Extreme Movies
The nightmarish world of Oscar the entomologist, involving his various fears of, and relationships with, women, intertwined with his love for insects, especially the metamorphosing and predatory kind. In this dark dream-world which is constantly drowned in darkness of a solar eclipse punctuated by brief flashes of blinding sunlight, everything is spliced together and nothing makes sense. There's his sister from childhood memories who may or may not have been killed in a hunting accident, by a wolf, or in some other unknown fashion. There's his mother who may have been black... was his sister black as well? A sick, black, pregnant woman appears in his bed to whom he may have made love, hunted by the spectre of his sister, and turning into a cocoon, then into a beautiful woman with a deadly insect-like weapon. A predatory schoolgirl seduces then bites him. Other elements include his work at a museum collecting insects, creepy twins, and a shrink that inspects his mind and dreams through a funnel and electric apparatus. Visually stunning and thoroughly atmospheric, a near-masterpiece of Lynchian cinema, but for some reason there is a slight element of unsatisfaction. Perhaps it's because the movie refuses to divulge even a nugget of fact, obfuscating every detail until the every end. Nevertheless, it's a must-see, visually rich, dream-like, psychological mystery.
An obscure surreal gem in which we are led into a paranoid, mad, nightmare world that keeps blurring the line between dream-like brain processes and reality. The story is loosely about a discovery of advanced personality-sculpturing brain surgery, a company that wants to market it to the public, and a surgeon who is being manipulated. But the movie is like one of those never-ending nightmares where you jump from one level to another only to keep finding that you are still dreaming.
Mental problems are treated with a sci-fi machine that allows one to enter the patient's mind and interact with him there. Things turn very dark and twisted when the therapist is asked to enter the mind of a demented killer in order to save his victim. Disturbing surreal imagery, repulsive sadism and bizarre necrophilia fill this visually rich experience.
A breathtaking cinematic masterpiece. Using timeless Brazil-like art and production-values, this tells a dark fairy-tale about an inventor that clones himself and creates other beings in order to have friends. One of them bewails the fact that he has no soul and doesn't dream, and therefore tries to steal children's dreams. When he kidnaps a muscle-man's adopted kid-brother however, they start a sequence of events that may lead to their downfall. Characters include thieving children that behave like adults, witch-like siamese twins attached to each other in more ways than one, and a cult of men that blind and attach themselves to machines in order to see better. Included are many more unforgettable visuals and a magically bizarre atmosphere from a fascinating imagination. This is one to watch many dozens of times.
A collaborative short cartoon conceived and drawn by Dali and Walt Disney in the 50s and completed 50 years later. A Disney-esque woman dances in a surreal dream on themes of love, time and loss with pure Dali imagery: Ants crawl out of a hand only this time they transform into a swarm of cyclists on dunes, a woman wears the shadow of a bell, turns into dandelion seeds, which turn into fairies, with a melting wristwatch and the sands of time ticking on, etc. Beautiful but short.
The masterpiece I always hoped Lynch would create. Mixing bizarre elements into a gripping and complex tale of time-travel, this one doesn't get lost in twisted creativity but magically ties it all together with a carefully layered and clever plot. Donnie is a troubled youth who seems at first to be just another teenager out of touch with reality. An evil rabbit tells him to commit violence and that the world will end, he discusses theoretical physics with a teacher and smurf sex with his friends, has anger issues with hypocrisy and idiocy, and his hallucinations at first get worse until some scary, otherworldy logic starts to tie it all together...
A masterpiece of surrealism presenting a character study and artsy meditations through dream-logic. A man's past, existentialist ruminations and relationships with his parents and women are explored in exquisite surrealism and incredibly detailed and odd sets. He visits his sick father in a dilapidated mansion with tombstones blocking the door, where they treat him using time-travel. He wanders between his bitter mother and eccentric father, his orthodox Jewish past and village, his obsessions, his fascination with the local voluptuous redhead, a young, innocent but clear-headed boy (youth), and his search for the mysterious Bianca (wife?) who comes from a conflicting culture, her father raising historical wax figures that are real people moving like puppets. All this and much more interweaves with many thoughts, psychological symbols, meditations on tradition and Jewish existentialism, the sets, locations and people appearing out of nowhere and flowing together like a dream. Drifts at times and is quite long, but altogether a beautiful, multi-layered, challenging and fascinating experience. This one goes very well together with Terayama's films.
A delightful cult movie if I ever saw one. A very low-budget sci-fi fantasy from Russia, this tells the tale of two hapless pedestrians who accidentally get sent to another world and try to make their way back while trying to survive the severe and absurd class system of another planet. Amongst other things in this absurdly hilarious world, people are defined by a colorful gadget, yellow pants and flashing light head-gear and the lowly must perform terrible musical numbers in cages. Matches are worth their weight in gold, and the vocabulary consists of about 10 words, with 'Kuh' covering everything else. Endlessly inventive and guaranteed to satisfy silly cult movie fans.
A great absurdist surrealist comedy from the UK. A being emerges from the sewer on the day of a solar eclipse and starts the apocalypse. Only this isn't raging fire and brimstone or a comet, but chaos. He exchanges personalities with various people and antagonizes the system and reality, shutting down the London Underground by turning it into a cult and passage to the afterlife, policemen report window conspiracies, fishery ministers declare war, the government's assets are transferred to an old man's bank account, a talk show spouts random nonsense about the situation, a man with god-like powers makes things disappear, etc. A blind policeman tries to stop this through the astral plane. The movie shifts chaotically from MTV to silent film, the soundtrack changes from middle-eastern chants to trance, and people get stuck in a film-loop. The atmosphere is as if David Lynch were filming absurdities instead of nightmares. Fascinating and amusing.
A prequel to the incredible Ichi the Killer (Miike) directed by his cinematographer. This low-budget, twisted work may indulge itself in too many pointless camera tricks and suffer under its miniscule budget, but its acting, story-telling and black heart are all in the right place. This is Ichi-lite, the high-school version. Ichi is constantly bullied even by small kids but is perversely attracted to extreme cruelty and butcher shops. Mr Dai is a superb and brutal boxer with an existential need to be the number one fighter in all high-schools. When the riveting Onizami joins in and changes the rules of the game by breaking bones with uncompromising brutality, Ichi explodes into a perverse, sado-maso killing machine.
By far the most enigmatic and abstract creation by the existential Ingmar Bergman. This one baffles and evokes numerous interpretations but always creates a spell. My own impression is that this is an ultimate study of existentialism and being. As usual, Bergman asks more questions than he answers: What makes us who we are? How do we separate ourselves from the influences, traumas, masks, and habits that make up our character? What if we are only masks and actors? An actress breaks down after a dark epiphany because she does not know who she is anymore and a nurse takes care of her, effectively becoming her soul (Alma). Personalities transfer, they merge until even the husband cannot see who is who. The actress studies and tries to transfer Alma's character to her own, even sucking her blood in the process. Alma goes along at first but then resists and learns her own self. Words in an erotic story are so vivid they become reality, the film breaks down at a character development climax and forces us to remember we are only seeing masks. The film provokes the audience with random provocative images and the actresses are themselves affected by photographs of real traumatic events. Many more intriguing details appear after multiple viewings. A treat for people that like to be challenged.
Possibly the most disturbing movie ever made. A devastating, brutal, realistic, involving, empathatic and sympathetic story about four drug addicts and the depths to which they sink. Artistic photography and advanced filming techniques, intelligent and effective directing, incredible uncompromising acting and no exploitative or preachy factors all combine to bring you to your knees and vow a solemn oath never to touch drugs. It's so good, I fear I may traumatize people by recommending it.
The equivalent of staring at Escher drawings while contemplating existential philosophy for 100 minutes, this endlessly inventive movie is fiercely self-referential. Incredible, live, 3d optical illusions and uniquely inventive special effects punctuate a meditation on what we are and what is the mind's I, serving as mental provocations in the best tradition of Dada art. The movie shows a character who is writing the movie, and the movie dictates the character and his actions. Real life seeps into the movie but becomes part of the movie, etc. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, as every other minute there is another self-referential game, wonderfully imaginative twists, and jaw-dropping illusions, all coming together as a mental gymnasium while the character reaches an existential crisis and nearly goes insane. The movie has superb momentum and timing, knowing when to pile on the mind-warping tricks, and when to stop for Tarkovsky-esque meditation. This is the movie Being John Malkovich wished it were. Ultimately rewatachable.
Great short movies are getting lost amidst thousands of unseen little pieces out there that never get distributed. Synapse and Fantasia film festival attempt to correct this by releasing a compilation of the best and most striking sick little shorts from the past few years. Hopefully, there will be more of these releases. Features 13 various shorts, of which at least a handful are guaranteed to be exceptional. Standouts: "Abuelitos" - an atmospheric, disturbing short that gets under your skin about old men in a decrepit building and their mysterious meals and hygiene habits, "Love From Mother Only" - a horrifying gore movie about evil, sex and possession, Tea Break - both hilarious and sickening featuring a conveyor belt human abattoir, and "The Separation" - a stop-motion poetic, twisted and depressing piece about separated siamese twins that long to get back together.
A Japanese salad of art cinema, black-humor, horror, detective story, morality tale, and gore. People all over Japan are mysteriously committing suicide, 54 schoolgirls jump in front of a train in a huge splash of gore, wives cut themselves up, high school kids jump off roofs, etc. Detectives try to track down the cause of this phenomenon to no avail as only more mysteries pop up: Sport bags full of stitched pieces of human skin, anonymous kids on the phone spouting existential mumbo-jumbo, web-sites counting the suicides, a transvestite rock star who kicks animals to death in bowling alleys, and more. An interesting, bizarre, existential exploration of a (Japanese) society that has lost its individual identity, pop-culture sweeping people into losing themselves, teenagers and adults who mistakenly define themselves by their connection to other people and objects, and empty, dead people who only live through peer pressure, all thus comitting suicide, etc. Followed by the unnecessary Noriko's Dinner Table, an artsy, overlong but mostly conventional drama focusing on identity through family and emotion, featuring 'families for hire' but over-explaining everything to death with voice-overs.
5 intertwined crazy plotlines with insanely colorful cinematography. A man repeatedly kills his wife only to have her come back more annoyed than ever, a family man is hypnotised into thinking he's a bird with unfortunate consequences, teenage thieves deal with a homosexual complex, a maker of crazy commercials tries to deal with annoying coworkers and husbands, and a British hit-man asks his victims their function in life via a Japanese interpreter. Visually stunning, very entertaining (but with a flawed, overlong second half), and works at several levels, one being the connecting theme of karma and accepting things in life in order to survive.
A unique classic that set the standard for backwoods horror and which has never been duplicated since. A group of youngsters, one disabled and prone to morbid interests and childish tantrums, stay unexpectedly at an old heirloom house, and encounter an extremely demented family as their neighbours with deranged obsessions for the meat industry and slaughter houses. Avoids the Hollywood teenage-horror cliches, masterfully builds a horrific and brutal atmosphere mostly thanks to a great sound design, and is still very disturbing and unrelenting today.
A twisted triptych of tales on the topic of losers who have really lousy lives only to get hit by something worse to make things more miserable. The first one is dumped by his team-mates, girlfriend, and parents, arrested, and then God punishes him by turning him into a fly. The second marries a pregnant slut and is forced to take care of the baby while she has loud sex with the violent neighbour who steals his electricity. The third vulgar idiot takes drugs to avoid marriage and is hit by lightening only to find he has switched bodies with a new born baby (to the horror of the parents). A lurid, fast-paced, surreal exercise in nasty dark humor.
Another intellectual metaphysical movie by Subiela, this one employing surrealism to explore life itself. A man emerges from the sea and walks to a strange beach-hotel where abandoned luggage is piled up in the lounge and men line up to look through keyholes. He knows he is in a dream and even grows to think he is living someone else's dream, his desperation leading to murder. He discusses various aspects of this dream-life with a mysterious woman, how anything could have meaning, the place of emotions and love, how to enjoy such a life, death, whether it is good to leave this life or even confront/kill the dreamer. He witnesses strange erotic visions in some of the rooms, a man who laughs at him for being helpful, a priest advises to masturbate to avoid suicide, miracles burn and transform a picture of a suffering Jesus into a toy for a young boy. This is a dream-world with random bizarre props and meaningful symbols, a world where mothers must be consumed, people gamble on death, and mirrors display romances, where anything can happen yet he is trying to figure out its rules. A fascinating, dream-like exploration of life with touches of absurd humor. Existential and mesmerizing, but not particularly insightful or coherent.
A beautifully shot sick movie. This short features high production values, great camera work and colors, crystal clear sound, no dialogue, very realistic special effects and extreme graphic detail of an autopsy and necrophilia while performing an autopsy. The ending is as subtle as it is thought-provoking and raises this whole sickening work into the single most gut-wrenching and extreme expression of irony ever made.
This Croatian oddity starts as an intriguing meditation on loneliness, then changes into a disappointingly near-conventional psychological thriller with a twist. A man lives in what looks like a dark dilapidated warehouse with his woman, their relationship a shambles as well. Dialogue is minimal or uncomfortable and fragmented, sex is mechanical while each obsesses on their own weird fetishes, he takes an erotic picture of her then leaves her alone to brood over it, she has a strange affinity for fish in her bath, etc. One day he accidentally kills a boy and covers it up. He collects sounds and has an affair with a strange woman who provides him with sounds in a garbage dump marketplace, but his past starts to catch up wth him. Unfocused.
Amateurish dream-logic explores the mind of a persecuted almost-braindead young man in an insane asylum. For some unknown reason, he is constantly being chased by women who want him, use him, and get him in trouble, to the point where his own doctor rapes him while he's in a vegetative state. Memories of his life as a T-Shirt designer help unravel his past, with several objects and words repeating themselves as in a dream, especially a mysterious t-shirt that says "Foxy Lady". Bugs and mice crawl under everything, t-shirts magically change to express their wearers' personality and intentions, and a drug causes him to experience a dream where t-shirts are pulled out of his intestines. Unfortunately, the acting is very stiff, hokey and awkward, and the writing doesn't lead to anything.
Based on the experimental book by J.G. Ballard that explores the mind of an insane man using segmented but abstractly linked chapters. The mind is deeply affected by recent atrocities and media events like Marylin Monroe, Kennedy, Challenger, various wars, as well as other difficult and disturbing concepts such as gory plastic surgery, the dangers of cars and extreme car crashes, pornography, etc. All of these are linked together in the mind and visually in the movie through geometry, shapes, common features, often shockingly juxtaposing entities such as sex with a model and Ronald Reagan, and car crash dummies with sexual positions (he also wrote Crash). Important events are recreated and warped through imagination, and then analyzed metaphysically by the scientists who are fascinated by his insanity. The effect is occasionally interesting and mind-opening in a twisted way but the overall movie is tedious to sit through and unrewarding.
An attempt at Lynchian dream-logic mystery and dark subject matter with confusing plot jumps. A man finds himself plagued by memories of a dark ritual involving a murder, he may or may not be locked in an insane asylum with a doctor who is after his occult knowledge, he finds himself in a House of Love where his fellow patients seem to have secret agendas, a ghostly girlfriend with confusing purposes is at his back, and an attic with a nightmarish trunk haunts him. The movie fails because it has none of the talented nightmarish atmosphere of Lynch, and the acting is too mediocre and flat to convince anyone. This is one of those where you constantly see the cogs turning instead of enjoying the escapism.
This movie is an unofficial third in the cult Coffin Joe trilogy and is by far the most bizarre. A group of people get together to discuss the perverse effects of drugs on the people's sexual habits, telling one lurid and strange tale of sexual orgy after another. As a final experiment, they show a group of people some Coffin Joe movies while under the influence to measure the effect of such evil impetuses. The result is a surreal and energetic nightmare in an insane hell where women are made into slaves, creatures and men keep appearing and disappearing in gaudy costumes with faces painted on their butts, and more LSD inspired madness.
An incredibly unswerving movie that tells the tale of a 35 year old man who, for his whole life, has been locked up in a squalid room by his abusive and incestual mother. When he discovers what cling-wrap does around people's faces, he goes out into the world for the first time with pure, childish but warped innocence and has to deal with music, pizza, women that react in various ways to his perverse innocence, small vs. huge breasts (like mother's), money, jail, rape, church, etc. A repulsively twisted beginning leads to a fascinating black comedy that pulls no punches while wandering between sickness, laughter, sadness and wonder. Acted amazingly well by Nicholas Hope. Unforgettable and unique.
