Most UNIQUE Movie You've Seen?

Cafe Society
81

I take up the challenge with Moebius by Kim Ki Duk.

Woman finds out husband has been cheating. She retaliates by cutting off her son’s penis and swallows it! Then runs away. Father helps son learn about sexual gratification by stabbing himself. Son is left alone to sexually assault a shop owner, after his friends have already gang raped her. Oh…the shop owner happens to be the woman who his father was having an affair with and is played by the same actress as his mother. When she stabs the son in the back with a knife, he’s sexually stimulated, so she continues.

THEN…things get really weird! Oh…and not single word is spoken during the entire movie!

Winner?

82

Of his movies, I would say that:

Aguirre
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

are the most unique.

83

Interesting film. I have it on DVD. I’d heard about it for years (Forrest J. Ackerman frequently ran stills from it in his magazine Famous Monsters), but never had a chance to see it until I got the DVD.

If you go to the internet movie database and click on the names of the performers, you can see that they did, indeed, appear in other films.

Schlitzy “The Pinhead” appeared in four other films, including Island of Lost Souls. That film’s denoument reminds me of that of Freaks, perhaps because Moreau’s creatures really do look disturbingly real.

Johnny Eck, the “Half Man” appeared in three other films, too – all of them Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films

Daisy and Violet Hilton, the Siamese Twins, actually starred in the film Chained for Life

Most of the others did not appear elsewhere, except in documentaries.

Incidentally, Bill Griffith, who based his Zippy the Pinhead on SChglitzy, recently released a biography of Schlitzy in graphic novel form, Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of SChlitzy the Pinhead. He interviewed some of the people who worked with Schlitzy and dug into his genealogy. Well worth the read.

Rather tragically, Rondo Hatton made use of his case of acromegaly to his advantage to appear in 25 films, invariably as the heavy. His condition eventually killed him. He inspired the character of Lothar in Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer comics, and the character (recreated with heavy makeup) appeared in the movie The Rocketeer

Frank Henenlotter’s film Basket Case involves a pair of conjoined twins, represented in the film by models and special effects. This low-budget film had a higher-budget sequel, Basket Case II that featured an entire house of freaks. In order to avoif offense, I suspect, Henenlotter’s freaks are outrageously distorted, and they’re definitely positive characters. There was a second sequel that I haven’t seen.

84

Eraserhead and Freaks were very odd, but they had recognizable plot structures.

I’ll go with Pink Floyd: The Wall. Never figured that one out.

85

Another unique Korean movie in storyline and real life circumstances.

Right Now,Wrong Then by Hong Sang Soo

A single movie in two parts.

An older married director arrives in a town to speak at a showing of his latest film. He meets a young woman writer who’s a fan of his at a local shrine. She doesn’t know he’s married and they have dinner with her friends. Both of them are obviously interested in an affair, but it ends when her friend tells her he’s married and a womanizer. She gets drunk and sleeps at her friend’s house and refuses to talk to him again. He’s surly at the event the next and a friend of hers gives him a book of her writing.

Part 2 starts exactly the same and they’re more open with their attraction to each other. Most of the events follow the same timeline, but this time she allows him to walk her home, promising to come back out when her mother falls asleep. He waits, but she never comes out. They meet after the film and speech, and she gives him a book of her writings then leaves.

The storyline and two parts of the film are unique enough on their own, but combined with what happened next in real life is particularly unique. In 2016, Hong’s wife accused him of having an affair with the lead actress Kim Min Hee. Right Now, Wrong Then was the first time the two worked together. Hong filed for divorce

Both denied the allegations, but Kim lost millions of dollars in ad endorsements. Hong stopped supporting his wife and daughter financially, saying he had to support Kim because of the loss caused by the allegation. In 2016 during a press conference for their next film together, On the Beach Alone Kim acknowledged she was in love with Hong and the both confirmed the affair.

In 2017 Kim was the darling of Korean cinema for The Handmaiden, but after he confession, she’s been banned from mainstream cinema and has only made highly acclaimed arthouse films with Hong since then.

