I’m certainly happy I kept this space open, but you’ll understand if I hope I never have to use it again!

Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Heartless: Philip Ridley (writer/director of the Certified Weird The Reflecting Skin) is back after a fourteen year hiatus from filmmaking with this arthouse horror starring Jim (Across the Universe) Sturgess as a photographer with a disfiguring birthmark who makes a Faustian bargain in a hellish modern London.  Ridley’s return would be notable even if the film wasn’t being well-reviewed; as it is, it won “Best Independent Feature” at the Toronto After Dark festival.  Heartless official site.

NEW ON DVD:

Best Worst Movie (2010):  This documentary on an unlikely subject—the making of the laughably inept 1980s horror Troll 2, a movie featuring vegetarian goblins—became an even more improbable critical favorite.

The Complete Metropolis (1927/restored 2010): Kino’s restoration of the mystical, visionary science-fiction masterpiece finally arrives on DVD!  From our own Alex Kittle’s review of the theatrical version: “While its story is standard allegorical fare and the performances are often melodramatic, the sheer inventiveness and visual splendor of Metropolis warrants its status as quintessential science fiction.  It set the standard for a host of weird films that came after it and has several iconically bizarre scenes and characters.” 

Don’t Look Back [Ne te pas] (2009): French psychological thriller starring two beauties—Sophie Marceau and Monica Belluci—and a confusion of their identities.  From weirdstress Marina de Van (In My Skin).

The Extra Man (2010): Eccentric tale of an aspiring playwright and cross-dresser who rents a room an educated, aging gigolo (played by Kevin Kline).  This didn’t get more than a token theatrical release; the reason may be that it was too literary for cineplexes, or it may be because it just wasn’t very good.

Night of the Hunter (1955) [Criterion Collection]: Robert Mitchum gives an unforgettable performance as the deranged, misogynistic preacher who marries widows and kills them for their money; darker than the blackest film noir and expressionistic to the point of being dreamlike, this  movie was way too much for 1955 audiences to handle, but has since been acknowledged as a classic.  This is already in our reader-suggested review queue, so this Criterion Collection release can only speed it along.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)/Three Ages (1923): Also from Kino this week comes this restoration of two Buster Keaton silent comedies: Sherlock Jr., a fantasy about a projectionist who enters into the film he’s watching, is the weirder one; Three Ages tells the tale of romance in the Stone Age, Roman times, and the modern era.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

The Complete Metropolis (1927/restored 2010): See entry in DVD above.

Crowley [AKA Chemical Wedding]: Read our capsule review. This occult/science ficition/fantasy hybrid about Aleister Crowley in modern times is from Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson; our staff agreed on its weirdness, but disagreed on the quality of the filmmaking displayed.

Night of the Hunter (1955) [Criterion Collection]: See entry in DVD above.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)/Three Ages (1923): See entry in DVD above.

UPDATE 11/19: Still working on restoring the old posts. I’ll be posting some new content here (i.e. this week’s WEIRD HORIZON), just in case the data gets overwritten there. Hopefully everything will be fixed before the weekend starts.

FEATURING: Voice actors

PLOT: Masterless samurai Jubei joins with an ancient spy and a cursed female

ninja to thwart a plot by an old enemy to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate with the assistance of the eight Devils of Kimon.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not truly weird, though the Devils of Kimon are novel and bizarre to Western eyes.  Ninja Scroll is, rather, a well-made fantasy adventure set in a magical feudal Japan, with gratuitous sex and violence that make it inappropriate for the age group most likely to be entranced by it. 

