Tag Archives: Underground

Capsules

CASPULE: TRASH [ANDY WARHOL’S TRASH] (1970)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Holly Woodlawn

PLOT: All the women (and the men dressed as women) want hunky Joe Dallesandro, but he’s impotent from shooting too much junk; he lives with a woman who furnishes their hovel with castoff items she finds left on Manhattan curbs for trash pickup, and the two dream of getting on welfare someday.

Still from Andy Warhol's Trash (1970)


WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Though Trash is about weird people and has its “off” moments, it’s not quite weird enough for the List.  Trash was cutting-edge in style, concept and subject matter when it came out in 1970.  But in the forty years since its debut, the sad lives of lowlife junkies and social outcasts have been tapped many times, and Trash‘s casual, near-documentary approach (accurately) makes a drug addict’s life seem painfully banal most of the time.  Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol have collaborated on weirder projects.

COMMENTS: Told in a pseudo-documentary style with partially improvised dialogue, on one level Trash is a gritty and realistic slice-of-life drama about deadbeat druggies on Manhattan’s lower east side.  It glides from meaningless episode to meaningless episode; Joe Dallesandro searches for his next fix and can’t get an erection no matter how many ladies try to seduce him; Holly Woodlawn keeps searching through the neighbors’ trash for stuff she can use, but she never finds any hidden treasure.  Their dreams are pathetically small but still far beyond their grasp, and by the end the conjoined losers end up exactly where they started.  Fortunately for us, plenty of weirdos drift into their lives in the meantime—a go-go dancer, a rich girl looking for an acid connection, an out-of-his-depth high school student, Holly’s pregnant sister, a welfare bureaucrat.  A few of these encounters are completely naturalistic, but most have an absurd edge to them.  Trying to turn Joe on, the go-go dancer breaks into a song and dance number, backed by swinging strands of Christmas lights on the stripper’s stage she has in her living room. The welfare functionary can’t approve a junkie for the public dole, but he’s willing to strike a fairly Continue reading CASPULE: TRASH [ANDY WARHOL’S TRASH] (1970) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

60. ELEVATOR MOVIE (2004)

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“I think it was from taking the elevator to my dorm room every day in college.  I developed this weird thing with elevators.  It wasn’t fetishistic or anything, I was just always thinking about the elevator, and you know how you feel your stomach move a bit when an elevator first starts or stops?  I would feel that at random times in the day when I wasn’t in an elevator, and I would feel like the ground was just a rising elevator platform.  I was also very shy at the time and I started to look forward to taking the elevator every day because it was the rare time I might be forced into a social situation with someone.”–Zeb Haradon on the origins of Elevator Movie

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Zeb Haradon, Robin Ballard

PLOT:  A woman carrying groceries is trapped in an elevator with a socially inept graduate student. Oddly, no one answers when they push the call button, and no one comes for days and weeks on end; even more oddly, her grocery bag is refilled each morning. As the weeks stretch into months, the mismatched pair—an adult virgin obsessed with anal sex and a reformed slut turned Jesus freak—form a sick symbiotic bond, until the girl undergoes a weird metamorphosis.

Still from Elevator Movie (2004)

BACKGROUND:

  • Per director Haradon, the budget for the film was between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars.
  • According to a statement on the official website the main influences on the story were Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” the films of Luis Buñuel (particularly That Obscure Object of Desire and The Exterminating Angel), and Eraserhead.
  • Although the mouse-stomping scene was faked, the end of the film shows a joke disclaimer that proclaims, “No animals were harmed in the making of this film except for lobsters and mice.”  Haradon received angry mails from animal rights advocates who believed that a mouse was actually killed onscreen.
  • Hardon’s followup film was the documentary Waiting for NESARA (2005), about a bizarre UFO cult composed of ex-Mormons.
  • The 2008 Romanian film Elevator features a similar dramatic scenario of a young man and woman trapped together in a cargo elevator, but without any surrealistic elements.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Lana, after she inexplicably transforms into a metal/human hybrid.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  By mixing Sartre’s “No Exit” with an ultra-minimalist riff on Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, garnished with large dollops of fantastical sexual depravity and a pinch of body horror, writer/director/star Zeb Haradon created one of the weirder underground movies of recent years. The absurdist script is exemplary, and the simplicity of the one-set scenario means that the movie’s technical deficiencies don’t stick out, and could even add to the oddness.


Original trailer for Elevator Movie (WARNING: trailer contains profanity and sexual situations)

COMMENTS: I have to start this review of with a confession/apology: when I first Continue reading 60. ELEVATOR MOVIE (2004) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: HEADS OF CONTROL: THE GORUL BAHEU BRAIN EXPEDITION (2006)

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BewareWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Pat Tremblay

FEATURING: Neil Napier, and amateurs who answered a newspaper ad

PLOT: Pharmaceutical molecules visualized as alien beings travel inside the mind of a

Still from Heads of Control (2006)

man afflicted with dissociative identity disorder and collect various “personalities,” who are examined as they perform monologues in front of surreal computer generated backgrounds.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s not released.  But even if it were released, it’s too uneven to qualify for a list of the 366 Best Weird Movies, although it would definitely have a shot at a list of the weirdest movies ever made regardless of quality.

COMMENTS: Before beginning the description of Heads of Control, I must explain why it earns a “beware” rating.  Normally, I reserve the “beware” badge for movies that are badly done, or even, in some cases, movies that are morally bad.  Heads of Control, however, meets neither of those criteria; although it’s cheap and uneven, it is quite competently mounted and the experimental impulse behind it is admirable.  Here, the rating is given due to the simple fact that this movie is so far out, so much like a performance art piece, that will only appeal to a very small slice of the most dedicated avant-gardists, or to those looking for the ultimate micro-budget drug trip film.  This experiment requires work on the viewers part to watch, and anyone looking for something remotely resembling a normal narrative movie is going to be hugely disappointed.

