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List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: VERA (2003)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Francisco Athié

FEATURING: Marco Antonio Arzate, Urara Kusanagi

PLOT: Trapped underground, a miner hallucinates, eventually encountering a green alien creature who leads him into the spirit world. Still from Vera (2003)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: On sheer weirdness, this trip skirting the veil that separates life and death would make the List easily. A couple of faults hold it back from making it on the first ballot, however: it’s very slow to get started, and the imagination behind the visual effects greatly exceeds the budget’s capacity to realize them.

COMMENTS: With this production, I get the feeling that Francisco Athié saw the chance to make the dream visionary feature of a lifetime and decided to seize it, even though the necessary funding wasn’t there. When Vera‘s imagery is on, it’s mind-meltingly sublime, but there are too many times when the CGI isn’t up to the tasks Athié sets for it. The movie serves as a reminder of why you should always shell out the big bucks for the top-shelf peyote, and not save a few pesos buying the shriveled-up buttons on sale for half off.

Although the love that went into it is clear, Vera feels stretched out: there is probably forty-five minutes of good stuff, and fifteen minutes of amazing stuff, here, but it’s padded out to an eighty-minute feature. The first ten minutes wordlessly depict life in an isolated Mexican village, while the title character doesn’t show up until the movie is halfway over. The first hallucinatory moment introduces the trademark visual awkwardness: it’s meant to depict a bone-chilling wasteland, but it looks like the main character is suddenly playing a mime walking in a stiff wind in front of a green-screen snowstorm. After twenty-five minutes with very little of consequence occurring, you may feel like giving up on Vera, but if you stick around you will be rewarded, because things start cooking after the old man trapped in the mine adds urine and blood from his penis (ouch!) to a cauldron of boiling lead in order to conjure up a jade statue of a Mayan god. The miner simultaneously prays to the Christian God, and to “Lady Balam” and the Winds, and modern mythology is added to the Christian/pagan mix when he discovers a little green (wo)man who projects a stream of 0s and 1s from an orifice in her torso.

This creature, the mystical “Vera” of the title, is at times crudely computer-generated, with a bobbing head that makes it resemble a character in a Star Wars ripoff video game, while at other times the entity is portrayed by the mesmerizing Japanese dancer Urara Kusanagi. The two different embodiments of the character are certainly weird, but probably not in the way Athié intended. The main effect is to draw attention to the cheapness of the effects, and make you wish the CGI had been scrapped for more scenes with the graceful and mysterious Kusanagi. Marvelous mystical visions accompany the doomed man as Vera guides him to the afterlife: a child skeleton that dances with Vera, the Virgin Mary appearing in a stalactite, and the green-skinned guide fetching fruit off of an Eden-like tree. And if the visuals are at times sketchy, the music and sound design, which ranges from ambient drones to Amazonian percussion, is always on point setting the chthonic mood. The resulting concoction mixes the promiscuously mythological preoccupations of an with the deliberate pacing of an , but, unfortunately, as realized by the visual effects team behind a SyFy shark movie.

“Bright Lights Film Journal” supplies insight on the film’s title: “According to writer-editor-director Athié, Vera ‘means trust and faith in Cyrillic (Russian), the truth in Italian, the side of the road in Spanish, and it is a very beautiful feminine name. Therefore, in a way, it points to the faith and trust you need to follow a path that is true to your own perception of the otherworldly’.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange, hallucinatory film that reveals itself in a slow, ritualistic way.”–Marilyn Ferdinand, Ferdy on Films

(This movie was nominated for review by NGBoo, who described it as “a beautiful metaphysical fantasy, that explores the afterlife, inspired by Mayan and Christian religions.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: GALLINO, THE CHICKEN SYSTEM (2012)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Octavi Pujades, , Sasha Slugina

PLOT: A man travels to Antarctica planning to rendezvous with a woman there later; he seeks refuge from the cold in a chicken shack, where he enters into philosophical discussions about pornography with the proprietor.

Still from Gallino, the Chicken System (2012)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Carlos Atanes slaves away in relative obscurity, continuing to make defiantly weird movies his way, despite a lack of funding and mainstream notice. His work as a whole arguably deserves representation on this List. While I wouldn’t say that we will automatically restrict “Atanic” entries to a single candidate, as of now, the apocalyptic fetish musical Maximum Shame is the Atanes film to beat. Poultry fetishists, however, may disagree.

