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I'm looking for some really off the wall movies to watch- serious movies that have that sleep deprived or drug induced feeling to them... the kind of original, underground movies that don't always make much sense (but aren't completely nonsensical like David Lynch flicks). Does anyone have any suggestions?

My all time FAVORITE movie  

'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"  
A superb film.

'Repo Man' perhaps.

All the films I can think of offhand are David Lynch films....

Lost Highway is one of my favorites.

If I think of any others I'll let you know.

Try out his Un Chien Andalou / Land Without Bread

There are actually many surrealist films out..pretty twisted stuff, and Dali one of the most twisted of them all.  You can order it off the web because I doubt you will be able to rent it.

Also the movie Gift by Perry Farrell from Janes addiction is pretty cool.

I know I have some others tucked away from back in the day...will let you know when I think of them..

If you want a verbal mind trip then try out My Dinner With Andre

Everything in life is odd. A few films came to mind when reading this post and they are:

Dead Man
Eraserhead
Santa Sangre



Post Edited (07-20-04 16:26)

* AT MIDNIGHT, I'LL TAKE YOUR SOUL

* THIS NIGHT, I'LL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE

* AUDITION

* FUNNY GAMES

* THE TENANT

* ASWANG

* BASKET CASE

I remember another one....how about "Naked Lunch".

That's a bizarre one.

There's a reader review of it here (http://www.badmovies.org/othermovies/nakedlunch/index.html)



Post Edited (07-20-04 16:42)

CANDY (1968) and any of its psychedelic drug trip brethren.

an added vote for "fear and loathing in las vegas" and also...
Requiem for a Dream
Trainspotting
Donnie Darko
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
and Donnie Darko

Cars That Eat People
or
The Cars That  Ate Paris
It's the same movie, I think that there's a review of it here.
Twilight of the Cockroaches, or just about anything Japanese, I guess.

Someone mentioned "Requiem For A Dream".
Another film that is similar but different and yet still weird is the crystal meth movie "Spun".

It's pretty trippy. (and no, I've never done meth and never will...I just like this movie)

(http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00005JM23.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg)



Post Edited (07-20-04 17:47)

* SUSPIRIA
* NATURAL BORN KILLERS
* WILD AT HEART
* ALTERED STATES

Barton Fink by  Joel and Ethan Coen

I agree with ASH, Requiem for a Dream is weird and disturbing.

Tetsuo: Iron Man (the story makes sense if you watch it a cople times)
Begotten (haven't seen it yet though)
My Dinner with Andre (basically one long converstation)
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Naked Blood (very disturbing gore and gets nonsensical only at the end)
Heavy Traffic (animated)
Jacob's Ladder
El Topo, Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre (haven't seen these yet but they're probably exactly what you're looking for)

"Dreams" by Akira Kurosawa came to mind immediately.

It's a series of 'short film' type sequences- none of the stories are realted.  The thing to take into consideration when watching it is the difference between our cultures.  Some of the dreams may not make sense, but it you go into it with an open mind I think some of them will BLOW your mind.

Some of the dreams have a very obvious tie to Kurosawa's feelings about war and government.  Those don't take much interpretation.

This is by no means a "bad movie"- it's a phenominal film (you can tell after the first dream- it has some of the most beautiful scenes EVER).

It's a crazy experience- I highly recommend it!

I'll have to agree with others on these films. They are strange films:

Naked Lunch
Donnie Darko
Dreams

Hey, y'all.

I've always thought The Doom Generation was totally bizarre.

Anything with Cronenberg directing is pretty wacky [well, his old stuff anyway]

Requim for a dream and Fear and loathing are excellent as well.  Both are quite disturbing.

I haven't seen Brazil, but the little I saw from bits of the behind the scenes made it seem very surreal as well.  Might be worth a watch.

Surreal Strange Weird and Outrageous are perhaps the best kind of film to watch!

Once again so many good choices already named.

"Head" - the Monkees' attempt to destroy thier old popstar image and gain the respect of older fans and their musical peers. It failed, but it's still a fun twisted bit of psychedelic smartass hijinks. Has a couple of cool songs as well. Plus it has odd cameos from people like Sonny Liston, Terry Garr, Annette Funicello, Victor Mature, and Jack Nicholson (one of the producers in real life).

Typical exchange:

Frank Zappa (while walking a cow): That song was pretty white.
Davy Jones: Yeah, so am I, what can you do?

The films of Alejandro Jodorowsky mentioned earlier (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) would defintely fit the bill, but most except "Santa Sangre" and "Fando and Lis" are hard to find through "legit" sources. He was going to direct a version of "Dune" in the 70s, that would have been interesting, it's worth looking up interviews articles about him to see his vision for the film.

"Castle Keep" - an odd WWII film from the late 60s, tamer than most the choices mentioned here but still worth a look.

