War and freezing temperatures lead a race of beings to the brink of genocide in a world ruled by cause and effect. Written, produced, and directed by Danny Zabbal.
Tag Archives: Science Fiction
LIST CANDIDATE: EDEN LOG (2007)
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DIRECTED BY: Franck Vestiel
FEATURING: Clovis Comillca, Vimala Pons, Zohar Wexleser
PLOT: A man named Tolbiac (Cornillac) awakens with amnesia alongside rotting corpses in a high-tech underground wasteland. He must find his way out of a massive labyrinth deep within the earth. To do so he has to collect and assimilate data and unravel clues to the bizarre circumstances in which he finds himself.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Shot entirely indoors in an underground setting, this unusual science fiction film blurs the line between supposed reality and apparent fantasy. Told visually, with minimal dialogue, the bizarre circumstances and setting disorient the viewer. One must see through the protagonist’s eyes to decipher his otherworldly experience. The fact that he has no memory and his world seems just as alien to him as it does to us heightens the challenge.
COMMENTS: Eden Log is told mainly with pictures. It is set in the near future. There is refreshingly little exposition. There are no long and grandiose on-screen paragraphs or narration at the inception telling about a land far, far away in a time long ago. As a result, the story is a bit murky.
The viewer must piece the action together from the protagonist’s experiences, which unfold from his point of view. The meaning of some events is not clearly delineated, and the beholder must learn how to interpret them. One must suspend disbelief to accept certain aspects of the plot, and one is never sure until the end how to understand some of Tolbiac’s impressions and experiences. It is, at first, hard to tell what is real and what is fantasy.
Tolbiac starts out at the bottom of a ruined, high-tech subterranean maze in pool of Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: EDEN LOG (2007)
CAPSULE: VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN (1968)
DIRECTED BY: Peter Bogdanovich (using the pseudonym Derek Thomas)
FEATURING: Mamie van Doren
PLOT: Three cosmo—I mean, astro-nauts—are sent to Venus to rescue two missing comrades,while Venusian blondes in seashell bras pester them from afar by sending volcanoes, thunderstorms and dinosaurs to hinder them.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Prehistoric Women is a classic Frankenstein-film, stitched together from various pieces of footage lying around the studio. The movie was made from dubbed footage from the Soviet space opera Planeta Bur, some effects from a second Soviet science fiction film, new voiceover narration which changes the focus of the original plot, and added scenes shot years later featuring English-speaking actors. Not only is the discrepancy between film stocks, soundtracks and atmospheres disorienting, but the new footage of (top-billed) Mamie van Doren and other scantily clad, pterodactyl worshiping Venusian dames is itself bizarre. This makes Prehistoric Women a worthy curiosity, if one for specialized tastes. Unfortunately, the movie is neither entertaining nor demented enough to merit inclusion among the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time.
COMMENTS: Though it was seriously intended, the original 1962 Soviet space opera that forms the bedrock stratum of Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women was not a great movie. Looking at it from a post-Cold War perspective, the most valuable thing about it is the revelation that, despite petty ideologically differences, the US and the USSR were not so different as we supposed at the time: both societies assumed that nearby planets in our shared solar system would probably be inhabited by dinosaurs. Technically speaking, the special effects are highly variable: the hovercar looks great, the giant-tentacled cosmonaut-eating Venus flytrap is not bad, the tin-can robot is standard Forbidden Planet surplus issue, and the men in dinosaur suits are as cheesy as anything you might see in a low-budget 1950s American sci-fi epic. The color, which was tinted from the original black and white, is extremely washed out in surviving prints, a look that producer Roger Corman and director Bogdanovich managed to keep consistent for the new sequences; or, maybe, the passage of time did their work for them. The muted colors add another layer of unreality to the film.
Looking at the original Soviet film, you have to believe that Corman was onto something: what this movie really needed was a bunch of sunbathing, telepathic, pterodactyl-worshiping sirens in skintight pants and clamshell bras to liven things up. The gratuitous mermaid babe sequences are the most memorable parts. Every time the explorers face an environmental Venusian threat like a volcano or thunderstorm, it turns out the ladies’ pagan ceremonies were the cause. Their siren scenes, which all take place on a single rocky beach, are accompanied by an eerie, wordless keening, and the fact that the prehistoric witches never speak except in voiceover does add a legitimately dreamlike feel to these sequences. Prehistoric Women is slow (and incoherent) by contemporary standards, but the patient viewer seeking a cinematic experience that’s the equivalent of a fractured dream half-remembered after falling asleep on the couch at 2 A.M. while watching a sci-fi marathon on a UHF station will find this to be mildly rewarding.
