EDITOR’S NOTE: Zeb Haradon, writer/director/star of the Certified Weird Elevator Movie, has asked us to submit a revised “Top 10 Weird Movies” list.  Of course we complied without hesitation. (Here’s his [more conventional] original list).

A while ago I was asked to put together a list of 10 weird movies.  I did this pretty quickly without thinking much about it.  It was, I think, too hastily written, as if I was just writing an email.  Also the movies, while all excellent, were not all particularly “weird” enough.  I decided to put together this better list.

1. The Room – The plot of this movie sounds fairly straightforward and is hardly worth mentioning. It’s a domestic drama about a couple where the woman has an affair and the man becomes jealous and then finds out. The strangeness is in the tone and execution. This cult movie is widely known as an unintentional comedy “so bad it’s good”, but I think there’s something else going on. Notice how the dialog seems to come out of nowhere, how characters seem to say their lines with no particular motivation, or have motivations that change from moment to moment. I think what we’re seeing here is what a movie looks like to an autistic person who is not aware of the inner lives of other people. I think the filmmaker is making a movie of what society looks like to him, where everyone is made of cardboard and another human’s personality is unfathomable.

2. “Happy Days Reunion Special” – This “Happy Days” reunion special, made just a few years after the series ended, never saw the light of day, but a copy was leaked (bad quality with time codes), and you can find it if you know where to look. This was made in 1989, and also set in 1989, so it’s supposed to take place 30 or so years after the original. 90% of this hour long reunion is just dopey sitcom B.S., but there’s a jaw-droppingly incongruous subplot involving Fonzie discovering that he has become infected with the AIDS virus. This was probably due to a well intentioned effort to talk about the disease, but “Happy Days Reunion” was not the place to do it, which is probably why this ill conceived special never saw the light of day.

3. Silhouette – This movie consists of a series of explicit sex scenes, and the sounds and dialog are right out of hard core pornography, but the only images you ever see are shadows of the performers cast on surfaces. At the beginning, the shadows are just shown where you would expect them to be, like on the hotel room wall, or on the ground next to the bed, but as the movie progresses it gets increasingly bizarre, and you see (to cite one example) the shadows of sex acts cast on the rapidly moving ground from on top of a moving train. Often the surface on which the shadow is cast changes, randomly and illogically, several times throughout the sex scene. At first I thought I was watching an art film, but then I got a boner and realized I was really watching a porno. The scenes are several minutes long, have porno music, porno editing, porno dialog, explicit sex acts, and the whole thing is so porn-like that you forget you’re just looking at shadows.

4. Switcheroo! – This dorky 1980s comedy about a father and son who “switch bodies” for twenty four hours sounds pretty typical, and in a sense it belongs in the same category as Freaky Friday, 18 Again, Like Father Like Son, etc. It has the same plot arc with modest family tension, a supernatural accident facilitating the switch, the characters learning something about each other, and then resolution where they end up back in their own bodies. But there’s something about Switcheroo! which sets it in a wholly different category from the others: it is set in a concentration camp.

5. Scared Sh**less – Set in an alternate universe where it is illegal to defecate, this film noir is about a cop whose assignment is to infiltrate an underworld toilet factory. This sounds like it’s a set up for a sophomoric gross out comedy, but no, it’s not toilet humor, it’s toilet drama. A serious, somber tone is maintained throughout, and I think there’s only about two or three jokes throughout the whole film, all clean and corny, none of them having anything to do with bodily functions. The whole movie looks like an early film noir, in black and white, shot on film, with period clothing, cars, and decor, an effect which must have been very expensive to achieve. If it weren’t for the subject matter, you’d swear this was made in 1948, and there is even a very convincing “cameo” by a (surely digital) Humphrey Bogart. I don’t know how a movie like this could come about. Maybe it was written by one person and re-written by another who didn’t understand the intentions of the original author. I think the point of this film is to make some kind of existential statement about society or something. I’ve seen it a few times and haven’t been able to figure out if it’s taking place in a world where people defecate in secret and deny it, or if it’s supposed to be a world where only criminals defecate.

