The digestion scene in NOPE. Yelled WTF in longform, aloud.
Yes, Titane was something else. I’m not even sure what to make of that movie. It was insane.
It’s been a while but the biggest WTF movie I have ever seen is “Circle of Iron” (aka “The Silent Flute”).
The movie doesn’t reveal what period in history it takes place or even where on Earth it takes place. But it’s about a very white guy on a quest to see a book. On his way he encounters talking monkey men, a man trying to melt his own dick in a vat of oil, and other strange things that are presented as being perfectly normal.
Kam Yuen Battles the Monkey King (David Carradine) in CIrcle Of Iron - YouTube
“A land that never was and always is.”
For what it’s worth, note that he closes his eyes and nods off right before he sets out on said quest…
Same here: I read the books 40+ years ago (yikes!), saw the new Dune in a theater this summer, but I had never seen the David Lynch version. It was just on IFC so I was able to record it (and I just finished it today). I had an “oh oh!” feeling when I remembered that when it first came to theaters a friend of mine said “They had to hand out a cheat-sheet before the movie started” and he was still confused. There must been lots of drugs involved, or perhaps lots of drugs were needed to understand it.
I DVR’d a couple movies from TCM that were totally unwatchable. One was Babo 73, the other was so fucked up I don’t even remember, nay, blocked out the name.
Fuck, I hate my life.
Sadly, I could not grok that film. Acting etc, all fine, but the plot.
The plot for Avatar was also messed up. Beautiful film, though.
One thing about Tusk that I noticed that I don’t think I have ever seen anyone else call out is that the old man is basically a realistic version of Batman. He has the exact same backstory but instead of turning into a superhero he is placed in an abusive foster home and he goes completely insane. And I agree, he’s trying to redeem himself in his own twisted way.
The Dragon lives again (1977), when I was told that there was a Bruce Lee exploitation movie where Popeye the Sailor(?!?) appears, I got curious, and it was as WTFey as was told.
The deceased Lee meets a number of pop-culture icons, including Dracula, James Bond, Zatoichi, Clint Eastwood, The Godfather, Laurel and Hardy, The Exorcist, and even 1970s soft-porn character Emmanuelle. Lee befriends The One-Armed Swordsman, Caine from TV’s Kung Fu, and Popeye.
Had you read the book before seeing it? I did, and I was baffled that the director was squeamish enough to remove almost all hints about the thing that made the book controversial. I did a thread at moviechat.org and none of non-book readers who responded had any idea why the kid died.
It was mindbogglingly bad. I mean, not even entertainingly trashy - just all kinds of dumb, even before you get to the ten minutes of Microsoft Windows screensaver footage at the end. I don’t know what Johannson or Freeman were thinking, unless it was “I’m getting paid a shitload of money for this nonsense”.
My recent WTF movie was also a “woman punches things” film but a much better one: Sucker Punch. I don’t know if I’d call it “good”, but it was enjoyably weird, visually fun and well-acted all around. Unlikely to watch it again but worth one go.
Here is what you missed in The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies:
Five armies battle. Interminably. There is about five minutes of actual plot, and little of it is interesting or original. The good guys mostly win, although someone dies so the composer can write a lot of sweeping sad music.
There. I’ve just saved you a couple hours of your life.
Devil’s Pass, a horror film take on the Dyatlov Pass incident. I was rolling my eyes through most of it. A truly stupid movie and a complete waste of time.
You’re Wrong About had a great podcast episode about the incident. Very informative and persuasive that it was simply the result of terrible weather and bad choices about where to camp.
As for WFT movies: Swordsman with Umbrella. I mentioned it on another thread, but the dubbing is amazingly bad and the effects are terrible. And a guy flies with his umbrella like a kung-fu Mary Poppins, which is less interesting than you might hope.
No, neither of us had read the book (or even knew of it). Now, after the fact, we’re aware of some additional plot points, but only because kind people like you have discussed them elsewhere.