This was the ever-frugal Corman’s second attempt to recycle footage from Planeta Bur. In 1965 he released the same Russian footage, with different inserts, as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. The earlier film featured a few scenes of top-billed star Basil Rathbone as a mission control type back on earth, barking extraneous orders to the stranded cosmonauts that were relayed to them through yet another unnecessary character. Mamie and her buxom coven were a big upgrade over Basil, and not just in pulchritude; without the ridiculous Venusian siren subplot, Prehistoric Planet was a much duller experience, while remaining just as confusing.
Because Corman was too cheap to renew the copyrights on his 50s and 60s movies, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women fell into the public domain. It can be found on many bargain-priced compilations or can be legally viewed or downloaded by anyone through the Internet Archive or other sites.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE BOX (2009)
The Box divided critics—even our in-house critics. Eric Young defends the movie, but read to the end for Gregory J. Smalley‘s opposing opinion.
DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly
FEATURING: Cameron Diaz, Frank Langella, James Marsden
PLOT: A man comes unsolicited one morning to the doorstep of a financially troubled family with a proposition: if they press a button he gives them within 24 hours, they will receive $1 million, and someone in the world, whom they don’t know, will die.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Kelly’s surreal odyssey through Virginia in the mid 70s is hauntingly strange. One would not think it to be remarkably anything from the marketing, the extremely negative reviews put out by, um, pretty much everyone, and a tame, seemingly safe cast. But this is Richard Kelly, so nothing is really as it seems. The Box needs to be considered for the List because Kelly tells a morality story involving aliens, God, and Jean-Paul Sartre in ways that are as flippant and off-handedly odd as Fellini, as unflinching as Lynch, and as psychologically insightful as Cronenberg. And while Kelly is not as good a filmmaker as those three, he has grown undeniably in his talents since Donnie Darko, and this time his story is just as weird.
COMMENTS: The Box is a little more complex than you’re led to believe by the trailers. I was honestly underwhelmed when I first heard about the idea, but after hearing more about it, it started growing on me. I wanted to know what the deal was with this button, and what I got was beyond my wildest imaginings. It’s unusually dense for a Richard Kelly movie, filled with haunting music, esoteric imagery, and references to existential philosophy. In a way, The Box is Kelly’s most obscure work yet, even more obscure than his previous film, the dumb, loud Southland Tales. Although Kelly’s touted it as his commercial movie, I have the feeling that he might never have actually seen a commercial movie, because what he came up with is quite weird, and more than a little off-putting for the average moviegoer.
Kelly’s imagination makes the film something special. He takes a simple, bare-bones concept from a Richard Matheson short story and adds a third, and perhaps even a fourth, Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE BOX (2009)
RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: SUBJECT TWO (2006)
DIRECTED BY: Philip Chidel
FEATURING: Christian Oliver, Dean Stapleton
PLOT: A medical student gets more than he bargained for when he accepts an experimental internship and discovers that immortality comes with a steep price.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Subject Two is a fresh twist on the Frankenstein plot. It envisions reanimation from the undead’s subjective perspective. It is deeply disturbing and every bit as repellent and hellish as one could hope for.
COMMENTS: A misanthropic medical student named Adam (who flunked his ethics exam) receives a cryptic email from a Dr. Fanklin Vick. It offers him an opportunity to assist in unusual medical research and subsequently to share in the revolutionary scientific advances in medicine that result.
He bites on the lure, but to accept the position, he must wait on an icy mountain road in the middle of nowhere to be offered a ride by a stranger. The alluring and mysterious chauffeur obviously knows more about what is going on than he does. His journey to meet the elusive Doctor Vick is itself a snowy odyssey into the isolated, surreal drifts and folds of the Colorado Rockies.
When Adam and his driver reach a landmark beyond which the driver is no longer allowed, Adam must hike up a snow covered mountain to the doctor’s laboratory. Now he is stranded, beyond the point of no return. The research facility turns out to be a converted chalet, reminiscent of Nikola Tesla’s Colorado Springs retreat in The Prestige.
He meets Vick, who tells him that the research is very unusual and important and that Adam is uniquely qualified. Vick avoids going into much specific detail. Adam accepts. What Adam doesn’t understand is that what uniquely qualifies him is that he is now a captive. Nobody knows where he is, he has no means of departure, and nobody will miss him if he disappears.
On this isolated, snowbound mountain peak, Dr. Vick is indeed performing very unique research. He is experimenting with life, death, and reanimation. In combination with makeshift cryogenics, he is using a bizarre recombinant DNA serum that alters and Continue reading RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: SUBJECT TWO (2006)