Skolimowski previously made two increasingly complex but playful movies following the adventures of a man finding his place in society. Long, meandering and complex takes focus on this alienated man as the scenery magically changes around him, employing snippets of whimsical dialogue, satirical humor and random social interactions to portray personal feelings of cynical but confused existentialism. With Barrier, Skolimowski extends this approach into Felliniesque deliriousness and surrealism. In this exploration, the man is a medical student tested by fellow students in an initiation ritual, receives a symbolic piggy bank from society, and a sabre from his father, escaping into society where he encounters many barriers built by generation gaps, money, religion and social classes. He courts an elusive female tram-driver, he symbolically tries to climb walls decorated with chickens, crowds run around like sheep, stopped cold by a traffic light and a single car, he goes to a restaurant empty of customers but full of waiters, and pays for his meal with his piggy bank, and suddenly the restaurant is full of dancing customers wearing paper hats, he fights a car with his sabre, etc. A difficult but interesting, rich and creative movie with many strange scenes and complex takes that feel both whimsical and carefully constructed, just like Jazz.
Wacky Japanese black comedy about a Kotatsu (heater in the shape of a table) that comes alive and eats people. It is brought into a house where a gentle old couple commit suicide via clock, a rock band practice at all hours of the morning and abuse their neighbour, all of whom are in love with the same schoolgirl, and a woman is trying to get rid of her husbands body and keeps the upper half in a bucket. To fight the evil Kotatsu, come a master electrician and an unfortunate Buddhist with sunglasses. Entertaining silliness.
Take the post-nuclear wastelands of junk, wrecks and scraps of Mad Max, mix with very dry Pythonesque absurdist humor, add some surreal touches and a slew of bizarre characters, and you may get this. A group of very strange characters wander the wastelands, some turning into cupboards, rooms or parrots, dogged on by policemen in balloons or cranes who tell them to keep moving. A girl is pregnant for 18 months with a creature and the doctor decides it makes more sense to move the furniture in instead of the baby out, a man is made prime-minister due to his 22-inch inner leg measurement, a man delivers BBC announcements through a TV frame with only the top third of his suit intact, and a man asks a women to take his wife's place in throwing dishes at him then calls her a slut, etc etc. The absurd humor doesn't work as often as you'd like and the consistent strangeness is both its strength and weakness.
This one makes all surreal movies look like children's stories. The movie is in grainy black and white with such a dreamlike, muddy quality that many images look like Rorschach tests where you stare and your mind tries to work it out using its own internal imagination. The story is a metaphysical fable about a god that kills himself, Mother Nature abused and raped, and the Son of Earth - a gift that is worshipped and then misused by the people. The dreamlike but dark quality of this movie is truly admirable and there are some brilliant as well as failed sequences, but overall it goes on way too long.
Featuring a fascinating, fresh idea of a portal into a celebrity's mind and the people obsessed over the experience. Interesting but dark, and ultimately a collection of repulsive bizarre characters that take this fun idea down to sickening levels of obsession and egotistical, childish goals. Many other bizarre but fun elements make this into an entertaining experience though.
A movie so magically bizarre I really wanted to like it and tried to find ways to approach it, unsuccessfully. Lily is trying to escape a world gone mad where men and women are literally at war with each other, brutally killing each other with tanks, fists and machine guns. She runs over a badger, finds herself in a strange house occupied by a strange, bedridden, whimsical mother who talks to a rat and a radio, a son and daughter, a talking unicorn, many naked children, and lots of sheep, chickens and insects. There's not much of a narrative, the rare dialogue is cryptic, and instead we get many bizarre or symbolic scenes of invisible attackers, Lily drinking milk from a huge glass, panties that keep falling down, breast-feeding the old mother, crying flowers, attacking an eagle with a sword, a series of loud alarm-clocks, etc. It's one thing to decipher or guess at the symbols, and quite another to derive any meaning and Louis Malle's intentions. It's too bizarre to be a fairy-tale or story, and just a bit too intent and consistent to be a dream. I think it's simply elements from Malle's dreams forced into an attempted fantasy narrative in an experiment which even he doesn't understand.
Strange stop-motion fairy-tale for adults with similar obsessive-compulsive attention to detail as with Svankmajer. Aristocratic mice pay the Oak Dwellers (some kind of mammal with beaks) to make them a female doll but they refuse to hand it over when done, developing some kind of relationship with it, then stitching an egg into its belly and crucifying it on a tree. The mice steal it, develop their own obsession with it, and the oak dwellers go on a quest to retrieve it, encountering labyrinths, dangerous fruit in a garden, a wizard frog who gives them hallucinogens, a bartering spider-woman, etc. Recurring themes include red string, tea (sometimes bloody), birds and wings. Very enigmatic and full of elusive symbolism, with hints of new-age circular mysticism, maybe some comments about social classes or feminism, but ultimately adding up to nothing except a strange, magical but unanchored experience, like a Jodorowsky movie.
Part surreal existentialist satire, part Bad Taste-like splatstick, and part sick Tromaesque toilet humor. This unique Norwegian film shows man born from the Earth in a huge vagina, programmed by monks, and sent in business suits with blank papers to kiss statues and finally end up crawling through the earth's anus. Outlaws become flesh-eating zombie-like creatures and are hunted with brutality by the military. This leads to many entertaining over-the-top splatter scenes with bodies being sliced or blown up in various ways. If this isn't enough we get to see a Nazi-like woman who stabs her victims while raping them, and a man getting his anus kicked in so hard he has to plug it with a bottle of beer. An entertaining movie with great cult potential but one that can't seem to make up it's mind what it wants to be.
Early experimental short from the team of Jeunet-Caro about a bunker during some kind of war with a countdown to some unknown catastrophe and the people inside it. Some electrocute cockroaches, some collect boogers, others go crazy and torture or kill scapegoats, keeping dead people wrapped in strange rooms. Features the typical eclectic and complex set design and it predates Brazil. Visually and atmospherically interesting, but nothing more than that.
Ferreri's most bizarre outing, exploring and taking apart gender roles as usual, this time with various different approaches, some of them quite abstract or odd: Lafayette (Depardieu) is raped by a group of feminist theatre actresses, he often communicates by blowing a whistle, he adopts an abandoned baby-monkey found next to a huge statue of a dead King Kong, and he works in a wax museum where a Cleopatra heats his loins and a strange aggressively male boss attaches himself to the Roman wax figures. He also hangs out with a troupe of old people, all of which are either depressed, alone, or nostalgic and all of which seem quaint, irrelevant and obsolete next to the modern youngsters. The finale features a couple of shocks and some bizarre violence. It seems that women are now scared, confused, aggressors, modern men are caregivers, and strong men and old people are obsolete.
The much talked about futuristic satire about violence escalating in society, and the means by which the system tries to control it. Alex is into 'ultraviolence', roaming the streets looking for fights, rape and murder with his 'droogs'. When he gets arrested, he volunteers for a mind-control experiment that brainwashes him into detesting violence. But will violent society accept the new and improved man? Features bizarre and stylish imagery, idiosyncratic dialog and very disturbing violence mixed with classical and happy music in the background, this classic is still disturbing and original even today.
Controversial blaxploitation from Bakshi that dives head-first into grotesque stereotypes and a parade of trashy characters. The movie is a pioneering mix of live-action and animation, mixing a story of a black prison-break with the longer animated tale of the Brother Rabbit, Bear and Preacher Fox. They get in trouble with a racist sheriff and the sherrif's daughter at a whorehouse, encounter a violent black resistance movement and are sent to kill a redneck cop and a grotesequely fat Godfather who is followed by an odd entourage of transvestites, a gay son, a headless black man, midget clowns, and bugs. A live stripper strips for an animated sheriff, there's a surreal speech by the fat, naked head of the resistence, a woman gets killed as she turns into a butterfly, there's an ongoing satirical clash between a small black man and a huge, white Ms America and it only gets more bizarre towards the end. Fragmented, satirical, trashy and raunchy.
Mix black comedy, horror, a murder mystery, some nasty rape and necrophilia, a touch of incest, a musical, very bizarre agents that sing the American Anthem while prancing in leotards on TV, and some kung-fu action and what do you get? I don't know, but this movie seems to be directed by a man with many whims. The story goes something like this: A mother and two daughters are hounded by police and journalists, accusing her son of beheading some schoolgirls. One daughter brings in some nasty psychics with an evil agenda of their own, convincing their customers to submit to rape, supernatural forces and other nasties. But who really is the murderer? Will breaking out into song or a flurry of kung-fu save them from the angry mob? And what's with the ending? A bad movie somewhat redeemed by its insanity.
A short, extremely disturbing masterpiece about a marriage that has deteriorated to depression, perversions, long uncomfortable silences, and an unhealthy relationship between the husband and son. When the wife unsuccessfully tries to get her husband's attention by dressing up, she loses it and goes to more extreme, gory and nasty self-inflicting measures. Very disturbing and depressing mostly due to the sympathetic character and familiar horrors of a bad marriage. Featured as the first of three shorts on Family Portraits. Also featured on an anthology of short tales under the same name, of which the first four are mildly entertaining silliness: A violent dog that smokes crack, a wife that keeps nagging her husband even after he kills her, a man with an unhealthy obsession for meat and a talking bowl of oatmeal, and a silly punk teenage angst movie.
Cult movie about an absolutely terrible stand-up comic who grows a strange appendage out of his back, and his hyperactive friend with a taste for hugely fat women and accordions. They try to make it big in show-business while working in garbage-collection. This one is truly one of a kind with a uniquely bizarre cast of characters, the actors are almost all covered in slime, grime, filth and garbage, and the scenes keep suprising you. There's an orgy with huge women and dog food, a touch of necrophilia, and their stage routine keeps getting weirder. Runs out of cult charm towards the end and it's a bad movie overall, but it keeps you watching.
Early Pinku that allegedly started the whole genre and was later remade by the same director with hardcore porn inserts. I suppose it was inevitable that given the fascination the Japanese have with erotic abusive relationships, that they would somehow find a way to exploit the relationship between a dentist and a woman. As the dentist manhandles her mouth, she gives in to erotic fantasies then goes under the nitrous oxide. A young man in lust with the woman and who is being treated nearby also joins in as the three get lost in a surreal romp. S&M, XXX, a naked chase through a hotel, the dentist becomes a vampire, she beheads him, a ghost train, hardcore porn with a puppet, she finds herself naked inside a car wash, etc etc.
A demon falls in lust with a girl, but when she dies from his attentions, he grieves and his blood falls on a bed, turning it into a hungry creature that digests anything placed on it. The bed can make flowers grow out of a skull, lock doors, drag bodies around, make munching sounds and pour pepto-bismol out of a bottle. The bed has a pool of digestive juices with blood that can swallow anything without soiling the sheets and it can bring an artist back as a ghost, paint his fingernails black and imprison him behind a painting. The bed is simply incredible. The only thing more amazing than the fact that this LSD-inspired surreal idea was conceived, was that it was actually filmed. Very entertaining in a bizarre way and must be seen to be believed.
If you're looking for the cinematic equivalent of a wild LSD trip, look no further. A humanoid female is kept tied up in a decrepit basement and several unknown groups of people seem to be interested in this creature. When the creature blows dust on some intruders, it sends them off to another world and gives them deep understanding of... something or another to do with rising above the limitations of flesh. These various parties fight it out amongst themselves, some turning out to be more than human. That's as much of the plot as one can gather from this bizarre experience however. The real movie is industrial hallucinogetic horror and gore spliced with random images of people and various creatures doing... random things. Oh nevermind, I give up summarizing this one.
Cult underground film that is a kind of gritty, paranoid, industrial-music-fan's fantasy with the involvement of William S. Burroughs. Big-brother government and corporations are monitoring the people, controlling information and generating muzak to play in hamburger joints that control people's emotions. When a youth decodes these signals in his home studio, he literally goes underground where he encounters a cult led by Genesis P. Orridge that treat information as their religion, make a lot of rhythmic noise on industrial and metal artefacts, and plot a revolution with sound tapes as weapons to disrupt society. In the meantime, his girlfriend has a bizarre obsession with frogs and a government agent with a strange attitude towards people tries to develop a relationship with a prostitute. A throbbing, rhythmic, blinking, beeping, whirring, gritty experience with some random disturbing imagery on screens.
In what feels like an enthusiastic, student-made, surreal movie project, a college student dreams of being a pirate in an adult world in between bouts of college confusion, stress and humiliations. His pirate adventures include strange home-made props as scenery, he travels and clashes with an adult-populated island, has strange discussions and philosophical arguments about individualism with his mates, and longs for a sorority girl who constantly hovers in his dreams. Mildly entertaining, sporting nonsensical dialogue, dream-logic, bad acting and bargain-basement surrealism.
In the spirit of Troma and Toxic Avenger, this goofy wannabe-cult film tells the tale of a married, loving, cannibalistic serial killer couple and the evil Nefarious who wants to turn the whole world into zombie slaves, starting with 3 naked female scientists. After his wife gets kidnapped, Red goes on a road trip in search of Nefarious, meeting Swedish boobs, trailer trash, angelic pizza guys, and Jamaican gurus, while gorily tearing apart zombies. In the meantime, Nefarious inflates the unimpressed wife's boobs and gets zombie chicks to hammer his overly enlarged penis while he plays a tune on his prickly butt.
Greek movie that creates a strange, dream-like world where a man dreams of a confusing shootout in an opera and a woman who loves him, a singer's voice is stolen, a psychic detective solves a furniture theft using his powers, an oracle tells the future through a tea-cup, and a red-headed whore finds a magic wand that grants her wishes. The movie's fatal flaw is that it doesn't develop or build up anything, not even a mystery, and wallows in meandering atmospheric strangeness instead, wandering between its many empty characters. Interesting, but lacking substance and only occasionally effective as a dream..
A surreal, amusing exploration of sex, love, innocence, knowledge, happiness and capitalism through the sexual awakenings and experiments of Dorothea. She comes downstairs one day as the parents are narrating their own words and actions, and informs them and us that an alien visited her and left her a strange red meteorite. The parents immediately are concerned about her sexual habits and thus starts her misadventures with unhappy, perverted or lost people. She tries a sex documentary with friends, working as a model and prostitute (where she gets abused), befriends a depressed Dominatrix, follows advice from Jesus (who comes to visit her out of the blue) to sleep with children and fools (a flasher) until she reaches some kind of conclusion in the rural, naked life of the country. In the meantime, her father works producing bags of canned laughter to make people happy. Didactic and meditative in some parts, an amusing sex romp in others, and unfocused in the rest.
The sets are low-budget German expressionism with garish colors, making the movie look like a cheap cartoon, the actors are mostly deadpan (with notable exceptions) and perform with their body movements, the insane dialog includes phrases like "My feelings are like filthy prayers. I want to scream in your face", the camp is over-the-top, there is black-comedy with nudity and nastiness, and the whole effect is surreal. It can't get more cult than this and yet it hasn't gained a following. The story is secondary but involves a Dr. Caligari who is in charge of an insane asylum and whose questionable methods include human experimentation, playing with a masochistic cannibal and a nymphomaniac, and the swapping of minds through hypothalamus injections. By a director who otherwise makes bizarre porn like Cafe Flesh and Night Dreams.
Tobe Hooper's follow-up to Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the closest in plot and mood but somehow loses the grit and realism amidst too much style and bizarreness that is almost surreal. A local seedy hotel is owned by a madman who tends to mumble on and on about nonsense, and who owns an insatiable crocodile to whom he feeds all his guests. This movie visits this location on a very busy night where sometimes the clients are crazier than the hotel owner. Lots of madness, gore and twistedness ensues.
A low-budget B&W that starts as an absurd comedy involving two people stuck in an elevator for days. The guy is a 26 year old virgin, obsessed with anal sex and venus fly traps that give fellatio, and the girl is an ex-slut born again Christian. They chat, date, share their personal lives, try to shave and shower, and deal with the sexual tension, all in the elevator. As the days become weeks and then months, she starts mutating, starting from the genitals which look like something out of Tetsuo. All this leads to an ending which is outrageous on many levels. Must see at least once.
A strange one from the 70s. Eliza is looking for her love and baby with the help of a mysterious old astrologer who lives in a house full of strange characters. While she is waiting for the predicted One to appear, she lodges in this house and has a series of misadventures while dressing up in increasingly more bizarre clothes and makeup: She develops a complex relationship with an angry half-native who wants to blow up a bridge infringing on his reservation and home, she meets a sea captain who has a fetish for dressing her up as a china doll, and have her whip a statue of a centaur he is riding on with her wig while being filmed, and she joins a strange new-age cult that keeps live specimens of the zodiac signs and participates in bizarre orgiastic rituals while taking mushrooms. Memories and symbols keep popping up including old baby shoes, her brother, some violence, a guide in an eye-patch, a bearded clown, and all of this comes together at the end in an all-out surrealistic nightmare. Interesting and unique, but it didn't come together for me and remains an enigma.
