WTF Film Festival

My favorite movies are the kind that leave you shaking in disbelief afterwards saying: “What the fuck was that?” I think they’re worthy of their own film festival. If you looked up “deranged” in the dictionary you might find any one of these 15 demented films listed:

The Baby (1973) A twisted gem about a man-hating mama (Ruth Roman) who keeps her mentally-challenged teenage son in diapers and in a playpen. A social worker (Anjanette Comer) is determined to free Baby from Mom and her two psycho daughters (Marianna Hill & Susanne Zenor), even resorting to murder to do so. This film, directed by Ted Post, straddles the bad-taste fence and then joyously leaps off. It also has one of the best, surprisingly warped ending of any movie I’ve ever seen.

The Passion Of Darkly Noon (1995). Before he was George Of The Jungle, Brendan Fraser starred as a loony religious fanatic named Darkly Noon who’s found practically unconscious in the middle of the road and nursed back to health by Callie (Ashley Judd). She lives deep in the forest with her mute boyfriend Clay (Viggo Mortensen), a coffin-building carpenter. Callie dresses in skimpy sun dresses while Darkly masturbates spying on her from his new home up in the barn. He fantasizes that his dead parents still talk to him, and he binds his body with barbed wire, paints himself red and, with a sword to “purify the forest,” heads toward the house. Weird circus folk and an elephant show up the next morning in this crackpot tale by Philip Ridley (The Reflecting Skin– another WTF classic).

Little Boy Blue (1997) Young Jimmy (played by a frequently bare-assed Ryan Phillippe) lives in a shithole Texas town with two young “brothers” who are forever fishing for an imaginary catfish. His crazy ex-vet father (a method-y, twitchy, John Savage) gets liquored up and forces Jimmy and his mom (Natassja Kinski) to get naked and make it in the back of the station wagon so he can watch. The “brothers” turn out to Jimmy’s sons; someone gets buried alive; and a mysterious woman shows up (Shirley Knight– wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a rifle). A strikingly weird film.

Being John Malkovich. (1999). In Spike Jonze’s blazingly bizarre feature debut, a failed puppeteer (John Cusack) takes a job on the seventh-and-a-half floor of an office building (the workers have to stoop to walk the halls) and discovers a small door behind a filing cabinet that is actually a portal into actor John Malkovich’s head. So, he and a co-worker (the hilariously nasty Catherine Keener) decide to make money by charging strangers $200 a pop for the experience. An almost unrecognizable Cameron Diaz plays Cusack’s sexually confused, animal-loving wife. It’s wildly original, furiously funny and scarily on target about the desperate need to inhabit some other personality in order to be fulfilled. The cast is sublime, including Orson Bean as a horny hundred-year-old carrot juice-drinking executive, Mary Kay Place as a Mrs. Malaprop-like receptionist and other surprise cameos.

Santa Sangre (1989). Visionary El Topo director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s deranged masterwork is set in a circus in Mexico. When a female aerialist catches her knife-thrower husband cheating on her with the tattooed lady she throws acid in his crotch. He slices off her arms in retaliation. Their son (played by Jodorowsky’s own son Axel) grows up in a mental institution, escapes to live with his crazy amputee mom whom he helps by acting as her arms- standing behind her to play piano, eat breakfast, and kill women- but whom he eventually buries in the backyard. Life Fellini on bad acid.

The Velocity Of Gary (1998). What can I say about this fabulous lulu? It’s a menage-a-trois between a dying bisexual ex-porn star named Valentino (Vincent D’Onofrio), a belligerent waitress named Mary Carmen (Salma Hayek) and a gorgeous male hustler named Gary (Thomas Jane). They hang around a donut shop where a deaf-mute drag queen (with the floor plan of the Grand Ole Opry tattooed on her ass) lip-synchs to Patsy Cline. In one scene, a shirtless, cowboy-hat wearing, Gary carries a victim of a fag-bashing down the street in his arms. It will not make you recall John Wayne carrying Natalie Wood in The Searchers.

