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SUPER WEIRD FILMS

 
  

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spidervirus
17:54 / 11.12.02
in the tradition of the super violent films thread, i'm asking for a list of films
that have seriously fucked your head.not necessarily violent, but reality warping.
 
 
Opalfruit
18:08 / 11.12.02

The Cook The Thief The Wife and her Lover is all I can think of at the moment - there are many more I'm sure but that'll do.
 
 
that
18:10 / 11.12.02
Society. Burroughs-esque imagery, orgies of flesh and gore. Seriously fucked up shit. Definitely weird, though I'm not sure if it's the sort of weird you're after.
 
 
videodrome
18:18 / 11.12.02
Jodorowsky. Either Santa Sangre or The Holy Mountain.

Or the Cremaster films, but those are not generally available.
 
 
Enamon
18:21 / 11.12.02
I never understood that about Cremaster films. I mean personally I haven't even seen one of them and that's my problem. You cant get em anywhere. Kinda ruins the whole point of making a movie if ye wont let the people see it. I mean it had a run at some film theatre here many months ago but then... silence enveloped the world.
 
 
Eloi Tsabaoth
18:39 / 11.12.02
Most Cronenberg, but, for me, especially Dead Ringers. It was just... I... hmm.
Also, someone reminded me the other night about Jan Svankmeyer. Any of his films are fantastic.
 
 
000
18:56 / 11.12.02
Oh, I know, a week has barely passed where I saw the Brood for the first time but although I wouldn't quite put it in the weird film category... I'd have to go for his first feature length, seriously dubious acting, bad editing, bad effects. I loved it, however, unable to recall the title. And I still stand by eXistenZ.

That Japanese movie, Tetsou II: Something, rented it on account of a supernice Barker recommendation, learned never to trust that man, although I am currently enjoying Imajica. Seriously weird and bad. The movie, I meant.

Back in Greenland, when I was wee, we always used to have funky shit that you'd never be able to find anywhere, I remember fondly a french movie about a butcher that keeps on killing women and chops them up to make tasty sausages -- with the effect that his store becomes superpopular. At the ending, chased by the police, he falls down from a floor up and into a tub full of boiling hot water. Priceless.

And any Kung-Fu movie that was made to capitalize on the popularity, only without any production value, which often made me sick.
 
 
Eloi Tsabaoth
19:04 / 11.12.02
Cronenberg's first film was Shivers, also known as Frissons, They Came From Within and The Parasite Murders. I've never seen it.
 
 
grant
19:46 / 11.12.02
Actually, there were movies before that one. Including one about auto racing. Go figure. They Came From Within was the first one that got wide release, I think.

Braindead (not to be confused with the everywhere-but-the-US release of DeadAlive, which has the same name as two words, or vice versa). Stars Bill Pullman, Bill Paxton, "Harold" from Harold and Maude and a wide variety of maybe hallucinations.

Now that I think of it, one of the strangest films I've seen lately (and it was bad in a bad way) was The Sweetest Thing, with Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Parker Posey (among others). Sort of an American Pie aimed at horny 20-something club-scene beauty bimbos rather than horny high school boys. Utterly bizarre musical scenes.

Most of the things I've seen by Guy Madden (not much) have been very odd. There's a five-minute short called Heart of the World that's funny as hell - done in the style of a preview of a German Expressionist silent film about sex cults and revolutionaries and fratricide and, of course, love.
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
20:10 / 11.12.02
I second Santa Sangre and Dead Ringers.

The films of Miike Takashi, current hot director in Japan, especially "Ishi: The Killer" and, oh goddddd, "Visitor Q." He is best known for "Audition."
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:18 / 11.12.02
Tetsuo 2 was the first film that came to mind when I saw this thread earlier - it's subtitled Bodyhammer, Chrome. I was that stunned (lterally) the first time I watched it that I ended up sat in front of the telly for about half an hour after it had finished, staring into the blank screen. Each separate part is screwed, but all together... blimey. The basic premise is fucked up, it's got the weird stop-motion bits in it (like Jan Svankmajer's Alice), the horrible/funny scene with the main character's son, enraged techno-organic humanoids running along the side of skyscrapers, etc. It builds and builds and builds and builds and just when you think it can't get any more bizarre it manages to top everything that's gone before. Stick with it for the ten seconds at the end of the credits.
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
20:41 / 11.12.02
I still don't get all of Naked Lunch...don't think I can unless there is a DVD with full commentary. I liked what I understood, but there was so much flying over my head, it was wonderfully confusing.

