Tag Archives: Violence

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MONDAY (2000)

Mandei

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DIRECTED BY: Sabu (Hiroyuki Tanaka)

FEATURING: Shin’ichi Tsutsumi, Yasuko Matsuyuki, Ren Ohsugi, , Akira Yamamoto,

PLOT: A businessman awakens in a strange hotel room with no recollection as to how he got there; as reassembles his memories, he discovers that a number of shocking acts lead directly back to him.

COMMENTS: “Get a little booze in you and you’re a tough guy,” the mugger’s moll says. And right she is. Koichi Takagi, a meek middle manager (in Japanese parlance, a salaryman) can’t even stand up to his mouse-voiced girlfriend. But get a few drinks in him, he becomes an entirely different person. Confident, even cocky, and – provided with the proper tools – a spree killer. Kanpai!

Like Garfield but so much worse, Koichi is having a truly terrible Monday. He wakes up in an unfamiliar hotel room with multiple religious tomes open on his bedside table and no clear memory of his weekend. When the neurons finally begin to fire, they first recall an incredibly uncomfortable funeral where, through farcical hijinks, he is called upon to snip the wires on the corpse’s pacemaker with disastrous results. From there, his girlfriend dumps him after he fails to explain why he missed her birthday party. An attempt to drink away his woes lands him in the orbit of a yakuza boss, and soon he’s engaging in a highly charged dance number with the gangster’s girlfriend. Alcohol definitely seems to have loosened him up, but maybe too much, as will become apparent once he gets a hold of the mobster’s shotgun. Whoops.

A surprising number of reviewers seem to think that “’Monday’ is a movie for those who believe that fate has once again dealt them an especially bad day.” The thing is, I don’t think this is really a case of bad luck. There are three very clear causes at the root of Takagi’s rampage: a gurgling rage from overwork and underappreciation, a distinct inability to keep a clear head with all the liquor that’s thrust upon him, and the sudden and unfortunate availability of a Philadelphia-made shotgun. (One of his selected poisons, Henry McKenna Kentucky bourbon, also throws some shade at all-American vices.) Maybe one can argue that none of these things are intentional on Koichi’s part, but this isn’t just a rotten roll of the dice. Rather, he has reached the point where he is unable to hold himself back from bad choices. In a funny/tragic moment, Koichi begins to compose a maudlin suicide note, expressing regrets to his family and offering explicit instructions for taking care of his plants. But while he writes, he idly takes a swig (and then several more) from a nearby bottle of booze, and his tone becomes less conciliatory and more aggressive. That proves unfortunate, but that’s not dumb happenstance.

The revelation of Koichi’s lost weekend plays out like a darker version of The Hangover, but when he discovers that every channel on the television is talking about him, as well as the regrettable ease of perpetrating gun violence, Monday takes on a different tenor as he tries to find a way out of this mess. It soon becomes clear that he’s the only guest left in the hotel, and the place is surrounded by authorities waiting to apprehend him as a brutal murderer. Here is where the film makes its true bid for weirdness, deploying a series of massive tonal shifts and elaborate setpieces in quick succession. When the drunk and armed Koichi emerges from his hotel room, we’re treated to a violent action scene to compete with the likes of John Woo or Gareth Evans. When Koichi enters an elevator to make his way down to the street, he is accompanied by a gaggle of giddy white-painted demons urging him on as he indulges his worst impulses. And when he reaches the street and takes the lead detective hostage, he indulges in an amusingly self-serving inspirational speech that culminates in a public celebration akin to the boys coming home from war. It’s a dizzying display, but even if you thought you could draw any meaning from it, Sabu yanks the rug out by returning Koichi back to the hotel room to contemplate his predicament. And there we end, certain that it all means something, but sure of little else.

Monday relies heavily on the goodwill engendered by Tsutsumi’s affable performance. He seems like a decent man in a world where decency gets eaten for lunch, and even when his actions are at their most appalling, you hold out hope that he’ll come to his senses and pull himself out of the muck. But despite his charm, you can pity Koichi but you can’t really forgive him. His excuses have merit, but his actions are indisputable. Friday may be pay day, but Monday is when the bills come due.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The flashbacks become increasingly edgy as Sabu turns up the danger, as well as the weird… It’s the sort of thing that sends conventional moviegoers and I suppose overseas distributors running for the hills, but Sabu has too much on mind to be concerned about that. One thing Sabu is not is subtle, and serious issues, such as unchecked authority, glorified perceptions of violence, and the questionable right to take justice into one’s own hands, come to the forefront, even debated openly by the main character and those he confronts.” – Steve Kopian, Unseen Films (2022 screening)

(This movie was nominated for review by Tamori. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ABRUPTIO (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Evan Marlowe

FEATURING: Voices of James Marsters, Hana Mae Lee, Christopher McDonald, Jordan Peele, Robert Englund,

PLOT: Recovering alcoholic Les Hackels finds himself compelled to follow murderous instructions or a bomb implanted in his neck will detonate.

