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.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
Horse Money (2014): Ventura, a Cape Verdean immigrant suffering from dementia, wanders an expressionistically shadowed hospital, conflating his modern reality with past events. Critics are describing Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s first film in ten years as “incomprehensible” and “overtly surreal.” Horse Money official site.
IN DEVELOPMENT:
31 (est. 2016): Rob Zombie, the best movie director named after a reanimated corpse working today, is back at it with a new flick that he promises will be his most “brutal” and “gruesome” effort yet. It involves an involuntary “game” where contestants strive to survive a night in a funhouse full of killer clowns. The best thing about it may be the character names: it stars Malcolm McDowell as “Father Murder” and Elizabeth Daily as “Sex-Head,” and includes other characters with names like “Venus Virgo,” “Sister Serpent,” and “Fat Randy Bumpagussy.”
NEW ON DVD:
Committed (1984): Expressionistic biopic of troubled actress Frances Farmer. J. Hoberman called it “the unexpected missing link between ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ and ‘Shock Corridor’,” while an Amazon purchaser had a different take: “this movie sucks big time!” Buy Committed
Love Unto Death (1984)/Life is a Bed of Roses (1983): A mid-80s French pair from Alain (Last Year at Marienbad) Resnais. Love is a talky philosophical film about a man who returns from the dead, while Bed of Roses features three confusingly intertwined stories set in a castle (one is a fantasy imagined by children); it’s also a musical. Buy Love Unto Death/Life Is a Bed of Roses
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Love Unto Death (1984)/Life is a Bed of Roses (1983): See description in DVD above. Buy Love Unto Death/Life Is a Bed of Roses [Blu-ray]
FREE MOVIES ON SHOUT TV:
Stroszek (1977): An alcoholic German ex-con and a prostitute try to start a new life in Wisconsin in what Roger Ebert declared “one of the oddest films ever made.” We have shared just about all of Shout Factory’s wonderful Werner Herzog collection with you lucky readers by this point; bless them for putting these cinema treasures online for free. Watch Stroszek free on Shout Factory TV.
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.
Good grief, Malcolm McDowell. Is there ANY script you won’t say yes to nowadays?
I hope not. I suspect it’s like a talent-philanthropy thing he’s doing. There isn’t any movie he shows up in that he doesn’t improve*, and bad movies are the ones that most need the help.
*: Perhaps an exception to this is “Gangster No. 1”, which he was great in – just could have done without his narration placed over the scenes acted by Paul Bettany as the young McDowell.