An unholy child of Godard's cinematic techniques and Aronofsky's Pi. The story involves a man who gets a job handling obituaries, finds out he was a gear in the mechanism of an old woman's accidental death, then causality itself goes to hell as past and future get mixed up and he finds himself manipulated by some mysterious people who are writing him into a script of death. Some surrealism follows, like when he follows a girl down the rabbit hole into a kitchen cupboard. A quote in the film declares art as exploring death at work but I wonder if he wasn't also going for the quote about only needing a girl and a gun to make a movie. What makes this movie special is the editing and metaphysics: Scenes are exremely disjointed, cut up into pieces, spliced together, interweaving past and future, often ending abruptly into long blackouts, all messing with the viewer's mind and his grasp of the sequence of events and continuity, but also giving the impression that the protagonist is caught in a movie with his actions scripted and his life at the hands of a writer who has the power to play with his past, his fate, his flow of time, and his actions. The metaphysics are fascinating and raise questions of causality, choice, fate and accident, but the disjointed editing is very overused and sometimes gets annoying. Unique and interesting but feels more like an experiment rather than anything complete.
This sequel in name only is vastly different and features a very bizarre blend of gory slashings by disturbed female characters, a creepy child-ghost that may or may not be behind all the strange behaviour, nightmarish surreal sequences, and sleazy perversions. The plot is incomprehensible but seems to involve lots of psychotic guilt over an abortion or two, an obese projectionist with no friends and dark secrets, and a celebrity who seems to be insanely jealous of the projectionist. Very artistically striking and beautifully shot violent scenes, atmospheric music, some disturbing and dense nightmares, but incoherent.
Compilation of 6 shorts from various periods, all featuring experiments with sight and sound rather than plot. The first four are mostly forgettable, featuring strobe effects, kaledoiscopic images, warped film stock, double images, etc. as well as some typical 60s psychedelic and colorful imagery, all more of an assault on the eyes and the head rather than anything terrorizing. Virgin Suicide features a Satanic montage of images that would go well with a Kenneth Anger short. The last two stand-out however: Tuning the Sleeping Machine is one of the best examples I've seen of nightmare-cinema, capturing the chaotic jumble of colors, lights and images inside an unfiltered brain, creating an intensely hypnotic and dark experience. Dawn of an Evil Millennium is an '18 minute trailer for an 18-hour epic' involving demons, sorcerers, aliens, action, car-chases and whatnot, with a unique approach of combining silly slapstick and sound effects with chaotic demonic splatter, action, fantasy and psychedelic sound and atmosphere.
An artsy, metaphysical, low-budget sci-fi dystopia film. The future is absurdly politically correct, with feminists in charge who donate their wombs to Notre-Dame, drink a lot of milk, forbid physical contact, blow up the Eiffel Tower as a phallic symbol, are all-knowing and make men choose sadistic punishments for themselves. An expressionless, emotionless, mute man offers a way out via his ability to connect with alternate realities, in this case bizarre virtual reality worlds, and subversive internet worlds where men are aggressive and where men and women touch each other lovingly or sexually. Lots of difficult symbols are used of nature, an obsession with sounds, a dead cat, the movie offering pretentious inscrutability, as well as some idea-oriented sci-fi and touches of humor. The ending drops the fourth-wall to disorient the viewer and demonstrate a metaphysical jump in reality.
The only attempt at an adaptation of this most difficult of novels by James Joyce. Although there were attempts at extracting a narrative and fleshy characters from the book, the writing is based on playful language and dream-logic, inventing its own words that are remotely English and perhaps Irish, allowing them to be recognized in a mad Lewis Carroll way, but twisting them around to play dense puns, games, and free associations with obscure or playful allusions, all carefully constructed to create a rhythm and patterns that will appeal to a stream of consciousness. The movie creates literal visuals to go with the flowing imagery of the book that rapidly moves and shifts between scenes as in a dream. Finnegan is challenged by having to attend his own wake, and characters interchange, representing various aspects of his life and ideals, as well as his own self. The movie is not about the visuals or story however, and the scenery merely provides more fuel for the language blender and sculptor that is James Joyce. The language is so difficult and dense, it is presented in subtitles. At times playfully interesting, especially to the most literary and academic, but rapidly grows tiresome and is probably best taken in smaller doses.
Forget Rocky Horror Picture Show. This incredibly offbeat cult musical is much more bizarre and creative, and even quite amusing at times. Try to imagine very quirky comic-book characters mixed with John Waters trashy acting, costumes that look like someone collected every item in cheap leftover wardrobes and put them together randomly, sets made of cardboard and sketches, some stop motion animation, very unpredictable behaviour and plot development, and campy dialog. The story isn't the star of the movie but it involves a door to a sixth dimension via a large intestine, where a midget king rules while a tuxedo wearing frog waits and a human chandelier swings. Other characters include a machine-gun toting schoolteacher, Satan, chicken boy, and a trio of prostitutes who get humped by passers-by. This one makes you wonder whether someone slipped you a drug in your drink.
Experimental, absurd and unique film that invents a foreign country and language called Bulbovia, and then features a group of Bulbovians doing strange Bulbovian things in the forest while speaking Bulbovian. What looks like a team of soldier-scientists are to occupy new territory while conducting bizarre scientific experiments and readings, and reaching absurd objectives. One is in a wheelchair and his partner his shocked at the social irresponsibility when he decides to leave his wheelchair, his abandoned wife sells the children to join them in the forest but soon falls for a strange meek local who lives in a barn and logs his daily hygiene habits. Other locals include some annoyed cows, and two people in bizarre costumes playing games with an inflatable ball. What's strange is that we can recognize how this alien culture is eroded by local customs and the tensions rise, leading to fights with chickens as boxing gloves, and force-feeding of milk. Did I also mention that the whole movie features four people?
A disturbing study of lust and loneliness by exploring such characters as a depressed woman who coldly repulses her lovers, a writer in search of raw emotion who tries to find it in rape, a wimpy obscene phone caller, and a pedophiliac father. Their lives are explored graphically and sympathetically, with painful scenes such as when the pedophiliac attempts to explain his affliction to his son through tears. Well done, but too unrelentingly repulsive and disturbing. The director seems to be more interested in uncovering filth in a realistic and sympathetic way rather than in offering insights. Who needs a movie just to show what filth and depression look like?
Another bizarre cinematic allegory by Herzog. A small village in Bavaria that lives on their export of ruby glass has lost the only man who knows how to make this glass. A local mystic continuously prophesizes about events both big (the world wars to come) and small (free beer), and poetically describes cataclysms and existential crises. Two men are fated to fight and one to die under another, and they catatonically fulfill this prophecy. Other locals also seem insane or catatonic, a man is tested for signs of life using a barking dog poked by a gardening fork, a strange woman with short hair strips and dances, and there is a twisted relationship between a laughing old man and a young girl. Most of the symbolism is too obscure and impenetrable but the movie as a whole is intriguingly pensive, poetic and pastoral with beautiful scenery.
Not a slasher film. This cult classic goes into the mind of a remorseless serial killer who calmly and carefully kills dozens of people at random for entertainment, to vent his twisted drives or merely to pass the time. Along the way he 'befriends' an abused stripper, attracted and intrigued by his murder of his mother, and her incestuous brother who is drawn in to the murdering sprees while filming them with a video camera. No camp, no excess gore, no dishonest heroic portrayals, and no message, just twisted and cold film-making.
Partially deserved hype accompanies this experimental 7-hour movie about Hitler. The approach is artsy, philosophical, operatic in its passionate, grand portrayal of the period and the coming of Hitler, and surreal in its stagy, bizarre sets and oddly costumed narrators and guides that serve as a strange abstract visual backdrop to the poetic narration and historical footage, quotations and audio. The result is a deep and sweeping understanding of Hitler and what he represented to Germany and the world. A vision that doesn't glamorize him, or attempt another dry documentary with facts, or another historical dramatic recreation, but something new. It is careful with its condemnation, always keeping it personal and close to us the audience, and it emphasizes the fact that Hitler would have been nobody without the masses who needed him, so that understanding will come through personal introspection and indirectly through a poetic and thoughtful narration. His personal life, quotes, attitudes, viewpoints, helpers and friends are also explored through many writings of his associates read by performers on stage. The big flaw is the length, much of it spent on needless flights of arthouse fancy, mildly interesting theatrical performances and puppets, and pointless tangents on minutiae, or rants about the artists of the time. A much more powerful 3 hour movie could be extracted from this.
An artsy study filmed in a style similar to reality-TV/Dogme about self humiliation, objectification, mutilation and abuse for glamor, commercialism and fame. It also deals with communication and relationship issues between people who are disconnected from themselves, desperate and empty. A man with a traumatic past makes porn movies in his house, aided by his male porn-star friend, a desperate female who will do anything for fame, and his lonely, intensely depressed son who stays in his room while his father engages in depravity. Personalities clash, connect and interact while the porn-making descends into violence, food fights, out-of-control orgies and vomit. A non-linear, experimental film that makes some interesting, scattered findings but wraps it in a disgusting and depressing bundle.
Bergman's second very abstract and somewhat surreal movie is challenging but feels incomplete and flawed no matter how hard you think about it. A neurotic artist and his wife move to a seemingly deserted island, but the local Baron and his strange friends pop up and upset their lives, using jokes, strange entertainment and knowledge of the artist's past to play games with the increasingly insane man. Events written in a journal, ideas sketched on canvas, people that appear, and stories told in the middle of the night may or may not be real, and his wife, so desperate to connect with her deteriorating husband may get more than she wished for. Bergman seems to touch on themes of subjective reality, schizophrenia, art, deep connections between man and wife, horror elements like a bird man and a woman who pulls off her face, and social drama, but that's all he seems to do with them: touch lightly.
Rob Zombie's homage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a slew of other horror movies. Take a healthy dose of TCM, increase the freak count from 4 to about 50, add much more camp and over-the-top acting by everyone involved, spice the movie with lots of MTV style editing, jumps to background scenes using various film-stocks a la Natural Born Killers, and top it with some Tarantino-influenced action scenes and you basically have this cult release. Looks like Rob tried to squeeze in too much horror entertainment in one go and forgot to make it horrifying.
Imagine Holy Mountain as directed by Tinto Brass on acid. This is so insane it feels like a satire on surrealism at times. A freeform delirious fantasy a la Fellini involving a woman who runs away from her groom during her alleyway wedding and has one bizarre symbolic adventure after another with a man and a lunchbox. Sex on a double-decker bus attacked by a troupe of maniacal British policemen (authority/colonialism?), seducing a bourgeoisie couple then urinating on their windshield, a cult of naked cannibals in a forest (religion?), a series of bizarre sex rooms featuring one fetish after another, including decapitation of a goose, a fascist war, a bizarre chaotic jail break, etc. Most of the movie consists of delirious romps by characters with random bizarre costumes (e.g. a barrel and an American flag) making statements or singing. Tinto always gives his women free-spirited independence, perhaps this was his way of exploring this using surrealism, symbolic unshackling of various forms in society and history.
Neil Young and friends on a goofy acid trip that's so messy it feels improvised. There's some kind of a story involving the new grumbling owner of a diner who tries to make all kinds of changes to make money out of the business while assorted weird characters interact, long after each other and dance. Hopper is Cracker who feeds his pet raccoon, Young is a dorky mechanic who plays music on his tools, there's a bizarre creature with a doll's head that talks incoherently, a rich Sheik who goes after the milkman, glowing nuclear plant employees, and suddenly the whole goofy thing dissolves into concert and weird jam footage of Neil Young, and a travelogue mixed with psychedelia. Definitely a "What the hell did I just see?" movie.
Intriguing Dutch visual piece with no dialogue, with most of the movie consisting of strange magical tricks, slapstick, visual comedy, gags, pantomime and surrealism as part of the story. Two strange brothers with a penchant for pantomime performance, constantly fiddling with magic props, collecting dead flies, and falling into pools of water are separated by their family. One is afflicted with sudden strange outbursts that disturb the locals and is therefore sent to be treated in an insane asylum. The family continues falling apart as the other brother follows his obsessive desire for a magician's assistant, his fears and a touching loneliness becoming increasingly confusing and surreal. Full of alien visual gags that are played with for their own sake, like when a moving branch gets in his way in the forest while cannonballs drop. Brings to mind a much more bizarre Tati movie.
Notorious for its twisted subject matter, this dark and cynical movie explores human monstrosities but fails to rise above them. An ex-Nazi with a continuing fetish for torturing young boys finally throws himself off the roof only to find himself dependent on others and kept alive by an iron lung. A mysterious teenager claiming to be a nurse shows up to take care of him, at first seeming to want revenge but soon reveals his true intentions: His traumatized, disturbed mind wants to become a powerful monster like the Nazi. So he plays sick and violent games with his family and brings young boys to the house to slaughter until the final depraved ending. Very well filmed and acted but the writing wallows in sickness instead of giving us something to think about.
A disturbing French artsy study on the topic of the self-body dichotomy portrayed by a woman who, in a desperate attempt to discover the meaning and connection to her body, self-mutilates herself. An accidental gash on her leg which she doesn't feel provokes a neurotic and obsessive breakdown and search for twistedly sensuous discovery. Some of the questions asked are: Who is in control? Why does my body misbehave? What's the meaning of etiquette and body language? How am I connected to my body? What if the body is just meat? Maybe individual body parts have meaning? etc. So this lost woman cuts, bites, stabs, pokes, slashes, eats and tears herself, then tries to keep ripped flesh around as mementos. A blend of Cronenberg's Crash and La Pianiste, this one is guaranteed to make you squirm or even walk out.
Japanese pornographic exploration of sexual obsession that somehow blurs the line between pornography and art. A master of a household falls for a possessive, prostitute house girl and things slowly change from youthful carefree sex to dangerous possessive and obsessive games (strangulation, rape) to the final fatal and shocking ending.
Insane entertainment involving a thief and his girlfriend, and their two accomplices (one with a urinating disorder) whom they double-cross. The thief goes to prison where the warden is queer, likes to play golf on prisoners backs and play with pigeons, and the girl goes to a gas station convent (huh?) as a nun. A meteor strikes and a piece falls in her soup, making her turn into a creature with a 10-foot talking tongue that likes to messily tear through people's heads and crack jokes, and her poodles are turned into flaming drag queens who redecorate her place and serve her every whim. She soon finds a new use or two for the tongue. What does it all add up to? Who knows, but it's certainly distracting!
Strange happenings in a Swedish village causes people and weird animals to appear and disappear, people go insane, see things, or have mysterious knowledge of the events that all seem to revolve around a dam and some fleshy goo. This starts off as a boring drama with empty characters and weak acting, it slowly builds the horror filmed with bad lighting and choppy editing for that gritty Riget atmosphere, for a short time it becomes weird other-wordly half-Lynch half-Kairo horror, then it steers into cheesy sci-fi denouement, and suddenly falls apart in a chaotic free-for-all involving sci-fi priests in robes, mutating body-snatchers, and super-powers installed via instant gory surgery. There is a potential creepy movie in here but a mess was created instead.
B&W bizarre homage to German expressionism. The 'story' involves a scheming ruler, and his son and daughter who plot against him while a 'connoisseur' is sent to find a replacement for his son, but this setup falls away quickly in seemingly random plot developments, as if the writer is on drugs and making things up as he goes. The visuals are strikingly expressionistic with weird angles and bizarre props such as fish growing out of the ground that serve as a singing Greek chorus. The plot moves from human archetypes, to murder and detectives, to mad scientist, to prison break, to theological symbolism, etc. People occasionally break out in song or philosophize nonsensically. Altogether a nonsensical but visually and oddly entertaining flick.
Low-budget, cult, artsy flick about invisible aliens invading an androgynous, bisexual fashion model's apartment looking for heroin but quickly going for human pheromones during orgasm instead. Her lovers disappear during orgasm and a German scientist follows these activities obsessively. Effects that are so bad they're good, and a minimalist electronic score make this into a cult, weird and darkly funny movie.
The insane are pouring out of the asylums by order of the government while a huge parasitic worm is roaming the sewers of New York mutating people into monsters. The protagonist is a man with a reading disorder who compulsively reads then destroys words, he falls for his neurotically affectionate neighbour with a fetish for chewing gum and who works with her hygiene-obsessed mother cleaning up crime-scenes. Add to this a sex surrogate in training, a horny doctor with a God-complex, a woman who thinks she's Kali, wife of Shiva, mixing sex and death while hearing voices, and you have one insane movie. The star of the movie is the kinetic cinematography, wacky effects and energetic direction, all resulting in a mindwarp of an experience similar in effect to Tetsuo. Entertaining and unique cult movie.
Strangely cartoonish satire on Brazilian culture and society. Macunaima is a black man birthed as a grown man from his man-in-drag mother. His jungle/country friends and family barely tolerate him and his childish ways, so he treks to the big city with some friends. On the way he bathes in a magical fountain that makes him white, gets romantically entangled with a violent guerrilla woman, clashes with city-folk and people out to trick, pressure or control him, and wages war with a rich Caligula-like tycoon who keeps naked women in a glass cage and entertains himself with a fatal swimming pool full of body-parts. Other adventures include a man selling a duck that defecates money, a cannibal-witch of the lake, and an old man who feeds him flesh from his thigh. Deals with racism, a black inferiority complex, lazy, repressive, corrupt or violent society, and many other things that probably only Brazilians are likely to get. Cartoonishly silly and absurd surrealism.