The Paperboy (2012). Director Lee Daniels returns to his flamboyant Shadowboxer roots for the follow-up to his Oscar-nominated Precious, filming novelist Pete Dexter’s Southern-fried gothic thriller as if it was Hurry Sundown on ‘shrooms. Set in the late ‘60s, Matthew McConaughey plays Ward Jansen, a reporter who returns to his hometown with his younger brother Jack (Zac Efron, mostly seen in his underwear) and a fellow journalist Yardley (David Oyelowo), to investigate the case of a death row prisoner (John Cusack). Nicole Kidman bravely plays Charlotte Bless, the trashy sexpot who writes letters to the creepy jailbird and, yes, she pees on Efron when he gets stung by jellyfish. It’s such an oddball confection, and told in such an unusual way you start to doubt your sanity after a while.

The Saddest Music In The World. (2003) Isabella Rossellini plays legless Winnipeg beer baroness Lady Port-Huntley, who decides to hold a world-wide competition in 1933 to find the saddest music in the world. The winners vie for the $25,000 prize and get to slide into a giant vat of suds. That’s the premise for this cheerfully bonkers gem from Candian oddball Guy Maddin (Tales From the Gimli Hospital, Careful). The “cavalcade of misery” includes sobbing Mexicans, woeful Scottish bagpipers and two brothers who have pitted themselves against each other. Roderick (Ross McMillan) represents Serbia by carrying his son’s heart in a small jar filled with tears, and Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) is a slimy Broadway producer who represents the U.S. Maddin’s films look and sound like no other- they’re like the hallucinations LSD might produce if you’ve watched too many silent German films. And any movie that features Isabella Rossellini dancing on glass legs filled with beer is my kind of show.

Dance With The Devil (1997) One of the most ferocious, outrageous films I’ve ever seen. Directed by Alex de la Iglesia (Witching & Bitching) and loosely based on the Matamoros killings, Devil stars Javier Bardem (No Country For Old Men) as the long-haired Romeo Delorosa, “drug dealer, bank robber, scumbag!” Trafficking in drugs and dead bodies with his sidekick (the late Screamin’ Jay Hawkins), Romeo lives by the motto “the two greatest pleasures in life are fucking and killing.” He invokes Satan by hacking up corpses at his Mexican hideout during voodoo rituals, but he meets his match when he runs into Perdita Durango (Rosie Perez), a sexy drifter who dreams of jaguars licking her naked body. She encourages the sadists to kidnap a young gringo couple, plan to sacrifice one of them, and then transport stolen fetuses to a gangster (Don Stroud) in Las Vegas. This berserk shocker also features James Gandolfini (The Sopranos) as a special agent doggedly hunting them down. You can’t imagine how really insane this gets. Not since Tura Satana (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) has there been a screen villainess as sexy and savage as Perez’s Perdita.

Nowhere (1997). “I’m only 18-years-old and I’m totally doomed,” moans Dark (James Duval). And it’s true he is having a gnarly day in L.A. His girlfriend, Mel (Rachel True), is fucking around, his friends are committing suicide, he keeps spying a lizard-like alien abducting people and he just spent a lot of money on CDs. The last film in Gregg Araki’s apocalyptic teen trilogy (which includes Totally F***ed Up and The Doom Generation) is his best- a dark, pop-psychedelic cartoon brimming with dazed, cute, stoned-out nihilistic kids whose obsessions with sex and death are expressed in Valley Girl-speak. It’s like Clueless with nipple rings. Violent, sexy and often dementedly funny, it’s everything Less Than Zero should have been. Duval is perfect as the dreamy-eyed, hopelessly romantic “Everyteen,” and Araki’s visual style is as startling as it is phantasmagorical- art-directed to the hilt, saturated with color and overlaid with a loud, driving, sensational soundtrack.

