, although it probably ran afoul of most local censorship laws.  Audacious directors like Esper deliberately put racy material into their films that the major studios could not touch.  Maniac contains a scandalous amount of nudity, which had been extremely rare in motion pictures up until that time and was banned outright when the Hays Code began to be enforced in 1934.
  • The film incorporates (steals) footage from Maciste in Hell (1925), and reportedly also from Häxan (1920) and Fritz Lang‘s Sigfried (1923), for its delirium sequences.
  • Named one of the 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made in The Official Razzie Movie Guide.
  • One gruesome scene involving a cat’s eyeball appears to be a real case of animal abuse, but is almost certainly a convincing illusion.
  • The movie’s ending rips off the Edgar Allen Poe short story “The Black Cat.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are lots of strange, unexpected sights to be seen in this time capsule of man’s freakish desires, but you won’t forget the cat’s eyeball.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Maniac promises to show us the life of a madman as a shameless


Scene from Maniac

pretext for delivering multiple shock scenes in an “educational” context, but the final product is so disjointed, feverish and crazily assembled that it seems to be the work of an actual madman.

COMMENTS: Most bad movies are just bad.  A rare breed are so bad they’re “unintentionally” Continue reading 65. MANIAC (1934) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: REANIMATED (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Mike Schneider

FEATURING: Karl Hardman, Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea

PLOT: An animated recreation of the classic zombie film, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated features a number of talented animators filtering Romero’s original vision through their own artistic viewpoints, expressing the universal messages therein in their own mediums.Still from Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated (2010)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  While aesthetically intriguing and at times very eerie, there never was much that jumped out as being incredibly weird about Romero’s zombie movie.  Although it was the first of its kind in what is now a celebrated genre, Night of the Living Dead was always more of a message film than a meditation on the dead rising from their graves.  This animated version does indeed add some visual quirks, but there is no real strangeness here.

COMMENTS:  For fans of the zombie film, it doesn’t get much more better than the simple-yet-satisfying claustrophobia of the grandpappy of them all, Night of the Living Dead.  More than a horror flick, this grainy 1968 indie is a meaningful, smart work of art that pushes the boundaries of what the genre is capable of and what it can stand for.  So above any horror I can think of, this one definitely deserves an animated homage that explores it from a stylistic point of view.  And Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated doesn’t disappoint in that department.

Using a cadre of young, experimental artists, this exercise explores the original movie nearly shot-for-shot with different styles of animation.  The styles are incredibly varied: parts are simply still images, sometimes it’s a comic book-style series of cels, while at other times it takes on an anime quality. One artist takes the real footage from the film and animates over it to generate an eerie reality that blurs the line between realism and otherworldliness. The different mediums at work boggle the mind; whether it’s claymation, pencil sketches, Flash cartoons, or sock puppets, this project has something to evoke just about anyone’s personal aesthetic. It’s amazing what the creators do here to make you think of the movie in a whole new way.  The different animators break from the stark reality of the original to steep the entire world in a haunting, eerie mood that was not there before.  My favorite style, personally, is when they use the real life baby dolls to simulate some of the action scenes!  It doesn’t fit well with the other styles to create that perfect sense of dread and the unknown, but it’s just too funny to leave out!

Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated is definitely a success in my book.  The unsettling black-and-white animation combined with the oddly displaced archive voices of the original actors creates a mesmerizing experimental film that goes beyond the norm and pulls off something that few people have.  The various styles of animation work fluidly together to pay homage as well as to press the boundaries of the original zombie survival template.  My only complaint would be that the ending is the most clinical part of the film, when I thought it should be a bit more erratic in style.  In those desperate moments before daybreak, Reanimated doesn’t hit any crescendo notes that the original did not already sound, making the last few scenes almost redundant if you’ve already seen NOTLD.  That caveat, compounded with this film’s lack of utter weirdness, knocks Reanimated out of contention for a spot on the List, although it must be considered one of the more impressive movies released in2010.

If you’re a fan of the original, or just a lover of experimental animation, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated has something for you.  It’s a very strong feature that builds upon Romero’s work with a love and a care that is both heartfelt and reverent.  Despite its lack of general weirdness, it is still one of the better films in a year devoid of cinematic life, and a must-have for any fans of the zombie sub-genre.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an ideal midnight movie for film geeks who don’t mind the animators occasionally taking some liberties or tweaking the material.”–Rob Gonslaves, efilmcritic.com (contemporaneous)

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

RIDERS OF THE WHISTLING SKULL (1937)

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This odd hybrid could only have been produced in an era which gave no credence to genre labels.  Riders of the Whistling Skull is the kind of movie which is so delightfully in love with its period that one could easily imagine a true genre geek like Tarantino falling in love with it today.  Director Mack V. Wright is completely comfortable throwing horror, western, jungle, mystery and comic relief into a seamless mix.

The Three Mesquiteers (Bob Livingston, Ray Corrigan, and Max Terhune), for those not in the know, were the starring trio of a number of “B” westerns.  The well-photographed, well-paced Riders of the Whistling Skull is, by far, the best of these.  Pretty girl Betty Marsh (Mary Russell) is searching for her lost father, Professor Marsh (John Van Pelt), who, along with Professor Flaxton (C. Montague Shaw), has been kidnapped by a diabolical Indian cult.

