The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?
Saw this at a drive-in in the 60’s. Don’t remember much about it, I can’t say why…
Well, Guinea Pig is pretty much like you describe: guy kidnaps a woman, then spends the next hour dismembering and disembowling her piece by piece. After the first one raised such a furor, the later ones in the series are explicitly fake (e.g., people keep talking after their heads have been cut off, guys in a hospital dropping body parts as they try to one-up each others’ illness) and are basically SFX people making cheap comedies to amuse themselves. Kinda fun, but not too shocking.
As for Nekromantik, it’s basically like a Lucio Fulci film with a lot more sex. IIRC, the main characters are a paramedic and his girlfriend, who both get off on sex with corpses, the more decayed, the better. Not much plt beyond that.
As for the others, here are the imdb pages:
El Milagro de P Tinto: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151572/plotsummary
The Groove Tube: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071583/plotsummary
Daikaijû Tôkyô ni arawaru: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313950/plotsummary
Survive Style 5+: no imdb summary. Several intertwining plots including a man who’s girfriend keeps coming back no matter how often he kills her, an office worker left thinking he’s a bird following a hypnosis accident, and an ad copywriter who keeps envisioning inane ad ideas (have you seen the “Speed is everything” ad floating around the net? That’s a clip from this film.) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430651/combined
Party 7: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267817/plotsummary
Cha no Aji: no imdb summary. You know, I don’t remember what the heck the plot of this one was, except I remember really liking it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413893/combined
Electric Dragon 80.000 V: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0276935/plotsummary
Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0194530/plotsummary
Tokyo fundoshi no geisha: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298185/plotsummary
Ai no Corrida, aka In the Realm of the Senses: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074102/plotsummary
Attention les Yeux: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072669/plotsummary
T-bakku no hanayome: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0220082/plotsummary
The Holy Mountain: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071615/plotsummary
Hakkyousuru no kuchibiru: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274541/plotsummary
Lisztomania: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073298/plotsummary
Hellywood (Lisztomania set in the early 80’s with Japanese teenagers): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0229441/plotsummary
Life is Cheap, but Toilet Paper is Expensive: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100023/plotsummary
Nezi: The Night of the Crazy Screws: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275548/plotsummary
Pickled Punk: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0156892/plotsummary
Not really in the same league as some of the above, but I stumbled across Rutger Hauer’s “Flesh & Blood” tonight.
Didn’t see all of it, but…Oh my.
From the Agony Booth review:
I forgot to also mention O Lucky Man! starring Malcolm McDowell as a travelling coffee salesman… and that’s about as much sense as I’ve been able to make of it.
Some of my choices have already been mentioned. These haven’t:
Hell Comes to Frogtown. Giant mutant frogs, and women looking for a fertile man.
Twilight of the Cockroaches. Actually pretty good, if you can wrap your brain around cockroaches as sympathetic characters.
Creature from the Haunted Sea. A crazy stew of monster movie and spy movie, with a riotously fake monster, extremely clueless spy and possibly the most unbelievable chase scene ever filmed.
Simon of the Desert. Directed by Luis Bunuel. Ascetic saint living atop a pillar in the desert. A woman tries to coax him down.
Straight to Hell. Alex Cox of **Repo Man ** and **Sid and Nancy ** fame threw a party on an old Sergio Leone set, invited Joe Strummer, Courtney Love and the Pogues, filmed the result and called it a movie. Elvis Costello plays a waiter, “Danny Boy” is sung and a funeral service begins with “Let us get this part over with quickly Lord, and then, on to the revenge.” I am one of perhaps 100 people in America who saw this in a theater.
The 47 Ronin, Parts 1 and 2. I’ve heard this is a film of a Kabuki play, which may explain why it’s so weirdly un-cinematic; almost all of it is guys in kimonos sitting (or standing) around and talking, and we learn of the climactic battle by listening to a maid read a letter to her mistress describing the fight. Made in Japan during World War 2, which gives it some historical interest.
