Tag Archives: Science Fiction

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

OBSOLESCENCE (2011) & LETHAL OBSESSION (2010): THE POTENTIAL AND FAILURE OF INDEPENDENT FILM

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Jakob Bilinski‘s last film, Shade of Grey (2009) was a well-crafted feature, compellingly approached, yet flawed by inexperienced acting in key roles.  Bilinski has returned to the short film format with Obsolescence (2011), having considerably improved his craftsmanship, first and foremost in the acting. That is beneficial, because Obsolescence turns out as Bilinski’s best effort to date.

The seed of the idea for this psychological science fiction was inspired by Bilinski’s wife, Mackenzie.  It was shot in L.A. on a minuscule budget with a two day shooting schedule and a meager cast of four.  Far more often than not, guerrilla film-making methods such as these only lead to an execrable experience, but Bilinski is a conceptual artist who molds his gem with intelligence and style.

“Better never to have met you in my dream than to wake and reach for hands that are not there.”–Otomo No Yakamochi.  This introductory quote aptly dissipates shortly before the opening view of an empyrean horizon, its composition dismantled by Bilinski’s feverish, frenzied camera—a sign of things to come.  Nick (Scott Ganyo) is bathed in a bucolic landscape, but the deceptive harmony fails to mask a twitch.

Still from ObsolescenceTess (Rosalind Rubin) is strapped to a chair in a desolate location.  She is being held hostage by Nick.  In lesser hands this would have been the predictable setup for an adolescent excuse to show a torture fest, but Bilinski and the superb Rubin invest kinetic, tense excitement into the conflict.  Nick has poisoned Tess.  Her salvation lies in information that Nick requires regarding the death of his wife, Annie (Jen Lilley).  Rubin hypnotically conveys fear, frustration, and futile effort as she witnesses humanity slipping away from her captor, who is engulfed in grief.  Nick’s ability to empathize trickles away like water into sewage.  He is more fascinated than compassionate when the poison begin to take hold of Tess.  Wracked with pain, Tess’ Continue reading OBSOLESCENCE (2011) & LETHAL OBSESSION (2010): THE POTENTIAL AND FAILURE OF INDEPENDENT FILM →

Capsules

CAPSULE: ALIEN VS. NINJA (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Seiji Chiba

FEATURING: Mansinori Mimoto, Mika Hijii, Donpei Tsuchihira, Shuji Kashiwabara

PLOT: Aliens land in feudal Japan, and a band of ninjas must defeat them.

Still from Alien vs. Ninja

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s a lightweight action movie with some b-movie absurdity; a fun and frivolous flick for an evening’s entertainment, but not approaching the level of weirdness required for Listing.

COMMENTS:  Inventive swordplay and thrilling (if ridiculous) action choreography narrowly defeat cheap CGI and corny rubber alien suits in Alien vs. Ninja, reaffirming our faith in humanity over technology.  In the prologue that begins the film, CGI ninjas leap from a towering pagoda, launching themselves at ridiculous speeds and flying hundreds of feet in the air; the effect doesn’t look superhuman so much as amateurishly fake.  By contrast, in the first action scene ninja freak Yamata slices up a dozen opponents, whirling about and deploying four different blades, tossing one into the air and using another to sling it into its target when it falls; both scenes are impossible, but the second one is an exciting and convincing illusion.  The ninja effects generally beat the alien effects; the extraterrestrials, while imaginatively designed (they have extra orifices hiding some nasty little tricks), are obviously played by a man in a rubber suit, and their immobile facial features seem way behind the times.  They look like they came from a planet where life evolved along the lines of a 1980s or 1990s Roger Corman movie, which could be a plus or a minus depending on your tastes in cheesy monsters.  There is some of the expected gore—a head squashed in an explosion of blood, and so on—but this actioner doesn’t follow the splatterpunk ethos, where showers of blood and organs are the “money shots” and main reason for the flick to exist.  The plot is serviceable: it’s a formula action flick, but a few minor points may catch you by surprise, and tributes to the classic Alien movies supply some additional interest.  The four main ninja characters are only briefly sketched, but that’s just fine, since the movie drags whenever they take a stab at fleshing them out.  The cowardly older ninja, played for broad comic relief by a mugging Donpei Tsuchihira, can’t get off the screen fast enough for most Westerners’ tastes.  Although it’s the action scenes, directed by Yûji Shimomura, that elevate Alien vs. Ninja from pure junk to acceptable entertainment, it’s the few flourishes of typically Japanese absurd humor that make it of tangential interest to weirdophiles.  It’s ludicrous that one ninja can deflect a throwing star hurled by another one in mid-flight or that a man could land on his feet unharmed after plummeting to earth from above the treetops, but what’s weird is that when ninjas are turned into zombies by alien parasites, the only language they can use are curse words—in contemporary English.  Even stranger is the one-on-one melee between sexy Mika Hijii (in skintight black latex ninja-wear with specially molded boob armor, yum) and an alien who seems to have cross-species mating more on his mind than victory in combat.  This battle is the funniest, most memorable and most bizarre of Alien vs. Ninja‘s set pieces; fortunately, Mika has “mighty strength” to help protect her from horny, handsy space monsters.  Mildly weird, with good action sequences and some silly chuckles, Ninja vs. Alien is not just a solid choice if you want to see martial arts masters duke it out ninjato to tentacle with beings from another planet—it’s your only choice.

