February @ 366 Weird Movies: PINA, SCHIZOPOLIS, IRON ROSE, GHOST RIDER 2, more!

[Rev. Powell]

TOMMY (1975): "...you have any number of frenzied images: Sally Simpson's husband—a dead ringer for the Frankenstein monster, Tina Turner transformed into a giant hypodermic needle, Clapton preaching in a church filled with statues of Marilyn Monroe, Paul Nicholas burning Daltrey with a cigarette—this is a musical, all right, but it's not exactly Meet Me in St. Louis."-SS

CATERPILLAR (2010): "The film never becomes truly exploitative, but there is plenty of caterpillar/human sex, in multiple positions, to titillate the curious."

BELLE DE JOUR (1967): Certified Weird!  "Séverine is torn between her split desires for chaste love and sexual lust, between her husband Pierre and her lover Marcel, between the comfortable life of a bourgeois housewife and the sensual adventures of working girl, and most importantly between dreams and reality."

SIMON OF THE DESERT (1965): "[Silvia Pinal] takes turns as a Catholic school girl, an androgynous messiah who performs a Janet Jackson-style wardrobe malfunction for the unfazed celibate, and finally as a mini-skirted Peter Pan, whisking Saint Wendy away from his Tower of Babel to a modern discotheque."-AE

[Rev. Powell]

More stuff---100% cheesier than last week!

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN (2011): "Hobo hits that difficult sweet spot between deliberate camp and shameless exploitation; it's the movie Troma studios have been trying, and failing, to make for over 20 years now."

THE BRIDE OF FRANK (1996): "The movie begins with a toothless old man tricking a five year-old girl into getting into his big rig, trying to get her to kiss him, then crushing her head under the wheel of his truck after she calls him a 'dirty bum.' If that scenario sounds like can't-miss comedy gold to you, then you're The Bride of Frank's target audience."

SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES (1971): "It's the kind of mobvie where curvaceous maidens in chiffon gowns walk through dusty corridors carrying candelabras, and there's always mist wafting across the tombstones at night."

CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR (1968): "The novelty of this being Karloff's final film is not enough to salvage the enterprise, although the film, posthumously, retains minuscule interest as an of-its-time curio (yesterday's trash is more tolerable than today's trash)."-AE

[Rev. Powell]

LA GRANDE BOUFFE (1973): Certified Weird! "It's a grotesque spectacle, but a strangely engrossing one, with a fascination that comes largely thanks to a dream cast of 1970s Euroweirdos."

TIM & ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (2012): "...essentially a combination of several sketches dragged out into a clumsy, broken narrative feature."-AK

THE NUDE VAMPIRE (1970): "There's always something new popping up on screen to raise your eyebrows, like the sexy twin assistants whose favored uniforms are scale mail miniskirts with mobiles covering their breasts, a nude model who goes into a spontaneous interpretative dance, and a suddenly sci-fi ending that might remind you of Phantasm (1979). You'll sympathize with the minor character who, near the end of the movie, asks the rhetorical question 'do you understand any of this?'"

CAULDRON OF BLOOD (1970): "...an out-of-synch diversion comes in the way of a surreal nightmare vignette with Lindfors haunted by psychedelic images of her hubby transformed into a shrunken head (replete with equally psychedelic scoring)."-AE

[Rev. Powell]

Finishing up a short month:

PINA (2011): "Pina Bausch invented weird dances, but filming them (even in 3D) doesn't make a weird movie, just a movie about people performing weird dances."

SCHIZOPOLIS (1996): "...the story of Fletcher Munson, a chronic office masturbator suffering from writer's block as he attempts to pen a speech for 'Eventualism' founder T. Azimuth Switters. A third of the way through the movie he meets (and sort of becomes) his exact double, an amorous dentist named Korchek who happens to be having an affair with Munson's wife, but Korchek (or is it Munson inhabiting Korchek's body?) falls in love with Munson's wife's doppelgänger, Attractive Woman #2. Then, in the movies final act we see the same scenes replayed from the perspective of Mrs. Munson.... What's there to possibly be confused about?"

THE IRON ROSE (1973): "...while it's correct to say Rose is pure Rollin, the very integrity of vision shown here exposes the director's flaws even more than his virtues: his seeming indifference to character and story, his stilted faux-Symbolist dialogue, and, especially, his tortoise-influenced method of pacing."

GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE (2012): "...the future of superhero movies may well just degenerate into the guttural hodgepodge found in this un-stylish, witless follow up to 2007′s Ghost Rider."-AE