With that intriguing warning out of the way, just what is Heads of Control?  It begins with the protagonist, Max, being attacked by river zombies; it quickly appears that this is a hallucination, as we see Max in a mental institution being shot up with drugs.  Soon, we are inside Max’s diseased brain, watching a pair of hooded creatures.  The subordinate journeys into the patient’s psychedelically appointed neurons to fetch various two-dimensional rectangles from his tangled neural networks, which the superior creature places into a floating computer monitor.  The pair then watch the results, which consist

Continue reading CAPSULE: HEADS OF CONTROL: THE GORUL BAHEU BRAIN EXPEDITION (2006) →

List Candidates

BORDERLINE WEIRD: FROWNLAND (2007)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Ronald Bronstein

FEATURING: Dore Mann, David Sandholm, Paul Grimstad

PLOT: A pathetic loser named Keith lives a putrid existence in his sigh-inducing apartment. He is horribly flawed in every way: vacuous, temperamental, and repulsively stupid. He lives with a roommate he wants to rid himself of, he tries to romance women to no avail, and his attempts to better himself in any way only exacerbate his terminal lameness.

Still from Frownland (2007)

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  The titanic sadness at the center of Frownland is certainly profound enough to be considered weird.  It calls to a part of us that we all carry within: that anti-social, misfit side who feels that, truly, in our heart of hearts, we are ugly and alone.  Only, in Keith, we find that part magnified, personified to a hideous degree.  There is something quietly disturbing about a man struggling with so many problems adapting to society, trying to overcome the shame he feels in himself and his deplorable condition.  But to say that it is weird based on that facet alone is to ignore the unflinching blandness surrounding Keith and the lack of any character whatsoever in the world Frownland creates.

COMMENTS: Cited by many media outlets as a comedy, Frownland is a crushing personal statement of loneliness and isolation in a city of millions.  If this is a comedy, then it is a comedy of the absurdity to which modern life is betrothed.

From the very first moment, Ronald Bronstein fashions an air of shame and anxiety around the central character, Keith, that is hard to shake.  Keith is a dreg of humanity, a product of a lack of any esteem or dignity, and while it doesn’t excuse his behavior at times, it is worth noting that he isn’t exactly like the hideous beast he watches on a televised horror movie in an early scene.  But everything about him is unappealing, from his appearance to his treatment of his semi-friends to the way he lies just to try to relate to other human beings.  He is not even an anti-hero: he’s an anti-anything, a character that admittedly took a lot of guts to commit to film, and one that will live in infamy in the indie circuit for years to come.

Bronstein has a very dark, organic vision that threatens to swallow the viewer in a miasma of dilapidated retro culture.  It has the heart of an angst-ridden 70s independent feature, the set pieces of an 80s European film, the youth-centric mindset of a low-budget 90s film, but for all we know it is set in 2007.  Nothing is given as far as details, and we can only guess while the unsettling score drifts in and out of the background.  It is an effort that many will compare to John Cassavetes, with its heavy mood and deeply troubled characters, but in the rhythms and pacing of the hypnotic dialog Bronstein traces out, I think there is a real visionary here who stands out from his peers.

Frownland is a work of art that tests us on a very cerebral level, and I for one am glad to have seen it.  I think it’s fair to keep this on the borderline for now, but with enough support behind it, it may very well earn its own spot on the List.  For a comedy in which I never laughed once, this might just be the best comedy I’ve seen all year.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…either a primal scream issued from a potentially dangerous mind, a wildly original work of outsider art, a doctoral thesis on how not to make friends and influence people, or all (or none) of the above. Only this much is certain: It’s been a while since something this gonzo turned up at a theater near you.”–Scott Foundas, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

This movie was suggested for review by reader “Rob”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.

Miscellanea

POSTMODERN MINIMALIST SHAKESPEARE AT THE LOCAL INDY FRINGE

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Bill Shakespeare’s play, Richard III, has always been a play about duality. Done right, it is a fun play, juxtaposing equal doses of black humor with rich, high octane melodrama.  It’s also a tough, balancing act and, perhaps for this reason, its usually not anybody’s idea of  first choice when tackling the Bard, but I suspect Indiana director and actor Tristan Ross revels in the challenge.

Tristan Ross as Richard IIIRoss has brought his post-modern, bare-boned, minimalist adaptation to the local IndyFringe Theater at 719 East St. Clair in Indianapolis, where it plays Thursday-Sunday until January 24.  This Richard III is the first of Ross’ planned series of cutting edge, contemporary Shakespeare plays with his “No Holds Bard Productions.”  If Richard goes well, Ross hopes to tackle Julius Caesar.

Ross’ adaptation is a concept-heavy Richard III, employing eight actors for fifteen roles.  Taking dualist themes to a refreshing extreme, Ross has issued his artist statement from his No Holds Bard website, “The characters all represent duality and I’ve done my best to make it as much of an ensemble piece as possible; that is, reducing Richard and strengthening the rest.  The duality is a reflection on Richard’s dual nature.  Every character is cast with a double.  For instance, one actor will play Elizabeth and Hastings.  Elizabeth is compassionate, sympathetic, and aware of Richard’s treason.  Hastings is competitive, vindictive, and believes Richard is her ally.”

Does Ross’ concept work?  For the most part, yes.  He has clearly thought the play Continue reading POSTMODERN MINIMALIST SHAKESPEARE AT THE LOCAL INDY FRINGE →