June @ 366 Weird Movies: WILD WILD PLANET and too much to fit on a subject line!

[Rev. Powell]

It's a new month, a new slate of weirdness!

TOKYO! (2008): An anthology of three short films set in Tokyo: an experimental filmmaker's girlfriend feels useless until she undergoes a strange transformation; a bizarre man-creature crawls out of the sewers and terrorizes the city; and an urban hermit falls in love with a pizza-delivery girl with buttons tattooed on her body.

DEAD SNOW (2009): "If you just can't get enough zombie carnage and severed limbs, this should temporarily slake your thirst for blood.  If you're looking for something outside the box, Dead Snow arrives about twenty years too late."

THE WAYWARD CLOUD (2005): "As a romantic, pornographic, hallucinatory musical that makes sure you will never see watermelons or Taiwanese sex movies quite the same way ever again, The Wayward Cloud is audacious and, yes, weird.  The powerful downside is the fact that, outside of the musical sequences, Tsai's minimalism—long takes, a motionless camera, and the absolute minimum amount plot and dialogue he can possibly get away with—is the most acquired of acquired tastes."

And it's not weird, but John Wayne fans may want to check out Alfred's account of THE SHOOTIST (1976).

[Rev. Powell]

Last week:

MALICE IN WONDERLAND (2009): "Malice may not go very deep, but it's entertaining, clever, colorful, and zips along at a nice clip.  And what lover of light absurdity won't respond to a smoky midnight ride with a rapping Rastafarian and a hooker, a mobile brothel in the bed of a sixteen wheeler, continuous trippy flashbacks, and a competition among thugs and con-men to deliver an impressive gift to the gangland kingpin who has everything?"

BURNING INSIDE (2010): "When I glanced at the back of the Burning Inside DVD case and saw that the running time was 120 minutes, I got an anxious feeling; I was afraid that I might end up trapped iside the work of a young director in love with his own vision, who didn't know when to turn the camera off.  After watching the first scene—five minutes of a nurse shaving a comatose man—my suspicions were confirmed."

THE SECRET OF KELLS (2009): "If Walt Disney hired a group of 9th century Irish monks to oversee the work of the animators who created Fantasia, the completed project might look something like The Secret of Kells."

THE BLACK CAT (1934): Alfred Eaker gives some background and appreciation on the best and most bizarre Lugosi/Karloff teamup; an expressionist horror classic.

[Rev. Powell]

New last week:

My review for THE ADVENTURES OF SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL IN 3-D for Sharkathalon!

Two reader submitted reviews for our June review-writing contest: one for Brian Yuzna's SOCIETY, and the other for the cult black comedy HAROLD AND MAUDE.

More B-Westerns: Alfred gives us the lowdown on Tom Mix's THE GREAT K & A TRAIN ROBBERY.

[Rev. Powell]

What we've done this past week:

A fairly backwards review of the classic MEMENTO.

Pamela uncovers the "lost" giallo THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS: "...overall this gory film demands attention with its curious plot, steady, brooding pace, and consistently suspenseful, creepy feel."

ELEVATOR MOVIE is officially inducted as one of the weirdest movies ever made: "By mixing Sartre's "No Exit" with an ultra-minimalist riff on Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, garnished with large dollops of fantastical sexual depravity and a pinch of body horror, writer/director/star Zeb Haradon created one of the weirder underground movies of recent years."

Alfred covers another B-Western, the Tom Mix silent oater THE LAST TRAIL.

And guest reviewer Alex Kittle of Film Forager gives us the skinny on the recently rediscovered Japanese midnight classic HAUSU: "'Weird' doesn't even begin to describe this movie.  A floating head, a ravenous piano, sporadic animation, a laughing watermelon, a dancing skeleton, a glowing cat, gusts of wind that only affect one person, a host of aggressive, mobile objects, and a group of girls who REFUSE to acknowledge the weirdness: it defies explanation, really."

[Rev. Powell]

We finished up our reader-submitted review contest with the Italian space opera WILD, WILD PLANET (1965) and the Czech New Wave puberty dream VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (1970).

I tackled the trashy ANDY WARHOL'S TRASH (1970) and Julie Taymor's sometimes-psychedelic Beatles musical, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE (2007).

In honor of Canada day Pam covered the Canadian furniture horror movie THE CHAIR (2007).

Alfred gave us the story on forgotten silent comedian Charley Bowers, who made some bizarre slapstick one-reelers mixing fantasy and stop-motion animation.

And we announced a new contest: UK residents can win a DONNIE DARKO Blu-ray, and people from anywhere else in the world can win one of five DD posters.  It's easy to enter, all you have to do is make a comment on any movie review!