Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available at the official site links.
NEW RELEASES (EXCLUSIVE STREAMING):
Gutboy: A Badtime Story (2015): We first mentioned this budget curiosity back in January. It’s an all-marionette feature about a flayed puppet who fights the Man, and proudly advertises itself as “the weirdest movie in the world.” After searching for a brave distributor for two years, it’s now available exclusively (for the present time, at least) on Troma studio’s new streaming service Troma Now! (which currently has a limited catalog but a reasonable price point of $4.99/month after free trail, and includes the Certified Weird Tromeo & Juliet ). Gutboy press release.
CERTIFIED WEIRD (AND OTHER) REPERTORY SCREENINGS:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). We won’t list all the screenings of this audience-participation classic separately. You can use this page to find a screening near you.
- Chicago, IL, 6/3,6/5, & 6/8 – Stalker (1979). At Music Box Theater.
- Los Angeles, CA, 6/3 (midnight) – Akira (1988). At Nuart Theater.
- Los Angeles, CA, 6/3 (midnight) – Wild at Heart (1990). At Cinefamily.
- Los Angeles, CA, 6/4 – Fantastic Planet [La Planète Sauvage] (1973). At Zebulon.
- New York City, NY, 6/2 & 6/3 (midnights) – Brazil (1985). At Nitehawk Cinema.
- New York City, NY, 6/2-6/8 – Stalker (1979). At IFC Center.
- New York City, NY, 6/3 – Angel’s Egg [Tenshi no Tamago] (1985). Super-rare screening (we didn’t know screenable prints of this even existed), with a new live score by drone musicians Telah. At Spectacle Theater.
- Silver Spring, MD, 6/6 & 6/8 – Stalker (1979). At AFI Silver Theater.
- Sydney, Australia, 6/7 – Belle de Jour (1967). Part of the Sydney Film Festival.
FILM FESTIVALS – Sydney Film Festival (Sydney, Australia, June 7-18):
Sydney is a minor festival (sorry Australia!), but it gives folks Down Under a chance to catch a few non-commercial features. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of debuts at Sydney, but visitors will get the chance to check out other festivals’ hits, including a handful of marginal interest to us: the indie comedy Brigsby Bear, Casey Affleck covered in a sheet for A Ghost Story, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, the mildly blasphemous homoerotic allegory The Ornithologist, and the erotic Mexican horror The Untamed. They also have a nice set of revivals, highlighted by a newly restored Belle de Jour (see above, also screening June 10) and Desperate Living (you’ll have to wait until June 17 for that one). We did notice one festival-circuit outlier we had previously overlooked that might be of interest to weirdophiles:
- By the Time It Gets Dark – a filmmaker working on a piece about Thailand’s 1976 military clampdown has elegant Apichatpong Weerasethakul-style hallucinations. Screening June 15 & 17.
Sydney Film Festival home page.
NEW ON DVD:
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015): Two girls face a mysterious evil while staying at a nearly-empty boarding school during Christmas break. Viewers compared it to David Lynch in tone. Buy The Blackcoat’s Daughter
“Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 2”: Scorsese again collects overlooked movies from world cinema. Most interesting to our readers is Mysterious Object at Noon, Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s experimental “exquisite corpse” debut, with Brazil’s avant-garde silent poem Limite a close second. Revenge dramas from the Philippines (Insiang) and Soviet Union (Revenge) along with the Turkish “Western” Law of the Border and Taiwanese drama Taipei Story fill out the well-rounded set. Buy “Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 2” [DVD/Blu-ray combo].
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015): See description in DVD above. DVD/Blu-ray/”digital copy” combo version. Buy The Blackcoat’s Daughter [DVD/Blu-ray combo]
“Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 2”: See description in DVD above. Buy “Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 2” [DVD/Blu-ray combo].
What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.