Frankly, I would never give a thought to reading the book after seeing the film, even though I think I would have been interested prior to watching the movie.
My last WTF movie was just this past weekend. Mrs. solost had rented some movies from the library that seemed interesting. We dusted off the Blu-Ray player and popped one in. The movie was ‘Crimes of the Future’. the basic plot: in the future body modification is all the rage and everybody routinely does surgery on themselves to alter their bodies in various ways. The main couple (played by Viggo Mortensen and some actress I wasn’t familiar with) are performance artists, and she uses genetic engineering to grow new, previously nonexistent organs in his body, and then surgically removes them. For the sake of art. LOTS of closeup shots of open body cavities while dubious surgery is performed. This movie is not for the squeamish.
Here’s a scene that sets the tone: at an art performance a man (not Viggo, this is another artist), wearing only speedo-like shorts, has maybe 100 ears all over his body and is dancing. A couple in the audience is watching and a woman is saying to her companion “sooo derivative. The ears don’t even work! the only good thing about this exhibition is his interpretive dance”.
The tools used to do the surgery and other tasks look like weird creepy mashups of organics and electronics, and I thought “this is like a bad knockoff of Cronenberg”. I took a closer look at the DVD jacket, and saw “a movie by David Cronenberg”
Honest Trailers did a wonderful episode about RRR
I went to see the Lynch Dune when it was released, and still have the Cheat Sheet they handed out.
The problem with Dune is that it’s such an immense work, with so many details, and they tried to condense it down into a two hour movie. It didn’t help that they changed several things from the books (Weirding Modules?), so that even a lot of people familiar with the books were lost.
I loved it, having read the books multiple times. I loved that the vision of the future it presented was so weird and fully imagined, even with the strange stuff they made up and threw into it. A lot of it just worked right.
My wife saw this before he read Herbert’s books, and described it as “a book with the middle chapters torn out”. That’s about right. Like the version of the Russian film War and Peace I once saw that was edited down from seven hours to two.
They made up a longer version for TV, in which they recut it, added an opening narrated explanation (so you didn’t need the sheet), and added scenes that had been cut from the released version. Lynch disowned this version (it lists the director as “Alan Smithee” in the credits – the usual dodge when the real director wants to dissociate him- or her-self from the picture) , but it is more comprehensible than the feature release version.
By the way, this isn’t the only movie I saw with a Cheat Sheet. The film Executive Action (a film about the JFK assassination conspiracy – sort of Oliver Stone’s JFK, but made much earlier and without Stone) was first released with what amounted to an entire newspaper of documentation and footnotes.
Here’s the Dune Cheat Sheet
Here’s the handout for Executive Action:
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/executive-action-movie-handout-1840823869
Whew. I’m glad it’s not just me. 
I have two. #1 - ‘Possession’ starring Sam Neill and Isabel Huppert. I don’t know how to describe it but it involves some kind of birth of an octopus-thing involving 10 straight minutes of screaming in a subway station. But it’s not a horror movie, per se, it’s that and a glum artsy movie, too. It’s been on TCM too often!
#2 - ‘Maitresse’, a French film starring Gerard Depardieu (which I woke up to while TCM was on in the middle of the night). Balls out S&M, speaking of which the Maitresse nailed a customer’s testicles to a board. Which really happened there on the screen, not done by the actress, but performed by a real pro and a willing client… Thank you, TCM! That one slipped under the radar, I guess.
I saw this in the theater. In fact, I went out of my way to find it. The octopus thing was the work of Carlo Rambaldi (probably best known for his mechanical work in the movie Alien, although he’s done tons of other stuff, going back to the early 1960s). which made me curious. Rambaldi worked for low pay just to be able to contribute to the film, which shows you that it had the enthusiastic support of some people. I had read about the film (and seen stills from it) in the magazine Cinefantastique.
I was practically the only person in the theater. It was gone the next day.
I still don’t understand the plot, even after re-reading it on Wikipedia just now