As far as I can determine, no one has mentioned the one film I thought of when I saw this thread: Being John Malkovich.
Two that I stumbled across on public tv as a teen were the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (which I own on video) and No Road Back, a British organized crime drama ( 
) with Sean Connery in one of his earliest roles, and a deaf-blind heroine who communicates through an odd sort of Morse Code/fingerspelling which involves tapping letters out on different areas of her palms.
A truly bizarre movie (not disturbing by any stretch of the imagination, just bizarre) that I stumbled across at the age of 12 or 13 was Million Dollar Legs, starring W.C. Fields as the president of Klopstokia, a country where all the women are named Angela, all the men are named George, and everyone displays some sort of superhuman athletic skill. Jack Oakie plays a brush salesman who somehow stumbles into this madness and figures out that the way to get the country out of bankruptcy is to enter them in the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles.
This synopsis does no justice to one of the truly insane movies ever made and makes no mention of the contributions of the future Mrs. Harpo Marx, Dickie Moore, Ben Turpin, the Klopstockian Love Song, and the incomparable Lyda Roberti as Mata Machree–the most beautiful woman in the world!
“The Constitution forbids me to hit a man under 200 pounds!”
Ah, that. Part of the premise of the movie, for those who didn’t see it, is that the “in” “drug” in 1999 is a device through which you can experience snippets of someone else’s life from that person’s perspective. So I do remember a scene in which a woman is raped and killed by a man who puts the headset on her so she is watching herself be raped and what killed from his perspective.
I have very strong memories of that movie. And I saw it with my grandparents, to boot.
My nominees include:
[ul]
[li]David Lynch’s Lost Highway: need I explain? 'Cuz I can’t.[/li][li]Class of Nuke 'Em High: one of the nastiest, grossest things I’ve ever had to watch. Has nobody else here seen a Troma film? If so, I’m jealous of all of you.[/li]Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?: the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It’s not incomprehensibly weird, like Lost Highway, but it’s still a pretentious Anthony Newley musical in which the Newlyesque Heironymous watching his own life as a musical movie - he watches it with his family, on a beach for whatever reason, and constantly makes notes to the crew about how everything in the movie is done wrong - featuring Joan Collins as his first love, Polyester Poontang, and Milton Berle as a Satan-esque character called “Goodtime” Eddie Filth. The whole thing has gross Lolita overtones, since Mercy Humppe is much younger than Heironymous, and there’s also a fable inter[del]lude[/del]lewd about a princess who falls in love with a donkey. In spite of all this, believe it or not, the movie is really boring.[/ul]
Death Race 2000. I ran across that one at 3 am on AMC or somesuch. A young Sly Stallone (and David Carradine, god how I hate David Carradine…) in a movie that is so bad, well, it’s bad. But hilariously bad!
I read about this about ten years ago in a now-defunct “Dark Art” mag called CARPE NOCTEM, and a recent copy of RUE MORGUE featured a cover story about the DVD release of this with two other short films by the same director-
AFTERMATH - behind the scenes of autopsies (SFX & actors but terribly movingly graphic)
Hell no, I haven’t seen it, nor do I plan to- but has anyone here?
Thank you Google…may I have another?
Searching for the terms “toad slingshot fetus”, the 4th results link rekindled my besieged memory for The Reflecting Skin (1990).
Back in '91 or '92 I was late night channel surfing on cable and stumbled upon a scene involving two young boys on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. The older of the boys proceeded to place a huge toad in the middle of the road, stick a straw up the toad’s cloaca and then grotesquely inflate the frog’s abdomin by blowing into the straw.
:dubious: “O…K…” I thought. “What the fuck am I watching?”