A fatally flawed masterpiece that starts as a delicately constructed and acted character study of a highly neurotic and lonely girl with a lazy eye, a nonchalance for all things gory and twisted, a fetish for perfect body parts and a glass-enclosed doll for a best friend. Her transition to a psychotic, confident slasher collecting body parts and then back again is unconvincing, but other than that, this is gripping, gory and disturbing.
A movie made by a make-up and set design artist and it shows. The star of this movie is the bizarre sets, gadgets, props and costumes. In an alternative universe, everything revolves around pipes, tunnels, tubes, and tentacles. The kitchen is full of bizarre appliances, tentacle food that is chopped and cooked by a portable pipe oven contraption, bruises are removed by a sucking tube, a creature with an eyeball on a stalk serves as a pet, and so on. The simple plot involves a family who is visited by the father's aggressive boss who promptly tries to seduce the wife while drooling over the teenage daughter. The atmosphere and dialogue is silly, cheesy, 50s-sitcom, cheery simplicity but the entertainment is in watching all the inventive eye-candy and quirks. Cult material.
Docudrama about the Japanese atrocities in China during WWII in Camp 731 where they developed biological weapons and experimented on people. The varied and shocking experiments are graphically displayed on screen including stripping flesh off a woman after a severe case of frostbite, decompression chambers where intestines burst out of a body and organ harvesting off a young boy who was lured into the camp with smiles. Young soldiers undergoing training get to draw the line and moralize at times, but the dubbing, lack of fleshed-out characters and failure to portray the victims as real people make this gruesome movie strangely uninvolving.
Spanish offbeat comedy that constantly crosses the border between Jeunet-Caro oddball magic and a stupidly crude wild cartoon. P. Tinto comes from a long line of P. Tintos, is confused by how many Gods there are in Christianity, is set to inherit the wafer-factory from his father, and wants a large family of his own. His blind girlfriend who likes frogs and P. Tinto set out to learn about making babies and discover all kinds of tricks except some basics. They set-up house, and decades later are rewarded with hungry, time-traveling, crash-landed midget aliens as children whom they adopt. Their 'real' child soon joins them as a brooding giant from an insane asylum. Non-stop inventive visuals, gags and jokes, but as mentioned, they range from hilarious, surprising and gentle to downright stupid or bawdy. Definitely very entertaining, but it's constantly held back by crudeness in the second half.
Tarkovsky explores his own psyche and memories in another meditative and slow movie. Memories of his childhood and his mother mix with personal discussions with his wife (both acted by the same person), interspersed with poetry readings and historical images of Russia. There is no narrative, only random scenes connected only in Tarkovsky's mind, including images of his mother at work in a printing shop, his mother sitting on a fence flirting with a passerby, military training of children, pastoral scenes, beautiful elemental scenes of wind, fire and water, etc. The memories frequently slide into slightly surreal and aimless daydreams, with bizarre touches altered by memory and mind such as the hypnotic imagery of his mother washing her hair as the house comes crumbling down in a downpour, or a levitating sleeping woman. Sometimes as self-indulgent as a Fellini movie, a bit of Bergmanesque introspection, and the symbolism and poetry border on the pretentious, but there's always a magical Tarkovsky meditative atmosphere.
By the makers of Mondo Cane comes a very fitting fictional project that takes the theme of Voltaire's Candide about a young, happy, optimistic man who roams the world and tries to reconcile the world's various madnesses with his outlook. Like the mondo movies, this is a series of outrageous vignettes, only this time not limited to reality and is full of bizarre imagery, absurdities, exaggerated social customs and provocative satire. Some of the scenes include soldiers who bite through barbed wire and have their armor nailed into their bodies, some Tinto Brass-esque sexual romps, a woman with three breasts, people who strap angel wings onto their young men as they jump off a cliff, 17th century cardboard soldiers wiped out by modern military, a dwarf rapist, a dance sequence set to synchronized inquisition tortures that convert women into cardboard cutouts, and much more. Mid-way, Candido is transported to modern New York, and to some naked, fighting, female, Israeli soldiers, and it starts feeling more like a Mondo. Often brings to mind a funny Holy Mountain or Fellini and perhaps Ken Russell. Rich, wacky, raunchy and entertaining.
Amidst the slew of exploitative cannibal movies in the 70s came this attempt at quality. Cannibal movies as a rule offer gory, real animal deaths, nudity, nasty human gore, and a plot involving amoral white people who turn into violent animals in the jungle only to rapidly find out that cannibals can easily outdo them in the nasty department. This one is no exception but it's relatively tamer, the direction and acting is adequate (no dubbing!) and the scenery is gorgeous. That doesn't elevate it above the exploitation genre however and it zooms in on animals getting torn and eaten, bloody deaths and castration, sex with a pig, and Ursula Andress's naked body.
A man with a very dark and brutal past roams a post-disaster planet where people cannibalize each other, performing acts of gory self-mutilation to cheering crowds and burying himself in the earth at night. Using flashbacks we learn of his guilt over a violent past and his torn and suffering mind. The cinematography and sound are the stars here, using creative editing, very gritty and grainy film-stock, minimal dialog and a very dark aural atmosphere, sometimes reminiscent of Begotten. Nightmares haunt him with symbolic and twisted visions of demons, angels and rebirth, while he searches for redemption. Has great acting and is fascinating at first, but then it becomes somewhat repetitive and empty.
A male doctor and a woman find themselves in a strange castle after a car accident where reality and time have no meaning and a strange man presides. This is as far as the story goes and we are then treated to random scenes of sex, colors, camera-shaking, living paintings, multiple characters with the same face, alternate personas, a horribly fake toy spider that tries to eat a woman, pseudo-philosophy nonsense, day and night lose their meaning, and yes, we have nudity and Satan. Trippy horror-sleaze that's so bad it's entertaining.
A sequel to the Teruo Ishii Tokugawa torture series. An endless barrage of disturbing tales of imaginative torture, sadism and cruelty in Japan in the 17th century. The first half tells the tale of a samurai who falls in love with a local Christian girl until his cruel shogun finds out. Intercut with gentle love and sex scenes are a wide variety of brutal torture and rape scenes including foot smashing, burning the eyes of a little girl, cooking of live humans, and splitting a woman into three pieces by oxen. The second half inappropriately mixes comedy with its tale of forced prostition and slave labor with plenty more cruel scenes of forced abortion, amputation with blunt knives, etc, etc. The high production values, good story-telling and great acting mixed with this endless brutality will make your jaw drop.
A deliciously wicked, hilarious sleaze-fest of a horror movie about a teenager with a very extreme female version of vagina dentata. A psychological fear causes her insatiable vagina to devour men who have sex with her so that only their clothes and condom remain. Matters aren't made easier by the fact that she is very attractive and almost every single man she meets wants to molest or deviously trick her into sexual intercourse. She soon learns how to live a jaded life with her evil genitals however. Add to the mix a virginal moron with a crush on her, and female siamese twins, one slutty and the other a virgin, and you have one entertainingly twisted release.
A result of the drug-induced attitudes and pseudo-philosophies of the 60s, this cult movie starts off as a gritty British crime movie and then gets lost in a nonsensical, artsy exploration of identities, the merging and loss of individualism and gender, and the 'performances' that express such transfers. The performers in this case are a criminal whose job it is to frighten and coerce people, and Mick Jagger as a fallen rock star. Their paths cross and there is a struggle of identity transference, and lots of sex and strange mind games. If this topic interests you then this is a movie to be watched numerous times with its many subtle references, obscure events and dialog, and strange filming techniques. Otherwise, you'll just find this a bizarre, nonsensical experience.
One of Pasolini's most abstract and difficult movies that mixes his earthy, violent style with artsy, intellectual obscurity. A son of a German industrialist represents the confusion and non-conformism of individualism, and neither agrees nor disagrees with his parents and a girl with ideologies. He has flings with pigs (a symbol for something or another) while trying to avoid being devoured by conformism and relationships. A violent, intercut story of a cannibal in medieval times seems to interwine symbolically with the intellectual exploration of individualism and is contrasted with modern, dehumanized ideas of a Nazi, etc. Mediocre intellectualism.
Four artsy and grotesque movies based on Edogawa Rampo's macabre and bizarre mystery stories. First is a nightmarish but pointless short about a man on an alien landscape envisioning a violent fight between himself and a female as their genders merge. Second is the most conventional, telling a murder mystery involving lots of mirrors, dead women with melted faces, and a strange, obsessive mirror-maker with a love for S&M sex. The third by Hisayasu Sato is the most depraved, involving a war veteran with no arms or legs, who can't talk, is deformed, and who is tended to by his insane, dominatrix, sadistic wife who may or may not have done all this to him. He becomes her Caterpillar, a sex slave for her sadistic impulses, a work of art according to a strange insane art collector living with her who soon performs his own twisted fantasies on them both. The fourth is a surreal, confusing trip into the insane mind of an obsessive man with an extreme fear of germs and a nasty rash on his neck from scratching himself all the time. He is infatuated with a celebrity whom he works for as a chauffeur, but is driven insane by wanting to touch her and his repulsions. He soon finds a solution but things get complicated when she starts to rot...
A female exploration of the sexual coming of age of a 15 year old girl. Explored are the girl's disgust and fascination with her sexuality and her strange fantasies, dreams and experimental sexual games. Interactions with parents and local men serve as vignettes for the roller-coaster of confusing lusts. A hunk ignores her so she dreams of him putting worms on her crotch, she flirts with men but quickly gets disappointed or shocked by perverts, and she plays with her body and underwear in very twisted yet innocent ways.
Exploitation horror on LSD and possibly the most confusing movie ever made. The plot involves a woman burned as a witch with a hole in her chest, a cult trying to bring her back to life with hearts of virgins, a vampire, a staring, giggling hunchback, a castle party with eccentric guests, and many other incoherent pieces put together with choppy editing, lots of nudity, histrionic acting, trippy colors, costumes and low-budget set designs, and a plot that jumps from one strangely out-of-place scene to another without a care for continuity issues such as night and day and consistent clothing. Terrible, but has to be seen to be believed.
A studiedly quirky and strange world of an idiot-savant who lives and works at a Prop House, a big warehouse full of props. His only contact with the world outside is in the cinema where he watches cheesy romance movies, and occasionally he catches glimpses of a 'movie' through the neighbour's windows. When a pretty production designer with bizarre requests for props comes to the warehouse, he becomes infatuated with her and is willing to do anything to fulfill her requests, and slowly his reality starts collapsing. Features striking visuals involving props and masks, Svankmajer-like animations as pieces of props come to life, some black humor, and a strange old couple that likes to dance, and beat each other up with a prosthetic or baseball bat. Slightly undeveloped writing and it seems to be holding back most of the time, but the good acting, idea and atmosphere makes this a must-see at least once.
A challenging and much more surreal creation by Michel Gondry. Whereas Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind used touches of surrealism and a non-linear screenplay to slowly uncover a story and insights about memory, this movie dives into the surreal for its own sake and as a study of a schizophrenic. The trouble is, the overly cute and quirky set designs and the feel of the movie is of a romantic comedy, making the increasingly distasteful protagonist a difficult case to swallow and unbalancing the movie. Stephane can't tell reality from his dream-world anymore, the movie constantly switching between his dreary new job and attempts at getting close with the girl next door, and a city that is a swimming pool populated by animated stop-motion objects that look like primary-school handcrafted projects, and the inside of his mind which is built from egg-cartons and which re-evaluates everything he sees through defense mechanisms and flights of fantasy. Very interesting, and often magical with touches of comedy, but feels half-baked and lacking focus.
Dennis Potter wrote and directed this slightly underrated flop. Whereas his Singing Detective series used some mental fugues and fantasies as part of interweaving narratives, this movie is pure stream of consciousness madness that doesn't provide any answers until the end. A man on a train is lost in a mental fugue and doesn't seem to know who he is, he thinks of his troubled relationship with his wife, whom he may have killed, or who may be a prostitute, or who may be having an affair, or who may be going mad herself. These variations flow from one to another with elements and characters from one layer appearing in different forms in another. There is more of Potter's dark deep psychological drama and misanthropy, exploring a dark character with sexual problems on the verge of madness. An interesting experiment.
A bizzare anthology of short stories tied together by a mummy who explains that it all has to do with the pursuit of sex and the interaction between genders. A man is tortured by a female photographer, topless stripping women are splattered with vegetables then assaulted by men with machine guns, a female burglar seduces her victim, a female spy plays cat and mouse with a military officer, one man attempts a threesome with a call-girl and lizard, and an old woman catches souls in her flowers. What it all means is beyond me. Awful but curious oddity.
Soavi, a talented horror director slowly finding his way, rips off Rosemary's Baby and creates a creepy world where a world-wide Satanic sect is building momentum, sacrificing children and waiting for the birth of ... something or another. Along the way, evil bugs are inserted in people's nostrils where they lay their young to feed on the brain, one woman's face is literally ripped off in a ritual and used for resurrection, a stork mounts a lady and eats worms out of her neck, rabbits turn out to be quite adept at switching TV channels with a remote and other inexplicable events occur. Cult material, if not for the stupid ending.
Demented French backwoods-horror black comedy. A group of annoyingly idiotic, over-sexed, partying teenagers accept an invitation from a sexy girl to come visit her country home and get more than they bargained for with the local inbred lunatics, one of which has some kind of pact with Satan and is after more than just their company. Very well-done, chaotic but trashy Euro-entertainment, with superb performances (especially a demented one by Cassel). Must-see at least once but fatally flawed by the fact that two thirds of the movie deals with the antics of the horny teenagers.
This is what you would get if you mix the demented and perverse sex from Thundercrack with film-noir and some John Waters trash. The plot concerns an insane girl and a demented hermaphrodite whom she calls her mother, and together they kill maids and play perverse sexual games and roleplays until a detective comes looking for a missing girl and falls into their hands. But the plot is just another ingredient for the insanity as we never figure out who is really who and what their motivations are. Normally I would just categorize this as pointlessly bizarre and twisted, seeing as it involves insane people having vomit sex, food sex, a golden shower while being electrocuted, hermaphrodite sex, a touch of confusing gore, and rape with a knife. But the performances here are so gripping, convincing and amusing in an insane way you could swear the actresses were recruited from a real mental ward. For the twisted only.
A raunchy Wodehouse-esque British comedy mixed with Monty Python and some drugs. This unique oddity was based on a radio show which revolved around colorful use of language, wordplay, wit and very British absurdities. There isn't much of a narrative that one can follow, the chaotic comedy revolving around many eccentric characters who say things like: 'If filthy fingers were trumps, what a splendid hand you'd have', rant to their maid that 'I don't know what I want but I want it now!', have monologues that include 'The trouble with Italian airplanes is that their wings are too hairy' and makes jokes like: 'How dare you belch before my wife!' 'I'm sorry, I didn't know it was her turn'. The wit often includes subtle bad taste ('Generally speaking when I eat something I don't want to see it again'), and the characters occupy themselves with random activities like riding a unicycle wearing a tutu and blackface, cutting up Reader's Digests with a stuffed animal's antlers, playing billiards on a horse, and practice shooting at fake parachutists. The movie also involves a ghost that speaks to a dead mother and takes a stuffed dog out for a walk to urinate, a man who entertains by pretending to be a chicken and eating maggots, and a climax with seance, swords and body parts. Incoherent, but entertaining.
This would be the mutant result if you crossed Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Troma. A family is stranded in the backwoods and are soon chopped up or kidnapped by a genetically mutated family from hell. There's a slashing monster with metal jaws, a midget that throws plates, a silly man with a huge brain, a headless muscle-man, a deceptively nice grandmother (of course), and a group of Hell's Angels type senior citzens. It's all played for silly and weird laughs, the over-the-top gore is too brief to get top billing, and included are some very strange scenes like when a man's brain is torn open and letter-blocks crawl out of his head to form the word "Love". And where else can you see an 80 year old man have a gory fight with a plate-throwing midget?
A dark, slow, surreal, and depressing look at humanity and where it's heading. This Swedish movie offers an ultimately bleak collection of characters and events that depict an extremely alienated, lonely and soulless state of modern society; People that are dead before they are dead. It is filmed with a blend of visually rich, Gilliamesque art direction and Bunuel surreal mockery and black humor, and uses a constantly stationary camera to portray the stuck state people are in. Scenes include endless and pointless traffic jams, a young girl being pushed over a cliff to symbolize the sacrifice of youth, a magician making a mistake and actually sawing into a man, and other unforgettable visuals like the sea of people overloaded with suitcases at a huge terminal. Visually rich, but pointless.