COMMENTS: The tagline proclaims this a “pornophilosophical film,” and so it is, although it’s probably heavier on the porno than the philosophy. Still, as far as academic name dropping goes, you’ll hear shout-outs to thinkers like Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, along with discussions of Bertrand Russell’s “barber’s paradox.” There is also the debate, between the mournful lover and the Antarctic poulterer, about the philosophy of pornography: the latter considers obscenity to be a species of topography, and an illustration of Gallino‘s putative thesis that human beings are essentially “donuts.”

But, this movie is not all abstract speculation. You can’t satirize pornography without making pornography, and there is plenty of filth here, although of an exceedingly strange sort: to wit, if you have a fetish for seeing women deep-throat chicken drumsticks, this is the movie you’ve been waiting for your whole life. “Fisting” is also a major subplot, and in another episode the planet of Jupiter gets violated in its red spot. The movie’s climax (forgive the wording) takes place in a sort of greasy trans-dimensional chicken-tube glory hole; the afterglow involves first contact with three “Sidereal pornstars.”

There’s also some weird stuff in there, including a Spanish actor playing a Spanish fried chicken magnate pretending to be from Texas, speaking Spanish with a Spaniard’s idea of a Texas accent. Things get so strange that the two main characters in the Antarctic chicken shack debate whether they’re trapped in a dream; they conclude that they cannot be, because things seem incoherent to them, whereas in a dream impossible things seem natural.

As for conventional carnality, the movie has only two short topless sequences. Most of the flesh on display is of the extra-crispy variety. The substitution of a poultry-based erotic system allows Gallino to get away with imagery that would otherwise make this a XXX feature, evoking the queasy arousing-yet-repellant feeling we experience when we see someone acting out a sexual fetish we don’t share. Today, we live in a world that’s awash in smut, but actual pornographic iconography rarely makes it into mainstream films. Even the explicit moments in arthouse films like Antichrist refer to real human sex acts rather than the fantasy rituals of porn. Gallino looks at pornography obliquely, the way an alien might view it; it appears both ridiculous and strangely poetic, a landscape full of symbols and secrets. Atanes is well aware of how the average person (or average critic) will view Gallino‘s assault on the viewer’s narrative and sexual sensibilities. He takes a shot at preempting criticism via an in-movie film critic who says, about the work of fictional art-porn director Gropius Cantor: “it’s a vulgar and disgusting concatenation of pseudo-pornographic shots lacking any appeal.” (While he says this, we watch an unrelated scene of a woman shoving her lubricated fist down another woman’s throat). Of Cantor’s legacy, the critic concludes, “his films became worse with time, more cryptic, more obtuse, more unappealing and utterly unwatchable.” Atanes’ films are becoming more cryptic and obtuse, but the more unappealing and unwatchable they become to “normal” people, the more fascinating they become to us.

Movies like Gallino, the Chicken System find themselves in an impossible marketing position. They really need rental outlets to allow people to take a low-cost chance on them, so the movie can eventually spread its reputation by word-of-mouth. Yet, they are too specialized and weird for outlets like Netflix to stock. Gallino is being sold in the U.S. in a DVD-R version. It includes numerous behind-the-scenes clips, all in Spanish.

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this movie was provided by the distributor for review.

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ABCS OF DEATH (2012)

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Weirdest!(segments F, W, Z)

DIRECTED BY: Kaare Andrews, , & , Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, , Adrián García Bogliano, Xavier Gens, Lee Hardcastle, , Thomas Cappelen Malling, Jorge Michel Grau, Anders Morgenthaler, , Banjong Pisanthanakun, , , Jon Schnepp, , Timo Tjahjanto, Andrew Traucki, Nacho Vigalondo, Jake West, Ti West, , Adam Wingard,

FEATURING: Too many actors to list individually, and no one appears onscreen for long enough to qualify as “featured”

PLOT: 26 short horror films about death, each inspired by an assigned letter of the alphabet.

Still from The ABCs of Death (2012)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As you might expect from an anthology with a hefty twenty-six entries in a multitude of styles, it’s too uneven and not consistently weird enough for consideration for the List. That said, there are three very, very strange shorts here, and several others that nudge the weirdometer at least a little bit, which makes this worth a look-see.

