A while back I wrote an article about a series of movies I call WTF Cinema– films that are so whacked-out and weird they defy quick characterization. But since then, I realized there were plenty of titles I forgot. Movies that melted my mind when I first saw them and had difficulty describing to friends. I have to admit admiration for directors who go for broke in such a way. They very often saw off the branch they’re sitting on, but it’s these films I revisit from time to time because they’re so cracked. Here are more entries in this category- not all of them are great, but they’ll definitely fry your brain.
Lost Highway. A thick cloud of menace hangs over David Lynch’s brilliant, nightmarish creep-fest. What begins as a story of a jazz musician (Bill Pullman) and his wife (Patricia Arquette) who receive mysterious videotapes showing static shots of the outside of their house suddenly escalates into violence, murder, and madness. Lost Highway has the crazed logic of a bad dream, though unlike any you’ve ever had: characters re-appear in different bodies; a man in a prison cell becomes someone else; a grinning, chalk-faced Robert Blake keeps popping up like a demented gnome. The Lynchian universe, with its muted walls, pale girls with black fingernails and extraordinary sound design, is unique and unnerving. Watching the film is like pressing a seashell to one ear while someone sticks a gun in the other. Just the simple act of Bill Pullman receding into the shadows of his bedroom can fill you with inexplicable dread. Of all of David Lynch’s movies, this may be the most WTF of all.
The Last Circus. Alex de la Iglesia’s grotesque, excessively violent, tale of two psychotic clowns and their love for the same woman in Franco-era Spain. Javier (Carlos Areces) is the sad clown of a ramshackle circus., The drunken brute Sergio (Antonio de la Torre) is the “happy clown” headliner of the circus, who nightly abuses his beautiful trapeze artist girlfriend Natalie (Carolina Bang). Javier is so enraged by Sergio’s bullying sadism, and so besotted with Nathalie, that he commits a deadly retaliatory act of revenge and goes on the run. Eventually he disfigures his own face with lye and a hot iron, flamboyantly dresses himself as a berserk bishop and starts shooting up the town while riding around in a stolen ice cream truck. The tears of a fucked-up clown. It all ends with the doomed three hanging off a massive stone cross being fired at by authorities. Iglesias uses the same wonderful cast in many of his films and there’s manic energy to burn. The crushing brutality of the film (mirroring Francisco Franco) make this less fun than Witching And Bitching, that’s for sure. But, also, no less bizarre.
Survive Style 5+. First of all, the art direction for this indescribably batty Japanese film, directed by Gen Sekiguchi, is just off the charts. A riot of color, every interior looks like offshoots of Pee Wee’s Playhouse. There are several strange stories going on. A husband (Ichi The Killer’s Tadanobu Asano) keeps killing and burying his wife (Reika Hashimoto) and she keeps reappearing at home to chase him around the house, kicking the shit out of him. A father takes his family to see a popular hypnotist- Aoyama (Hiroshi Abe), and is unfortunately permanently hypnotized into behaving like a bird. Aoyama’s wife (Kyoko Koizumi) is an Ad Agency’s director of humorous TV commercials. There’s also an English hit man (Vinnie Jones) who confronts everyone with “What’s your function in life?” And a group of not-so-bright teen burglars driving around in a colorful VW van. Eventually all these stories blissfully stir together in this loony, psychedelic stew.
The Pillow Book. Exquisitely beautiful and characteristically cracked film by Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover) about a young Japanese woman’s (Vivian Wu) obsession with calligraphy and human flesh. As a young girl, her father would paint an annual birthday greeting on her face, then her aunt would read to her from Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book before bed, setting in motion a lifetime fetish for writing and being written on. She even artfully covers the flesh of her lover (the well-endowed Ewan McGregor) with the first chapter of an epic erotic poem, and “submits” him to the book publisher who had sexually blackmailed her father in the past. Less shrill then some of earlier Greenaway films, but sumptuous to look at- his image-within-an-image framing is gorgeous. When the plot turns toward suicide, skinning and sweet revenge, it feels mysterious, operatic and intoxicatingly mad.
