November @ 366 Weird Movies: MANOS, TRASH HUMPERS, and a chance for you to vote

[Rev. Powell]

Fishing up the month and going into December a bit.  New stuff is in this first post.    

TRASH HUMPERS (2009): "Any film in which four rednecks in latex masks that make them look escapees from a nursing home for the criminally insane force a pair of Siamese twins connected at the head by what looks like a giant tube sock to eat pancakes doused in Palmolive obviously has weirdness in its corner.  But among Trash Humpers many qualities, weirdness isn't the pre-eminent one: the movie is also repetitive, ugly, pointless, unsavory, deliberately annoying, and tedious."

MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE (1966): "Manos' saving grace, the one truly remarkable thing about the film which saves it from being an unsalvagable abomination: John Reynolds as Torgo.  While Tom Neyman as the Master, meant to be the colorful villain, is just a bad actor in a Frank Zappa mustache and a ridiculous bat-wing cape with scarlet fingers painted on it, Reynolds had a concept for his character."

READER'S CHOICE: VOTE FOR TWO MOVIES TO MAKE THE LIST!: An opportunity for you to vote for 2 movies to eventually make the List of the 366 Weridest movies ever made!

HOUSE [HAUSU] (1977): Certified weird! "Rife with images of flying heads, murderous furniture, laughing watermelons, an invisible wind machine, and a truly demonic kitty, the film's surrealist atmosphere and ever-shifting styles are as hilarious as they are inscrutable.  There is no way to get a handle on Hausu—the viewer is completely at the mercy of Obayashi's bizarre whims."-AK

ONDINE (2009): "Neil Jordan has gone weird from time to time (The Company of Wolves, The Butcher Boy)...  It's strange to see him helm a movie that plays it so safe, that aims so squarely at a middlebrow arthouse crowd who only ask for picture postcard vistas and enough painfully dramatic soul-searching to make the happy ending seem well-earned."

ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1951): "At only 75 minutes, the film zips along at an impatient child's pace, yet manages to catch all of Wonderland's major attractions: shrinking and expanding cakes, the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat with his variable opacity and detachable noggin, the Mad Hatter's eternally insane tea party, a game of flamingo croquet with the queen, and a trial that plays like a Kafka nightmare viewed through a head full of laughing gas."

NINJA SCROLL (1993): "The Devils, partly drawn from Japanese mythology, are as grotesque a gallery of rogues as you could hope to find outside of the Mos Eisley cantina, and a good deal nastier. There's a giant with stone skin and a taste for rape, a snake-woman who stashes a spare serpent in an unusual hiding place, a dwarf who births wasps from the hump hive on his back, and one Devil is even a homosexual with the hots for the archvillian."

Thanks to the Great Server Crash of 2010, 366weirdmovies.com lost all it's content from Nov.---well, not totally lost, but we have to restore it all by hand, cutting and pasting raw HTML.  So the links below this point probably won't work---though they are being restored, slowly.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A few appetizers to start out feast month:

FLOODING WITH LOVE FOR THE KID (2010):  One man Rambo show.  "In the category of Best Feature Film made for under $100 the winner is: Flooding With Love for the Kid... Zachary Oberzan has blown away Robert Rodriguez' El Mariachi and Ed Wood's entire oeuvre in terms of stinginess, and against all odds has made a feature that, while no masterpiece, is actually more entertaining in its way than most movies with 1,000,000 times the budget."

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998): "The movie version swaps Thompson's acidic prose for Gilliam's lysergic visuals; it's a trade for a loss, but not nearly as bad as it might have been."

GODS AND MONSTERS (1998): "...one of the most beautiful, elegiac films of the last fifteen years; a fictionalized, speculative film about the last days of the great golden-age Hollywood director, James Whale, who is best remembered for directing several Universal horror classics, such as The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)."-AE

[Rev. Powell]

Continuing the feast:

ST. JOHN OF LAS VEGAS (2009):  The director thought my review missed the big picture.

SUCK (2009): "A struggling Canadian rock band finds sudden success when their female bassist becomes a vampire.  It's a campy, tongue-in-cheek music movie with horror comedy flavor, but doesn't do much we haven't seen before..."-AK

PERFORMANCE (1970): "Performance is almost exactly what you would expect to see if you matched a couple of smart, artsy, experimental directors to an eccentric half-amateur cast of drug addicts in 1968 and the set's caterers fed the crew a diet of nothing but hash brownies and magic mushrooms for the entire shoot." Certified weird!

SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN (1951): "Superman and the Mole Men has a strange, rudimentary feel. Superman is never actually seen flying, there is no obligatory origin story, and the dated plot is an excuse for a strangely impassioned plea of tolerance delivered with all the subtlety of a pair of brass knuckles."-AE

[Leah]

Continuing the feast:

ST. JOHN OF LAS VEGAS (2009):  The director thought my review missed the big picture.

SUCK (2009): "A struggling Canadian rock band finds sudden success when their female bassist becomes a vampire.  It's a campy, tongue-in-cheek music movie with horror comedy flavor, but doesn't do much we haven't seen before..."-AK

PERFORMANCE (1970): "Performance is almost exactly what you would expect to see if you matched a couple of smart, artsy, experimental directors to an eccentric half-amateur cast of drug addicts in 1968 and the set's caterers fed the crew a diet of nothing but hash brownies and magic mushrooms for the entire shoot." Certified weird!

SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN (1951): "Superman and the Mole Men has a strange, rudimentary feel. Superman is never actually seen flying, there is no obligatory origin story, and the dated plot is an excuse for a strangely impassioned plea of tolerance delivered with all the subtlety of a pair of brass knuckles."-AE

umm, why isn't the last entry in a URL form?

[Rev. Powell]

umm, why isn't the last entry in a URL form?

It's called a "mistake."    Fixed now.