Tag Archives: Weirdest!

Canonically Weird (The List)

109. EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL [AUCH ZWERGE HABEN KLEIN ANGEFANGEN] (1970)

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“To put it mildly, Even Dwarfs Started Small is a bit bizarre… Because Herzog’s film makes little direct reference to social-historical conditions outside of the sealed-of institution in which it takes place, questions remain as to what the film ‘means.’ It seems as though something is being allegorized, but little in the film helps decode it… [Dwarfs is] indeed allegorical in the way that Kafka’s works are allegorical: it reflects the world back to us not as it actually is, but in a distorted form, as though seen through a glass darkly. The intention may be to force us to recognize our world by re-presenting it to us in this strange and alienating incarnation.”–Brad Pager in The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Helmut Döring, Paul Glauer,

PLOT: As the film begins we infer that a group of people in some sort of institution, possibly a mental asylum, have revolted, and an “instructor” has barricaded himself in a manor house while holding one of them prisoner. As the instructor tries to reason with the rebels and waits for the arrival of the police, the insurgents vandalize the property in increasingly bizarre ways: lighting flower pots on fire, fixing a stolen car so that it circles endlessly around a track and throwing crockery at it, and crucifying a monkey. All parts are played by dwarfs, although the buildings and props are scaled normally.

Still from Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)

BACKGROUND:

  • Herzog financed Even Dwarfs Started Small, his second feature, with funds he received when he won the German National Film Award for his first feature film, Signs of Life. Dwarfs was then banned by the German censors on its release.
  • The film was shot on Lanzarote, a volcanic island in the Canary Islands.
  • Herzog partially attributes the dark influences of the film to the fact that before making it he had been imprisoned in a third world prison while shooting footage for another movie in Cameroon in the paranoid weeks after a coup attempt. While incarcerated he contracted a blood parasite and ran a high fever.
  • The production was plagued with problems: one of the dwarfs was struck by the driverless car (he was unscathed), then the same actor caught on fire (he had minor injuries). With the morale among the non-professional troupe low, Herzog promised the actors that if they completed the film, he would jump into a cactus patch and allow them to film it. The actors stuck with it and Herzog fulfilled his end of the bargain.
  • A scene of piglets nursing at what appears to be the corpse of their mother is disturbing and proved highly controversial. The sow’s eyes are shut and it lies almost perfectly still, but its legs clearly jerk during the feeding—though perhaps this is just a post-mortem reflex.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Hombre, the tiniest dwarf with the most demonic laugh, nearly chuckling himself to death as he watches a camel struggling to rise to its feet. Watch the scene and share an inexplicable nightmare with millions of other human beings.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Even the title of Even Dwarfs Started Small starts weird. What follows is a grotesque parade of cannibalistic chickens, insects dressed as a bride and groom, a crucified monkey, a defecating camel, and dwarfs running amok destroying everything in sight. Presented in bleak black and white in a heartlessly cold documentary style, it’s the gloomiest depiction of the triumph of the irrational ever filmed.


Re-release trailer for Even Dwarfs Started Small

COMMENTS: A provocateur knows he is doing something right when he gets criticized from Continue reading 109. EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL [AUCH ZWERGE HABEN KLEIN ANGEFANGEN] (1970) →

Canonically Weird (The List), Shorts

102. LUCIFER RISING (1981)

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“The montage of hermetic symbols becomes first dreamlike, then menacing; centuries of mystical thought are distilled into a series of voyeuristic fantasies, a kinky psychodrama backed by the carnival strains of a maleficent calliope.  Anger intended Lucifer Rising to stand as a form of ritual marking the death of the old religions like Judaism and Christianity, and the ascension of the more nihilistic age of Lucifer.”–Mikita Brottman in “Moonchild: The Films of Kenneth Anger”

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Myriam Gibril, , , Leslie Huggins,

PLOT: Lava erupts and the goddess Isis awakens, calling to her husband Osiris. In a room far away a man wakes up, sits on a throne in his apartment and somehow spears a woman in a forest far away, then climbs into a bathtub to wash off the blood. Later, the moon awakens the goddess Lilith, a magick ritual summons Lucifer, and flying saucers appear over Luxor, Egypt.