Alien vs. Ninja is the first offering from Sushi Typhoon, a new B-movie subsidiary of venerable Nikkatsu studios (best known around these parts for their battle to get weird director Seijun Suzuki blacklisted after he delivered the sublime but “incomprehensible” Branded to Kill).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…dull to start, but goofy good fun once guys in rubber suits start tangling with a foxy ninja baby and her hunky male comrades-in-arms.”–Richard Kuipers, Variety (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

78. ZARDOZ (1974)

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“When I see the film now, I’m astonished at my hubris in making this extraordinary farrago.”–John Boorman in his 2001 director’s commentary for Zardoz

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DIRECTED BY: John Boorman

FEATURING: Sean Connery, , John Alderton, Sara Kestleman, Niall Buggy

PLOT: Zed is an Enforcer, a warrior and slaver who pillages the countryside and takes commands from Zardoz, a floating stone head, in a distant barbaric future.  One day Zed sneaks into the head and is carried away with it to Vortex 4, a land filled with technologically advanced people who never seem to age.  Zed is a curiosity to them and becomes both a slave and an object of scientific study, but his presence disrupts their society in profound ways.

Still from Zardoz (1974)

BACKGROUND:

  • Zardoz was John Boorman’s first film after being nominated for an Oscar for Deliverance.  Boorman had been trying to get an adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” off the ground, but the project fell through.
  • This was Sean Connery’s second role after completing his run as James Bond with Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 (although he would return to the role for a one off in 1983’s Never Say Never Again).
  • Burt Reynolds was originally slated to play Zed but fell ill.
  • According to Boorman the film’s budget was one million dollars, $200,000 of which went to Connery’s salary.
  • Cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth also lensed 2001: A Space Odyssey, among many other films.
  • Boorman later co-wrote a novelization of the film.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Try as he might to fill his film with unforgettable visions of giant floating stone heads vomiting firearms and of humanity’s entire cultural heritage projected onto the half-nude bodies of immortal hippies, the one image that adorns almost every review of Boorman’s Zardoz is a simple one: Sean Connery standing in the desert, pistol in hand, ponytail insouciantly thrown over one shoulder, dressed in thigh high leather boots and a red diaper with matching suspenders.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This sci-fi spectacle starts with serious ideas and weighty themes, but gets weighed down under an avalanche of self-indulgent dialogue, a confused script, low-budget psychedelics, and consistently bizarre directorial choices. Fill a talented young director’s head full of anticipation of adapting Tolkien, then pull that opportunity out from under him but instead give him Sean Connery and carte blanche to make whatever film he wants, and the result, apparently, is Zardoz. (Oh, and LSD might have had something to do with it, too).


Original trailer for Zardoz

COMMENTS: Zardoz is introduced by a floating head weaving through a void, slowly Continue reading 78. ZARDOZ (1974) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

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The Man Who Fell to Earth has been promoted to the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies Ever Made. Read the official Certified Weird entry here. Comments are closed on this post.

DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Roeg

FEATURING: , Candy Clark, Buck Henry, Rip Torn

PLOT: An extraterrestrial visits earth in search of water, but becomes distracted by alcohol, television, corporate politics, and a tempestuous relationship with a human woman.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Roeg’s usual penchants for nonlinear storytelling and rich, occasionally disturbing imagery are stretched to their breaking points here; the resulting film is not always coherent or consistent, but it is fascinating and intermittently very weird.

