Forgot to mention “Day of the Locust” - very strange, very grim, but certainly has something to say.
How about Johnny Got His Gun. Weird. Disturbing.
Dr Caligari
NOT Cabinet of Caligari, or Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The title is just 2 words. The first 20 minutes are so, no one speaks. After that, it’s a synapse-frying trip through an expressionist/surrealist landscape of madness. The houses have few if any walls. Instead of doors, giant disembodied keyholes stand in front of the houses. Lines include-
"There is much to be learned from a desparing shriek."
"The smell of burnt flesh always brings back memories."
"I know that they're watching me. I can feel their eyes on me like filthy prayers."
I LOVE weird films, but Dr Caligari surpasses anything I've ever seen. It's weirder than Peter Jackon's zombies, or kung fu priest (Dead Alive) and more bizarre and disturbing than the fly tabliod reporter snacking in an unflushed toilet (Meet The Feebles "MMM, carrots. Are they your's Harry?"). It's more shocking than Cronenberg's breathing videotape or the beginnings of the New Flesh (Videodrome). The shrinks make his twin gynecologists (Dead Ringers) look sane and well adjusted in comparison. After seeing Dr Caligari for the 1st time, I had to take a moment of introspection to decide if it was brilliant and disturbing, or just a nauseating piece of crap. Definitely the first.
Killer Tongue-A meteor crashes to Earth, transforming a woman's poodles into humanm dragqueens and giving her a black carapace(meaning she spends most of the film naked except for a layer of black latex) and a huge tongue possessing not only a killer instinct but a mind and a voice of it's own. Robert Englund (Freddy) plays the commander of a prison. Doug Bradley (Pinhead) is one of his inmates.
Blood Diner-Guided by the disembodied brain of their serial-killer uncle, two men engage in a new career. By day the run a restaurant advertising a vegeterian menu, but secretly serving customers human flesh. By night, they kill women in order to obtain the parts needed to build a new body for the goddess Sheetar to inhabit.
Eat And Run-An obese alien lands on Earth. The first human he meets praises the merits of Italian food. Naturally the alien goes on a binge, eating all the Italian-Americans he can find. The detective on the case constantly speaks in voice over.
Nearly anything by Troma-proud creators of The Toxic Avenger.twin falls idaho is pretty quirky. i really liked it… it’s about these conjoined twins and set around halloween time. (‘a most unusual love story’ as the cover says)
i saw an italian movie called ‘teeth’ (‘denti’) at a film festival in may, so i don’t know if it’s out anywhere on video, but it’s great surreal stuff. (but warnings for the squeamish, there are some cringe-inducing closeup shots of dental scritching)
i tried to look up this japanese movie i saw a few years ago but i absolutely can’t remember the title (frustrating! maybe i’ll remember as soon as i click submit). it was about this writer who burned a manuscript after it was banned by authorities. the next day, the newspaper headlines mimick the plot of what he had written and shown to no one. so he of course has to go meet the woman involved in the news occurance and from there on it gets hard to tell what is the reality and what is perhaps the guy’s imaginings and it all gets blurred into surreal fun. (and the empty house felt chilly after watching that and ‘the city lost children’ during a thunderstorm on the same night!) i wish i could remember the name, but i found it at blockbuster so it shouldn’t be that difficult to come across i think.
hmm weird, the first part of my post got cut off…
well here is the beginning:
twin falls idaho is pretty quirky. i really liked it… it’s about these conjoined twins and set around halloween time. (‘a most unusual love story’ as the cover says)
i saw an italian movie called ‘teeth’ (‘denti’)…
(for some reason the url i was giving for twin falls idaho was making things funky. it was a link to listing on http://www.rottentomatoes.com where there’s a description and reviews)
Well, obviously I’m way behind on my movie viewing, but just wanted to pop in a link to http://www.badmovies.org for reference. Great site for this sort of thing.
Chaos
Ken Russell’s been mentioned, but not for “Women in Love,” his adaptation of the, ahem, impenetrable D.H. Lawrence novel. But trust me, it’s plenty odd, and not just because of the nude male Greco-Roman wrestling scene…
“The Last Dinosaur,” c. 1977, starring an alcoholic Richard Boone and Joan Van Ark [who may’ve become one because of this movie – who knows?]: B-grade sci-fi with an overdetermined plot and over-the-edge music and acting. Hilarious, pitiful, and bizarre.
Anyone else like the Japanese anime/live action “Twilight of the Cockroaches”? Sure, it’s structurally a conventional-enough film; on the other hand, how many cockroach epics are there out there?
Some movies feel [almost] normal, only to end very oddly: “A Handful of Dust,” “The Comfort of Strangers,” and “The Ninth Gate”.
And directors like David Lynch and Peter Greenaway have staked their professional identities on being thoroughly, and often inaccessably, fetishistic and obviously “clever”. Feh. Films like “Counting by Numbers” and “The Droughtsman’s Contract” are interesting to see once, but I doubt I could watch them again.
Someone mentioned The Gods Must Be Crazy???
Geeze… no wonder he was banned.
Lon Chaney, THE UNKNOWN. silent movie about a guy hiding out in a circus as a armless knife thrower. He is hiding out because he killed someone and the only clue is his double thumbs. he falls in love with the owner’s daughter. she likes him because she can’t stand being touched by hands. The owner finds that he does have hands and so he kills the owner. He runs off and finds a doctor to force into removing his arms. he thens goes back to the circus but finds that the girl is marrying the strongman. she has lost her fear of being touched.
dont know of wierder storyline in movie history.
other movies might be staged oddly, like Clockwork Orange, but they have conventional plots.
A really odd one I watched for the first time the other day is My Boyfriends Back. It was a stupid/funny kind of bizarre, but most definately bizarre.
quinoa, the movie you describe sounds like Rampo.