"200 Motels" - Frank Zappa's very cheeky, and cheap looking, take on the trials of life on the road. If nothing else worth a look for a few clever scenes and Ringo Starr playing a Zappa clone/crony called "Larry the Dwarf".

"Chappaqua" - a very dated look at a man trying to beat drug addiction, but it has a scene where William Burroughs and Herve Villechez (Years before "Fantasy Isalnd" or "Forbidden Zone") are a gangster and his sidekick mowed down by rivals for who knows what reason.

A great thread. Some of my favorites are:

Liquid Sky
Visitor Q
The Lathe of Heaven (original)
Audition
Tetsuo (nice to see this one mentioned)
Dark Water
Juon


I see alot of Asian cinema on the threads here. And that's a very good thing.

Definitely Brazil (hey, just about anything by Terry Gilliam is,  e.g. Time Bandits)

raj wrote:

> Definitely Brazil (hey, just about anything by Terry Gilliam
> is,  e.g. Time Bandits)

Timebandits...hehe!
Everytime I think of that movie I remember the phrase I've always loved.

"The Most Fabulous Object In The World!"

"We don't know him that well, we only work for him"

has anyone seen Ichi the Killer?  It's one of the most voilent movies I've ever seen, and extremely odd.

Thanks for the suggestions. My list of movies to rent/buy is now incredibly large... it'll take me a while to get through it all.

I love "Fear and Loathing" and "Requiem for a Dream", and hope I'll find other movies like them within the list I've received.

BTW, to throw more ammo to this thread I'll go ahead and suggest a movie of my own that wasn't mentioned: "Waking Life" (2001)

Oh yeah, I should have included that one in my list too! "Love really does hurt !!"



Post Edited (07-21-04 20:21)

jga5000 mentioned "Aguirre: The Wrath of God". I have the Herzog/Kinski box set that includes all 5 films they made together and Herzog's documentary about their "friendship" called "My Best Fiend". I'd recommended any of their work together for a thread like this.

They're both long and drawn out, and not everyone's cup of tea, but the Russian films "Solaris" and "Stalker" are both odd and disconcerting. Both are by the same director, I'd give "Stalker" the edge on oddness just because the story is more abstract and the characters are more symbolic types reather than people per say. Plus it has that bizarre last scene, that makes me think I know where the inspiration for several Tool videos came from.

Yaddo42 wrote:

> They're both long and drawn out, and not everyone's cup of tea,
> but the Russian films "Solaris" and "Stalker" are both odd and
> disconcerting. Both are by the same director

Andrei Tarkovsky.  Yes, they are good candidates for this thread...both VERY VERY slow however, so be warned.

Harry wrote:

> has anyone seen Ichi the Killer?  It's one of the most voilent
> movies I've ever seen, and extremely odd.

yeah  i got this one on dvd. i liked it even though i wass labeled a sadist by my friends.

"I know I know ive been exposed permeant psychoses..
at least the colors are nice"- Aeon Flux

Cemetery Man
Carnival of Souls
The Dark Backward (not really "serious," but genuinely bizarre and sick as hell)

The Fobidden Zone

One more favorite of mine for this thread. The dark comedy thriller "Winter Kills", I call it a paranoid conspiracy theorist's wet dream. It's a thinly veiled takeoff of the half brother of a slain beloved young president trying to find out who really killed his brother when a man materializes claiming to be the fabled "second shooter". The living brother, played by Jeff Bridges, begins chasing down leads and clues that take him further and further into the vast array of enemies and factions who wanted the president dead. All the while, he goaded on and taunted by his overbearing father, played by John Huston as a monsterous parody of Joseph Kennedy, who Huston reportedly loathed in real life. Fair warning: there is a scene of Huston rather proudly in just red bikini briefs and an open robe, that scene alone is weird enough on its own to warrent this film being included.

The film was financed with drug money and one of the producers was murdered by people he owed money to. The film was shut down when money ran out, and various other troubles occurred during the making and during the brief release when the film was recut, losing it's punch and much of its humor. A later release with much put back got critics' attention but not the public's. The Anchor Bay DVD  restoration makes it  well worth seeking out this underappreciated gem with a great cast of familiar faces (everyone from Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Toshiro Mifune, Ralph Meeker, Richard Boone, Sterling Hayden (Boone and Hayden are both very memorable here) plus some surprises and even Joe Spinell and Tisa Farrow in small parts) and some great extras including a documentary dealing with those behind the scenes troubles.

Although I can't recommend it, "Liquid Sky" probably fits the criteria

I just remembered another one...

"Leaving Las Vegas" with Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth Shue

This is one of the most disturbing films I've ever seen.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that one.   On a different note does anyone here remember the name of the movie where Nick Cage was a ambulance driver and he kept seeing a dead little girl?  I could do the research and look it up, but I am sure one of you well versed people would be able to tell me right off the top of your head.

