Frankenweenie–an early offering from Tim Burton.
Harold & Maude
Which reminds me… I haven’t watched it in a while
On it’s own DVD or on “The Nightmare Before Christmas”?
Prince of Darkness: “I’ve got a message for you and you’re not going to like it. Pray for death.”
The Last Wave: A different kind of apocalypse.
Roadside Prophets: Motorcycles and the art of Zen. Has John Doe, John Cusack, Adam Horowitz, Timothy Leary and… other people I can’t remember.
My Chauffeur: a somewhat cheesy, fun 80’s movie. It’s great to watch, if for no other reason than groaning at the clothes that we used to consider stylish back then.
Hell Comes to Frogtown: A post-apocalyptic movie with Rowdy Roddy Piper and, you guessed it, mutant frog-men.
I don’t know if this counts as unusual per se, but I did disturb the cashier at Best Buy when I bought Sweet Home Alabama and Road House at the same time.
I was lucky enough to find a copy of Shame a couple years back.
Takes place in the sixties, in a small Southern town. A young professional-looking man comes to town and claims to represent a national “White Pride” organization. He begins agitating the local population to not allow integration of the local high school, and to keep the n******s in their place! Meanwhile, he’s sleeping with a local guy’s wife and generally being a scumbag, and it ultimately comes out that he’s doing all this for sheer love of the power trip. The organization he represents is found to be nonexistent, and our young bad guy gets his comeuppance. and blacks and whites walk into the high school, hand in hand.
It’s creepy as hell for two reasons:
-
The movie was filmed on location in a small southern town around 1962, when the integration issue was INCREDIBLY hot. There are no sets in the movie. It’s all real. Director Roger Corman writes in his memoirs that during the crowd scenes, where the guy is exhorting the crowd to lynch and burn and hate… the local people who were acting as extras thought he was the HERO, not the villain!
-
Our hero/villain is played by a very young William Shatner, a couple years before he got the job on Star Trek.
It’s a mindbender.
I was going to say Hell Comes To Frogtown (in a post-apocalyptic future, only one man remains fertile and is responsible for repopulating the planet. He is played by Rowdy Roddy Piper) but it seems someone beat me to it.
How about: Burn Hollywood Burn. The plot is that there is a director named Alan Smithee who makes a big hollywood movie, but hates the producer’s cut. He wants to take his name off the project, but since it can only be replaced with the industry standard – Alan Smithee (which is his own name anyway) – he goes mad and steals the film.
The thing about this movie is that its actual director hated it and decided to take his own name off the project, so now on the box it says the film was directed by Alan Smithee.
Then there’s Shakes The Clown. Much like you could call UHF “The Weird Al movie” or Spice World “The Spice Girls movie”, this one is “The Bobcat Goldthwait Movie”. It’s about a bunch of party clowns with a drinking problem. After work, the all go to the same bar – still in costume and full makeup – and just get wasted. Every now and then they get drunk in the daytime and try to beat up some mimes (including one played by Robin Williams). At the end they tacked on a thin plot so that there would be something to write on the back of the box, but really it’s just a movie about party clowns getting drunk.
Well it’s not really mine but… “The Magical princess gigi” or “Freddy the frog”
Freddy the frog’s a cartoon about a psychokinetic frogman who saves the world from a fat guy with a bunch of ninjas and an airship and a cobra that changes into stuff"
The other one… It’s HORRIBLE. Aliens try to take over the world, send one “THING” in. “THING” Turns into a midget with pink hair, meets Psycho Peter Pan"He thinks Beating the Sh!t outta people is FUN!", saves the world from buisnessmen with grenades that control time(don’t get me started) and “Time Dragons”, becomes a rock star, etc. And it’s anime.
ooh I forgot to mention that somewhere along the line, Burn Hollywood Burn lost its soundtrack budget, so they acquired music from a bunch of unknowns. So while the movie itself is horrible, the soundtrack is honestly one of the most interesting things I’ve ever listened to. I think the CD is out of print right now, but it’s still not too difficult to find online.
Also let me add Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, one of the funniest documentaries I’ve ever seen. My 10th grade Biology teacher made us watch it and only recently have I been able to find it on DVD.
Basically, in Australia there was a pest problem. They brought in the toads to eat all the beetles. The beetles could fly; the toads could not. The toads did nothing to control the pest problem, and reproduced so fast that they soon became an even greater problem.
This film interviews the people who have incorporated the toads into their lifestyle. The one guy who laces cigarettes with the toad venom to get high. The guy who hunts them for sport by running over them in his pickup truck. The film’s “toad expert” is a man whose cat was killed by the toads, and his anger towards them is casually sprinkled among any answer he provides to the filmmakers.
The Why We Fight WWII U.S. propaganda series, plus other WWII British shorts by Humphrey Jennings
Canadian Animation collections, including works by Norman McLaren
About 10 films by French filmmaker Eric Rohmer
The Peter Jackson mockumentary Forgotten Silver, the Seijun Suzuki bizarre 60s hitman movie Branded to Kill, and the not-available-on-video 30s classics Man’s Castle and Love Me Tonight.