COMMENTS: Rendered in a wild variety of morbid styles ranging from the avant-garde to the zany, these twenty six short films about death derive from a new breed of up and coming punk directors working in the diffuse genre that now loosely goes by the name “horror.” All the usual disclaimers about anthology films apply to The ABCs of Death, but this compilation faces an additional alphabetical hurdle: if A, B and C are all duds (and I say they are), the movie gets off to a slow start, and there’s nothing the editors can do about it. The order is locked in place and randomized, and the curators can’t impose any sort of flow on the show. The fact that each entry has to be unusually short (after the 11 minutes of end credits are subtracted from the run time we come out to four-and-a-half minutes per mini-movie) is more of a virtue than a drawback, since we aren’t asked to invest much time in the inevitable losers and failed experiments. The necessity for each director to hit hard and fast, with no time to build up true horror, led me to expect shock, gore, and cruel comedy to dominate over true terror. ABCs delivers on that score, but there was also a trend that make me wonder where horror’s head is at. Three out of the twenty-six entries—that’s 11.5%—prominently feature a toilet, and that’s not even counting the one that’s flatulence based. Has horror finally dug to the bottom of the bucket of viscera, and now there’s nowhere else to turn but the toilet to elicit cheap disgust? A more promising development, and one that’s much more to the point of this website, is that the exact same number of shorts (3, or 11%) were unabashedly weird-–suggesting that cutting-edge horror continues to be the last refuge for surrealism in pop culture. Before describing the three bizarre gems, we’ll mention a couple of odd, and not so odd, runners-up. “P is for Pressure,” set in a third-world country and involving a prostitute’s quest to buy an expensive present for her daughter’s birthday, is the omnibus’ only dramatic entry; although it has a morally sickening climax, it is authentically and unexpectedly touching. Though not written by Srdjan Spasojevic (who turns in an extreme but unmemorable riff on “R”), the violent and transgressive porn fantasia “L is for Libido” has a disturbing Serbian Film vibe (with a hallucinatory kick) that soils the mind. On the opposite end of the sexual spectrum, Catette and Forzani’s “O is for Orgasm” is a surprisingly beautiful and experimental explosion of color-filter eroticism that traffics in the concept of sexual release as “la petite mort.” In a normal compilation, “H is for Hydroelectric,” a Chuck-Jones-does-furry-porn style adventure in which an anthropomorphic Nazi stripper fox lures a British bulldog pilot to his doom, would be the WTF-iest entry. Here, however, it’s only an honorable mention, as that title is literally taken by “W is for WTF?” This is a study in surrealistic economy: initially appearing to be a self-aware parody, it quickly establishes a comic book mesh of Satanic gore porn, killer walruses, zombie clowns, and decapitated animators, then spins the images in a psychedelic blender for two gloriously insane minutes. “W” features miniskirted nurses and princess warriors in chain mail bikinis, but for gleefully adolescent gross-out sleaze, nothing beats Noboru Iguchi’s already notorious “F is for Fart.” It’s the tender tale of a lesbian schoolgirl that defiantly expresses a humanistic preference for the gas of an earthly lover over the vengeful flatus of God. “Fart”‘s motto is “let’s pass beyond the boundaries of good taste and become one together,” and does it ever achieve the first part, at least—this is a bad-taste stunner for an unstunable age. Still, top honors in the “weird” category go to Iguchi’s frequent collaborator Yoshihiro Nishimura, who continues to set himself apart as the brigade’s most inventive and audacious talent with ABCs’ capper, “Z is for Zetsumetsu” (“extinction”). A blond Nazi hermaphrodite fights a nude kung fu woman while a Japanese Dr. Strangelove comments on the action; it’s somehow inspired by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquakes, and there are satirical references to American imperialism, the nuclear power industry, and Japan’s own sense of racial superiority. A topless rendition of the 9-11 bombings may have Americans shaking their heads, but it’s hard to be too offended by something that resembles an insane sushi chef’s wet dream (multiple characters ejaculate rice). Whatever associations this stew of mad images raises in the Japanese consciousness, its bizarro bona fides are unquestionable.

Of course, we would have highlighted an entirely different set of segments if this piece had been written for a gorehound journal or a monster blog. One of the issues with what marches under the banner of “horror” these days is that it’s a loose confederation of disreputable interests that encompasses torture porn, black comedy, sick eroticism and experimental imagery alongside traditional stories of vampires, hauntings and madman. With two films prominently featuring pedophilia, and the aforementioned scatology and surrealism joining the expected blood and guts, ABCs‘ selections suggests that the modern horror genre is becoming a final resting place for the generally transgressive rather than for the terrifying per se.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Wow, what a weird, anarchic, energetic and exciting display, from claymation to puppetry to crazy postmodern collage to regular old live action!… I’ll take the movies that pissed me off too, if in some way they help make possible things as divergent and weird and exciting as Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s abstract, erotic ‘O Is for Orgasm,’ Simon Rumley’s grave and dramatic prostitution mini-melodrama ‘P Is for Pressure,’ and animator Jon Schnepp’s hyperactive every-genre-at-once ‘W Is for WTF?’ (probably my favorite of them all).”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE RAMBLER (2013)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: ,

PLOT: A nameless man is released from prison and hitchhikes across the West heading for a job at his brother’s ranch, meeting absurd characters along the way.

