Here we are more than halfway through September, and I'm just getting around to posting September reviews. You guys have been
very considerate in not complaining about my lack of self-promotion! But now I'm here to bombard you with notices...
LITTLE OTIK (2000): Certified weird! "This modernized fairy-tale adaptation about an insatiable man-eating tree stump baby is actually Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer’s most conventional and accessible story (by far). Of course, in Svankmajer’s world, a conventional narrative includes scenes where street vendors fish infants out of tanks, wrap them in newspaper and sell them to passersby."
THE TEN (2007): " the weirdest bit [is] an X-rated animated sequence (recalling Fritz the Cat) involving depraved anthropomorphic animals, including a heroin-dealing rhino who inexplicably poops flowers, and ending in an interspecies orgy."
MUTANT GIRLS SQUAD (2010): "The loosely sketched storyline involving a war between humans and mutants is just a clothesline on which the filmmakers hang as many “WTF?” moments as they can."
ATTENBERG (2010): "Although 'normal' movie audiences will find the casual, naturalistic surrealism of
Attenberg insufferable, around here we see it as a case where an infusion of welcome weirdness spices up what otherwise might have been a dreary drama about a disaffected daughter and her dying dad."
THE DEMONIACS (1974): "
The Demoniacs explores a new aesthetic for Jean Rollin, one that I’d dub 'beach Gothic': there are scenes set in a ship cemetery, a battered girl in a nightgown crawling along the shoreline past a congregation of carefully arranged crabs, and a pirate’s tavern decorated with bat wings and death’s heads."
Film critic DENNIS SCHWARTZ' TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIESTWIN PEAKS week:
TWIN PEAKS (pilot): " Everyone in town is connected to each other, and to the murdered girl. The waitress/owner of the local diner is mentor to a junior waitress who is having an affair with the captain of the football team, who was Laura Palmer’s boyfriend; she, in turn, is having an affair with the local gas station owner, who is the uncle of a motorcycle punk who was secretly seeing Laura behind the quarterback’s back. And so on; for each layer of mystery the pilot peels back, there are two more layers underneath."
TWIN PEAKS (Series): "There were almost too many storylines to follow, and the clues piled up, there was a fish in the percolator, and, in the most surreal six minutes of television ever aired, Cooper dreamed of a dwarf in a red room who spoke in riddles pronounced backwards while the ghost of Laura Palmer whispered the name of her killer in his ear."
TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992): "...as a wrap up to the 'Twin Peaks' phenomenon,
Walk with Me is frequently brilliant and sometimes frustrating, just like the series that birthed it."
Alfred Eaker's Edgar G. Ulmer series:
BLUEBEARD (1944): "Wisely, Schufftan and Ulmer focus not on the strangulation victims, but (in extreme close-up) on the pernicious face of their killer. Schufftan’s excellent, smokey camera work defies the film’s bottom of the barrel trappings."-AE
THE STRANGE WOMAN (1940): "Jenny becomes an Eve-like temptress by the time she can skip and, one occasion, almost drowns her childhood playmate Ephram (foreshadowing there)."-AE
DETOUR (1945): "The pessimism of Detour drips into the nitrate of Ulmer’s bubblegum Shakespearean saga."-AE