Still from "Aprubtio" (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Violent twists accumulate to breaking point as the plot lurches toward a supernatural conspiracy, with all its hapless character-victims played by humans-as-puppets.

COMMENTS: There’s societal collapse, a shadowy organization texting orders for murder, ill-conceived genetic experiments, a troupe of levitating aliens with tentacles, and perhaps the creepiest babies ever seen. All told, Les effectively handles these challenges with quiet, almost passive, determination. But that’s not what this movie is about—and what this movie is actually about challenges Les far more than the parade of creepy ultra-violence. Abruptio is about heaping great ladles of intrigue and ickiness, poured over the least proactive protagonist this side of Barry Lyndon.

His calm is broadcast through his medium, for he is a puppet—fortunately, the least creepy of the bunch. Puppetry can hit just about any tonal note from cute to uncanny, and the characters in this film all skew firmly to the latter. They are puppeted human actors, similar to Xhonneux‘s oddities in Marquis. The bodies move like ours, but all the heads and exposed limbs smack of prosthesis. Even the occasional bare breasts are obviously latex facsimiles positioned over the genuine article. This visual choice has its  ramifications—the entire film experience is always at least a little “off”—but is something of a blessing when you consider just what we’re seeing.

Les kills off his co-workers with a gas-spewing typewriter case. He massacred an innocent family. And more. He blindly follows orders sent to him from an anonymous contact on his mobile phone, his dispassionate puppet face, and deadpan tone of voice, suggesting a deeply troubled, but deeply tranquil, mind. These acts of carnage and survival are a lot to take in, but there’s a point in the growing grisliness. Why are we enduring this alongside the “hero”? How are these disparate Saw-style acts and executions tied together? What is “Herason”? Why does the digital alarm continue to blink 10:22? And just what does the police chief want him to confess to?

Abruptio smacks a good deal of The Trial, but with ultraviolence. It also brings to mind two films whose titles would give the game away, but I’ll hint that one stars Anthony Hopkins and the other doesn’t. The uncanny journey Les takes has the grinding feel of a video game as he lurches from one nasty imperative to the next, attempting to keep his new ward (a rape survivor who emerges from the background dystopia) calm while dodging encounters with his overbearing mother. The final reveal comes as tragic relief, through procedural electric shock. The ghoulish veneer is stripped off, pieces fall into place, and Les finds himself staring down something a good deal more unpleasant than mayhem, murders, mutants—and the creepiest babies ever seen.

Abruptio is scheduled to screen in Gardena, CA (filmmakers in attendance), Riverside, CA, Kansas City,  MO, and scattered independent venues starting this week; in Seattle from Oct. 4-13; and there’s also a one-night screening at a drive-in in Orefiled, PA on Oct. 10. Blu-rays drop Dec. 10, streaming is still to-be-announced, and you can keep up with added dates by continually refreshing the film’s home page or following their Facebook page.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a film that’s just too weird to ignore… Even viewers who find it too strange to genuinely enjoy will still be suitably perplexed when they watch it. Simply put, this is a film that really does have something for everyone.”–David Gelmini, Dread Central (contemporaneous)

Abruptio
  • Les Hackel hates his life. He works a dead-end job. He discovers a fresh incision behind his neck and his friend says it's bomb.

FANTASIA 2023: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: VINCENT MUST DIE (2023)

Vincent doir mourir

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Stéphan Castang

FEATURING: Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, François Chattot

PLOT: Vincent flees his humdrum city life when it takes a deadly turn as more and more strangers try to kill him.

Still from "Vincent Must Die" (2023)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: L’absurde et la comédie comme Dupieux, le commentaire social comme Godard, et un peu d’ultra-violence comme Romero? Une combinaison gagnante.

COMMENTS: Vincent’s boss had a dream: a horde of deer in an open field, his mother in a grand, flowing dress—just like she has in real life!—and a newly-grown pair of antlers. What could it mean? Vincent (Karim Leklou) doesn’t care; politely, he shifts the conversation to inquire who that new guy is. Boss tells him it’s Hugo the intern. Vincent jokes to the new lad, “Where’s my coffee?” It falls flat, and later that day Vincent’s face gets smashed by repeated laptop blows from the intern. It’s all very calm, and sets a comedic start ahead of the ratcheting horror to come.

Castang is one of those irritatingly sure-handed newcomers, having floored the audience at Cannes with his feature debut Vincent Must Die before shuffling it across the Atlantic to floor the Fantasia audience. Vincent’s journey from mild-mannered office jockey to prey is more of a shift in his bodily injuries than his behavior. Leklou conveys affable soft-spoken softness and sheer personal terror with masterful body language, apt facial expressions, and (almost) unfailing placidity.