The Favor, The Watch, and the Very Big Fish
Jeff Goldblum, Bob Hoskins. Irreverent, quirky comedy.
The Committee
One of the original casts, shot on video in the 60’s (not film!), including Peter Bonerz and Howard Hessman (credited as “Don Purdy”).
The First Nudie Musical
Cindy Williams (but she’s not nude) and some great, REALLY uninhibited tunes by Bruce Kimmel; one is “Dancing Dildos.”
A Sinful Life
Originally a skit by L.A.'s The Groundlings, a great performance by Anita Morris.
I have some that have already been mentioned (Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive, to name but two), so I’ll have to dig deeper…
How about Deadbeat at Dawn, a very low-budged indie flick by Jim Van Bebber about gang warfare and vengeance and blood and rappelling from a six-story parking garage and more blood? There’s even a director’s commentary track!
I also own and still watch Cutthroat Island, the pirate movie that went so over-budget it esentially bankrupted Cannon Pictures all by itself. It cost $92 million to make, but only made $11 million at the box office. The biggest financial failure in movie history! Still, I think it’s a very fun movie, and I just dig pirates. The ship-to-ship battle at the end is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen on film.
I’ve got
**Orlando
Sweet and Lowdown
Love and Death on Long Island
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
The Frighteners
M Butterfly
Zorro the Gay Blade **
AND MANY MORE!!!
*Holy Mountain* (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
Forbidden Zone (Richard Elfman) Heh – accidental connection with “The Zone” in Stalker. Don’t miss Herve Villachez as the Evil Dwarf King of the 6th Dimension.
*Warlord* (Bizarre Sci-Fi set in feudal Japan)
What? (Roman Polanksi) Sort of like what The Tenant would have been like if it were produced by Benny Hill.
*Institute Benjamenta, *or The Dream People Call Human Life. (Brothers Quay)
Tales From Gimli Hospital (Guy Madden)
Tetsuo: The Iron Man
*Dark Star*
Yeah, I guess I have some oddities in there. (I really had to exercise some restraint with the ones I named.)
The Saragossa Manuscript (1965). The title document is a magical text discovered during the Napoleonic Wars. Capt. Alphonse van Worden lives out the book’s intricate storylines as he embarks on a journey across a Spain populated by ghosts, alluring demons, debauched royalty, and mystical priests.
Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927). A montage-documentary of a day in the workings of a great city, capturing the ordinary goings-on of the restaurants, factories, and sidewalks. Mingles the realistic, the expressionistic, and the abstract with such rapidity and precision that the viewer has little time to dissect and analyze what flashes across the screen, and is instead whisked away in the kinetic stream of images.
Che? (1972). The story of an American hippie girl who wanders into the decadent environment of an Italian seaside villa populated by Marcello Mastroianni and a host of bizarre guests. The least-discussed of all of Roman Polanski’s films.
Le Corbeau (1943). An early feature by Henri-Georges Clouzot, who later made The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques, which almost decimated his career. It was distributed by Continental FIlms during the Occupation, and the director was accused of being pro-Nazi. The story of a mysterious author of anonymous letters who terrorizes a small French town, the Germans saw it as a castigation of French provincial life…it actually carries a postmodern existentialist “EVERYBODY sucks” message.
Murders in the Zoo (1933). A pre-Code Paramount thriller which opens with a scene of Lionel Atwill sewing a victim’s mouth shut, so he’ll “never kiss another man’s wife!” The wife in question is played by Kathleen Burke, best known as the Panther Woman in Island of Lost Souls.
Million Dollar Legs (1932). Another pre-Code winner, starring W.C. Fields as the President of Klopstockia (“Major Exports: Goats and Nuts. Major Inhabitants: Goats and Nuts”), ruling with an iron fist over a land of schemers, beautiful sirens…and Olympic superstars.
Maya Deren: Collected Experimental Films. Includes Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945), and others. Deren was a pioneer in the American avant-garde cinema, and an important link between Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor, Kenneth Anger, etc., and the European past of Cocteau and Bunuel.
Holy Moses! You’ve got this, too???
See the above post…maybe it’s not as unusual as we both think…
I think there are a few places where our tastes intersect, Ike– Maya Deren rocks my world.
I have a movie titled The Green Pastures , filmed in 1936. It tells several Old Testament Bible stories “From the prespective of rural black America.” Guess it wouldn’t be thought of a PC in this day and age, but an interesting flick. I did admire the performance of the actor who played De Lawd(plus Adam and one other role). His name was Rex Ingram. After seeing the movie on TV I learned he had an MD degree and was Phi Betta Kappa. I think I liked his voice best. I’ve never seen the 1939 Hickleberry Finn (with Mickey Rooney) but Ingram also played Jim the escaped slave in that one. The actor who played Noah in that movie had a small role in *Gone With the Wind, * as Peter, Aunt Pittypat’s driver. He was the guy who chased the chicken through the yard at Christmas. And the Angel Gabriel was played by the actor who was Gerald O’Hara’s valet(the one who said “we’s house servants”) in GWTW.
Seen it. Wasn’t one of the guys from V the star?