I miss being that confused by movies and having to read and puzzle out what they are trying to do.
 
 
videodrome
21:29 / 11.12.02
Tetsuo II is shit. The first one is intermittantly good, until it becomes a long stop-motion chase scene. But it's far better than the second, which was one of the more boring films I've slogged through.

Shivers is Cronenberg's first feature - i.e. funded and released. Stereo and Crimes of the Future predate it, but are little more than student films, each barely feature length (i.e. around 60 minutes). Fast Company, the car movie, came later, and is difficult to find as its distributor went belly-up shortly after completion of the film.

And, to keep the thread current, I'd recommend Adaptation as a great headfuck film.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
00:08 / 12.12.02
Also tempted to mention Head, but it's so long since I last saw it that I think my rose-tinted contacts may be in. That and I've been listening to the soundtrack a lot over the last week.
 
 
spidervirus
01:12 / 12.12.02
i've seen one of the cremaster films in the museum of modern art. i think it had a bunch of guys dressed as Pan beating each other up in a taxi. it made me feel like i was watching a mix of dante's inferno and taxicab confessions.
 
 
No star here laces
01:34 / 12.12.02
Conspirators of pleasure - Svankmajer

It's a film all about people with really, really elaborate fetishes. The blurb says "the only full-length erotic movie without coitus".
 
 
Murray Hamhandler
02:01 / 12.12.02
Definitely Head, E. Randy. The plastic pop groups of today should take notes from this fine, bizarre film. The more honest counterpoint to "Dirtypop".

Also on my list:
Either of the films directed by Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy)
The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper's second directorial effort)
Some of Altman's goodies (Popeye, Brewster McCloud)
...and just to be predictable, I'm gonna go with Jacob's Ladder and most Lynch films.
 
 
videodrome
02:28 / 12.12.02
Yeah, Lyra, that's a great one. And the DVD has his short Food which is just brilliant. Conspirators manages to feel simultaneously loving and dirty, which is a grand achievement.

And as an extension, just about anything by the Brothers Quay is very worth seeing, though I was undewhelmed by their feature Institiute Benjamenta. Evidently they're responsible for one of the 'dream sequences' in Frida, though I haven't caught that film yet.
 
 
Chubby P
09:26 / 12.12.02
The obvious ones that spring to mind are:

Fight Club - A completely different film as to what I was expecting and absolutely brilliant!

Being John Malkovich - A great little mind bender.

Donnie Darko - Just look at the lengths of the threads on this board. Need I say more.
 
 
bjacques
10:18 / 12.12.02
Guy Madden: Tales of the Gimli Hospital: Snurfriddur (sp?). Owes a lot to Carl Theodore Dreyer and David Lynch
Seconds (1966) dir. John Frankenheimer, starring Rock Hudson. A n executive, bored with his life, gets a mysterious phone call offering a real change. Nasty movie.
 
 
hanabius yamamura
11:20 / 12.12.02

i once sat through five hours worth of danish sub-titled weirdness called THE KINGDOM ( by lars von treir ?spelling ) ... not very sure what, if anything , happened - especially at the end ...
 
 
videodrome
11:54 / 12.12.02
The Kingdom doesn't end, really, which might be part of the problem. The ending of the first part is explained quite a bit by the second part, but then the actor that played Stig went and dies, so there's no thrid part to explain the rest. Very good stuff. Maybe not super wierd, but very very good.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
12:05 / 12.12.02
Cemetery Man (as its called in the USA, something else in other countries) - it stars Rupert Everett as an impotent groundskeeper at a cemetery where the dead come back as zombies every night. He falls in love with a woman, who is killed by the zombies, but keeps coming back to life. It's much weirder than this, however.
 
 
The Natural Way
12:15 / 12.12.02
I don't really think Donnie, Fight Club (eh?) or Malky qualify as "super weird". They're pretty Hollywood in many respects.
 
 
rizla mission
12:47 / 12.12.02
All other 'weird' films appear mindnumbingly mainstream when compared to the mammoth headfuck that is;

Wax, Or The Discovery of Television Among The Bees

It is just .. completely indescribable..

IMDB, somewhat bizarrely, has it classed as a documentary, and the sole user comment seems to regard it as primarilly being an anti-war film..

My strongest memory of going to a screening of it last year is of multi-layered images of fractals fighting over a city which is the centre of the universe and is also located in microcosm within the brain of every bee, while at the same time William Burroughs as the central character/narrator expounds scientific / religious theories of Valis-like complexity, whilst having some kind of nervous breakdown and occasionally bellowing "I AM MELTON ABBERSID!"