Colorful punk-rocker sci-fi oddity featuring aliens sent to Earth to kill a set number of beatniks and country folk, but updating that to hippies. Pizza-delivery aliens are stuck on Earth for breaking the rules and get a blood bond with a psychotic repulsive girl who goes on a killing spree while stripping, making out with other girls and lifting motorcycles. A naked angel with a snake appears every once in a while, as does Guitar Wolf from Wild Zero complete with laser beam eyes, a zombie grandmother and some incoherent bizarre sequences that make no sense.
Exactly what it sounds like. An ongoing festival produced by travelling producers featuring sick and twisted short animations and who also release video compilations. The animations are mostly humorous and very short, from seconds to minutes, and focus on gross-outs, gore, depravities, offensive content, plain weird, toilet humor, sick jokes, twisted fantasies, politically incorrect rants, etc. There are some reoccurring characters and artists such as Joe No Neck and his life's little misadventures with no neck, Brian's Brain - a kid missing the top of his head, and Lloyd who constantly mutilates himself in gory ways with his clumsiness. The shorts range from stupid, dull and pointlessly gross, to funny and entertaining, but the fun of these things is in the short gross-outs and the reactions by crowds. The stand-out artist included often in this festival is of course Bill Plympton.
A psychological, psychedelic movie based on a book by Hermann Hesse which I have not read. Harry is an antisocial, intelligent, uptight, suicidal man who struggles with his inner trapped wolf and suffers under society and the bourgeoisie. He meets a mysterious woman during this mid-life crisis who makes him obey her frivolous demands and who takes him on a journey of dancing, women, sex, popular music and drugs - to the ultimate goal of joining a mysterious magical theatre, the members of which appear and disappear around every corner of Harry's life. Features Gilliamesque animations, and an extended psychedelic sequence as he sinks into his own conflicted mind while under drugs. A well crafted psychological study and it features the always-noble Max von Sydow, but feels trite and seeped in too much drug-culture of its time. A fitting accompaniment to Performance.
A zombie sex movie that may become a cult item. Matool is a zombie killer who prefers to kill the undead with nine-inch nails. He's also a horny bastard who tries to get into the pants of girls he rescues. When he runs across a couple who live an 'alternative lifestyle' despite the post-apocalyptic world around them, things get complicated. This lifestyle includes having sex with anyone that crosses their path, including a laughably mutated sister in their orgies, and keeping a naked sexy zombie around in case of hormonal emergencies. When more people join them and tensions rise, things get out of control. An inventive, offbeat, kinky, funny cult movie with the expected gore but for some reason leaves you unsatisfied due to some flat elements and acting.
Japanese schoolgirls are prostituting themselves for money and gifts. One group of psychotic sleazebags working at a porn shop decide to teach them a lesson by having sex with them, abusing them and not paying. Another couple decide to entice men who go for these schoolgirls and torture them for being such perverts. When these groups clash, the blood flies. The clash of twisted ideals and sick characters is entertainingly violent, the rest is extreme sleaze and filth.
Disgusting sleaze, but so bizarre and over-the-top insane that it's entertaining. The abused schoolgirl from part one is back working as a pimp with a team of schoolgirl whores, all on the look out for her assailant. The psychotic comes back for more abusive fun to teach schoolgirls a lesson, only this time he's practically super-human and has an obsession with vegetables and his grandpa. Features vegetable rape, over-the-top camp with sleaze, various perversions including a diaper fetish and one man who likes to be abused while yelling 'Michael' repeatedly, harrassment by a stuffed toy down a man's pants, and random crazy scenes such as a basement that turns into a disco while the lunatic dances with his dead grandpa. Many vegetables were harmed in the making of this film
A surreal blend of Lynchian warped and repulsive characters with over-the-top Guignol grotesqueries and a narrative that schizophrenically melds realities before pulling a plot twist and turning them all inside out. Sion Sono of Suicide Circle fame masterfully crafts a nightmare with interesting cinematography but covers a pointlessly twisted story. In one reality, a girl is forced to watch her parents having sex through a cello-case before being raped by her father, her identity instantly confused with her mother's in heavy-handed Freudian fashion as her rape is braided together with her mother's lust, with guilt and jealousy messing everything up even further. In another reality, a freaky female author in a wheelchair is writing about these happenings while keeping a strange cello-case in her grotesquely decorated house. The schizophrenia is further enhanced by surreal nightmares, visions of a strange circus and a guillotine, walls covered in blood, and more. A unique, well-crafted but pointless movie that also could have used more subtlety and atmosphere.
A man with electrified hands walks into a monastery (a colorfully decorated tent) with two nuns, they shower him with cookies and he converts them to rockers, party girls and hippies. They go out on adventures with other hippies, a killer that gorily slices up bodies, pornographic bees, throw eggs at a dance-crazy sex therapist in a barn, make fun of a black boy playing a violin, experience an insanely psychedelic montage and more while stop-motion stuffed hedgehogs and dolls go on a road trip. Altogether, like a low-budget warped children's film for adults with silly puns and pop-references. A campy, crazy bad-movie.
Takeshi Kitano's films always had a touch of whimsy. In between violent Yakuza scenes and drama, Kitano would insert artistics images, paintings, dancing, sound, or make the characters detour into fun and games for almost no reason. In Takeshis', this whimsy is given free reign and is the star of the movie which seems to be exploring Kitano's world with self-references, merging his cinematic roles and real life in numerous ways. Kitano acts as both a Yakuza-film star and a regular loser in the street, going to auditions, hounded by fans and strange characters, Yakuzas, bizarre dreams, and elements from his life being used in his acting roles and vice versa, until you have no idea what is real. The climax of the movie features one absurd gun battle after another, as if saying that this is what the audience expects of his public persona which he both despises and has fun with at the same time, throwing disparaging remarks at himself and converting gunshot flashes into star formations. Repetitive, obscure, whimsical, but interesting for Kitano fans.
Artistic nihilism and absurd, surreal comedy on the rat-race and banal lives with useless habits and jobs. Dialog is thrown out in favor of grunts, gibberish and other animalistic sounds. Themroc gets fired from his job painting half of fences black, so he goes home, throws out all his possessions and turns his house into a cave, smashing the outside walls and climbing in through a rope. He has incest with his sister, declares war on confused policemen, and gets his neghbours to join him in this much more satisfactory, bestial life.
A simple story of a man going with his family on an annoying vacation serves as a backdrop for surreal absurdities and nonsense, presumably to explore the life of a Hungarian in the 80s. After some family tension and sexual problems, the wife develops a strange hair on her face and things fall apart while he visits relatives and grapples with the various eccentricities of city life. Some examples of scenes and visuals: Neglected dead men in a cinema, a meeting with his uncle who doesn't recognize him who starts barking beaurocracy which turns into a Western shootout, doors open into bizarre fantasy scenery, a hotel clerk drills them to fill in a feedback form as soon as they enter the room, brand names pop on screen like capitalist balloons, a tiny dancing woman in a matchbox, and many more odd tangents, musical pieces and freewheeling scenes. Mostly chaotic, confusingly entertaining at times, but you probably have to be Hungarian to get anything out of this.
A full-length from Ian Kerkhof, a South-African/Dutch film-maker who usually makes transgressive shorts. An aggressive Dutch man on the run from the Yakuza is at a wild and desperate end of his rope when he meets a neurotically submissive, real-life porn-star in a bar. They get together through desperate lust and needs, their psychology explored through flashbacks, horribly pretentious monologues, perversion and censored hardcore sex. The cinematography is all over the place, using filters, superimpositions, wild movements and colors, but in a raw, gritty way like a Richard Kern movie. A blend of art and hardcore porn that both studies and revels in perversions and neurotic relationships, and which doesn't really work, but is, nevertheless, somewhat interesting.
I could almost swear this was Guy Maddin making a movie under a pseudonym. This odd indie movie derives pleasure from twisting around the postcard-perfect, romanticized images and propaganda of the USA during WWII into almost Lynchian deviant, racist and odd behaviour. To that end, it recreates the look of a 1940s noir complete with amusing news reels, then has its characters deadpan their cursing, obsessions, threesomes with married couples, bigamy, rape, and lots of repressed (and therefore surreal) gay urges. In fact, it could be argued that most of the subtexts and behaviour in this movie emerges from repressed homosexuality, giving Enola Gay a new meaning. The story involves two intelligence officers trying to create useful misinformation by building a fake life, letters and back-story around a dead body, then dropping the body near the Japanese as a kind of information bomb. In the meantime, they partake in their sexual escapades with many women, always in lifeless and awkward moods, as if in a frustrated search for something else, until the naked dead man appears to come back to life to shake up their psyches. Even the endless nonsensical encrypted messages and random letters that seem to be everywhere take on a new meaning in a surreal fashion.
A gentle, tasteful but very surreal and dreamy exploration of the confusing and overwhelming sensual awakening of a young girl who gets her first period. Sensual curiosity is projected onto friends, relatives and even parents, identities change often, fantasies reach fairy-tale proportions and confusing fears rear their heads which involve marriage, old age, sex, parental arguments, love, and oedipal conflicts, all beautifully filmed using confusing allegories of vampires, monsters, witch-burning, mysterious characters, and magical earings. A magical experience for a while, but then wears out its welcome with too many confusing or meaningless cinematic wanderings.
Lopushansky is no stranger to sci-fi, using it often like Tarkovsky as metaphor, backdrop or metaphysical introspection, but in this case he just goes for a surreal, fantasy world. Like Stalker, this is mostly a strange, religious, existential meditation. In this world, a man is on a quest to visit a mythical underwater museum in between the tides. To get there he must pass through a town that is basically a big garbage dump, which the materialists there see as the produce of humankind. While this handful of snobbish atheists party, the rest of the masses, which consists of the mentally challenged, the ugly, and the midgets, pray at their monastery to 'let them out of here'. The masses are prone to religious hysteria and irrational fears, while the rational handful try to train them as servants for their materialistic needs and social rules. The religious symbolism involving redemption, Jesus, etc is heavy-handed and the allegory is a touch too simplistic, but the imagery is strong and the atmosphere is unique.
I love Pink Floyd but found the album slightly overrated and the video a dreary, drug-induced mess. It tells the story of a rock star that grows up repressed by parents and teachers and builds a mental wall to protect himself, then suffers one emotional blow after another, and sinks into drug abuse until he manages to break free of the wall. Surreal, lots of striking anti-fascist cartoons and overall a darkly twisted and depressing visual and aural assault.
Cult classic about a Christian policeman that comes to an island inhabited by Pagans in search of a missing girl, and finds a lot more than he expected. This one is erotic, chilling and offers an unsettling look into Pagan lifestyles complete with long musical episodes where the folk dance and sing joyously while committing primitive or brutal acts. Unforgettable.
Reclusive, eccentric, twin sisters have been collecting trash for decades, their house literally covered in bric-a-brac both inside and out. When they find a big pile of red wool, their lives are invaded by a strange girl who obsessively re-knits her red dress over and over, while yelling in multiple other-worldly voices. Various inanimate articles around the house declare war on the girl and a mess ensues. Doll-houses and wool bring up childhood memories of mother and first love as the movie and flashbacks weave together. Lots of wool is knitted, knitting is seen a method of getting pregnant, dolls act out the flashbacks, there's a river of wool, random musical pieces and chaotic animations, and more wool. Gentle, unusual, weird and interesting but whimsical.
Bizarre alien horror movie about an abductee who returns three years later in alien form in order to abduct his son. He goes through several transformations, one of them by impregnating a woman through her mouth and gorily emerging a short while later as a full grown male. He transforms his son by sucking on his shoulder, who then joins him in bizarre activities like melting phones, creating a killer midget clown and stuffing the babysitter into a cocoon so that she can lay eggs. No, this movie does not make any sense.
Bonkers Japanese comedy that feels like one of those energetic Japanese comedy duos that feed off each other's silly and wacky non-sequiturs. The whole movie is basically one wildly, impulsive, inventive gag after another which are much more silly than witty. Yaji and the drug-addict Kita are a gay couple on a road trip from medieval Edo complete with period costumes with flamboyantly gay colors. Hallucinations, dream-sequences and gags include: Bodies on a river turning into a Tetris game, elastic testicles, deadly stand-up comedy trials, a 'face-tumor' which grows as a clone of your partner's head on your arm, a samurai procession turning into a parade of half-naked samba dancers and toy tanks, numerous technological anachronisms in a medieval setting, sudden bursts of gay dance and music, a drag-queen sex-change surgeon, an old lady that serves as a radio, a King Arthur that squeezes yam out of his fists, a bartender's wife who grows mushrooms on her body, a giant, farting human source of the river Styx, and much more. Fun, but too random to be truly entertaining.
Creative Beatles animation that is also a vehicle for their songs, and also a wildly psychedelic experience. The Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Band is asked to save a land overrun by Blue Meanies who hate music, and use weapons like a flying jet hand, stomach jaws, big apples and explosive clown noses. The foursome are picked up in a Yellow Submarine and most of the movie consists of an Alice in Wonderland like trip through surreal landscapes full of crazy creatures, foothills of heads, kinky boot beasts, a strange nowhere man creature who talks in poetry, a sea of holes, and time-travel paradoxes. Psychedelic, bizarre, inventive and entertaining.
Insane, freewheeling French New Wave comedy by Louis Malle. It's a combination of fantasy-comedy involving a young girl on a short vacation in Paris with her uncle, a series of surreal improvisations (musical boots, waves on top of the Eiffel Tower), a satirical attack on Paris and Parisians, making fun of sightseeing, elitist restaurants, the crazy night-life, sex-starved tourists, traffic that carries cars along with it, fascist invasions, and a dreamy woman that attacks a policeman with kisses, slapstick comedy that seems to be cataloging every old-school physical gag as well as some new Tati-esque inventive ones, a live-action Roadrunner cartoon chase complete with exploding dynamite, and a coming-of-age comedy where a saucy, rude, foul-mouthed but cute young girl discusses various sexual deviations with adults, some of which are transvestites or suggested child molesters while desperately wanting to ride the (allegorical?) subway. And this is only a broad description, the movie being so energetic and unrelentingly over-the-top wacky, that it isn't really funny but unforgettably entertaining.
Odd, fragmented Canadian indie movie exploring the mind of Faustus, a weak-willed bureaucrat in the Education Ministry slowly going insane. He has violent fantasies about his annoying co-workers, an imaginary friend/devil/angel who constantly hovers around him with advice, various fantasies about getting power, becoming president and a popular hero, and many trips down memory lane remembering mother's advice and dad's strange behaviour. His coworkers are planning a staged play in costumes, his boss worships an almighty Grid that runs everyone's lives, the cheesy-poem-spouting Premier keeps disappearing, prompting a TV show to give rewards to finders of the Premiere, and a chicken-actor has a nervous breakdown and runs around killing girls. A confusing movie that meanders between these various real, odd and imaginary worlds, but doesn't really do anything with them until the ending which sort-of ties the threads together.
Hungarian theatrical art film that is based on a literary book about the Tragedy of Man. After Adam and Eve fall from Eden due to their conceits and Lucifer's seduction, they continue with their sins and are guided through the world's history during monumental events when humanity takes a few steps forward. In ancient Athens, Byzantium, Prague (as Kepler), Paris during the revolution and London during industrialization, Adam is constantly faced with a new ideal which gives him new confidence in his conceit, only to have it fail in his face as humanity twists it around, using it for violence and more depravity. All the while he yearns for Eve and finds her in each historical setting as well as Lucifer who appears in different guises to show him the failure of mankind. This is all filmed in a confusing hodgepodge of dense historical references, poetic, pretentious soliloquies, and surrealistic snippets, and for some reason, the actors are all children who perform like a bizarre avant-garde theatrical group complete with nudity and posing theatrics. A messy art film that gets lost in its overly avant-garde pretentions.
One of the nastier Pinkus and by far the nastiest movie by Hasebe. An annoying woman and her weak boyfriend who decorates cakes get a taste for blood when they accidentally kill a deranged woman. When they find out what an aphrodisiac killing is, they go on a killing spree. Things get out of control and the man develops an obsession for carving up women's genitals. Not visually graphic but relentlessly nasty, like an extreme Cat III entry.
A seemingly random series of strange and absurd vignettes joined together by some kind of anarchistic, big, deaf-mute man. A midget bullfighter fights a rhinoceros, man attacks golfer and removes his shoes, a rich man uses the man as a chew-toy for his dogs, animals are eaten and stuffed at a taxidermist while being decorated with syringes, a fat woman is kidnapped and dragged up a mountain, two men shoot each other with darts as some kind of game, a Dali painting is reproduced in real-life and some new-age philosophy on death is discussed. I couldn't decipher any meaning or goal out of this unfunny mess. Maybe it was just an exercise in wordplay and strange humor.