Still from The Rambler (2013)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It’s a defiantly weird and dryly funny mix of dusty movie clichés and arthouse surrealism, set in that timeless, existential American movie desert where the cowboys and hobos of myth once roamed.

COMMENTS: The Rambler is sure to be marketed as a surrealistic horror film, which is a shame. I think people will enjoy this druggy road trip through the Weird West more if they go in with the mindset that they are attending a black comedy with horror bits. The title character—who is almost never seen without his rumpled cowboy hat, sunglasses, and a cigarette dangling from his lip—is a parody of every ultra-macho B-movie man-with-no-name existential outlaw since Clint Eastwood. When he briefly takes a job as a hobo boxer, he’s about to whip his shades off to fight his opponent (who, rather unfairly, has a nasty hook for a hand), but his promoter advises him to keep them on because they “look cool.” He’s so unflappable that when someone tosses a severed limb into his lap he brushes it away and shrugs nonchalantly. He’s a man of few words—mostly the word “no”—and at one point, when “the girl” presses him on his feelings, we see why, as he stumbles to put together a coherent sentence. His blank stoicism as he slouches his way through a world of redneck nightmares is a running joke; the only character who gets much of a reaction from him is the living corpse who pukes a gallon of yellow bile onto his face while he’s handcuffed to a bedpost, and even then the Rambler registers only mild annoyance (he also forgets to clean the crusty vomit off his face before he resumes hitchhiking, and wonders why no one will pick him up). The movie is so deadpan in its absurdity that it’s the sincerely intended horror sequences, like a trip to a family home that resembles a hallucinatory funeral parlor, that seem out of place. The movie’s final sequence grows from an effectively sick and squeamish nightmare notion, but arguably overplays it a bit, with the incessant screaming becoming annoying rather than horrific. The knockout oddball character is a mummy-toting professor who records dreams onto VHS, although he hasn’t quite perfected the technology yet. Lindsay Pulsipher is the sunshiny femme fatale (and horrific specter of commitment) who won’t stay dead and who haunts the Rambler throughout his psychedelic odyssey. Mulroney inhabits the title role like a suit of clothes that haven’t been changed for weeks. Given the picaresque, incident-to-incident nature of the movie, it’s necessarily hit-and-miss, but the road movie architecture serves the surreal format—there is just enough loose structure to keep us grounded, as we know the Rambler is on a journey with a clear destination in mind, even if we suspect it’s a mirage and settling down into a steady job as a cowhand goes against his rambling nature. When I attended Reeder’s debut movie, The Oregonian, almost a fourth of the midnight audience walked out before the ending. For The Rambler I only spotted a single early exit. With The Rambler‘s exploding heads, severed limbs, and corpse-eating dogs, the lack of flight into the aisles wasn’t because the material was less grotesque or shocking than the prior film’s notorious “rainbow pee” sequence. Perhaps it was because word of The Rambler‘s eccentricities had gotten around and the audience was better prepared this time, or maybe I simply saw the movie with a tougher-minded, more weird-friendly audience. I think the answer to the conundrum is simpler, though: The Rambler is a better and more watchable movie than The Oregonian, largely due to the abundant humor. If Reeder keeps improving his craft at this rate, he’ll have to abdicate his title as “the walkout king of Sundance.”

Throughout the movie the Rambler carries a guitar, although he rarely plays it, because, as he says, “I haven’t found a song yet.” Per Reeder’s post-screening statements, he based the character on the wandering hobo folksinger archetype, a la Woody Guthrie (the title itself might have been suggested by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, who always wore a cowboy hat). The Rambler has been picked up for distribution by Anchor Bay and is currently available on video-on-demand; it releases on DVD June 25.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Rambler just seems weird for its own sake and in love with cheap shock value… The overall effort comes off like a half-assed pastiche of the entire cult section of the old Kim’s Video on Bleecker Street.”–Steve Erickson, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: L’AGE D’OR (1930)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Luis Buñuel

FEATURING: Gaston Modot, Lya Lys

PLOT: What plot? The screenplay was co-written by Salvador Dalí! A man and a woman long to have sex, but for various reasons they never do. Along the way, other things happen for no reason at all.