COMMENTS: Only Nicolas Roeg would have taken a story roughly in the vein of Starman or E.T. and turned it into this.  Instead of falling into a facile, friendly relationship with earth’s inhabitants, Roeg’s spaceman, Thomas Jerome Newton, is afflicted with a severe case of culture shock.  Struggling to simultaneously save his faraway family and understand human behavior, he ends up failing at both, and the film traces out his steep rise-and-fall arc with a plot so disorientingly scrambled that it sometimes threatens to become stream-of-consciousness.

Through this frenzied editing style, we’re witness to Newton’s past, present, and future, although it’s rarely clear which is which at any given moment.  This extreme nonlinearity conveys the sensation of being a stranger in a strange land, as flashbacks bleed readily into the film’s putative reality or its characters’ fantasies; however, this also tends to make plot developments foggy and render motivations obscure.  In this sense, it’s a very messy film, often more interested in delving into Newton’s frazzled interior logic than in aiding the viewer’s comprehension.  Stretched with epic sweep over 138 minutes, the film’s detours and repeated segments (like that of the spaceship crashing) can get frustrating, but The Man Who Fell to Earth is more about visceral sensory experiences and emotional intuition than narrative flow.

Under those terms, the film is a qualified success.  Newton’s skyrocketing financial fortunes, his dalliance with a sweet small-town girl named Mary Lou (Clark), his alcohol-driven decline, and his subsequent institutionalization are all tightly interwoven, delineating a tragic, decades-long trajectory.  The tragedy is further illustrated by the interspersed snippets of memory and fantasy, including a violent musical interlude set to the song “Hello Mary Lou” that recalls the “Memo to Turner” scene from Performance.  Also like Performance (and the rest of Roeg’s early films), The Man Who Fell to Earth abounds with graphic sexuality, which becomes one more avenue for Newton’s experimentation with life on earth.  Both formally and morally, this film is tailor-made to offend conservative sensibilities.

The film’s mounting transgressions are compounded by the way that Bowie’s cadaverous, androgynous body blurs the line between human and alien, especially during the lengthy sex scenes.  His star power and otherworldly aura make the film’s sci-fi conceits believable, since with his shock of unnaturally red hair, his eyes (which are different two colors), and even his British accent—which stands out against the voices of his American costars—Bowie is believably not of this world, and when he chooses to remove his human skin and eyes, the outcome is only marginally stranger than the his original appearance.  As he changes from freshly arrived naïf to contaminated wino, Bowie anchors the film, his intractable presence acting as a counterpoint to Roeg’s flighty direction.

Since Roeg speaks in such an indecipherable visual language, it’s hard to know what to make of The Man Who Fell to Earth.  It’s partly a spaced-out parable about capitalism and chemical dependence, and possibly a satire of the rags-to-riches American success story.  Although it drags on too long and is often unfulfilling, it’s still inexplicably captivating.  When it’s all over and the poor man is stuck here on earth, you’re left with a film that’s as enigmatic, tormented, and unexpectedly beautiful as the pale face of Bowie himself.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story is complicated. It is set up as a near-total mystery that unfolds bit by bit, leaving—it must be said—a few small unexplained gaps. The price paid for this method is a certain confusion; the gain is the spectator’s tingling desire to have the puzzle work out.”–Richard Eder, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: GENTLEMEN BRONCOS (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Jared Hess

FEATURING: Michael Angarano, , Sam Rockwell, Halley Feiffer, Jennifer Coolidge, Hector Jimenez

PLOT:  A pretentious pulp fantasy icon who’s run out of ideas steals a home-schooled teen writer’s sci-fi epic, “Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years,” and positions it to be his next bestseller; meanwhile, the original author has sold the property to a team of his nerdy peers who are making it into a YouTube-quality adaptation.

Still from Gentlemen Broncos (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Weirder than expected and funnier than its reputation suggests, Gentlemen Broncos falls just short of a general recommendation, and just short of being weird enough to be considered for the List.  You may want to take a flyer on this uneven but sporadically hilarious spoof of sci-fi nerdom, though; the beyond-offbeat tone is sure to alienate many, but if you can connect with it you may come away with a peculiar affection for this messy film, the kind of devotion an owner gives a particularly ugly dog.