Messy, bizarre film involving a lion taming assistant who gets raped by a snake-like monster that ripped its way out of a leopard who then talks to his mother while in the womb and forces her to kill people and drink their blood so that he can be born and return to the sea and replace mankind (don't ask). At times a silly satire on pregnancy and female harrassment by idiotic men, and at other times just a very gory, bloody and incoherent horror movie.
Bad horror movie by Zuccon that tries to be mysterious and sophisticated by adding psychological layers of reality, only confusing us in the process and adding up to nothing. A strange serial-killer couple kidnap various people before killing them in the hopes of finding something in their bodies. Then they kidnap an unusual man who seems to have a psychic connection with them. Flashbacks regarding a murder in the family, a strange relationship with a mother, and constant shifting of reality (i.e. bad editing) complicate matters as they occupy themselves with sex and try to achieve their goal. What this goal is, is never explained, their attitude towards their victims is extremely inconsistent, one second they are strangely compassionate, then they are eating eyeballs, and the multiple twist endings are both cliched and nonsensical. A confusing mess.
This is what you get if a group of pornographers tried to make a film about misandry a la Thelma & Lousie. A low-budget, gritty look at a violent neighbourhood and a couple of extremely angry drug-addicted whores, one of whom gets raped, sending them off on an anarchical crime and sex spree. This X-rated movie alternates between pornographic sex and pointless bloody violence, following the very unsympathetic women on their path to doom.
Another in the long line of Ilsa-style Nazixploitation clones with a lesbian German officer in charge of torturing, experimenting and humiliating women. Mixed with this one is a dull action and drama movie of guerilla activities and warfare. The occasional nasty bits come out of nowhere, including ridiculously sleazy scenes of a bestial dwarf raping women and ripping off their pubic hair.
Only the Japanese can mix art and exploitative violent sex this way. An early shocker supposedly dealing with the topic of nature versus nurture as an insane rapist begets a son through his victim who is a wife of a professor. This anti-social son grows up wanting to be like his father and more, despising the weak idiotic masses, kidnapping popular girls and methodically humiliating them until their psychology breaks down and becomes something else. For every weak statement the movie makes however, there are 10 exploitative scenes of rape, torture and wicked humiliation.
This concerns only the last episode of the 15 hour TV series by Fassbinder. Whereas the series was based on a book and develops an existential character study of a weak-willed, violent, naive man, the epilogue is Fassbinder's surreal interpretation of this story as a mad Ken Russell biopic. Characters, events and dialogue are reshuffled as in a dream, traumatic highlights of the man's life re-appear in different ways, there are strange characters in shiny costumes, anachronisms, random nudity, characters re-interpreted as gay, the Nazi subtexts are exposed, Franz has several nightmares in an insane asylum involving violence, strange doctors, torture and revelations about his friends and girlfriends, and all kinds of artistic, symbolic scenes are included such as Jesus crucified against a backdrop of a nuclear bombc. A mess, and a complete clash with what came before.
A bad rip-off of Rosemary's baby complete with a married couple, a traitorous husband, Satanic neighbours, rituals and Satanic brides, only this one is soft-core porn and happens to include rape, sex with a goat and sodomy with a sword.
Arthouse sleaze supposedly making statements about consumerism and violence vs. sex, but this is just a strange, disgusting mess of a movie. A woman with rape fantasies is taken to a photographer's home who treats his models as merchandise and has dominant, perverse relastionships with them. The rest of the movie consists of weird sex and fantasies, submissive women degraded and used, and models being locked up, fed junk food and made to urinate and defecate into coke cans and cigarette boxes
This Australian gore movie gets a prize for the most bizarre deaths ever. The movie is all over the place and so messy that plot lines are left hanging, characters are left in the middle of a predicament, and neither the dialog nor the deaths make much sense. A chemical company making super-health vitamins and treatments is illegally experimenting on the locals. But their chemicals rapidly get a life of their own, causing people to hallucinate about deformed lovers who massage ribs out of chests, drink detergent, crack up and break out with wormy tentacles, explode, melt, deliver a living killer placenta, get hardons that explode, develop grotesquely swollen tongues, drown in their own snot, etc.
And I thought nobody made movies like this anymore since John Waters mellowed out. Frank is a real-life old and nasty bum who doesn't only recite his lines like a robot, but needs subtitles to understand what he's saying. He was taught by his mom to warn people before he kills them so he tells various people that annoy him how he will bite their penis off, decapitate them and defecate down their neck, do nasty things to their skull and rip off their face, and then actually does it literally and graphically. But Frank is a lonely man in search of tits, so his friends at work who bought him a blow-up sheep put an ad in the paper and get women to come visit him with disastrous results. Extreme trash with a very low-budget that offers a few slimy chuckles.
A 12 million dollar pornography and gore film about the depraved Roman emperor. Explicit hardcore porn, imaginative gory violence, a rich production and Shakespearean actors like Gielgud. 2 1/2 hours of every kind of excess trying to hide under the excuse that it is historically accurate. Unbelievable.
A man with a fetish for being eaten and for eating human flesh searches the internet for a man with compatible tastes. After several failed attempts, he finds the man of his dreams, works up an appetite, battles with his willpower, has lots of sex, and proceeds to carve him up and eat him in great detail. The gore effects are so disturbingly realistic, you'd swear they were using a real human body. The direction is interesting, the atmosphere is palpable and well done, the dubbing job is bad albeit the dialog is sparse, but it's still just pointless gay snuff porn. That it's based on real events doesn't change anything.
All hail the LSD trip for it is all-knowing and omnipotent. This drug culture 60s movie tells the real tale of a spoiled rich man who did nothing interesting in his life except have trips and go to a special clinic to cure his alcoholism and drug addictions. He takes drugs, travels to Europe, lies in a bed, talks to a French doctor, then flies back. Since this isn't interesting enough, this 'story' is flooded with scores of his visions and hallucinations which make no sense to us but have spiritual meaning to him. He sees a beautiful woman walking by a river, Indians, Native Americans, Druids on Stonehenge, Dracula in a casino, an ice skater in the clinic, other assorted weirdly made-up creatures and humans, and throughout all this he dances, freaks out, does the jiggle, shakes, stands on his head and runs away while being chased by a strange bald chauffeur.
A pretentious study on individualism vs conformist groups by the usually interesting Kiyoshi Kurosawa. A cop tries to save both a lunatic criminal who demands to "restore the rules of the world", and his hostage, but ends up losing both. This sends him on a quest for discovery on the issues of individualism and intolerance, the philosophical exploration depicted using a metaphor of one special tree poisoning the forest and the various factions that try to fight for one or the other. Obscure, a plodding lack of pacing, and inscrutable.
Lame bad taste coroner and autopsy humor, a touch of nudity and slapstick, toilet humor, and the occasional gore effects that consist of very obvious hard rubber dolls and body parts. The non-witty banter involves things like necrophilia, selling bodies as dog food, penis transplants, silly autopsy jokes, etc. Despite the title, this doesn't deliver neither sex nor splatter.
Three bizarre shorts by Atanus: Morfing is a self-referential vanity project dealing with Atanus himself and his movie-making life. A fan drools over him, other actresses curse him out, he crawls through a hole in his Producer's office into a surreal backstage where a girl grows an insect arm, and various characters spout nonsensical non-sequiturs and he tries to kill himself, until he is convinced to make a movie about a man babbling through a phallic tube while a girl gets white liquid all over her face. Yeah, my thoughts exactly. The nonsensical Metaminds and Metabodies features some bizarre performances and costumes in a bar where violence breaks out unexpectedly, people talk about some contract, eat bugs, see fish and coked-up sluts in mirrors while discussing skin layers, yellow emperors and pituitary glands. Welcome to Spain shows a surreal meeting between father and son at the airport, which turns into a bizarre gross-out as four characters pin each other down on a staircase while attempting to eat, vomit, masturbate, lick or inject each other. This last one is funny in a crazy way, but the rest is just weirdness for the sake of being weird.
This one's practically impossible to review. For starters, there's no detectable plot, and the plots and descriptions released with the movie don't seem to match the movie which is basically a chaotic LSD trip. This is a sci-fi movie made by trans-genders featuring a small budget that seems to have been spent on gaudy, outrageous costumes and a wide range of colorful cinematography effects and filters. The feel of this psychedelia is cheap but uniquely bizarre and chaotic, making Liquid Sky look like a mainstream movie. There's a heavy focus on genitalia and simulated pornographic sex, as if the film-makers were too obsessed with their own personal issues to make a real movie. There's splatter, colorful body fluids, random geeky sci-fi narration, silly comedic voice-overs, and demented action like a gay HK fantasy action flick on acid. And there are the endless bizarre scenes which have nothing to do each other including: A person urinates on some cheap plastic alien plants which suddenly grow and attack his/her body, artists paint on breasts and are gorily interrupted by a person with exposed genitalia and ridiculously huge shoes, a fight with plastic chainsaws, flower darts and a sparkler, a man with a flame for a head, a spider-vagina creature that comes out of a book, a gory penis-drill, and much more. Ultimately bizarre but annoyingly senseless.
A surreal trip into the mind of a sick man who got cut by the doctor at birth, lost his parents, became addicted to self-mutilation by razor, has whores urinate on him, and develops an unhealthy attraction to little girls, one of which he nails to a wall. This sick and disturbing but very well filmed short offers no insights or plot, only a nightmarish, non-linear experience. Also features a gripping dark soundtrack.
A stylistic movie in the vein of Natural Born Killers about teen angst and a group of teens on a violent crime and sex spree. The crucial difference though is that this movie respects and even idolizes these repulsive creatures who murder, lie, cheat, and indulge heavily in their sexual depravity, intensely foul mouths and self-absorbed, psychotic characters. This is also a homosexual movie posing as heterosexual and features non-stop gore, violence, sex and very colorful language. To top it all off, the climax features even more repulsive homophobic nazis that chop off a guy's genitals and this was supposed to be a comedy yet lacks even one laugh.
An artist slowly loses his mind as he fights with his girls, is stressed by his agent, and an annoying punk band plays their obnoxious noise next to his apartment day and night, until he starts rampaging in streets drilling holes into random people. Gritty and repulsively dark.
Wildly experimental cinema featuring some silent throwback expressionism cut together with headache-inducing random montages, repeating footage of a woman being chased naked in the snow by a man in a mask, rape, tarot and crystal balls, and some extreme scenes of male sodomy, abuse and fisting. The silent sub-movie presents a group of people performing some sleazy exploitation melodrama, some S&M, then a sexually ambiguous person sings an opera, then they turn vampiric and insane while abusing each other. The grating soundtrack is as annoying as it can get: Noise that sounds like a warped radio tuner, classical music mixed with gunshots, beeps and tones like a cat on a synthesizer, pounding industrial beats and electronica, electronic vibrations, etc. It all only adds up to something that requires an aspirin. Of course there's always going to be some idiot that will call this artistic. Color filters, transgressive imagery and montages do not an art movie make.
An artsy, dull, allegorical study by Herzog on antiestablishmentarianism and the free human spirit portrayed by some undefined establishment and its rebelling members/students/patients. The whole cast consists of dwarves, perhaps to point out a system that is too big, impractical and inappropriate for an enjoyable and free life. The manager of the place tries to keep things under control as the troop goes on a rampage, destructing property and nature, throwing live chickens through windows, bullying blind dwarves, laughing and having a wild time in general while the chickens resort to cannibalism. A typical scene is when a dwarf stares and laughs at a camel for 5 whole minutes until he starts coughing and the camel defecates.
An angry hateful movie by an angry writer who seems to think his misanthropic bile is interesting. The protagonist is a middle-class ex-drummer with a varied sex life who is willingly drafted by three trashy punk musicians to join their band. One is a violent woman-beater, another is deaf and lives with a junkie wife and child, and the third is homosexual, his arm is numb from masturbation, his mother is bald and is having an affair with the violent one, and his father is psychotic and bed-ridden. Add to the mix another band singer with a huge penis and a penchant for raping people of both sexes. The ex-drummer enters this world with arrogant anti-social motivations of manipulation and twisted amusement, philosophizing occasionally while revving up the violence, obscenities and hate. Non-stop indulgence in pointless trash, hate and violence that is out to offend every race, gender and sensibility, backed by creative, talented and bizarre cinematography including people who walk on ceilings, a movie moving backwards and a woman who's vagina becomes a room.
A few movies edited together that never really meet: A cheesily dubbed sci-fi flick about a world run by robots (cops, psychiatrists, priests, etc) who are after a robot serial killer, a psychotic robot that goes around killing women and carving them up into gory quivering flesh while seeing confusingly edited hallucinations of mutated creatures, devils and talking books and stuffed animals, literally dozens of porn actresses showing off their huge fake boobs while screaming, and lots of huge bugs getting squashed. The kills consist of the aforementioned screaming boobs edited together with scenes of bloody weapons. An extremely repetitive, silly mess.
Earlier work by the transexual-lesbian maker of Dandy Dust. A lesbian sci-fi movie involving a female pyromaniac revolutionary wearing Groucho Marx eyebrows and pyramid horns, a comic book artist whoss printshop was burned down by her lover, and a weird woman in a red latex suit who likes eating snails and blowtorching mini alligators. This trio interact and take revenge on each other randomly and boringly for most of the movie with pretentious, poetic, nonsensical dialog, or non-sequiturs. The scenery consists of cheap toys and miniatures, a car is made futuristic by covering it with a sheet, there are some parties and art shows, sex with furniture, a bizarre sex performance, and a climactic fight scene where people are turned into a cardboard cutout in latex. Nothing makes sense and there seems to be some kind of fetish for liquids. Boringly murky, chaotic and self-indulgent.
One of the worst movies ever made about a retarded character that thinks things like huge animal penises, spraying elephant semen on his dad, and swinging newborn babies by their umbilical cord are funny. The movie spares nothing in its ultimately juvenile and annoying 'humor' on things like crippled girls that like their legs caned, child molestation, gore, etc.
Without Oliver Stone's hand, this sequel is pure trash and exploitation entertainment without style. This time around, the story is loosely based around Hansel and Gretel with characters such as a female, murderess necrophiliac (Hansel) who receives visions from a transvestite cannibalistic nun (the witch), and a whole slew of female prisoners with various disorders and crimes, all young nubile females of course. Brings to mind a slicker John Waters flick.
While Nazisploitation movies are bad enough for using concentration camps as cheap titillation, this one commits the additional crime of pretending to be a real movie. Yet again, beautiful women are used, raped, tortured and killed in a camp with sadistic Nazis and a dominatrix. Worse than any of the torture or rampant nudity however is the Nazi propaganda, the attempt at drama amidst all the exploitation, and the really sick 'love' affairs between the soldiers and the female victims.
A sequel to Crazy Lips. Actually it's more of a revisitation of the insanity and some of the characters, this time involving an even more nonsensical plot. A mother is accused of murdering her daughter but when she tells her tale, things don't seem to make sense. Her husband says they have no daughter, there's a psychic that can trace phone calls, a blonde who sings the US anthem, a house with no bathroom, some Lynchian dream sequences, aliens, breeding experiments, very quirky FBI agents, and some other random events. Oh and the main actress breaks out into song again. I've had enough of this after the first outing.
More like 'Misogyny in Venice'. This is part giallo, part soft-porn featuring a parade of acts of violence and humiliations to women, some of the women actually liking it. The mystery case involves the usual murders and beautiful women, as well as a man who forces his girl into perverse humiliating sexcapades. A couple of gruesome murders include rape with a knife and sawing off a woman's thigh.
Four men decide to try to commit suicide by overeating. It starts out with style as the various men find new ways to indulge their hedonism to excess, but it then becomes debauchery with whores, lots of sex, extreme endless flatulence, exploding toilets, and of course enough food to make you sick just by watching it. A schoolteacher joins them to add to the allegory I suppose. Allegedly a parable on the fall of modern society, but there is no satire, no tragedy or insight, and no message. Just shocking brainless art posing as an allegory.
An underground Russian nasty directed by a woman, with the feel of an August Underground home-video but the artsy and social pretensions of Salo. Four macho Russians converse in a disgustingly squalid correctional building and abuse each other, each befitting his rank in the military and his social status. The lowest, filthy peasant and military reject attempts to converse and connect with the higher levels but only gets humiliation and abuse. The abuse escalates to violence, homosexual rape, coprophilia, and gory disemboweling. Intercut with the movie are some black and white scenes, perhaps to make comparisons to civilization or to let the movie breathe. A shock-oriented repulsive movie that makes points about aggression, the military and social hierarchies, but the filth was unnecessary.
The first in a long series of Japanese movies that deal with the topics of snuff and gore with attempted shocking realism. One of the releases actually fooled Charlie Sheen to report the release as a real filmed death. This first is quite dull however, mainly due to the boring and unrealistic acting by the female victim. A group of men kidnap a girl and torture her in various ways for days, using beatings, loud noise, pliers, maggots, knives, etc. The effects range from lame to sickening but the unconvincing way this is handled and the lack of plot make this worthless.