>On a different note does anyone here remember the name of the movie where
>Nick Cage was a ambulance driver and he kept seeing a dead little girl?

I had to look it up, but, Bringing out the Dead?

That's definitely the name of the flick. "Bringing out the Dead." It's a great movie.

Yep, that was it.  Thanks a bunch John!

Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women? That's out there.

The 1972 film version of "Slaughterhous Five" -- even better than the book.  Really.  "Billy Pilgirm has come unstuck in Time . . .".  Totally balls-to-the-wall Odd.   Notable too for the fact that it's the only period film to get ALL the WW2 German uniforms EXACTLY right:  eg:  The Waffen SS, the Political SS, the Wehrmacht fieldwebels, the Stalag Luft guards, the anti-aircraft people, etc.  90% of war movies just grab any old grey thing, sew an Nazi eagle on the front, and voila:  German Soldiers!!  Uh, no . . . it's really more complicated than that . . .
"The Ruling Class", also 1972.  Peter O'Toole is Jesus Christ and Jack the Ripper.  With musical numbers and gorilla suits.  Beyond brilliant!
Ralph Bakshi's "Heavy Traffic"(1973), was also mentioned here.  A dream sequence of a film that owes a lot to:
Jean Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet"(1934).  I would nominate all of Cocteau's work as odd-beyond-odd.  If you haven't seen his stuff, please get it today.  He loved smoking opium & drinking Absinthe, and it shows in his films.  Seeing them could change your life.  Jodoworsky(El Topo, etc.) has said in interviews that he owes a lot to Cocteau.  Check out his "Beauty and The Beast" and "Orpheus" as uparallelled European weirdness.
On Asian weirdness, I've always been fond of a Chinese classic fairy-tale adaptation:  "The Bride with White Hair".  Has an eerie full-color-in-the-dark quality to it, very dreamlike.
peter johnson/denny crane

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Greaser's Palace yet.

Ichi the Killer and Audition are good suggestions--basically anything by director Takashi Miike is going to be out there.

Perhaps the craziest movie I've ever seen was the Jackie Chan vehicle Fantasy Mission Force, in which a team of commandos must rescue Abraham Lincoln from Chinese Nazis in World War II.  It's amazing.  I hear that Young Daoism Fighter (Wu-Tang Temple?) is similarly kinetically wacky, but can't confirm.  Apparently it has a villain that gains power from eating human placentas.

Since I'm rolling with the Asian films, Seventh Curse is a bizarre little horror-comedy-action-fantasy film that's real fun and weird.  I don't know if they count, but the Mr. Vampire films are a bunch of fun and just downright bizarre, especially to people who don't know anything about Chinese ghosts.  The first one is one of the better movies ever made, in my humble opinion.  Dr. Vampire is a spoof of the Mr. Vampire movies and a really funny one at that.  Odd too.

Begotten.  I thought it was crap, but it's one of those movies where you either think it's genius or just a bad idea.  I also can't recommend it, but Body Melt may fulfill your criteria.

Anything from Bollywood, probably, from my understanding of Indian cinema's reputation.

AAUGH, was Audition the one where the guy eats the chick's puke?

If you want strange and off the wall, but maybe not so surreal as it is disturbing..Pink Flamingo by John Waters is right up there.  But be warned, this ain't no Hairspray!

House of 1001 Corpses (Even though I thought it was a rip-off of Texas Chainsaw Massacre)

Story of Ricky (Ultra Violent)

Sleepaway Camp (Strange ending)

El Topo (Emmmm)

Anthropophagus (The fetus scene)

95% of Anime movies and tv shows

Flash Gordon (1980)  

The Cell (but I hated)
 
Angel Heart (big yawner)

Dr. Phibes & sequel

Time Bandits

Edward Scissorhands

Batman & Batman Returns

Beetlejuice

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Vampire Journals

I saw John Waters speak a few months ago, and he talked about police reports he's read from families who liked Hairspray, rented Pink Flamingos, and reported it for obscenity. "They always say, 'We watched half an hour, and turned it off!' Translation: They got to the singing a***ole."

Yeah I've had to warn people I knew who liked Waters' films like "Hairspray", "Cry-Baby" or even "Serial Mom" (a tame satire compared to his heyday) but weren't fans of "our" kind of films, that if they seek out his earlier films don't be surprised if they aren't quite the same kind of thing. SInce these were usually people I liked, Ifelt I should warn them.

On the flip side of the coin, I do remember having to explain once to a kid in high school who ONLY watched stuff like John Waters' films, Rocky Horror, etc. that not everything with the name John Waters attached was from the director. He was unaware of the Aussie actor of the same name, and was about to order some low budget action film or drama out of a video distributors catalog he had access to based on that name appearing on the box. Stupid twit.