6. Every Young Man’s Battle – This “documentary” is a Christian diatribe against pornography which has it’s opening scene on an old civil war battlefield, with a narrator explaining that the battle against pornography is just as difficult and deadly as the civil war. This seems, at first, like a singularly awkward metaphor, but the movie returns to the topic of the civil war again and again and again, and at one point there’s even some guy drawing diagrams on a white board, so into the specific strategic details that you forget (and he seems to forget) that he’s trying to make a point about pornography. You also have several people talking about how they were financially ruined by their porn addiction, and lots of badly acted, goofily conceived sketches about the dangers of porn. Truly strange and hilarious, this movie was made to be watched with a group of friends and herbal accompaniment.

7. One More Minute – This is sort of a minimalist mafia movie. A hitman takes a victim up to the woods to shoot him. With a gun to his head the victim asks for “just one more minute” of life. The hitman agrees to delay the execution by one minute, then when the minute is up, the victim begs for another minute. The hitman agrees again, and it goes on and on like this for seventy five minutes. If this sounds boring, that’s because it is, almost to a Warholian degree. There’s a tiny bit of tension throughout, several little hints come up of the possibility of escape, but the victim is restrained and is unable to and never attempts to actually run away, so it never really amounts to anything plotwise. The reason I recommend this movie is because the boredom creates a necessary buildup that releases like a burst dam when the hitman finally denies the victim’s request for just one more minute. I don’t know if this unconventional structure makes it weird enough to put on this list, but it’s certainly a powerful movie and continues to horrify me to this day.

8. Samoa’s Greatest Blunder – In Samoa, cars used to drive on the right side of the road. In 2009, the government decided to change that (in order to import cars from Australia), and all cars now drive on the left. Samoa’s Greatest Blunder is a low budget documentary about that decision and its implementation. Sounds pretty dry, but the filmmaker’s angry and conspiratorial (and possibly mentally ill) slant on the subject, as well as his unorthodox and unethical journalistic methods, make for fascinating viewing. I admit that I didn’t understand even half the Samoan political references, but apparently there is a generations old division of some sort in Samoan society, tracing back to colonialism, and the filmmaker believes the traffic switchover relates to it somehow. As for his methods, he planted microphones and hidden cameras not only in government offices, but in government officials’ private homes, and gets several candid conversations about the switchover, as well as a lot of irrelevant and private material that he includes in the movie anyway. By the end of the movie, the whole thing becomes a vitriolic diatribe against the government, with apparently serious accusations of vampirism, and the pointless inclusion of hidden camera footage of the minister of agriculture taking a crap in his own home. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

9. I Am A Sociopath – There’s a lot of good cinematic fiction exploring the minds of sociopaths (“Dexter,” The Bad Seed, Bully, The Night of the Hunter, Rope—the list goes on and on), but until now I haven’t seen any documentaries that go as deep into the sociopathic character. Here we have something, a personal documentary made anonymously by an actual sociopath. It’s rough around the edges, as expected, but incredibly disturbing and insightful. This middle aged sociopath (pseudonym: Frank) is not a killer or anything like that, he just manages the mail room in a large office building, although he hints teasingly at various felonies he may have gotten away with in his youth. We see videotaped sessions with his psychiatrist where his history (painful) and diagnosis (antisocial personality disorder) are discussed. We see footage he made of people in his life who care for him and who think they are cared for (a girlfriend, family members, friends), yet in his voice over narration he details exactly how he is exploiting and using each of these people, and what he actually feels for them (in every case: nothing). It makes all the fictional sociopaths from the movies listed above seem like saints. I really pity the people in Frank’s life, especially if they ever see this movie.

10. The Deadly Art of Survival – I wanted to see this because I wanted to see how a feature film shot on super-8 looked, but ended up with so much more. This is sort of a kung fu movie, with sort of a plot, and some badly choreographed fight scenes and real martial arts experts acting out a terribly written (written at all?) script. But there’s also some moments of sincerity, where the people seem to forget that they’re in a movie and talk candidly about their lives in the inner city—in one case while someone offstage is randomly shining flash lights on their faces. Overall an engaging mess and accidental documentary about a specific time and place (new york in the late 70s). Must watch the extras on this disc.