“The bad karma in this place is so thick you could cut it with a knife!”
Berserker
If you can’t imagine a film stranger than City Of Lost Children, you have a sad excuse for an imagination. Indescribable? Hardly. One is a circus strongman (played by Ron Pearlman). His adopted little brother is kidnapped by cultists with electric eyes. They give him and other children to Kronk, a mad scientist unable to dream. One’s search for his brother leads him to a group of orphan thieves controlled by conjoined sisters, finding a girl and adopting her as his sister, and uncovering the secrets of Kronk, his dwarf assistant, six narcoleptic clones, and the talking brain in an aquarium.
Re Fantastic Planet
A surprisingly large number of Dopers (myself included) saw this film on Night Flight. On the SDMB, Fantastic Planet is an old favorite. For those who haven’t seen it. It’s an odd, touching animated film. A race of tiny humans (called Ohms) shares their planet with huge green, reptillian people (can’t remember their names. When a tribe of wild Ohms kills one of the big green folks, his pet Ohm is taken into the tribe and learns about the world.
A Man Called… Rainbo.
Dubbed early Sylvester Stalone made really really weird…
I’ve only seen this one once, on the big-screen at a revival house in the early-'80s. I’ve always wanted to see it again, but haven’t gotten round to it.
WR: mysteries of the organism (1971) Was pretty odd. I particularly enjoyed the segment about a young lady who created plaster casts of rock-star penises. W.R. in the title refers to Wilhelm Reich.
On a lighter note, Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (1989) was just plain old, wierd FUN.
I have some problems with this thread…
#1. I own at least half, maybe more like 75% of the films mentioned in this thread.
#2. Some of them are such favorites, and so familiar to me, that I don’t think of them as strange (Fantastic Planet, Repo Man, Meet the Feebles, etc., etc.).
#3. I’m not at all sure what that says about me and my taste in films. :dubious:
Other movies I love but that many think are strange:
Woo hoo, Psychedelic Monkees! Didn’t Zappa show up in that with a Brahmin bull? He’s not listed in the credits.
200 Motels was pretty wild too.
Yep, that was FZ… and Bob Rafaelson and Jack Nicholson and Teri Garr…
One of the funniest posts on the SDMB was somebody who I can’t remember ranting about how much he/she hates Santa Sangre. I’m going to have to look it up.
time passes
Okay, I found it. Hamlet was the poster in question. I was wrong, it’s not one post, but a series of posts. Still, very funny stuff.
Start with this post and read till the end of the thread, his comments go until just about the end:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=3063585&postcount=95
Lots of great picks so far. Two I haven’t seen mentioned are Schizopolis, directed by (and starring) Steven Soderberg, which pretty much defies description (I loved it, pretty much everybody else I know couldn’t make it through it) and the Monkees movie Head.
The short subject Help! My Snowman’s Burning Down is right up there in overall strangeness. It’s an almost plotless movie about a guy living on a raft. It’s been years since I saw it, so I don’t remember all the details, but at one point the guy baits a fishing hook with a diamond ring and goes fishing in a bathtub drain. He gets a “bite” and reels in a female hand wearing the ring. I also remember the guy opening a door on the edge of the raft, walking through it and falling face-first into the water.
The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human… basically a rom-com with the premise of being a documentary for aliens on Human behaviour. Starring Carmen Elecra, voice-over David Hyde Pierce. I liked it…but it was odd.
Tokyo Eyes- a Japanese film about a guy who wears big fish-eye glasses and tries to shoot people (or does he?). Guest stars Takeshi Kitano as a Yakuza…again odd, but likeable.
The Peanut Butter Solution. It’s funny reading the reviews for this movie on IMDB and amazon, because they consist primarily of people either saying that they had seen the movie as a kid and wondered years later if they had just imagined it, or that they mentioned it to other people and the people looked at them as if they were crazy.
I just got done reading the whole thread of Hamlet’s rants about SS, and I gotta say: Jodorowsky’s movies do that to people. There was rioting after the premiere of Fando & Lis in more than country… and I own and like that movie too. Now if only we could get them to release El Topo on DVD! 
Quiet Earth It was a payback movie that my cousin tortured me with by forcing him to watch White Nights.
We sat there in the theater going WTF.
Premise is a handful of people ( 3, I think) are on the edge of death at the moment of nuclear warfare. For whatever reasons, besause they are on the Edge of death, survive and are the only survivors of Nuclear war and the wasteland aftermath. Depressing and bleak as only holocaust situations like that can be.
The fact that the Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith (the coke-bottle thick glasses voracious reader guy survives nuclear war because he was in a bank vault at the time it happened…and has all he needs to live… but he breaks his glasses……traumatized me for the rest of my life. Quiet Earth was alot like that.
I remember saying I liked the movie to piss off my cousin. But it was the first movie I thought of.
I love The Quiet Earth. Still have my VHS copy, in fact.
Me too. I saw this in the cinema, and I have a VHS copy. I wish I could find the book.
Not quite… Scientists discovered that they can solve theo world’s energy problems by creating a global grid. I don’t remember what powered the grid, but the idea was that it would solve the world’s energy problems. The day after the grid was powered up, one of the scientists who worked on the project woke up to find himself alone on the Earth. Except for the expected damage from speeding vehicles suddenly unattended, a few fires, and such, everything was intact.
I didn’t find it ‘depressing and bleak’. (If you want depressing and bleak, watch Butterfly Kiss.) I did find the relationship between the three characters to be rather predictable, though.
I was just reading about more library patrons when I remebered a very weird movie that I had checked out of a library.
Un Señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (English title: A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings)
In summary, the title character falls to Earth during a big storm. He’s sick so the owners of the property where he crashed decide to nurse him back to health. He soon becomes a tourist attraction, and a travelling carnival shows up, presumably to take advantage of the situation. Then the carnival’s main attraction is dubbed “Spider Woman”, a being with a woman’s head and a spider’s body. Naturally, the spider body is a fake and her real body is out of sight, which allows the carnival’s owner (IIRC) to have sex with her without anyone seeing. Except those of us who are watching the movie.
Naked Lunch
Fahrenheit 451
The Ninth Configuration(Twinkel, Twinkle, Killer Kane)
On the Beach