Category: Cinema 31
It's been my privilege in life to seek out some of the strangest movies in the world. I don't just mean movies with strange or difficult stories, but films where the story behind their making, the method of execution, the acting, the music, everything just combines to create this singular, bizarre trip into another world. These movies can definitely be a turn-off to some, but in the right mood, with teh right people, they can become an experience you'll never forget.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of these gonzo entries I can immediately think of come from the 60s and 70s. Why? I dont' know, it seems like this was the era when so many people were just getting really excited about experimenting with art and, even if the nature of experimentation is that sometimes it's goin to fail horribly and spectacular, they were willing to make a damn good try at it. But that's not to say that there aren't totally gonzo movies being made today, though you'll never see them at your local blockbuster cinema. A recent-ish example I can think of is the British production from the early 2000s, "The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz". here some sort of man/alien/something in 17th century clothing crawls out of the London sewer and jumps into the body of a cabbie, who jumps into the body of a businessman, who jumps into the body of a government minister. Train stations are disappearing for some reason and the guy responsible for surveillance suddenly discovers he can erase people and things from existence with his cameras. The police chief is this blind guy who is a mystic and holds seances, where he discovers that there's something horrible going on on the astral plane. This all somehow leads to the apocalypse. If the movie sounds incoherent, it's because even after a few experiences with it I'm still baffled by it, but I'm won over by the performances of a number of British character actors and the fact that, considering a lot of the dialogue is improvised, the whole thing comes off as being rather clever and smart. Also, the movie has some wild touches, like occasionally dropping into the look of an old silent movie complete with title cards and eerie choral music, all the while managing to make commentary on modern, technological life. It's the sort of thing one can't really explain but simply has to experience, as is the case with a lot of these "psychotronic" sort of movies. It's also pretty funny if you appreciate dry humour.
I want more strange movies. Throw them at me.
what the hell with ghost Busters? weirdest movie I've ever seen. oh, don't forget ted the bear. It was supossedly for children. You don't want to know how many inapropiate cursing there was and sexual stuff. :p haha, weirdest shit, I'm telling ya.
Which Ghost Busters? The 1984 one or the one that recently materialized? The original is pretty cool; definitely a part of childhood. What did you find weird about it? I wouldn't really call the original a weird film...it's a paranormal investigation comedy with some endearing qualities.
I know about Ted the bear. Not really my cuppa! haha
I got another one: This movie from 1970 called, appropriately enough, "Bizarre", that I watched the other day. It's also got the subtitle 'Secrets of Sex". I'll just repost what I wrote about it on facebook:
This is a 1970 piece of psychedelic insanity that depicts the battle of the sexes in the form of six short stories, with Valentine Dyall (The Man in Black, Doctor Who's Black Guardian, the caretaker from the original "The Haunting), depicting a mummy who has been "observing humankind" for centuries giving plummy commentary. According to him, men have mostly failed in this battle, and most of the vignettes reflect this. A male model gets trussed up in a "spanish horse" and castrated, while the female photographer goes out to lunch with her ffriends. You hear the sound of her cutting her meat juxtaposed with the guy screaming in pain. Then photographer and her assistant come back to find him a bloody mess and she says, "that's just the way I like it!", and starts taking pictures. In another one, a businessman admits to his scientist girlfriend that all he really wants is a son and that women are just the vehicle for giving him what he wants, and that his ex-wife took his away from him in a fatal car accident, so the scientist, who happens to have a debilitating genetic disorder, makes sure to become pregnant so she can give him a horrible, mutated freak of a son as a "gift" (i imagine the untold part of this story playing out much like "Eraserhead"). Another one has a female secret agent outsmarted by an ambassador dude who locks her in a safe with all the other agents who had failed in their task before her (the men won out in this one, i guess). Another has a guy having a call-girl come to his house, but when he invites his pet lizard to play with them, she is disgusted and storms out, so he goes for a walk and fantasises about dinosaurs and his mamma or something. In between we get Dyall's commentary on life, the universe and everything, interspersed with go-go dancing, machine guns and finally, an orgy. Totally nuts. Jaw on the floor the entire time. I want to watch this with somebody. hahaha
I’m not a movie person, but sometimes am taken to them, or will sit and listen with company that likes movies.
Strangest is The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
That movie has and had a cult following, and people would go to see and act it out as entertainment on Friday night around midnight.
They’d dress up in the costumes and the whole thing.
How do I know, was invited out.
Just, just.
Oh yes, I'm familiar with it, though I've never done the whole costume theatre Rocky Horror experience. the "Time Warp" rules! heheh
Yeah, that.
Laughing.
So far the weirdest movie I watched was hard candy. That was a few years ago. The only thing I could remember was the young girl cutting off a man's privates. And the funniest thing was that there were only 3 people in the movie. I think the girl was 14 and she set the guy up because she was on one of those internet chat sites and the older guy was chatting up underaged girls so that was his punishment. That was the most of what I could remember. I not watching that ever again. lol
Ouch!
yep, hard Candy..I have that movie. It's pretty good I think. The punishment the guy gets is really harrowing and makes you feel uncomfortable even though you know that he deserves it, which I think was in part the point of the film. The actor playing the young girl was really good.
It's not such a weird movie though if you've seen all the exploitation revenge type movies I have. But I enjoyed the premise being so in line with genuine 21st century concerns.
I have it described so that was painful to listen too and yest the girl was real good to. lol. I shouldn't have said it was weird but it was a painful movie. the guy deserved it.
I actually want to see that one. There's also one called the Audition. It's a Japanese movie about a man seaking a wife. He gets much, much more than he bargained for. No idea if there's an english version out there, but I doubt it. And us with subtitles and all.....