Ichi The Killer (2001). The prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike has often gone off the deep end, blending genres and injecting his films with irreverent craziness. Check out The Happiness Of The Katakuris (2001), about a sweet family trying to make their remote hotel succeed only to have all the guests die on them. This was a musical, with added Claymation sequences. It was sublimely nuts, but also surprisingly tender-hearted. My favorite Takashi Miike film is Ichi The Killer, an outrageous gangster gore-apalooza about a cry-baby killer in a superhero costume whose specialty is slicing and dicing entire rooms of bad guys with a retractable blade in his shoe. Hot on his trail is a masochistic bleach-blonde yakuza who has slits on each cheek fastened by safety pins. This is Miike at his most gleefully shocking- faces slide down walls, tongues are severed in two, people slip and slide on floors of gore. Any movie in which the opening credits rise up from a pool of spilled semen clearly does not come from a sane planet and should not be missed at any cost.

Jack Be Nimble (1993). Alexis Arquette is Jack, Sarah Smutts-Kennedy is his sister Dora. They were abandoned by the mother and dumped in an orphanage only to be separated when they are adopted by two drastically different families. Jack ends up at a bleak rural farm with a father who whips him with barbed wire and four terrifying sisters with bushy black hair that delight in tormenting him. Jack creates a weird machine that hypnotizes his mother and father into committing suicide and he takes off in search of his sister. Dora has psychic abilities and can feel him coming. But those scary sisters are also headed their way in a beat-up truck, hell-bent on revenge. This strangely lyrical New Zealand film by Garth Maxwell is definitely weird as hell and deserves to be better known.

Cemetery Man (1994). Rupert Everett is laconically sexy as the love-starved watchman of the Buffalora Cemetery who, along with his mute, mentally-challenged sidekick Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro), spends evenings shooting bullets into the heads of “returners”- corpses who claw out of their graves after seven days of burial. Everett is Francesco Dellamorte, the “St. Francis of the dead,” in this macabre, visually stunning film by Michele Soavi. Soavi, once the assistant to horror master Dario Argento, has directed several exceptional shockers (Stage Fright, The Church and The Sect). This delirious, crackpot film has the rambling logic of a disturbed Romantic poet’s fever dream. “At a certain point in life, you realize you know more dead people than living,” bemoans Dellamorte after he blows a hole through the skull of a reanimated Boy Scout in this unique cinematic marriage of Samuel Beckett and George Romero.

O Fantasma (2000) Barking dogs and ambient traffic noise reverberate in the back of the wild, practically dialogue-free, film by Joao Pedro Rodrigues about a hunky young North Lisbon garbage man named Sergio (Ricardo Meneses) whose life spins dangerously out of control after he begins obsessively stalking a handsome swimmer. Erotic skirmishes with a female co-worker, prowling the night engaging in risky sexual encounters with other men in bathrooms and alleys, the movie gets sexually explicit and pretty outrageous when Sergio starts skulking the night in a head-to-toe black latex fetish outfit scaling fences and foraging though garbage dumps like a wild animal. I just loved the feverish, loony feel of the film, and thought it insanely erotic.

But this one deserves mention because it’s probably my favorite movie of all time:

Sonny Boy (1989). A 350-lb. criminal thug (Paul L. Smith) lives with his transvestite wife (David Carradine!) out in the desert with a bunch of stolen loot. When they steal a car, they discover a baby in the back seat and decide to raise it. Little “Sonny Boy” (Michael Boston) is fed live chickens, has his tongue cut out on his twelfth birthday, and is chained in a silo and then sent out to rob and kill by his loving parents. I hosted a screening of this film at the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington, NY with director (Robert Martin Carroll) and his lovely wife Darlene Young (who plays Doc Wallace in the film). Carroll admitted that the movie really hurt his career, and it was misunderstood and reviled at the time. That’s a criminal shame. For those of us who “get it”, and love these type of films, it’s movies like Sonny Boy (and the other films on this list) that make this stupid life worth living.