you said it!!
Funky Forest was slightly weird. Also Wax. And good old Eraserhead. I’m not worried about that stuff ever becoming mainstream.
Drowning by Numbers (1988)
Quoting Wikipedia:
“The film’s plot centres on three married women — a grandmother, her daughter, and her niece — each named Cissie Colpitts. As the story progresses, each woman successively drowns her husband.”
“In Drowning by Numbers, number-counting, the rules of games and the repetitions of the plot are all devices which emphasise structure and symmetry. Through the course of the film each of the numbers 1 to 100 appear, the large majority in sequence, often seen in the background, sometimes spoken by the characters.”
And that’s the easy part.
El topo by Jodorowski.
I see I’m not the only one. However, I didn’t find it disturbing, just bizarre (although maybe I have forgotten disturbing things).
I’ve seen it, or at least most of it. I remember it being stranger than I expected, and also less interesting than I expected. It didn’t leave me with any lasting impression. I vaguely remember the plot, and that’s about all.
I loved this movie (pretty much everything Kieslowski did, in fact. He’s, with Kubrick, the only director whose death I regretted). I wouldn’t have thought of it as “strange”, even though the story it tells is. It’s a beautiful movie, and with a haunting music.
Now, I’d like to see it again.
It’s easily the most outrageous movie I’ve ever seen, but I don’t think it really qualify as “strange”. It’s pretty straightforward, in fact.
Memento is quite difficult to follow, very dark in tone but it’s among my preferred movies. I’d definitely recommend it too.
I discovered it only last year. The art is strange, but contrarily to many movies listed in this thread, the story is pretty simple and easy to follow. I really liked it.
The weirdest movie I ever saw that was trying to be weird was The Holy Mountain, the whole thing is so unrelentingly bizarre that by the time you get to an old dude squirting milk from his own jaguar-head breasts, you don’t even blink.
The weirdest movie I ever really liked was Jisatsu Circle (Suicide Club). The same director (Sono Shion) also did Tag, which is another major head trip that works pretty well, IMO.
Sorry, didn’t see your post before I did mine.
(BTW: The good Casino Royale is hardly a “mess”. It’s the way movies should be made.)
I’d like to mention The Loved One. Rod Steiger and Liberace are both so over the top here. Recommended.
That was going to be my choice. A friend of ours with unusual taste in movies convinced us to go saying he seen it before and how great it was. I managed to force myself to fall asleep so fortunately missed the real disgusting parts but what I saw was definitely the weirdest movie.
My choices: Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, The Dark Backward, Fantastic Planet, and Eraserhead.
This. So, so much this.
I was in college when I saw it with a friend. After we were done we decided to get stoned and watch it again. Big mistake.
Such a bizarre, disturbing movie.
I think Magical Mystery Tour was just plain bad.
btw, I think Persona is a great movie.
Acción Mutante. Alex de la Iglesia is one of those people who simply don’t do normal.
Chilean, and also writer of some of Moebius most hallucinogenic comics (Moebius as in “Jean Giraud doing weird”, not as in the mathematician).
Come and See, a USSR movie about Belorussian partisans on the Eastern Front of World War II. It doesn’t put the Nazis in a flattering light.
It has some weird off-putting scenes as the main character tries to come to grips with Nazi cruelty. It’s almost like Spielberg saw this movie and said “I have an idea for Schindler’s List, but let’s tone it down”.