A cut-and-paste job of Coffin Joe movies consisting of the most odd and horrific scenes from previous Coffin Joe movies, and some deleted scenes usually involving more nudity, strangeness or evil, all wrapped together inside a weak movie about a man who is deliriously obsessed with Coffin Joe, thus providing the excuse to splice together all of these scenes as dream sequences. An interesting touch that predates New Nightmare is to bring in Jose Mojica Marins himself to try to cure the man but, as you can imagine, this isn't a real movie.
Experimental film from Skolimowski consisting of an avant-garde introduction, and footage from a censored movie he made during his surreal Barrier period. The intro is a kind of surreal film-diary depicting images of Skolimowski's film career, war-torn Beirut, some bizarre sci-fi scenes of carnage, a ping-pong game with blackness and other miscellaneous symbolic imagery. The film itself consists of a group of anti-communist students participating in strange rituals, death re-enacments and games in a boxcar full of dusty plaster and candles, taking speed, discussing various topics with increasingly impenetrable dialog, and being interrogated by an unseen party about a poster of Stalin with four eyes. Strange, haphazard and mostly impenetrable self-indulgence; for fans of experimental films only.
Normally, twisted porn movies wouldn't be listed here but this one happens to be insane. A nymphomaniac is locked up in a special treatment center where a cult has orgies and uses neurotic patients for their severely demented ideas of eroticism. These ideas include chopping off a penis or the girl's head while having sex. Other bizarre, gory and over-the-top sequences are included.
Various loosely-filmed stories are spliced together using a slew of cinematography tricks with a Dogma feel and improvised acting. A film-crew with a pretentious director is filming a fast-food version of The Duchess of Malfi while his producer conspires, an annoying documentary team is following him to film the 'making-of', various other characters weave in and out of the movie to abuse their wives or rant about Venice, and the mysterious hotel they are staying in practices violence and cannibalism. Features a dozen celebrities in strange, short, improvisational roles, gratuitous and explicit fetishistic or perverse sex scenes, and endless boredom. I really tried to like this movie given its brave experimentation and handful of bizarre, fascinating scenes but it just never coheres or develops.
A twisted black comedy about a dysfunctional family. Jackie-O is obsessed over Jackie Kennedy and the JFK assassination, and has an incestual relationship with her twin brother ever since she was born holding his private parts. The mother is obsessive-compulsive and makes jarring remarks like 'how did you fit in my womb?'. The father disappeared mysteriously and the older brother has his own disturbing quirks. When the male twin brings home his new, very normal and innocent fiancee, matters get out of hand.
Artsy, symbolic, poetic (read: pretentious) piece with an overacting, annoyingly whiny Nico from Velvet Underground performing abstract scenes with various men, spouting monologues, rants, poetry, and singing terrible new-age music. The symbolism covers a rocky relationship between man and woman in a barren landscape (e.g. woman cries while man walks in circles), children, monologues about mercy and justice, the soul, and various existential ambiguities, with surreal scenes of fire, deserts, ice, waterfalls, shepherds, naked man on horseback, etc. Emotions, symbols and cinematic experimentation that is obviously up for various interpretations by film-school buffs, but for me this is pretentious artsy indulgence at its worst.
Extreme Euro-trash featuring an incestuous brother and sister who visit a Greek island to violently kill all perverts while inflicting them with their own over-the-top sickness and brutality. Goat-sex, urine, rape, homosexuals and various very brutal deaths decorate this boring pseudo shock-fest that isn't even interesting enough to be called bad taste.
The absolute, unsurpassed apex of exploitation sleaze. In a Nazi camp, men and women are experimented on in a wide variety of horrifying ways by Ilsa, an Aryan dominatrix who's pet project involves proving that women can withstand more pain and torture than men, and also tends to punish men that don't perform to her satisfication in bed until an American comes to tame the shrew with his sexual prowess. The real tragedy is that this story is based on real expirements and accounts of SS camps, only in this movie the girls are all sexy, and the nudity, S&M and gore is gratuitous and rampant.
Pet Shop Boys, the movie. Not much of a movie actually, but more like a sequence of strange music videos wrapped around a supposed road trip or tour of England. In this road trip we get a blind serial killer priest spouting non-sequiturs, various odd ranting characters, a practical joker in a restaurant, an existentialist ventriloquist dummy pontificating about our perception of time, a man on fire going to work, and various other odds and ends, all backed by the music obviously and the usual boringly deadpan Neil Tennant. If you want to see what pop-music looks like when it gets pretentious, look no further.
A whole movie based on trashy redneck/hillbilly 'humor' featuring deranged backwoods families who wear cheap, repulsive masks, cross-dress, talk about idiotic or random filthy subjects, tell tales, go on a feud and out-gross each other with a general lack of hygiene. One man tracks by licking filthy underwear, another blind old man asks God for some company and gets the cross-dresser whom he mistakes for a young girl, etc. Spliced with this John Waters-like trash are random scenes involving cheap aliens and anal probes, zombie impregnation sex and a nasty anal birth, and sprinklings of gore and bargain-basement surrealism. Tedious, unfunny trash.
Bizarre mess from Korea that starts as surreal exploitation with a hooker who gives specials in back alleys and meets up with her angry mutant teacher after waking up his grandmother. They perform a strange dance, then she is killed by some giggling loons, is turned into a killing robot, goes through some scenes ripped out of Nikita, then comes back for revenge with a mechanical penis. Boasts distorting and colorful cinematography, but it isn't as fun as it sounds.
Necrophilia filmed as if it were a mystical and romantic experience. A girl grows up feeling a twisted affinity with dead things and becomes a full-fledged necrophiliac as an adult. An idiotic student falls for her but she prefers the dead so he figures out a way to make her love him... Idiotic and unforgivable movie with filth posing as something beautiful.
Gritty movie about a psychotic who is released from jail. Angry and cynical, he decides to repay society's lust for daring porn movies and sadism by making snuff movies. His acquaintances assume it isn't real at first, but soon learn just how mad he and his psychotic friends are. Features an effective, disturbing atmosphere but is undone by bad dubbing, shallow characters and lack of plot. The gore and nastiness is mostly off-screen except for one notorious scene where a girl is cut up and taken apart in a kind of prototypical Guinea Pig. Supposedly cut from 170 minutes down to 77.
A modern adaptation of Virgin Spring by Wes Craven and a very early 'landmark' in the twisted gore and horror genres. This tells the tale of two over-confident girls that get raped, humiliated, mutilated and killed by a gang of disturbed criminals and the girl's parents who take their bloody revenge on them. Much tamer by today's standards but caused fainting and walk-outs when it first came out, this has the feel of a gritty, trashy Herschel Lewis film featuring silly music, slapstick cops, unflinching humiliation, and death by chainsaw and oral sex.
A cult movie by Dennis Hopper which is actually more incoherent than anything brilliant. While in Peru, a man called Kansas is hired as an actor in a violent Western. When the Americans leave, the locals use the sets for their own film but don't realize the action has to be faked. In the meantime, Kansas's life becomes like a movie, hanging out with a Peruvian whore who wants American comforts, searching for gold, going to parties and shows at the local whorehouse. Slowly his life becomes a movie as the cameras become fake, and his life shows its seams with gaps of 'Missing Scenes', disorientation and surreal cuts. None of these themes and plotlines are developed however, and the extremely choppy editing make this a chore to sit through.
A confusing, zero-budget, surreal mess where various repetitive scenes are weaved together into a nightmare. A guy's wife has slutty sex with his brother, his brother is sliced and gutted by a strange man with a zombie philosophy, his wife keeps telling him the same phrases like "you're home early", he has cravings for biting into flesh and dreams inolving blood feasts, zombies, guts, his beckoning wife, etc. as he keeps waking up from dream after dream. With plot development and more than $100 for a budget, this could have become something Lynchian.
A more comic Japanese Gummo with an over-the-top ending. Fragmented vignettes of a loser family involving two loser brothers, one wanting to be a baseball star and the other, a manga artist. Scattershot scenes filmed on grainy home video, many ending in dumb slapstick, failure or trashy humor. The brothers seek sage advise from a Visitor-Q-esque neighbour who instructs them on how to play baseball or have anal sex, they attempt to fulfill their dreams, collect rent from an aggressive tenant who threatens to poison the water, and seduce girls by pretending to be disabled. The ending features a bizarre spoof on a climactic battle featuring magic, brutal fights with pens and cameras, and over-the-top splatstick involving disemboweling and decapitation. A terrible mess.
Boring sick movie about a lunatic who escapes the insane asylum and goes on a rampage killing people and raping the female corpses after they're dead. In one scene he waits for the corpse to decompose and rot before he deems it ripe for fun.
Basically a series of dreamy mostly homo-erotic visions put on film as imagined by some guy with a love for outrageous costumes and sets. Two men enter a house where they can peer through the looking glass into various rooms full of oddities: Wind-up mostly-naked human toys jittering on stage, strangely costumed and colorful drag-queens or transexuals, some bizarre sci-fi settings and props, nuns and bishops getting it on, a mass of naked male flesh through a fish-eye lens, various silly costumes and people playing games, an Egyptian pharaoh, some hetero hardcore porn, etc. all accompanied by strange sounds and soundtrack. In other words, this is like Jack Smith on acid.
A slutty, married woman has sex with the decapitated head of her former lover while teasing a blind man. And she is actually the healthier of the two sickos in this silly and pointlessly gruesome horror movie that hs no plot to speak of.
Euro-sleaze with such unbelievable levels of stupidity that you'll split your sides laughing. A biker gang gets entangled in a cycle of revenge and violence with a philanderer in a hot-rod, leading to rape, gore, karate, penis-chopping, family massacres and lots of gratuitous nudity and sex. Features extremely dumb dialog and possibly the worst dubbing job ever recorded.
50-minute experiment by the Beatles involving a bus-full of passengers who are supposedly taken on a magical tour but nothing much happens. They sing, play, crawl, chase, they watch midgets wrestling, and intercut with this random boredom are some bizarre and pyschedelic music videos, including the trippy I Am A Walrus, and random surreal scenes such as a sergeant barking nonsense in front of a cow, silly wizards overseeing the bus route, and a woman's nightmare where she has a nervous breakdown while the waiter shovels spaghetti off the floor onto her table. If any movie deserves to get the reaction 'what the hell were they thinking?!', then this is it. A terribly messy flop.
Imagine a Korean Jodorowsky doing a new-age movie about the environment and spiritualism vs. destruction. This beautifully filmed, symbolic and surreal project is new-age claptrap at its worst. Pure spirits are naked women swimming in clear waters, but business, medicine, science, internet, industrialism and men are all corrupt, destructive, greedy and filthy, destroying the environment and all that is pure, and even eating meat (gasp). All this is wrapped in a creation myth about Mago and 12 female (naked) spirits and how the earth became corrupt and the spirits went into exile. Pretentious, dumb, preachy, misandric, new-age excrement.
Artsy French perversion using the Oedipus Complex and other base Freudian instincts to contemplate on ...something or another. A young man comes back home with idealistic worship of his mom only to learn she is a perverted bisexual slut and a lush. She tries to educate him in the ways of life by pulling him into perversions with her wildly kinky and bisexual lover, only to find him diving into her life lessons with wild abandon and nihilistic passion, soon to go out of control. She tries to re-adjust him with another neurotic girl who has a masochistic slave, etc. Psychology, incest, philosophical musings, coprophilia, artsy pretentions and necrophilia. It would be disturbing if it made any sense or added up to anything.
A hatefully twisted precursor to Blue Movie by Alberto Cavallone. Society in all its forms is attacked. While festivities are going on in the streets, various depraved people interact and have sex. There's a nymphomaniac, psychotic woman, a hypocritical policeman who uses whores, a priest that seems to like the boys a tad too much, a man with a fetish for pictures of nude women and internal organs, a butcher that humps his frozen meat, some surreal imagery involving female genitalia, billiard balls and an eyeball, and an unbelievable grand finale involving snuff coprophilia.
A pointless sequel that has the Japanese butchers from camp 731 gather together for a reunion of sorts and rehash the original story, this time with more gore and a cheesy love story. We see some of the same expirements again, freezing a woman's arms then striping off her flesh, some splatter autopsy scenes, experimenting on Chinese prisoners with nasty diseases and chemicals, and testing guns on lines of live humans. Nasty exploitation but not disturbing like the first, and flawed by cheesy drama.
No, not a Mondo movie but a German low-budget stab at Richard Kern and trangressive surreal pornographic cinema. Backed by a pounding soundtrack, we dive into the mind of a shocked virgin girl who sees lesbians going at it at a rock concert. Everything she sees afterwards brings on sexual and bloody, violent, perverse fantasies and images.
An old shocker about an insane deaf-mute who was abused as a child and has an unhealthy obsession over dolls and violence. He has a crush on a local pretty girl who dances all day and has trouble with mean co-workers at the office. When he discovers the joy in mutilating and toying with corpses, there's no turning back, and soon he is darting into funeral homes to cut up the dead dolls, pull out eyeballs, and suck blood through a straw, thinking himself untouchable. The symbolism is crude however and I found nothing of interest here.
After a silly intro involving a man beating up a Schwarzenegger poster and the producer telling us that this film sucks, we get a short tale about a dentist assistant and her burnt brother who is insane from pain and wears a KKK outfit after he was hit by a black car. She gets harassed by sleazy patients and a door-to-door saleswoman but she soon discovers that by injecting her insane brother with her urine, she can command him to do whatever she wants. So she makes him eat his own vomit and then kill her enemies in gory ways, including slicing up a face in a meat slicer. Purposely goofy and bad in ways that almost goes beyond terrible into the realm of the cult. Almost.
Alain Guiraudie has a knack for creating stories and fantasy worlds out of mere dialogue, a simple location (usually outdoors), the mundane and the quirky. After some light half-length experiments, his first full-length movie is a freeform movie about a superficial teenage slacker who is afraid to sleep in case it's his last, and who spends the entire movie running through a confusing barrage of locations, identities and some absurd adventures. A whole village is killed, he falls for an old man, he rides an airplane to a bar in the middle of a field without taking off, a big wave takes his friend away, he is hunted by various eccentrics and thugs, people seem to die, but then they don't, etc. But there's no depth of character, ideas or story, only annoying whimsies, endless banal dialogue, and faux-creativity. Pointless.
So what if Beverly Hills 90210 featured a kaleidoscope of bisexual, sex-starved, extremely neurotic, nihilistic, foul-mouthed, angst-ridden teens with various personality disorders? And to top it all off some of them run around killing and raping or getting abducted by aliens? You get this movie of course, a pointless, repulsive but stylish piece of garbage with non stop depraved sex, violence, teen-chatter and drug-induced weirdness.
Australian oddity by actors that look like something between 80s punks and village people, attempting to make a camp cult movie a la Rocky Horror Picture Show. The story revolves around a mysterious Dingo woman (a playmate) and spends most of the movie dressing and undressing while most of the cast try to bed her for different reasons. There's the parents who tried to kill her as a baby, a punk-master of the occult who thinks she's the center of a spiritual event, a short blonde Hitler-clone with a Pinocchio nose, lesbian Nazis who want to inseminate her for the Third Reich, horny Dingo incestual pagans, a Tarzan, a mad scientist, and other assorted strange characters and plotlines involving the Christian Trinity, sacrifices, actors, and spiritual powers. Tries too hard to be off-the-wall and funny.
An underground, darkly atmopsheric B&W short by Rozz Williams who used this film to release his almost Dadaist fantasies of sadism and murder before killing himself. A man uses a bizarrely illustrated book to inflict several sadistic games and tortures on another man. While this goes on, we are treated to severe camera angles and overly artistic twistedness in the form of incomprehensible symbolism.
Artsy nonsensical movie with three intercut stories whose only common theme seems to be crime & punishment or sex. The three stories are: A documentary about a kid that shoots his father for attacking his cheating wife and then literally flies out the window, a horror movie about a scientist that isolates the sex drive in liquid form then drinks it and becomes a leper, and a prison story of obsessive homosexual lust and abuse. The movie is full of strange events, dark moods, repulsive scenes, and artsy nonsensical quotes and dialog that add up to nothing at all.
A curiosity led by the colorful Tomata Du Plenty who splices together a hodge-podge of strange performances, musical-videos, beatnik-like poetry and monologues, video-art and various footage while telling the history and future of America as it revolves around him meeting Sheela. Old footage is mixed with 80s-punk renditions of old songs, Tomata performs in his bunker while various bathroom appliances fly in the air and work on him, then he tells of an apocalyptic future of which he is supposedly the only survivor, during which doctors performed experiments on people until they mutated and girls got breasts for eyes. Odd but mostly uninteresting.