Oh, and I should add that it's made much stranger by the fact that it's not a completely Avant Garde film .. it starts off having a vague kind of Philip K Dick esque storyline about a guy who works for a weapons research company and farms bees in his spare time, and then it .. just..goes ..completely.. gaaaahhh
 
 
hanabius yamamura
12:53 / 12.12.02

i am very intrigued videodrome ... apologies to all if this is minor thread-rot ...

i watched THE KINGDOM in 5 one hour parts on a double dvd ... is all that just part one ???

if so, where can i get my grubby little hands on part two ???
 
 
No star here laces
13:27 / 12.12.02
Oooh. There's a japanese horror movie called "Uzumaki" which is all about evil geometry, specifically a pesky bunch of spirals that terrrorise a small town and turn people into snails. Kind of like if Zero Girl was japanese, and stranger...
 
 
Murray Hamhandler
13:58 / 12.12.02
Yes yes yes...I had just remembered The Kingdom and was going to post it up. Well done, kids. This one definitely gets kudos for its ending (one of the more bizarre/grotesque scenes I've ever seen in a movie).

Hana bi, you're in luck! You have indeed only seen the first part of The Kingdom. Get the second part on eBay. They have lots of the all-region discs pretty cheap, from what I remember.

I am very saddened that it will apparently never be ended properly. Oh, well. As long as Von Trier keeps making films, I'm happy.
 
 
illmatic
14:28 / 12.12.02
You guys want weird, I'll give you weird ..
WR: Function of the Organism

Dusan Makavejev states at the beginning that this is his personal response to the life and work of Wilhelm Reich. This film has about six different narratives intercut - one a documentary about Reich, featuring scenes of Reichian therapy, intercut with random scenes of people playing with sloppy egg yolks, a crazed solider pacing around a big American city, the editor of Screw magazine having his penis cast in plaster, and russian Stalinsist propaganda.

The bulk of the narrative is a narrative about a sexy Yugoslav revolutionary chick who falls in love with a Russian ice skater and the tragic consequences of her love, after some great scenes of her advocating the unity of sexual freedom and revolutionary activity to her tower block climazing in a big line dance!
It also features some of the best dialogue Ive ever heard:
"You are more beautiful than the revolution!", "rays from the cosmos penetrated our pulsating bodies!", wish I could remember more.

You need to see this - it rocks with orgone enhanced fists of sheer platinum.
 
 
illmatic
15:19 / 12.12.02
Some quite cool listings here:
http://www.revelwood.org/velfilms.htm

I saw the first of these films "The Loved One" on late night TV a few years ago and it's absolutely brilliant. it's set in an undertakers, features Liberace and the only scene I can recall properly features an enormously fat person eating a chicken carcass with their bare hands. What more do you want?

I so hope this is available on video.
 
 
spidervirus
16:30 / 12.12.02
UZUMAKI!!!!
that has to be one of the best films i have seen in a while. does anyone know when this is out on video?
 
 
grant
17:08 / 12.12.02
I now realize that I want to see every single one of these.

Don't forget anything by The Brothers Quay. They've got a two-tape set of their shorts out, which I think was made into this DVD.
 
 
grant
17:16 / 12.12.02
Damn, videodrome mentioned them first!

They do a really cool hospital/anesthesia/she may be dying scene in Frida, with animated Day of the Dead dolls in hospital uniforms. And real tongues.

To make up for redundancy, should I mention Doris Wishman in here? Exploitation movies about Triple-D spies with cameras in their breasts? (I haven't seen one of those films, but I did get to meet her once - she lived in Miami.)
 
 
videodrome
18:12 / 12.12.02
Uzumaki has been available on DVD for a while. Two good places to look on-line for all this sort of thing are Diabolik and Poker Industries. Both are US-based import DVD retailers. Dunno if they ship to the UK. I've ordered from both with no problems. Additionally, if you take a look at the generally horrid DVDTalk.com message boards, you can find international retailers. There's an 'international' board, available through one of those drop-down menus. Just don't read too many other posts, because most of the people who post there are idiots. Both of the places metioned above have stuff like Uzumaki, the Miike stuff, all the Kingdom, etc. I drool everytime I look at those pages...
 
 
jeff
02:04 / 13.12.02
Cemetery man was also known as "Delamorre, Delamorte". It was indeed an interesting film, and I was deeply confused by the "cliffhanger scene". Then I realised it was trying to be deliberately weird and I went to bed.
 
  

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