March @ 366 Weird movies:AMER, HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING, more

[Rev. Powell]

We march on to a new month in weirdness...

NOTHING (2003): "I wouldn’t necessarily make a big deal about Nothing, but it's worth checking out to see how a movie can still entertain using only two characters acting against a blank screen."

M.O.N. (2006): "Whole minutes go by with nothing but the sound of screams, or the sight of characters stumbling in and out of forests. If you’ve ever wondered whether snuff films could be boring, here is your answer."-AS

ENTER THE VOID (2009):  Upgraded to Certified Weird!  "Visually, Enter the Void is unconditionally stunning, and the movie is best and most honestly enjoyed on a purely sensory level, as the most technically accomplished and accurate documentation of a psychedelic journey ever filmed."

FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1974): "Like nearly all of Fisher’s films, Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell is stamped with the director’s assured composition and electric editing."-AE

[Rev. Powell]

Keepin' it goin'...

PSYCH: 9 (2010): "Watching this picture is not unlike sitting down in the seat of a Ferris wheel, only to have the Ferris wheel unexpectedly transform into a roller-coaster."-PD

ALIEN V. NINJA (2010): "Even stranger is the one-on-one melee between sexy Mika Hijii (in skintight black latex ninja-wear with specially molded boob armor, yum) and an alien who seems to have cross-species mating more on his mind than victory in combat."

THE PEANUT BUTTER SOLUTION (1985): "A movie that dealt with these themes in a straightforward way would likely upset tykes, but Peanut Butter Solution adds nightmarish imagery: a kid who’s gone totally bald (particularly frightening to a youngster who’s vaguely aware of childhood leukemia and chemotherapy).  An nameless horror in an attic of an old house.  Hobo ghosts.  A boy smearing a mixture of peanut butter, rotten eggs and dead flies on his head.  Hair that grows so fast it gets snagged in trees as he walks to school.  Fur flowing out of a kid’s pants leg.  A child imprisoned in an elevated box with his hair hooked up to a loom.  Paintings that you can walk into."

OBSOLESCENCE (2011) & LETHAL OBSESSION (2010): THE POTENTIAL AND FAILURE OF INDEPENDENT FILM: Dual review.  "If Jakob Bilinski’s Obsolescence is an affirmation of the refreshing potential of independent cinema, then Lethal Obsession (2010) flails in its redundant failure... the equivalent of a low budget,  NC-17 Hershey Bar, manufactured for an imbecilic audience."-AE

[Rev. Powell]

Even more weirdness:

PINK FLOYD: THE WALL (1982): "The live action is the meat of the film and the animation is the pudding, but how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?"--EG

KABOOM (2010): "It gets weirder as it progresses, and it’s better for it, and the brash, unexpected ending definitely has a special effect on audiences (there was a good mix of 'Huh…', 'Ha!', and 'What the hell?!' at my screening)."--AK

PAPRIKA (2006): Certified weird! "The film is most thrilling in its second act, when Paprika’s search for the DC Mini thief leads her to explore various dreamscapes in the guise of Tinkerbell, a mermaid, or a griffin; she’s chased by a rolling wave of gnarled roots, or swallowed by a whale and spat out its blowhole."

THE UNHOLY THREE (1925):"The Unholy Three consist of gang leader Professor Echo (Lon Chaney ), a ventriloquist; the spitfire midget Tweedledee (Harry Earles); and that 'marvelous mastodonic model of muscular masculinity,' Hercules the strongman (a very young Victor McLagalen)."--AE

[Rev. Powell]

AMER (2009): "Brought to opulent (some might say pretentious) life by Belgian directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, Amer is an homage to the Italian giallo horror films of the 1960s and ’70s, and more specifically the works of the genre’s most notable denizen, Dario Argento. "-KK

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: A MAN WITHIN (2010): "Bolstering the doc's weird credentials are a series of bizarro bumpers between interviewees: animated wire frame sculptures used to introduce chapters, manipulated and superimposed stock footage, what looks to be a segment from an archival experimental film featuring Brion Gyson's trippy spinning light 'Dream Machine,' and snippets from 70s-80s era punk-surrealist music videos incorporating Burroughs' image and mystique."

HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING (1989): "...after a dream where a pair of pink and blue birds fresh off the set of Song of the South flit about his room devising a plan to sell burglar alarms, he wakes to discover that that the boil has grown and developed a voice, and—worse—an embryonic face."

TOD BROWNING'S WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1928) AND THE ROAD TO MANDALAY (1926): "...the Tod Browning/Lon Chaney collaboration at the height of its nefarious, Oedipal zenith, brought to you, for your entertainment,  by Irving Thalberg."--AE

[Rev. Powell]

Finishing up March...

THE UNKNOWN (1927): "...one of the final masterpieces of the silent film era.  Suspend disbelief and step into the carnival of the absurd."--AE

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973): "If you tore out pages from the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, The Golden Bough, and a dozen other esoteric works from the Kabbalah to Gurdijeff—throwing in a couple of sleazy pulp novels for good measure—and put them together in a giant cauldron, stirred them up and pulled out sheaves at random and asked a troupe of performance artists, carnival freaks, and hippies tripping on peyote to act them out, you might arrive at a narrative something like The Holy Mountain."  Certified weird!

SUCKER PUNCH (2011): "The fact that almost the entire proceedings—all of which are meant to be the conscious projection of an independent 20-year-old woman, mind you—involve scantily-clad twentysomething hotties with heavy fake eyelashes fighting evil in egregiously high heels while their male tormenters ogle them, well… that just gives Mr Snyder a chance to incorporate as much exploitation and fetishization as he can."--AK

POSSESSION (1981): "This movie is long on style and short on decipherable substance, suitable for the LSD crowd, though with it’s schizophrenic script and cinematography, Possession on top of a dose of LSD would be redundant."--