Black Snake Moan. Perhaps Samuel L. Jackson should be wary of titles with “snakes” in them. This jaw-dropping howler is directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow). Samuel L. Jackson stars as Lazarus, a bible-thumping blues guitarist, living in a rural shack down South, still reeling from his wife leaving him, who finds a battered white trash gal on the road named Rae (Christina Ricci) one morning and chains her to his radiator to cure her of her wickedness. Rae’s got snakes in her pants ever since her soldier/boyfriend (Justin Timberlake) left town in this lurid, ludicrous, and overheated tale. I had a blast watching this mess but fear people might smack me upside the head with a Bible for recommending it with a straight face.
Shakes The Clown. A demented, sick, and frequently hilarious movie about alcoholic clowns, written, directed and starring Bobcat Goldthwait. This bizarre saga with broken-down clowns who hang out all day at “The Twisted Balloon,” a seedy bar where they bitch about their career and hurl liquor. Shakes (Goldthwait), the hero of this twisted tale, finds that drinking is screwing up his career, his girlfriend (the hilarious Julie Brown), and runs him afoul of the law when he is framed for a murder by a jealous clown. Unlike anything you’ve ever seen and refreshingly anarchistic, with Robin Williams as a fascist mime teacher, and Florence Henderson as a boozy clown groupie. You can’t help love a movie that has clowns driving around looking to beat up mimes.
Enter The Void. A major psychedelic mind-fuck from Gaspar Noe (Irreversible) is set among the lurid neon lights of Tokyo, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a drug dealer, lives with his stripper sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta). When Oscar is shot to death after a drug deal goes bad, his spirit leaves his body and restlessly hovers over the city, waiting to be reborn. With gravity-defying cinematography that dollies over buildings, in manholes, even into a vagina as a penis ejaculates, death becomes a real trip. It’s extreme, insane, and kind of amazing.
Satan’s Brew. Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder channels Antonin Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” in this frantic, absurdist 1976 black comedy starring Kurt Raab as a man who suddenly decides he is the reincarnation of a 19th century homosexual poet named Stefan George. The film offers sick slapstick performed by Fassbinder’s stock troupe of actors- Margit Carstensen with coke-bottle glasses as a masochistic fan; Helen Vita as his bitter, shrewish wife; Volker Spengler as his mentally ill brother who captures flies. They all operate at hysterical pitch throughout. Even for Fassbinder this one is pretty out-there.
Singapore Sling. Notorious 1990 Greek cult film directed by Nikos Nikolaidis, gorgeously lensed in black and white and shot like a modern film noir. A detective (Panos Thanassoulis) is searching for his lost love- Laura, and shows up with a gunshot wound on the doorstep of remote chateau and taken in by a weird mother (Meredyth Herold) and daughter (Michele Valley), who may be responsible for Laura’s death. The women have just buried their chauffeur (alive) and delight in playing all sorts of S & M sex games with each other. They tie the detective to a bed, torture him with a portable ECT machine; have sex with him; even pee and vomit on him. A disgusting scene has the woman sloppily eating prawns and meat in front of the bound, starving detective, spitting up all over each other. The women recreate scenes from the 1944 movie Laura and repeatedly play the Glenn Miller or Julie London record of the main theme song. The acting by the women is all heightened- they always twitch or grimace, or jerk their bodies violently while they talk. It’s either an avant-garde masterpiece or pretentious nonsense.
Blind Beast. Made in 1969 by the father of Japanese new wave- Yasuzo Masumura– and based on a tale by legendary mystery writer Edogawa Rampo (say his name real fast to get the gag), it’s about a blind sculptor (Eiji Funakoshi), who with the help of his elderly mother, kidnaps a model (Mako Midori) and brings her to a warehouse way out in the country where his studio walls are lined with sculpted eyes, noses, lips, breasts and arms and two giant, nude 60-foot women lay across the floor. The sculptor and model scramble across this Mount Rushmore of sculpted flesh and their relationship deteriorates further from artist and model to captor and prisoner to willing sexual slave and master. Eventually madness and mutilation swallow them up whole. Echoing later films like In The Realm Of The Senses and foreshadowing Boxing Helana, this is a creepy, deliriously mad film- there is an elegance and simplicity of style that offsets the unsettling psychological violence of the subject. The sculptor is played by Eiji Funakoshi, who you might recognize from the sweet Japanese Gamera monster movies.