The premise could well have been concocted during a night of one-upsmanship between Godard and Dupieux, with heavy references to Weekend and the quiet office absurdity permeating Keep An Eye Out. For reasons never explained, more and more people—strangers, friends, and even the damaged manic-pixie-dream-girl waitress, Margaux—cannot resist the urge to attempt to murder the protagonist, using whatever is at hand. Not long after his attack by laptop, a passing co-worker stabs Vincent in the wrist multiple times. And his boss, the fellow with the Buñuelian dream of antlers and mother, thinks it best Vincent spend some time away from the office. You know, to help morale. (Everyone’s been a bit tense.)

And the world has gotten tense. As we join Vincent during his internet delvings and late night drives through the French countryside, more and more plot snippets flesh out a growing problem. Castang explores fury and abandon, uncomfortably drawing our attention to a world becoming more and more unhinged. An understated absurdist comedy morphs increasingly into a febrile survival horror, spiked with the requisite French sex and deadpan. I laughed, I gasped, and I began eyeing a malfunctioning automatic door by the movie screen with more apprehension than logic should allow. But logic went out the door, as fear stole its way through the stunned crowd.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“While Vincent Must Die is first and foremost a horror, it is also a mystery, sometimes a thriller, occasionally dramatic, and absurdly comedic.” – Eamon Tracy, Irish Film Critic (contemporaneous)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)

DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Winding Refn

FEATURING: Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas, Vithaya Pansringarm, Yayaying Rhatha Phongam

PLOT: An expatriate American drug smuggler in Bangkok becomes enmeshed in an escalating cycle of violence following the murder of his brother, with increasing pressure from his revenge-minded mother and a persistent sword-wielding cop.

Still from Only God Forgives (2013)

COMMENTS: The power of success is immense. For the filmmaker who receives acclaim for their work, the decision about what to do next marks a decision point of unusual gravity. Is this a time to pursue a longed-for passion project? A call to double down on the styles and tropes that first merited attention? A surrender to the siren call of mass entertainment? The choice speaks to a director’s very soul.

So it says a lot about Nicolas Winding Refn that, hot off the success of Drive, he went all in on a moody, bloody, glacially paced meditation on vengeance and justice. Refn renews his commitment to evocative visuals, bathing a dark and seedy Bangkok with stark contrasts of red and blue and framing his actors with an eye to capturing their place in the universe. But he does all this in service of a story that marinates in grimness, where everyone starts out bad and only gets worse, if they change at all. Refn’s response to success seems to be to hit back at the very things that brought it.

Refn displays a remarkable commitment to not doing anything that feels like the next logical choice. For a film predicated upon the twin impulses of sex and violence, he refuses to do anything that could be misconstrued as pandering to the baser desires of the audience. When he shows sex, it’s isolated and unsatisfying to everyone involved. When he shows violence, it is brutal. He frequently withholds the direct impact of this violence, but when he does let it show, he is unrelenting. In the most vivid example, a character actually tells people in the room to close their eyes and watch nothing while a scene of torture methodically unfolds. It could be a command to the audience.

This perverse contrariness extends to the performances of his actors. Gosling walks about in a perpetual state of resigned exhaustion, barely speaking (IMDb reports that he has 17 lines of dialogue in the entire film; this seems accurate) and appearing beleaguered and helpless even when he has clear agency. His counterpart, Pansringarm, is equally taciturn, but at least blessed with the certainty that he is in the right and backed with the force of the sword that always mysteriously seems to be at hand. At least he has karaoke to give him some release; the film frequently cuts away to what looks like a cheaply decorated wedding hall to give the policeman a chance to serenade a roomful of his underlings with a plaintive musical number. Maybe that’s why, when the two men finally square up for a brawl, Gosling fails to lay so much as a finger on his opponent. If only he’d sung.

Kristin Scott Thomas, on the other hand, seems to be joining us from another movie entirely. Arriving with bottle-blonde hair, leopard prints, and a hardcore devotion to vulgarity and crudeness, her nightmare mom feels like a breath of fresh air simply because of the change in energy. She is consistently emasculating with Gosling, utterly brutal toward his pretend girlfriend (she’s not entirely wrong, but, you know, social niceties), and openly dismissive of everyone else. Perhaps everything you need to know about her is contained in her much-quoted response to the news that her late son had raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl (and this after having been denied his previous requests to have sex with a 14-year-old girl and then the club owner’s own daughter): “Well, I’m sure he had his reasons.” An argument could be made that every bad thing that happens in Only God Forgives is directly attributable to her, which may just be more evidence of Refn’s agenda.