Enter the Three Mesquiteers, who have found the injured Flaxton in the desert.  They take him to Miss Marsh.  Flaxton revives long enough to tell all that he and Professor Marsh found the lost city of Lukachukai (!) hidden deep in the region of the Whistling Skull Mountain.  Flaxton tells them of vast hidden treasures and of the unspeakable horrors of the ancient cult.  Before Flaxton can reveal the location of Lukachuka, the lights suddenly go out.  When the lights are turned back on Flaxton is discovered on the ground with a knife in his back.  Inscribed in the handle of the murder weapon is ancient Indian curse.  The mystery begins!

After a treasure map is discovered, The Mesquiteers join Betty and travel into dreaded taboo territory in order to find Professor Marsh and to uncover the identity of Flaxton’s murderer.  Shortly into the expedition, one member of the party is murdered, shot by an arrow inscribed with the same ancient Indian curse as the knife.  Another member of the party, Professor Fronc (George Godfrey) is kidnapped, tortured by Indians, and tied half naked to his horse, after being branded with the brand of the ancient Indian cult of Anastasia.
Still from Riders of the Whistling Skull (1937)
Silhouetted Indians atop Coachella Valley (atmospherically shot) attack the expedition with flaming arrows shot into the wagon, which of course, demands late 30’s, western-styled expert stunt work.  Betty goes missing in the ensuing chaos.  The Three Mesquiteers go out in search of her and find her in the middle of an ancient Indian cult ceremony.  Russell’s tight, white shirt competes with her equally tight slacks and the even tighter jeans of our three cowboy studs for inducing the most testosterone and smoldering sex appeal.  One halfway expects King Kong to come out of nowhere and seize the heroine from the clutches of the natives, but no such luck.  Never fear, because the Mesquiteers are old hands at heroically saving virginal heroines when danger looms.

When the expedition finds Whistling Skull, they stumble upon more killer natives, secret passage ways, living mummies, and Professor Marsh.  Corrigan wins the testosterone contest when he loses his shirt, bares his chest, fights off the cult, and saves pal Livingston.  The mystery is solved when the murderer is exposed.  Luckily, the Sheriff and his band have been following from afar.  They lend a hand in dealing with the murderer, defeating the natives, and surviving a terrible avalanche, all before the neatly wrapped last line of comedy relief.

The End.

Canonically Weird (The List), Free Online Weird Movies

59. THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS (1961)

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“There’s a rare kind of perfection in The Beast of Yucca Flats — the perverse perfection of a piece wherein everything is as false and farcically far-out as can be imagined.”–Tom Weaver, in his introduction to his Astounding B Monster interview with Tony Cardoza

Beware

DIRECTED BY: Coleman Francis

FEATURING: Tor Johnson

PLOT: Joseph Javorsky, noted scientist, defects to the United States, carrying with him a briefcase full of Soviet state secrets about the moon. Fleeing KGB assassins, he runs onto a nuclear testing range just as an atom bomb explodes. The blast of radiation turns him into an unthinking Beast who strangles vacationers who wander into the Yucca Flats region.

Still from The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961)

BACKGROUND:

  • The Beast of Yucca Flats can always be found somewhere on the IMDB’s “Bottom 100” list (at the time the review was composed, it occupied slot #21).
  • All three of the films Coleman Francis directed were spoofed on “Mystery Science Theater 3000“.
  • Tor Johnson was a retired Swedish wrestler who appeared in several Ed Wood, Jr. movies. Despite the fact that none of the movies he appeared in were hits, his bestial face became so iconic that it was immortalized as a children’s Halloween mask.
  • All sound was added in post-production. Voice-overs occur when the characters are at a distance or when their faces are obscured so that the voice actors won’t have to match the characters lips. Some have speculated that the soundtrack was somehow lost and the narration added later, but shooting without synchronized sound was a not-unheard-of low-budget practice at the time (see The Creeping Terror, Monster A-Go-Go and the early filmography of ). Internal and external evidence both suggest that the film was deliberately shot silent.
  • Director Coleman Francis is the narrator and appears as a gas station owner.
  • Per actor/producer Tony Cardoza, the rabbit that appears in the final scene was a wild animal that wandered onto the set during filming. It appears that the feral bunny is rummaging through Tor’s shirt pocket looking for food, however.
  • Cardoza, a close friend of Francis, suggests that the actor/director may have committed suicide in 1973 by placing a plastic bag over his head and inhaling the fumes from his station wagon through a tube, although arteriosclerosis was listed as the official cause of death.
  • The film opens with a topless scene that lasts for only a few seconds; it’s frequently clipped off prints of the film.
  • The Beast of Yucca Flats is believed to be in the public domain and can be legally viewed and downloaded at The Internet Archive, among other sources.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Tor Johnson, in all his manifestations, whether noted scientist or irradiated Beast; but especially when he cuddles and kisses a cute bunny as he lies dying.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Coleman Francis made three movies in his lifetime, all of which were set in a reality known only to Coleman Francis. His other two films (The Skydivers and Night Train to Mundo Fine [AKA Red Zone Cuba]) were grim and incoherent stories of despairing men and women in desolate desert towns who drank coffee, flew light aircraft, and killed off odd-looking extras without finding any satisfaction in the act. Though his entire oeuvre was more than a bit bent by his joyless outlook on life, his natural affinity for the grotesque, and his utter lack of attention to filmic detail, this Luddite tale of an obese scientist turned into a ravening atomic Beast survives as his weirdest anti-achievement.


Trailer for The Beast of Yucca Flats with commentary from director Joe Dante (Trailers from Hell)

COMMENTS:  Touch a button on the DVD player. Things happen onscreen. A movie Continue reading 59. THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS (1961) →