Wow. Hard candy will make you cringe. You could probably find it on the blind mice movie vault.
There's no dub of 'Audition", I believe. It's a pretty intense movie though, all the moreso because the first half or more are really laid back and ...almost relaxing. Then suddenly things get really bad, really quick.
if you have a braille display, you can download and follow along with subtitles, though synchronizing with a film can be a bit of an issue. A sighted fellow movie enthusiast can be helpful to have around. haha
the ghost busters one was the recent one they made. weirdest stuff ever. :d
Synecdoche, New York, is hands-down the weirdest movie I have ever seen. I don't necessarily know what went into it, but if you want the full experience, get hold of it, slap on some headphones (or do whatever it is you do to make yourself as distraction-free as possible) and just let fly. It makes sense...sort of. But it's very, very strange.
Shepherdwolf..yes, I'm definitely interested in Synecdoche, New York. Sounds really surreal and inventive.
How about "Death Bed: THe Bed that Eats"?
It's a story of a demonically possessed bed that dreams and throws tantrums and..eats people, and things.
I haven't seen it yet. And it's certainly not as cerebral as the movie listed above. But..it's on the list, just for the weirdness factor.
Wait, so there's a way to download subtitles? That's a new one on me.
I don't see many movies but out of the ones I've seen, I think it has to be chicken Run. :)
Remy, for sure, there are several subtitle file formats, the most common being .srt. Your mediaplayer will usually load them automatically if they're in the same folder as whatever you're watching. But you can also just download .srt files from various internet sites for a whole lot (most, though probably not all) of movies out there. It's been a while since I ooked around so I'm not sure what the best sites to find them are, but a quick google search usually yields results for whatever specific movie you're interested in.
I should clarify that this specific type of subtitle file is nothing more than a text file with timecodes imbedded into it. That's why you can easily read it on a braille display, though skipping past all the timecodes can be a pain, and with some movies you have to be quick!
Wow. Yeah, I've seen those files. So a text editer would open them?
It would, yeah. Then you can read them on whatever device you choose. I'd like to find a quick and easy way to strip the time codes out of the files, actually; it would make for faster reading. I think it'd be pretty easy to do, I just haven't really looked into it yet.
A find and replace would do that, though it would be a long process. Just find the numbers and replace them with spaces.
Yeah, I'd definitely want a macro do that automatically, it'd take hours to do that by hand.
Ok, so how about "Zardoz"? This is one of the most famous weird movies of all time. I'ts pretty much the ultimate expression of the "acid age" approach to science fiction (or is it fantasy?) The name is a kind of corruption of 'The Wizard of Oz", which makes perfect sense once you experience it for yourself. It has Sean Connery running around in nothing but a loincloth and giant flying stone heads that intone in a booming voice things like "THE GUN IS GOOD! THE PENIS IS EVIL! ZARDOZ, YOUR GOD, HAS SPOKEN!" There is a utopian future society of asexual immortals (many of whom are topless women) who decide to study the "brutal" human (connery) who arrives in their midst. They show him pornographic videos to see if his penis will become erect. it doesn't work, but he is noticeably aroused by the sight of one of the female counselors, interestingly, the one who appears most hostile toward him and wants to kill him because she believes he is a threat to this utopian society. The movie seems to be making fun of new age hippie ideals in a way, but it's a lot more than that. Basically it seems like director John Boorman was a really excited kid who just read a ton of philosophy books and did a bunch of LSD. he throws everything at the audience and not a minute goes by in this movie where you're not seeing some interesting philosophy expressed or some far-out futuristic concept displayed on the screen or some trippy "sex" scene (in quotes because the sex seems to involve altered states of consciousness and telepathic osmosis of knowledge that is trippy as hell). Ultimately, I think the film is trying to say that death is good and a necessary part of life. The immortals are not happy and their society is kind of like a glorified mental asylum. There are catatonics, criminals who have been punished by being artificially aged and made to go senile, and nihilists who want to destroy everything and reveal their negative auras when pressed to go into meditation by the "stable" members of society. Meanwhile, the people who live in the outlands, the 'Brutals", worship the flying stone head that vomits forth guns and ammunition so they can cull their own kind. It's nuts and I could be here forever trying to explain it and what I think it is. It's just something you have o experience for yourself. Definitely weird and psychotronic.
That sounds all sorts of messed up. Having not seen the movie, I can't comment constructively, but ... yeah, sounds ... unique.
Once you start to make sense of it, some of the philosophy does actually come off a little bit childish, and you could even interpret this as a variant of the old "battle of the sexes" trope that was already old by 1974, but ther'es just so much packed into the running time, so much going on, and at least *attempts* at depth that other genre movies could only hint at. It's totally big and a bit pretentious and bonkers, but, I think, ultimately admirable; you have to respect the mind of the person who came up with a ll this stuff.
Or at least respect the drugs that mind must have been on.
Hah. Speaking of that, I wanted to watch Jodorowsky's "Holy Mountain" on magic mushrooms quite some time back, but the right moment just never presented itself. Definitely want to watch that fabled psychedelic gem with a sighted person.
Pulp Fiction
What did you find weird about Pulp Fiction?
The Human Centerpede. Enough said.
Ugh, yes, I haven't seen that, but I red a bit of the synopsis and content advisory. That one sounded really messed up, even for me. I think it was the poop puke ass to mouth interchange that did it for me. Or maybe that's simply what stands out the most.
EraserHead is probably the weirdest movie I have ever seen. It was just flat
out disturbing. I've read many great reviews on it but I still don't get it and
probably never will.