Still from L'Age D'or (1930)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: This is a direct follow-up to Un Chien Andalou, arguably the weirdest film ever made; it’s the only other film by the Bunuel/Dalí combo; and it’s the only other official Surrealist movie by Buñuel. So it ought to be a shoo-in. Unfortunately, as with so many sequels, it utterly fails to live up to the promise of the first film.

COMMENTS: Although this is often described as a collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, they fell out before shooting started, so Dalí’s contribution was probably minimal (though depending on who you ask, he may have contributed little to Un Chien Andalou either). Scripted to run for 20 minutes, it somehow ballooned out of control and tripled in length during shooting. Fortunately, the aristocratic patron who provided the finance simply reached for his checkbook and told them to carry on regardless. Or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it. Un Chien Andalou is 16 minutes long, which is about as long as that level of blistering irrationality can realistically be maintained for, both in terms of the scriptwriter’s imagination and the audience’s patience. Stretched to just over an hour, the same kind of thing feels baggy, and is at times downright boring.

After a totally irrelevant prologue—the first three minutes are a documentary about scorpions—the film proper begins with a ragged man observing four elderly bishops sitting on a rock by the sea mumbling prayers. He rushes to a tumbledown shack and informs the other ragged men within, who appear to be guerrillas of some kind, that the “Majorcans” have arrived. In what seems to be a typically sly joke expressing Buñuel’s growing disillusionment with the Surrealist movement (he left in 1932), these men listlessly perform utterly pointless activities, and when they take up arms to combat the forces of religion, they’re so crippled and worn-out that almost all of them collapse, apparently from sheer apathy, before making it as far as the coast. The one man who gets there has just time to observe that the bishops have spontaneously turned into skeletons anyway before he too collapses. In an otherwise nonsensical speech, the most listless of the lot tells the others that they’re sure to win because they have paintbrushes. And their leader is played by the Surrealist painter Max Ernst (who remained a faithful Surrealist, so maybe the joke’s on him too).

At this point a flotilla of small boats arrives, and numerous civic dignitaries and smartly-dressed persons disembark. It becomes apparent that the death of the four Majorcan bishops has inspired these people to build the city of Rome (in 1930). However, the ceremony of laying the foundation stone is interrupted by the first appearance of the two protagonists, who are attempting to have very loud sex in a pool of mud. Not surprisingly, they are prevented by the outraged crowd and dragged away.

Not a bad beginning, but from this point on, it’s strictly by-the-numbers Surrealism. Gaston Modot, a very prolific character actor, is suitably intense, but kicking puppies and blind men is a poor substitute for slashing a woman’s eyeball! Lya Lys at one point comes across as the world’s worst actress, and is obviously using an autocue, but this must have been deliberate, since she too had a mainstream career (weird movie buffs can see her in The Return Of Doctor X, in which Humphrey Bogart, for the first and last time, plays a vampire). The almost-consummation of their passion goes on far too long without being anywhere near as intense or explicit as the similar scene in Un Chien Andalou. Priests and bishops in vaguely comical situations recur time and time again, we see the first use of Buñuel’s characteristic “incongruous animal indoors” trope, random passers-by kick violins down the street or have loaves on their heads, and so on. But it all seems a bit tired.

There are standout moments—a man cold-bloodedly killing his son for the most trivial of reasons, a suicide falling not to the floor but the ceiling, Lya Lys passionately sucking the toe of a statue—but not enough of them. There’s a tacked-on ending, in which, as a lengthy intertitle informs us, a quartet of degenerates emerge from a bestial orgy (actually the one described in the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom), and one of them turns out to be Jesus Christ. It comes across as a rather childish ploy to get the film banned on purpose.

Ultimately this is an ambitious failure, and not really very interesting. So many specific motifs from this film cropped up 44 years later in The Phantom Of Liberty that the latter movie could not implausibly be viewed as a secret remake. Perhaps Buñuel, always a lover of in-jokes, knowing that his career was almost over, was making his biggest in-joke of all?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an exhilarating, irrational masterpiece of censor-baiting chutzpah.”–Jamie Russel, BBC (DVD)