The Mad Butcher was pretty weird:
Ghost Story. Boy, I hope I can watch a woman eat a pie for ten straight minutes! Then I hope I can watch a guy in a sheet stand there. And there. And over there.
you know theres 3 or 4 sequels to that? syfy runs them in order occasionaly
weirdest m9vie ive ever seen is one where this youngish chick had psychologial problems and hurt someone as a little kid so her parents raised her as some sort of bdsm submissive (she lived in a cage that had shackles and a special swing whole th8ng filled filled the second floor of the house) … and at some point she became her older sisters playmate/sex toy (which of course they showed soft core style)
well the 'rents died and the older sister moved back to take care of the sister and the relationship resumed but after a while older sis found a guy she liked and was going to marry younger sis flips out and kills the guy …but to pun8sh the younger sis she ties her self up in the cage and slowly starves to death
odd thing about it is it had will geer who was known as grandpa walton when the movie originally released… i cant ever remeber the title but i was like 11 when i watched it the first time…
At least with Dr. Lao, you understood what they were doing. “Hey, Tony Randall is a B-level star who does a bunch of great foreign impressions. Let’s showcase that in a movie.” It’s not Peter Sellers in The Mouse That Roared, but I get it.
As for The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, I can’t believe I forgot about it. I actually have a pact with friends to alert each other when we see it pop up on the TCM schedule.
After reviewing Terry Gilliam’s entire body of work, I nominate him for a Lifetime Achievement Award.
I started to watch it a few weeks ago. I kept hoping it would get better. Nope. I ejected the DVD about 70% into the movie.
As for weird/strange films I’ve seen, here are a few that come to mind:
Gummo
Rubber
Alice in Wonderland (1988 film by Jan Švankmajer)
TCM has also shown “The Baby”, an early 1970s film about a single mother and her children, all of whom have different fathers and none are in the picture, and her only son is a teenager who is kept infantile, as in he sleeps in a crib, wears diapers, eats from a bottle, and apparently does not speak even though he does not appear to be mentally disabled in any way. There was a weird sexual undercurrent about the whole thing.
I’ve never seen “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover” nor have I seen it mentioned here until now. Has anyone here seen it, or will admit to it? When it came out, and for several years afterwards, THAT seemed to define “strange movie.”
There’s also the short film “Sunday’s Game.” Watch at your own risk.
I own most of the movies mentioned here already, so I’ll try and just add a few:
‘Possession’ is shown on Turner Classic movies once or twice a year in the middle of the night.
Last month, people, I turned on TCM in the middle of the night and happened to come across ‘Maitresse’ a stylish S&M movie featuring Gerard Depardieu, and observed an S&M dungeon in several shots, and a lovely lingering segment showing a gent actually getting his testicles nailed to a board. … OK, enough tv for tonight! I said to myself…
There are a lot of interesting films mentioned here, so I won’t repeat any of those.
For a film that really hit me as strange and unforgettable, even though the director may not have been aiming for that, I think that “The Double Life of Veronique” by Krzysztof Kieślowski, is in a class of its own. I am less affected by the strangeness when it is clear that it is the intent of the director, I just enjoy the ride (as in “Brazil”,for instance).
I’m torn between Rubber and Trail of the Screaming Forehead.
And Baraka. Same Cinematographer from Koyaanisqatsi went on to make this and Samsara.
I’ve seen a hell of a lot of movies, and to this day, I think the weirdest damn one is Clifford (1994) starring Martin Short and Charles Grodin. It’s also one of my favorite movies, believe it or not. It is so outlandishly bizarre in every way, I can’t help but love it.
Definitely Eraserhead.
I watched it three times to try to make some sense out of it. It finally dawned on me that the woman in the radiator was enticing him to commit suicide.
Bummer of an ending.
Strange in a good way.
Most of Kim Ki Duk’s films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ki-duk but especially Moebius. Don’t worry if you don’t understand Korean, there’s no dialogue! Warning…while I find all of Kim’s films brilliant, I highly suggest getting a few of this films under your belt before you tackle Moebius. Warning again…the plot centers around a mother doing a 'Bobbit" on her son because of her husband’s infidelity.
At the other end of the cerebral spectrum is anything by Noboru Iguchi:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noboru_Iguchi, especially The Machine Gir. A high school girl’s arm is cut off and replaced by a machine gun. The follow-up short The Hajirai (Shyness) Machine Girl. This time the machine gun is is her butt!
I’ve seen it. Quite bizarre, but I liked it.
Peter Greenaway, the director, was quite the rage in the late 1980s as I recall. I’ve seen a couple of his other movies.
A Zed & Two Noughtsis quite strange as well. I’ve also seen The Draughtsman’s Contract which is unconventional but not as bonkers as his others.
Mmm, for me it’s a tossup between Head (starring the Monkees!) or the all-star mess that is the 1967 Casino Royale.
My contribution is The voices with Ryan Reynolds.
Tossup between Montenegro and The Honorary Consul.
The former tells the story of a bored American housewife in Sweden, who alleviates the boredom by setting a fire, eating her family’s entire dinner, and trying to poison the dog. She ends up in some sort of nightclub with a bunch of really strange people, including a stripper who dances with a radio-controlled truck sporting a dildo. Critically-acclaimed, but it left a lot of us non-critics, saying “What the hell was that?”
The latter featured Richard Gere and Michael Caine, in some sort of Latin America political thriller. Or maybe it was a romantic drama. Or it could have been a romantic thriller, or perhaps a political drama. Who knows? It involved a lot of characters sitting or standing in shadow, supposedly saying something profound, while a ceiling fan totates lazily overhead.
That’s my immediate vote as well. Loved the movie, and it excelled beyond the book thanks to purging the repetitive shock value of necrophilia and scatology in favor of interweaving the story with a biography of William Burroughs.
Oops! That should be “rotates,” of course.