Still from Lucifer Rising (1981)

BACKGROUND:

  • Anger originally shot a film called Lucifer Rising (A Love Vision) in 1966, which starred Bobby Beausoleil as Lucifer. Anger claimed that Beausoleil stole most of the completed footage and hid it; the star contended that Anger merely ran out of money to complete the movie.  Anger then took out an obituary-style ad in The Village Voice announcing his retirement from filmmaking.  Whatever the case, Anger incorporated some of the surviving footage from the original Lucifer into Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969).
  • Anger began working on the project again in 1970 and completed the first cut of Lucifer Rising in 1973, with a score by Jimmy Page.  After a falling out with Page he had the movie re-scored by Bobby Beausoleil.
  • Beausoleil was a Haight-Ashbury musician who came under Anger’s influence during the Summer of Love.  After his falling out with Anger the musician joined Charles Manson’s “Family.” He murdered music teacher Gary Hinman in 1969 over a drug deal gone wrong, and was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.  Anger contacted him to create the music for Lucifer Rising, and he wrote and recorded the score from prison.  The band heard on the soundtrack is comprised of his fellow inmates.
  • Lucifer Rising was completed with funds from the National Film Finance Corporation of Great Britain, prompting some controversy about state funding of a “devil film.”  Anger also received financial assistance from the Germany’s Hamburg Television and the U.S.’s National Endowment for the Arts.
  • Anger did not complete the editing on the final cut until 1981, a decade after work was begun.
  • In one of the film’s final scenes there is a long shot of the Colossi of Memnon in Upper Egypt. If you look hard you can see a puff of smoke rising in the distant background. According to Anger, this came from him ceremonially burning the film’s script because the work was now complete.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The orange UFO flying over the crumbling columns of the Temple of Luxor, then peeking over the shoulder of the colossal ancient statue of Ramses II.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Egyptian gods and goddesses frolicking through a magickal psychedelic landscape, summoning Lucifer and flying saucers.


Trailer for “The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. 2 (including clips and music from Lucifer Rising)

COMMENTS:  A shaggy-haired man in a robe of many colors caresses a stone column. A Continue reading 102. LUCIFER RISING (1981) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: 200 MOTELS (1971)

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200 Motels has been officially added to the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies. Comments are closed on this post; please comment on the official Certified Weird entry.

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Tony Palmer & Frank Zappa

FEATURING: Howard Kaylan, Mark Volman, , , Keith Moon, Jimmy Carl Black

PLOT: 200 Motels is a series of sketches, experiments and concert footage loosely organized as a reflection on the mixture of insanity and tedium experienced by a rock and roll band on tour.

Still from 200 Motels (1971)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  The movie’s wild visuals, absurd jokes and attention deficit disorder pacing are enough to bring it to our attention.  But if anything sets 200 Motels apart from the other psychedelic cinematic noodlings of the hippie era, it’s Frank Zappa’s extraordinarily weird music—a unique mix of jazz-inflected blues/rock, avant-garde 12-tone classical music, and junior high school sex jokes.

COMMENTS:  Ringo Starr plays Larry the Large Dwarf, portraying Frank Zappa.  The Who drummer Keith Moon is a female groupie dressed like Sally Field in “The Flying Nun.”   Theodore Bickel plays an omniscient Master of Ceremonies who brings Zappa’s band, the Mothers of Invention, a cheeseburger, and demands they sign for the delivery—in blood.  Bickel’s character (or at least one of them) also explains the movie’s philosophy to the band: “You must remember that within the conceptual framework of this filmic event, nothing really matters.  It is entirely possible for several subjective realities to coexist.”  Zappa himself is barely in the movie and never speaks (or sings).  He’s only briefly glimpsed in concert footage—although the other band members reference him as a godlike figure who spies on them through an empty beer bottle.  Other than appeasing the great god Frank, the Mothers only care about three things—scoring dope, getting paid, and getting laid.  The characters in this “surrealistic documentary” drift in and out of various skits, animations, and drug trips, and also find time to perform numbers like “Mystery Roach,” “Lonesome Cowboy Burt,” and an oratorio in praise of the penis.  One highlight sees lead singers Kaylan and Volman taking a “trip” to everytown “Centerville,” which is full of churches and liquor stores and bathed in wavy zebra stripes that lysergically distort Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: 200 MOTELS (1971) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: MAXIMUM SHAME (2010)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Marina Gatell, Ana Mayo, Paco Moreno, Ardiana Ferrer, Ignasi Vidal

PLOT: On the night before the world is to be swallowed up by a black hole, a man discovers a world underneath his bed ruled by a chess-obsessed dominatrix queen.