The boys then hid in some grass on the side of the road just as a matronly woman approached on foot. As she bent over to examine the puffy herp, the older boy shot the poor creature with a rock from a slingshot, causing it to explode onto the woman’s face and front. :eek:
At this point I had to continue watching, though I don’t remember much more about the film aside from some sexual tension between the older boy and a woman who lived in some desolate farmhouse, and a scene where the older boy shows the younger the “angel” he found in a barn that turned out to be a dead premature/stillbirth fetus. I must’ve fallen asleep shortly after that.
This is probably my top pick for weird movies. It’s like being trapped in some dude’s nightmare. (shudder…) Yeah…fucking weird. And yet I’m drawn to every frame.
And this is tied with Eraserhead. I love this movie. Jesus…what a flick.
David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ is rather delightfully creepy and weird; both in terms of the plot and the visuals.
House of 1,000 Corpses Very twisted, very brutal. Stange out of place cut scenes. Strangely compelling.
Blood Dolls Amazon.com description: Virgil Travis is a wealthy, soulless psychopath who lives in seclusion in his mansion home with his dwarf butler and maniac right hand man. Tortured and forcibly mutated as a child by a woman who put him through body transforming procedures, Virgil has an abnormally sized head. Basking in the suffering, degradation, pain, and death of others, Virgil has already killed, and kidnapped a female rock group that he keeps imprisoned in his basement to help satisfy his constant need for perverse amusement. Never satisfied, though, Virgil decides that he will once again try to fill the emptiness that exists within him, and so creates a trio of deformed, living dolls to systematically murder any and all people who have ever wronged him. What Virgil doesn’t anticipate, though, is meeting his match and finding love, both of which come in the form of a woman who is even more evil and twisted than he is.
And I’ll nominate a pr0n move, Fresh Meat
What, no meantion of Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left?
One I found on late night cable, though it appears to have won some awards, is What Alice Found. Poor Alice is on her way to Miami when her car mysteriously breaks down and she loses her money. She then gets a ride with a kindly older couple who happen to be a truck stop prostitute and her pimp. Can she resist the lure of easy money? Hmmmm… Good, but odd.
I have about a third of these movies, too – and have probably seen at least half. Bookmarking this thread to catch up on the rest, for sure!
My second most favourite high school English teacher co-wrote that. 
I nominate Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Mirai Ninja (Warlord) in the wacky Japanese category. (I didn’t think Tampopo was strange at all – just beautiful.)
I have all of Jodorowky’s films – he’s up there with Tarkovsky as far as I’m concerned. I’ll admit that Holy Mountain is a weird freakin’ film.
Twin Town may not be as weird as my memory of it – I watched it after obsessively learning 3D Studio Max over the course of several days, during which I couldn’t sleep at all. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to actually sleep unless I filled up some time between 3D Studio and bed, because I’d kept trying that and getting back up to try something before I forgot it. When I started hallucinating I figured I’d watch a movie and then sleep. People have since assured me that it is, by there standards, a strange little movie.
Someone upthread said that Ruben and Ed was unknown outside of Minnesota – not so – it’s a classic!
I often wonder how well-known Tales from Gimli Hospital is outside of Canada, being so firmly grounded in (a surreal, nightmarish version of) Manitoba history. The scene I like best is when the protagonist spiffs himself up for the ladies by squeezing guts and ichor out of a dead fish and using it as pomade.
Ooh! That reminds me:
Die Toten Fisch – a great German movie about an oppressed employee who spends his days in the sewer, collecting rare stamps for his boss (an avid philatelist) with a butterfly net. Apart from that straightforward plot, the rest of the movie is really strange.
And any Fassbinder film, but especially Satan’s Brew.
Roy Andersson’s *Sånger från andra våningen (Songs From The Second Floor*) – a poetic apocalypse that makes great use of the words and images of Caesar Vallejo. It’s the only incredibly bizarre and surreal film I have that always makes me cry.
Also one of my favourites. Cockroaches as sympathetic characters is actually pretty natural when you consider that it’s an allegory for Japan’s history as an Axis power. That sort of thing must be really hard to integrate into your national identity.
Austrian. Sorry.