Viewers were notoriously split when Only God Forgives came out. Audiences at Cannes responded with a mix of applause and booing. The critics’ score at Rotten Tomatoes is around 40%, just below middling but with enough raves to merit further review. Rex Reed hysterically labeled it “unquestioningly in the top five” of the worst movies ever made, which given his intense dislike for anything with even a hint of quirk should makes us think more charitably about this particular film (although we must take his assessment seriously, as he himself earned consideration for the list with the lone film in which he himself starred). Honestly, it’s easy to understand everyone’s confusion. The film is uncommonly well-made but extremely hollow and off-putting in its content. And there’s every evidence that this is exactly what Refn intends; love it or hate it, that’s exactly what he wants from you. It’s a strange ambition, but no one can say he didn’t earn it. After all, it’s not your forgiveness he wants.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“But as gorgeous as the film’s world and imagery look, Refn’s frustratingly slow pacing and wildly uneven tone are very off-putting; this film is throttled by the eccentricities of its creator. There are probably dozens of films that Refn and Co. are drawing inspiration from, but the references and/or homages are so esoteric it’s hard to estimate the number of people who would actually get them… The tone is a constant mismatch of high-brow film art and low-brow grindhouse-style violence that never  coalesces into a discernible point. It’s everything arthouse haters mean when they talk about films that are ‘weird for the sake of being weird.'”–Kofi Outlaw, Screen Rant (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “a”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: I MARRIED A STRANGE PERSON! (1997)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Tom Larson, Charis Michelsen, Richard Spore

PLOT: Mid-orgasm, two birds crash into Grant’s satellite receiver, whose redirected beam gives him super powers.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: When the line, “Have you ever tried to tell a 50-ton tank to stop having sex?” makes perfect sense in context, it stands to reason the surrounding film is peculiar. Plympton’s surrealist animated comedy is fit to burst with caterpillar daydreams, organ juggling, and boobs big enough to fill the house.

COMMENTS: The word “strange” is right in the title, along with an appropriate exclamation mark. The film opens with a bit of duck sex, replete with tongue-chomping, teeth-shattering lust (literally, figuratively speaking). And as a flight-of-fantasy indictment of network television’s pervasive malignancy, it’s somewhat ironic that the hero—Grant, the “strange person” of the title—received his phenomenal powers from that very danger. But perhaps it’s not ironic so much as appropriate. If this movie is at all suggestive of Bill Plympton’s views, he finds the human mind far more nonsensical than any invention yet made manifest.

On the topic of manifesting, that is just the power our hero develops. After the amorous anatidaean opener, we meet Grant, an accountant (or something) with the squarest jaw and doublest chin this side of Hollywood’s heroic age. With a pulsating boil on the back of his neck, his day-dreamy outlook changes his reality: the insects his mother-in-law fears appear from her clothes and swarm into her mouth; his chirpy, lawn-mowing neighbor ends up pursued by a giant, psychotic blade of grass with a vendetta; and mid-coitus his wife’s boobs grow to ginormous size, crashing through rooms and smashing through windows. All this does not go unnoticed, neither by the witnesses of his visions-made-real, nor by SmileCorp studio’s Machiavellian overlord, Larson P. Giles.

But back to the sex. It is with a modicum of surprise that I found this film to be R-rated. Granted, it’s animation: a medium in which one can get away with a lot more than any live action equivalent. Bodily explosions, a man hog-tied with another’s intestines, and so on: these are kinds of things that could not get a live action theatrical release, R-rated or otherwise. And there are plenty of “these kinds of things” in Strange Person. In one long-form example, Grant’s friend Solly, a comedian on the cusp of failure, saves his act through sheer force of showmanship by self-dismantling in front of a live studio audience.

But back to the sex. I have seen few non-pornographic films with more sex than I found in I Married a Strange Person! That is not to say any of it was erotic. Plympton’s style doesn’t bend that way; instead, it bends as far away as possible from mundane concerns—like sex. It’s there, but presented on the very edges of acceptable taste (much less “good taste”, a concept decried in an opening quotation from Picasso), smashing like a pastel hammer into the viewer’s consciousness. What truly tips the scale, with weirdo-violent aplomb, is the film’s sweetness. The musical interludes (“Would You Love Me If…?” and “How’d You Get So Cute?” among them) and the overarching theme of love and forgiveness add a saccharine spike of whimsy to the absurd and violent reverie. Rest assured, I Married a Strange Person! ends on a happy note… of sex.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Plympton] is head and shoulders above Spumco, Spike and Mike, and yes, even hometown boy Mike Judge when it comes to creating the weirdest, wildest, most sublimely outré cartoons in the world… Absurdist comedy of this sort is rarely seen these days…”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)