Still from Maximum Shame (2010)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Carlos Atanes is a defiantly, and proudly, surrealistic director, and his brief filmography (three features and dozens of bizarre shorts) already constitutes a body of weird work that could be worthy of recognition on this List. With its wardrobe of black leather and chrome dental restraints along with a powerful musical score that ranges from 40s show tunes to 80s synth pop, Maximum Shame is perhaps Atanes’ most ambitious and polished—not to mention weirdest—feature work.

COMMENTS: You have to love the tagline for Maximum Shame, which describes the movie as “an apocalyptic fetish horror musical chess sci-fi weird feature movie.” The surprising thing is that the film, which plays like a combination of “Alice in Wonderland” and the Orpheus legend staged by refugees from a leather bar in a deserted warehouse, largely lives up to that description. The words “apocalyptic,” fetish,” and “chess” define the three motifs that keep the film (somewhat) grounded.  The story, such as it is, takes place as a black hole is encroaching on earth (or so we are told), and characters mention the total destruction of the world sometimes as an imminent cataclysm, and sometimes as a disaster that’s already come to pass. The film’s s&m/b&d fetishism is obvious from the costuming, most notably the deviant dental equipment used to keep slaves’ mouths perpetually splayed. (Although the Queen plays games of dominance and submission, there is no overt sexuality in the film—which, together with its alienating weirdness, makes it of only marginal interest to the bondage crowd). All of the characters have, or are given, the names of chess pieces, and talk of gambits and sacrificing rooks makes up a large part of the plot. “Horror” and “sci-fi” turn out to be the least accurate of the descriptors. The film does speak of black holes and invokes a theory of infinite parallel universes in a throwaway bid to explain the inexplicable Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: MAXIMUM SHAME (2010) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: BLACK MOON (1975)

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Black Moon has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies Ever Made. Comments on this post are closed; please visit Black Moon‘s official Certified Weird entry.

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Louis Malle

FEATURING: Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Alexandra Stewart,

PLOT: A 15-year old girl flees a shooting war between the sexes and ends up at a farm estate inhabited by a bedridden old woman, a brother and sister both (like her) named “Lily,” a gang of naked children who herd pigs and sheep, and a unicorn.

Still from Black Moon (1975)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:   If we were making a list composed only of European-style arthouse surrealism, Black Moon would easily make the List.  Here at 366, Black Moon has to fight for its space not only with other Buñuel-based concoctions, but also with the mutant species of crazed B-movies, the maddest of midnight movies, and intentional and unintentional oddities of every stripe; the competition makes this (admittedly very weird) experimental art movie a more marginal choice.

COMMENTS:  Mercurial auteur Louis Malle (Au Revoir les Enfants) had dabbled in light absurdity with 1960’s Zazie dans le Metro, but audiences weren’t prepared for the sudden onslaught of full-on surrealism he unleashed in 1975 with Black Moon.  The movie concerns a young girl’s flight from an absurd world—where camo-clad men line up female prisoners of war and execute them, with gas mask-wearing ladies returning the favor to their male captives—into a totally irrational one.  With Malle behind the camera, we know that this will be a deliberate, quiet, beautifully-shot film.  Indeed, there are lots of long atmospheric shots and no dialogue at all for the first fifteen minutes, until Lily, the fleeing girl, finally comes upon the villa hidden deep in the woods and meets its insane inhabitants.  Her adventures are loosely inspired by that old weird warhorse, “Alice in Wonderland.”  There’s a pig /baby that may be an explicit reference to “Pig and Pepper,” and the characters Lily meets have the casually insulting demeanors of the denizens of Wonderland: the bedridden old lady says she looks “stupid… and she has no bosom, no bosom at all!’  In a Caroll-esque exchange, the unicorn accuses her of being “mean” for trampling some daisies (who, disturbingly, scream), while the myth is munching down on the selfsame flowers.  But don’t let the Alice references confuse you into supposing Malle’s film is a light absurdist comedy; although Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: BLACK MOON (1975) →