Ruthless People
After Hours
In Bruges
Maid in Manhattan
Elizabethtown
You’ve Got Mail
Grease 2
My Greek Fat Wedding
On Golden Pond
Approach with a very long stick:
Man Bites Dog
.
I can see it!
A lot of mine are mentioned here. I’ll add Grosse Pointe Blank.
Yep, yep, yep.
I second that and add Hunderby to the list.
One of my absolute favorites. Actually got to see it on the big screen about 25 years ago at a local theater.
Wow, you guys really came through! There are so many of these I haven’t seen much less even heard of. Thanks.
“Parents” - Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt as 1950s squeaky-clean cannibalistic parents.
“Arsenic and Old Lace” - old classic, with Raymond Massey as Jonathan, who is, without question, the finest character in cinema history.
Almost, but not quite, everything by Lynch and Waters has a strong black/quirky thing going.
There’s two awesome-as-all-get-out things in Hitchcock’s “Frenzy”: the dead foot repeatedly kicking the bad guy’s face in the back of the produce truck, and dinners with the detective and his wife, who’s an erstwhile experimenter of a cook.
My favourite Bruce Campbell flicks are “Man With the Screaming Brain” and “Bubba HoTep”, the latter having elements of…whimsy? that somewhat dilute the general blackness of it.
Dr. Strangelove is probably the best dark comedy I’ve ever seen. It’s brilliant.
I’m also a big fan of City of Lost Children, a twisted French fairy tale, beautiful and bizarre and hilarious.
“Serial Mom” with Kathleen Turner.
Dark TV:
Getting on
Marion and Jeff
Also surprisingly many bits of dark brilliance in the Alan Partridge oeuvre.
Also another vote FOR Blood Simple. I saw it in the cinema on first release and thought it incredibly dry, with some amazingly funny bits, so a darkly comic thriller perhaps.
This was just on TCM a few weeks ago. Recorded and semi-watched it (lots of FFing). Mainly for the Jonathan Winters bits. An incredible cast for such an obscure film.
This movie is absolute genius.
The TV series Delocated has some brilliantly dark moments, especially in season 2.
As does Adult Swim stablemate “Children’s Hospital”.
Hyperviolent yet darkly funny films: Deadpool and Hardcore Henry.
I seem to be watching a lot of darkly comic stuff on Amazon Prime: Comrade Detective, Preacher, The Tick (which is much, much darker than its predecessor versions).
A Shock To The System with Michael Caine as a man gleefully murdering his wife.
Though it is mostly a romantic comedy, the recent The Big Sick had one of the darkest lines I’ve ever seen.
Kumail is an American of Pakistani decent who fell in love with a girl, but never met her parents Terry and Beth before she fell into a coma:
Terry: So, uh, 9/11.
[everyone looks at Terry expectantly]
Terry: No I mean, I’ve always wanted to have a conversation with…
[gestures at Kumail]
Terry:…about it. With…
[gestures again at Kumail]
Terry:…people.
Kumail: You’ve never talked to people about 9/11?
Terry: No what’s your, what’s your stance?
Kumail: What’s my stance on 9/11? Oh um, anti. It was a tragedy, I mean we lost 19 of our best guys.
Beth: Huh?
Kumail: That was a joke, obviously. 9/11 was a terrible tragedy. And it’s not funny to joke about it.
I just about fell on the floor laughing.
In a different venue, the web comic Schlock Mercenary is constructed almost entirely of dark comedy.
It’s run continuously, a daily 3-4 panel strip, with a Sunday Special, since June 12, 2000.
Physicists should stop looking out into deep space for Dark Matter; Howard Tayler has it neatly categorized, indexed, and archived on his own personal server.