COMMENTS: Gentlemen Broncos is a movie with three different tonal layers, which sometimes conflict, but ensure that the movie remains stylistically unpredictable and never gets boring.  The base tone —which might be styled “nerd grotesque”—takes some getting used to; in fact, you’re going to have to work to meet the movie halfway on it. Jared Hess creates a world as seen through the eyes of a frightened adolescent: everyone young Benjamin encounters is uncomfortably strange, every social interaction awkward and fraught with the danger of humiliation. It’s as if every character in the film is some variation of Napoleon Dynamite. His role models include a nightgown-designing mom who supplements her income by selling homemade popcorn balls and a Church-appointed Big Brother with an incontinent albino python and a perpetually stoned expression framed by permed blond ringlets.  His peers are fellow maladjusted home-schooled youths: when he first meets the scheming Tabatha, she fleeces him for half his meal allowance, then cozies up to him by sitting next to him on the bus and letting him give her a squishy hand massage.  Even stranger is Lonnie, the creepiest kid on the block, a no-budget movie mogul whose flamboyant air of artistic superiority could have been hilarious if not for the freakish dental prosthetic he wears that stretches his mouth into a permanent Mr. Sardonicus death mask.  This base layer, a suburban universe inhabited by nothing but oddball losers makes for an uncomfortable, subtly nightmarish viewing experience, in the mold of a gentler and geekier John Waters.

Dr. Ronald Chevalier introduces another dimension to the film. The self-important sci-fi idol and general tool, obsessed with American Indian spirituality and breastfeeding, is shrewdly and purposefully characterized by Jemaine Clement.  He speaks with a carefully affected accent that suggests Ivy League superiority without having any actual geographic significance, and answers his omnipresent blackberry headset with a self-important “Chevalier” that makes you want to smack him.  The scene where he pompously lectures aspiring teen writers on the importance of providing characters with “magical” names is a pinpoint piece of character-assassination comedy.  If the entire movie had been made out of scenes like that, Gentlemen Broncos would be acknowledged as a satirical masterpiece.

These two layers—the uncomfortably quirky and the sharply sardonic—exist uneasily together, but the wild cards, and the segments of most interest to fans of the weird, are in the third layer, the dramatizations of the “Yeast Lords” adventure. The saga involves the mysterious properties of yeast (which look like cow patties and allow a Yeast Lord to fly), stolen gonads, clones, cyclopses with ray guns, and flying reindeer mounted with rocket launchers. We see three iterations of the tale scattered throughout the film: Benjamin’s original concept (with a manly Sam Rockwell as the hero) and Chevalier’s plagiarized version (he changes the protagonist into a “tranny” in an Edgar Winter wig, also portrayed by Rockwell, in a weak attempt to hide the story’s origins), as well as the amateur film adaptation by Lonnie, who doctors the script and casts himself as the female lead. Outrageously cheap CGI is used to achieve the flying and pink puke spewing effects, adding another layer of parody to the already tongue-in-cheek proceedings.  There’s brilliantly absurd dialogue throughout: “we’re investigating ways to strengthen the military—your gonad is being used for research,” “take me to your yeast factory!,” and Chevalier’s memorable couplet (from an alien lullaby) “within my breast meat there is a famine/No more sweets in the mammary cannon.” Without the “Yeast Lords” scenes, Gentlemen Broncos would be a highly peculiar mix of over-quirkiness and pulp fiction satire; scattering these histrionic playlets throughout turns the movie into something meriting the designation “weird.”

On the strength of Hess’ Napoleon Dynamite and the less-successful but still profitable Nacho Libre, Broncos received a generous $10 million budget and was scheduled for a limited release by Fox Searchlight.  The film was savaged by critics and shunned by audiences; its opening weekend was a disaster, netting just over $100,000 theatrically.  The movie was far too weird for mainstream filmgoers, but it stands to improve its performance on home video and could even develop a small cult following. Extreme weird movie trivia: Robin Ballard (star of the Certified Weird Elevator Movie) has a bit role in Broncos as a “female assistant.” Further trivia: the movie is set in a fictional Utah town called “Saltair.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a finely deranged, sillyhearted satire… the aesthetic is followed through to the end by the filmmaker, who’s fixated on whatever weirdness he can devour.”–Brian Orndorf, DVD Talk (Blu-ray)