Holy Motors. In the fabulously strange film by provocative French director Leos Carax (Pola X) Denis Levant stars as Oscar, a man who changes into different characters (using elaborate makeup) in the back of a white limousine, as his driver Celine, the beautiful Edith Scob (Eyes Without A Face), makes stops around Paris. In surreal segments, Oscar emerges from the limo as an old beggar woman; a troll-like man who kidnaps a model (Eva Mendes), and an elderly man who has a touching deathbed scene with his niece. The movie bristles with perverse dark humor and a fiery anarchic spirit.
The Neon Demon. In Nicolas Winding Refn’s visually stunning, weirdly dreamlike, fabulously insane movie, Elle Fanning stars as sweet, pretty, seemingly naïve, Jesse who shows up in L.A. with aspirations of being a model. She instantly finds herself a top agent (Christina Hendricks); is shot by a trendy photographer (Desmond Harrington) and chosen by a major designer (Alessandro Nivola) to close his runway show. She even meets an aspiring photographer boyfriend (excellent Karl Glusman) and makes a new friend with the makeup girl- Ruby (Jena Malone). But there is always the threat of menace behind the glittering façade. It’s like Valley Of The Dolls if it had been directed by Dario Argento. The film oozes the vampiric, sleek, glamorous, decadent, fashion scene, and, quite literally, the short shelf life of being the next “it girl.” Elle Fanning really creates a sympathetic, poignant, lead character and Jena Malone is just scarily sensational. Keanu Reeves is seedily terrific in a small role as a malignant motel manager. And then the movie just goes bonkers.
Sitcom. A wonderfully perverse 1998 black comedy by Francois Ozon about a French family irrevocably altered when their father brings home a white lab rat for a pet. The son announces at the dinner table that he’s a homosexual. The daughter jumps out the window and becomes a wheelchair-bound dominatrix. The mother- well, you can discover the kinky twists for yourself. Reminiscent of later Bunuel in the matter-of-fact way Ozon presents the outlandish, often surreal turns of the plot.
Possession. Bizarre apocalyptic sci-fi film by Andrzej Zulawski. Living next to the Berlin Wall, distraught husband (Sam Neill) spends his time hysterically screaming or cutting at himself with an electric carving knife. His wife (Isabelle Adjani) pukes blood in the subway and keeps a secret apartment where she fucks a squid-like monster (created by FX master Carlo Rambaldi: E.T., Alien). Their small son eventually dives fully clothed into a filled bathtub to get away from both of them. This had them scratching their heads on 42nd St. when it premiered in 1981 in a truncated version as a straight horror movie, which it, most assuredly, was not. The full European version now out on DVD and Blu-ray is an extra 45 minutes.
Gozu. Spectacularly surreal black comedy from Takashi Miike (Audition/Ichi The Killer) about a gangster who loses his boss- a paranoid nut who imagines Chihuahuas are Yakuza killing machines- in the parking lot of a weird restaurant in an even weirder town and then hunts desperately for him. The film’s stranger elements include transvestite waiters, a creepy hotel with ceilings that drip milk, a man with a half black/half white face, and a creature with a cow’s head and human body which appears in the night to lick faces. This is Miike’s David Lynch film. Wild and outrageously funny.
Synecdoche, New York. Writer Charlie Kaufman’s (Being John Malkovich) deliriously deranged directorial debut is an ambitious tale of an unhappy, unhealthy, theater director- Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant that he uses to rent out a huge hanger in which he builds an entire city, peopled with actors representing different aspects of his own life. In this fake city he recreates his illnesses, misery, and loves- such as his artist wife (Catherine Keener); a ticket taker he becomes enamored with (Samantha Morton– who literally lives in a burning building); and a self-absorbed actress (Michelle Williams). It’s like Fellini’s 8 1/2 on hallucinogens, or a whacked-out Wild Strawberries. There will be many who will not have patience for this weirdness, but there’s a thematic brilliance to Charlie Kaufman’s premise about molding art out of your life, and a sense of rueful tenderness at the end.