Laughably bad in an Ed Wood way, this psychedelic piece of cheap sleaze tells the tale of a virgin girl who gets involved in sexual witchcraft and encounters her ancestor Abigail, an evil witch, during meditation. Abigail guides and controls her through perverse sexual fantasies and dark acts of magic with evil effects on her friends. This is not what it sounds like though as the camera only lingers on various facial expressions while silly voice-overs further the story, and then displays a confusing collection of psychedelic colors, superimpositions, floating eyes and masks while Wagner plays loudly in the background. Offbeat.
Vastly overrated award-winning micro-cinema dares to make a sci-fi film for $2000. A repulsive man meets a repulsive girl (both inside and out), alternatively fight and get the hots for each other, then find out they are long lost siblings. This is pointlessly set against a sci-fi backdrop of a futuristic New York occupied by acid rain, genetic engineering, strange cockroaches, and flying vehicles. It also starts off with a darkly bizarre Lynchian atmosphere, including things like a mysterious human tooth, a genetically engineered bug, dark lust, and walking on eggs in the park, but this soon peters out and along with the sci-fi, disappears in favor of an ugly drama involving incest. Bad accents are used and then discarded, and the acting is weak. Suppedly part of a trilogy, and this may develop into something interesting in the future, but as a stand-alone it's a horrible mess.
If Bad Taste consisted of mostly fart humor, this would be the result. An ugly, foul, trashy family with a farm live their lives with filthy habits full of farts, burps, other bodily functions, horrible living conditions and idiotic humor. To get more milk out of the goat, the farmer has sex with it and the result is a half-man half-goat monster which grows to become an angry monster that wreaks its gory revenge on the family.
The ultimate cult movie made popular by the village people and a worldwide horde of cross-dressers. A repulsive campy horror spoof about a couple stranded and caught in the clutches of a transvestite from the planet Transsexual accompanied by a circus of mad, colorful characters and a Frankenstein monster with golden underwear. A mad night follows complete with immensely popular musical numbers, kinky sexual adventures and lots of cross dressing. Dumb lunacy for the rest of us who are comfortable with our apparel.
Nazi-controlled Italy rounds up some youths and takes them to a castle for extreme sexual and sadistic experimentation and entertainment. Probably the most extreme and sickening movie ever made. Based on De Sade's writings, this one features unwatchable explicit scenes of true nihilism and depravity that start with bisexual sodomy and go on to humiliation, nauseating coprophilia, torture and snuff. Explores fascism, themes of sex, body and politics, and De Sade's sadistic philosophies, but despite these artistic aspirations, this is the only movie with scenes I had to fast-forward through. You can practically smell this one through the screen.
Two shorts by Clive Barker in his early years. Both are in grainy black and white with no dialog, and make use of various tricks such as dark sound effects, negative exposure, grain and extreme lighting to achieve a dark dream-like effect (this predates Begotten). The interpretation of Salome is too fast and obscurely hops from one dark scene to another, lingering only on the 'erotic' and death scenes. The Forbidden is a precursor to Hellraiser, featuring a man who discovers a puzzle that opens various worlds of pleasure and pain. The climax is a sickening, endless 10-minute long scene where a man's body is skinned slowly in layers. This is true underground cinema but there isn't much of interest here.
Well what can you expect with a name like that? Japanese campy gore-horror-sleaze about a dumb group of back-packers in the woods that encounter a parasite that lives in... female genitalia. The infected then seduce and tear apart their victims. This is similar to Cronenberg's Shivers but wth campy gore and exploitative sex and nudity. Theoretically this would deliver to fans of the genre but the nudity isn't a pretty sight and the whole affair is silly and too low-budget.
An underground Italian tribute to Fulci and D'Amato consisting of an anthology of short and disgusting comedy-splatter vignettes. A monster carnivorous purse, a mutant, slimy blow-up doll from hell, a cannibalistic virus, a transvestite doctor and a coprophagic psychotic all strut their stuff in this extremely silly and ploddingly repulsive hodge-podge.
Unrealistic, sleazy piece of trash about a dwarf and his mother who kidnap women by enticing them with toys, lock them up, then inject them with drugs and make money off them as unwilling whores. A poor, married couple move into the same building and cross paths with this nasty duo with dire consequences.
It's the future. An insane brutal cop with 16 tongues grafted onto his body after a near-fatal accident stays in a hotel where you have to pay to switch off the porn, and interrogates suspects by forcing them to perform fellatio. A lesbian duo of internet hacker and criminal robot killer cross paths with this man and the sparks fly. The ideas are ludicrous and don't make sense, the nudity is not sexy, and the pace and cinematography is slow and amateurish.
If John Waters were a retarded 15 year old, this may have been the movie he would make. The budget almost makes Schiff's movies look like blockbusters. Twin brothers visit their necrophiliac grandmother who drugs and molests them, while her homosexual farm-hand chops up passers-by, has sex with their decapitated heads and organs, and rapes one of the twins. This would be vile or disturbing if the movie had even an ounce of talent but if ever you need a benchmark to know how bad movies can get, this is it.
Unfocused, repulsive, splatter-fest movie about a wide variety of trashy characters (mostly street bums) doing an even wider variety of horrible things and using a lot of humorless dialog. The extreme gore is the only thing interesting here, featuring people melting in different colors or exploding after drinking some very old, mysterious booze. Then there is some sex, murder, necrophilia, and a bunch of people playing 'monkey in the middle' with a severed penis.
As the director put it, this is an attempt to catch the darkest subconscious side of people with brutal honesty. First, the left-right brain dichotomy is explained, the left side said to be in need of exploration as a woman's womb is cut open and an eyeball pulled out (what this means is beyond me). Then a man ruminates on the ultimate evil against creation (killing a baby as it is born) and concocts a plan to commit said evil on his sister for whom he has incestual fantasies. He also is both fascinated and scared by her menstrual cycle. After this nasty bloody sequence, some nature worshippers have an orgy with nature which bleeds on them. And finally, the hypocrisy of religious people is portrayed as a masturbator loses himself in twisted guilty fantasies where his penis is shredded and Jesus is cannibalized and urinated on by naked frenzied women. What does all this add up to? Not much. The points are shallow and could have been made without the series of extremely shocking and gross-out images. Jodorowsky at least had fascinating or wild imagery, this is just a collection of shallow gross-outs.
Two intercut stories of bizarre repulsive satire that never make sense. One features a beauty queen that goes from a hygiene-obsessed tycoon who urinates on her, through various stages to a commune (Vienna Actionists) that regularly participate in a banquet of vomit, feces and urine, and pretend they are babies. The other story features a madwoman who lures people onto her boat to discuss obsolete politics and to participate in sex, murder and child molestation. Supposedly a political satire where all of the above symbolizes Capitalism, Communism and the likes, but everything is disgustingly explicit and bizarre.
A man wakes up one morning covered in blood with his brain missing and a Dear John letter in his ear. He now has to deal with life without a brain but reality isn't what it used to be. He sees increasingly bizarre hallucinations like people in bunny costumes, gory body parts and murders, naked woman painted black that make strange noises, and dead people, one of which he has sex with. He has discussions with his friend about his madness and reality, and yearns for the return of his brain. Unfortunately th makes the movie sound a lot better than it really is. The scenes go on for way too long, the humor falls flat, the strangeness isn't done very well and the movie doesn't do anything interesting with the concept.
Unusually bizarre Anime with over-the-top cutesy animation and kittens, mixed with adult themes of violence and a chaotic sci-fi setting. On CatEarth, a planet run by a super-corporation Catty and Co., Tamala is a strange, whimsical kitten who goes on a voyage and befriends Michelangelo while being pursued by a hungry police-dog. The rest is an incoherent mess suffering from ADD: There are many short scenes that lead nowhere, characters like a Dark God of Death pop-up then disappear, some of Earth's history is re-invented (brand-names and the Loch Ness monster), a dog has some S&M with a mouse, some typically over-convoluted armageddon anime-mythology is established but nothing is done with it, a cat grows old, develops maggots and starts falling apart for no reason, etc. This would go well with We Are The Strange.
Lust, fire-shooting penis, gory evisceration of a pig, pedophilia, sex with fat lady and with pig remains, speed-eating contests, gorging, vomiting techniques, more fat sex, taxidermia, lots of dead things, gore, extreme fat, death, artistic self-mutilation. Although this barrage of shocking and disgusting scenes is filmed wonderfully, artistically and creatively, and there are claims of all this being some kind of allegory, this doesn't change the fact that this is still merely a collection of gross-outs. The narrative involves three generations of twisted people (sex-maniac with a fetish for fire, speed-eating olympic champion, and taxidermist) but there is no thread that ties things together into some kind of plot.
Ten, wildly varied short dreams from Japan that aren't very dream-like. They range from artsy, confusing meditations about the cycles of time and health, to infantile madness involving a strange man who sculptures religious statues by dancing techno, to the tale of an overly handsome man who is fed human-flesh with spit and attacked by a farting female human who turns into a pig, to dark nightmares about haunting bad pregnancies and the killing of a kid, to a Final-Fantasy-like manga. Mostly pointless or dull weirdness with nice cinematography. Just because you can write down a chaotic dream you had that does not make it interesting. Kurosawa did this much, much better with his Dreams.
A somewhat enigmatic and ambiguously symbolic film by Pasolini. A stranger visits an upper class family and proceeds to fulfill each of their psychological needs, all represented by sex. When he leaves, they all fall apart (the mother turns into a desperate slut, the son grasps at art but ends up urinating on his painting, etc), except for the maid who leaves the house and turns into a country saint, levitating and peforming miracles. The meaning seems obvious, the stranger representing religion/God bringing something crucial to each of the family members and portraying how they handle a life without religion (with only the lower class maid emerging strong). But the seduction tactics seem more devilish than god-like and the intellectual insights are shallow.
Both goofy and bizarre, this B&W oddity tries too hard to pay homage to cheesy old horror or Twilight Zone episodes as well as to be a cult item a la Eraserhead. The story simply involves a babysitter who has to deal with a monstrous baby, but the focus is on the interesting cinematography and quirky characters and sets. Odd sculptures decorate the house, machines seem like they're from the 50s and the future, and strange scenes involving fluids or odd people in masks are spliced into the movie. It simply doesn't go together though: The unsubtle acting, the cheesy horror, the miles of boring dialog all undo the bizarre atmosphere.
A free-form, schizophrenic hodge-podge of sexual fantasy revolving around a submissive woman who may or may not be a nun with narcolepsy. The movie wanders from silly attempts at blasphemous kink, to nunsploitation, laughable domination and humiliation scenes with weak Story of O ambitions, a dreamy lesbian encounter in a castle, a fling with a Yeti a la Borowczyk, to a colorful theater of extreme and ugly kink, masochism and perversions. In between scenes we get random kaleidoscopic montages to make it look artsy, and various cinematography filters and effects are used at random. The acting is bad and unconvincing. In short, a bad movie that isn't as avant-garde, erotic or surreal as it thinks it is up until the last few minutes when it veers into Lynch territory.
If John Waters had gotten stoned out of his mind and decided to write a hardcore pornographic comedy tribute to Rocky Horror with miles and miles of hammy and artifical dialogue, this may have been the result. This notoriously deranged grainy black and white movie features a group of strangers that get caught during a storm in a strange house full of sex toys and perverts and soon occupy their time indulging in every sex act possible. Blow-up dolls, sex-starved gorillas, oral sex, gay sex, cucumbers and penis enlargement machines serve as distractions while they ramble on endlessly about pickled husbands, lust, circus stories, or nothing in particular, even while indulging themselves.
Swingers get together in a mansion belonging to a strange old 'Uncle' who hosts all-night orgies and asks couples to act-out bizarre sexual fantasies for which he gives them a reward from a toy box. These fantasies include sex with a possessed bed (huh?), a butcher who hangs dead girls corpses like meat then has sex with them, murder during oral sex, etc. But why are corpses and decapitated heads appearing out of nowhere? Why does the uncle lack eyes and seem deceased? What's up with the 50 foot naked woman? Is it all a cruel alien conspiracy? A totally off-the-wall & bizarre softcore porn flick that isn't as interesting as it sounds due to the low budget.
A group of radical Austrians (including Otto Mühl and Kurt Kren) who claimed 'art is flesh and blood' and made a series of vile short films consisting of men and women at their most animalistic and disgusting, their naked bodies wallowing in various liquids and substances, exploring various perversions and fetishes, coprophilia, eating their own vomit, having sex in front of babies, etc. Some of these creatures established communes for like-minded people and one got arrested for pedophilia. A charming artistic movement, their shorts now compiled on DVD.
Garrel's strange hippy/drug parable take on Christ. Jesus seems to be a lost teenager with a Freudian mother-complex, pressured to proselytize and save the people by his mother, when all he really wants to do is hang out with Mary Magdalene. But the people reject him at every door, thugs on horseback push him and his mule off the road, and Mary demands a constant payment of stones for her services. I make this sound like a comedy, but this movie takes itself very very seriously and employs striking black and white cinematography in medieval, Pasolini-like scenery. Other random symbolic scenes include the hellish opening of Pandora's box, preaching to water-bearers, and Jesus taking flight (probably while on drugs). Presumably a parable on the social revolution of the 60s that nobody wanted to listen to, but seeing this movie, it's clear why nobody did.
Ming-liang Tsai directs an artsy study on, presumably, longing and perversion, love and connection replaced with imitation and fetish. Taiwain is plagued by a water shortage but a surplus of watermelons. One girl obsessively gathers water bottles, while she longs for her neighbour who is a porn star. Both try to open a locked suitcase in a heavy-handed metaphor. Watermelons become replacements for water, erotica, romance, simulated pregnancy and in one pornographic scene, a girl's vagina. Characters break into song dressed in gay dance extravaganzas to express their longings and problems, while the porn and madness continues on mechanically. The theme would be interesting except that there's no focus or consistency. Notorious for its shocking and confusing pornographic ending.
A unique movie created with a strange mixture of anime-style animation, 3d computer graphics, stop-motion animation, cut-outs, and graphics that look like computer games from the 70s and 80s. The story is almost non-existant and involves a girl with a strange disease abused by an evil pimp. She runs away and meets a doll-boy who communicates using squeaks and searches for ice-cream, while a warrior fights various evil forces in the bizarre city full of trippy decorations and strange monsters. Most of the movie is just weird visuals and crazy fighting sequences. It fails on almost every level though because there is no interesting plot, it doesn't bring a world or characters to life but reinvents them every minute, making this the ultimate A.D.D. movie, and the voices sound like they're made by a teenager who watched too many cartoons and has way too much time on his hands. There was obviously lots of work involved in creating this but I got bored after 5 minutes. This is the worship of freeform acid-induced imagination taken to a dull extreme.
A farmer is followed with a camera while he handles his daily chores, bathes, feeds the animals, eats, plays games, places doll heads on birds, plays bizarre games with his animals, chases his pig around, has sex with the pig, takes care of the resulting piglets, kills some animals, prepares tea and food out of his own feces, collects dead things in jars, eats various repulsive things and vomits. There is no dialog, only a bizarre soundtrack. This probably has some artistic symbolism or message, but frankly, I don't care what it is.
A near-cult flick about a club-footed weirdo who owns land with a lake which business men and the town want to take over. He lovingly keeps worms as pets, naming each one, singing to them and building them homes, he plays music to his foot, and is visited and harrassed by various strange city folk, students and dead fishermen. He starts feeding them worms and turning them into beeping worm-humans that excrete whipped cream and crawl after women. Several throwaway weird scenes, shlocky acting and weird characters would make this entertaining if it weren't so terrible in general. Features close-up worm chewing.
Dull and overlong experimental movie that dives into the mind of a very pathetic, lonely and schizophrenic man who talks to pornographic mags, indulges in racist rants, wanders around the woods, maintains a biology hobby, collects dead animals and parts in jars, and develops a sexual relationship with the upper part of a mannequin. Sounds and images are cut together to make the experience, using images of animals parts, the female body, lactating breasts, etc, all of which slowly get more deformed and bizarre as mutating flesh, a head that is part chicken, a growing mutation connected to a woman through an umbilical cord, bleeding breasts etc. A particularly dark scene mixes colors, disturbing visions and sound as the man tries to cut into a nasty cyst on his arm. A repetitive, long and slow movie studying a character that only deserves 3 minutes tops.
A truly abysmal home-made splatter movie about (let's see if I can get this right): A guy who chops up a horse belonging to a shoe repairman who tortures people for a living. The horse infects him with a toxin that makes him defecate and vomit nastily, and then infects a field of yeast (what?) which catches the attention of a Nazi who plans to kill the world by selling the toxin in wine bottles. The wine bottles then come alive and attack the locals while random characters sing and blow each other's heads off, eat each other's flesh to the bone, slash, cut, rip and blow off each other's body parts until Mary Poppins comes to save the day. If this sounds like insane fun, think again. The horrible acting, production values and annoying voice-overs balance out the fun.