Hong applied for a divorce, but his wife has refused and the court sided with her stating that she would have to call for the divorce.

86

Five: Dedicated to Ozu
Abbas Kiarastomi

Begotten
Elias Merits

Sans Soleil
Chris Marker

Playtime
Jaques Tatie

Un chien Andalou
Louis Buñuel and Salvador Dali

87

Interesting stuff; thanks.

88

La Jetée (1962, France, dir. Chris Marker)

89

Autocorrect rendered Merhige as Merits above.

Apparently I can’t get anything right.

Sans Soleil
Chris Marker

90

Baby Snakes might be worse, although there is some OK concert footage in the second half.

91

The most unique one I can think of is the 2012 film “Cloud Atlas”. Six more or less interconnected stories taking place at different times (respectively in the years 1849, 1936, 1973, 2012, 2144, and 2321). The same actor may play more than one role, including a race/gender-flipped one between time periods.

92

This worked really well as a book, but I often wondered if the movie were any good, especially if someone had not read that book.

93

Now that I’ve mentioned David Lynch, come to think of it, “What Did Jack Do?”, a noir in which Lynch interrogates a talking monkey for 17 minutes, is not like any other movie I can think of.

94

I think it’s worth repeating something I said earlier in this thread:

Literally dozens of surreal and offbeat movies have been posted. How exactly does that make them unique?

Sure, each one will be weird and surreal in a slightly different way, but so are innumerable detective movies all different in individual ways. That doesn’t make those detective movies unique, any more than the whole large category of surreal movies.

95

I could write a longer synopsis but I think brevity will suffice:

A murderous psychokinetic automobile tire goes on a rampage in a small desert town.

Think Scanners, only it’s a tire. :smiley:

Two-clicking because there is a bit of gore in this trailer:
Rubber Trailer 2 - YouTube

96

I saw it without reading the book, and I liked it a lot. I mean, it was pretty self-indulgent, and it once again made clear that the The Wachowskis are incapable of understanding the Law of Conservation of Energy, but as a cerebral sci-fi film with some decent emotional beats, it works pretty well.

97

Several of the movies mentioned here are among my favorites, but I didn’t consider them unique enough to mention. La Jetée is one of my favorites and somewhat unique, so I decided to mention it. I just looked through my list of favorite films to see if there’s any others that might count as unique. There’s the following two movies among my favorites, but they might not count as being unique enough:

Slacker (1991, U.S., dir. Richard Linklater)
They Live (1988, U.S., dir. John Carpenter)

98

You may say these movies are just surreal or weird. I say they’re unique because the storylines have likely never been done before or will be done or remade as a new movie.

Little Miss Period / Seiri-chan by Shinsuke Shimada

Women’s periods appear as an anthropomorphic character representing the pain and trials the women go through. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VSsywmZZbA

Child by Children by Nobuhiro Yamashita

Despite the title, this movie is a charming story of a ten year old girl becoming pregnant after she and her schoolmate put their parts together. Being winter, the clueless adults around them chalk up her weight gain to the season. Even when she goes into labor, it’s her classmates who gather around to help her deliver the baby. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMc5pSzY278

Edit: BTW, all the movies I think all the movies I posted about are brilliant!

99

Damn, that hurts just reading it. I can’t imagine it being a long movie.

“The Savage Is Loose” is not exactly like that, but still kinda interesting (but not great)… Directed and starring George C. Scott with his wife, Trisha Van Dere (One Is a Lonely Number)

100

Since you put it that way, I’m suddenly reminded of THE CALLER, where Malcolm McDowell shows up at a woman’s house and — okay, sure, there’s an odd undertone to the mannered conversation that follows, but the story is still approachable, y’know? It’s no more weird or surreal than a chat in a typical episode of COLUMBO: not, I grant you, an early chat, where the killer is putting on an ‘innocent’ act while the detective is putting on an ‘unsuspecting’ act; a later chat, where each character (a) has realized what the other is up to, but (b) keeps going through the motions like before.

And, yeah, seeing that without buildup or context or whatever is a little strange; but it’s not a lot strange. But the longer it goes on…