Extreme Movies
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A serial killer movie following Silence of the Lambs's footsteps, but this one with a twisted theme of food. An Australian cop is after people in Germany who want to be eaten, and people in the USA who feed and take care of submissive women until they reach 700 pounds and die. The fat, violence and gore are disgusting enough, but what really sets this movie off into the land of the disturbing are the psychological aspects: The neurotic cop has an equally disgusting relationship with a (thin) bitch-slut, the Feeder has endless philosophies about female happiness and consumerism and a twisted past with his mother, and the Gainer (AKA fat woman) is twistedly submissive and ferociously loves and protects her demented feeder. It's crude, over-the-top, often unconvincing, but still extremely hard to watch and relentless.
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.
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, symbolically unshackling of various forms of 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.
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.
From the maker of Alucarda comes this wild story of a lunatic asylum run by lunatics inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. A Mexican production that features connections to Jodorowsky, it looks like the costume designer was given some LSD. A reporter goes to visit an unusual lunatic asylum to report on its unusual practices and discovers chaos. People run around in soldiers uniforms, perform cult and satanic rituals, act like chickens, run around naked, perform entertaining dances, climb into strange buildings and artefacts, and others are tortured. The reporter soon finds that he cannot leave and he is falling in love with a mysterious girl. Weird but clumsy, and with a penchant for slapstick.
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.
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 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 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...
An underground cinematic experience that is in a class of its own. At first reminiscent of Julien Donkey-Boy, it intimately explores the mind of a very fat street wacko who sells cheap watches for a living (or tries to), has violent or verbally abusive encounters with other street bums and dogs, can't stop eating, sneaks sandwiches in his mouth while distracting his mother, visits Universal studios, etc. The indescribable hypnotic effect this bizarre film has is created by camera warps, disjointed editing, loud, exaggerated and silly sound effects and voice-overs, repetitive insanity, lots of random angry people dreamy sequences of his dead sister roaming a strange deserted city and other random scenes of 60s hippy-culture satire, TV shows and Spielberg bashing. Meanders aimlessly from one vignette to another and it goes on forever, but the overall effect is a mind-twisting depressing, satirical meditation on human existence. Well, if you can describe this one better you're welcome to try.
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 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.
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 call this a bizarre and very twisted movie that 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 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 in front of 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 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 reoccuring 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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A modern, brutal but empty remake of Last House on the Left which in turn was a trashy, exploitative remake of the intense Bergman drama The Virgin Spring. The plot was copied, complete with dumb girls, rape, humiliation, grisly torture, and revengeful parents but adds drugs, a rave party and cellphones. The movie takes some cues from Rob Zombie in its no-holds-barred brutality, a surprisingly wild ending and intensely psychotic characters, but offers nothing entertaining, creative or new, going for the shock value of nipple slicing and rectum carving instead.
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.
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.
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.
Slow and strange but completely unrewarding and impenetrable art-piece. A boy and an old man set fatal traps in a bunker and steal from the victims, a biologist goes to visit his strange relatives in the country where eveyone behaves oddly and talks in one-word sentences, men in dark suits play listlessly in the forest with wooden structures, bodies of live people are wrapped, entombed or left in the bushes in strange death-like rituals, he philosophizes with a man about searching for the unknown and rolling bodies who then stuffs cotton in his mouth, and other such random scenes of slow meditative weirdness. Uninterestingly bizarre, and as painfully slow as Tarkovsky, only without the narrative.
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 but then becomes debauchery with whores, extreme flatulence, exploding toilets, and of course enough food to make you sick just by watching it. But why are they doing it? Why did the schoolteacher join them? Who knows. And even if this is supposed to be a parable of the fall of modern society, I don't detect a message anywhere. Brainless 'art'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 p