COMMENTS: There’s no scroll, and the main character, Jubei, is a ronin (former samurai now for hire as a mercenary) rather than a ninja; but, accuracy of title aside, Ninja Scroll is an average fantasy adventure with some shocking scenes and startling artwork.  Jubei is an archetypal wandering folk hero, helping out the less fortunate out of a sense of duty to mankind rather than avarice.  His eventual companions are a more interesting lot: a withered, gnomelike spy from the court of Tokugawa who’s willing to go to any lengths to trap others into working for him, and a virginal ninja woman under a sexual curse who’s even more of a loner than the ronin.  The story, often the red-headed stepchild of anime, is a strong point here.  The intrigues between the various feudal factions and the character’s backstories are richly detailed, yet free of plot holes and surprisingly easy to follow (although Jubei’s code of honor can be difficult to penetrate at times).  Even if you don’t catch all the intricacies of the plot on a single viewing, the basic strands—a quest for vengeance on a wicked old enemy, a succession of monstrous antagonists to defeat, reluctant companions with crossed agendas, dilemmas of honor and loyalty—create a familiar heroic context for the tale that makes it easy to pick up the gist of things.  The animation style is naturalistic rather than stylized (that is to say, the characters don’t have huge round eyes and bizarre hair hues).  As is frequently the case in amime, which tends to be cheaply produced, the animation is not fluid— most of the time, it’s almost a series of stills, with characters standing stock-still, moving only their lips.  But the frame rate picks up dramatically for fight sequences, and excellent editing creates a sense of movement that makes the fight scenes thrilling.  There are points where the animation overcomes its budgetary limits and becomes magical, as when Kagero stands in the eye of a swirling cyclone of bees and rose petals.  The Devils, partly drawn from Japanese mythology, are as grotesque a gallery of rogues as you could hope to find outside of the Mos Eisley cantina, and a good deal nastier.  There’s a giant with stone skin and a taste for rape, a snake-woman who stashes a spare serpent in an unusual hiding place, a dwarf who births wasps from the hump hive on his back, and one Devil is even a homosexual with the hots for the archvillian.  The frequent sexual content is sometimes erotic—the nude tattooed snake woman—but mostly gratuitous, as when one clan master delivers his directives while delighting himself inside a village geisha.  The violence is also extreme; monster rape, daggers in eyeballs, showers of blood, limbs torn off, and a man whose head is repeatedly bashed into a bloody pulp.  The strong (falling just short of ‘extreme’) content adds some cachet to the fantasy film for a certain age group (evidence that this ninjas vs. monster tale isn’t just “kid’s stuff”), but it serves little other purpose.  The truth is that the younger, and more male, you are, the more likely you are to groove to Ninja Scroll’s beat. It starts out as a five-star spectacle of awesomeness in your teens and early twenties, but you can expect to subtract a full star for every decade of life that passes until it flattens out and reveals itself as nothing more special than a darn good adventure yarn.  And the world could certainly use a few more of those.

Animator/director Yoshiaki Kawajiri was also responsible for the anime standout Wicked City (1987) among others.  The British censors understandably cut some of the rape scene for the original UK DVD release, but unexpectedly also removed two scenes with shurikens (throwing stars), apparently believing they constituted “imitable weaponry.”  The cuts were restored for the 2004 release and the movie is now uncensored.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“For those more accustomed to Anime or Japanese cinema in general you really won’t find anything new or ground breaking here… Yet it remains a solid entry essentially on all counts.”–Nakadai, Infin-tropolis

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DIRECTED BY: Stuart Gordon

FEATURING: William H. Macy

PLOT:  A latently racist and mentally addled accountant leaves his wife, spends

an impossibly long night touring the NYC commercial sex trade and meeting lost souls, and finally ends up in prison.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Edmond isn’t so much weird as terminally confused.  It’s true Tarot cards keep popping up in impossible places as shorthand foreshadowing, that Macy’s wild night out seems unnaturally long solely to enable it to fit in all the necessary episodes, and that it’s extremely odd that the prison wardens would march new meat in the buff past inmates’ cells.  Still, even with these departures from reality, the movie still doesn’t seem in-your-bones weird so much as it feels like the author (playwright David Mamet) is trying to force events into a meaningful symbolic line, but failing to communicate his meaning to his audience. 

COMMENTS:  Edmond is only for William H. Macy fans and for those who think vagueness is the equivalent of profundity.  Macy manages to create some interest, though no sympathy, through his performance as a sad sack salaryman who thinks he’s found a temporary fix for existential bafflement by tapping into his tribal bloodlust.  After whoremongering, assaulting women and minorities, and threatening old churchgoing ladies, he finds himself under arrest.  In prison he’s forcibly stripped of his macho facade, and spends his time in stammering attempts to articulate some profound philosophy of life (“every fear hides a wish”).   Unfortunately, Macy wanders through a script that doesn’t know what to make of Edmond any more than Edmond himself does.  Those recurring Tarot cards and the closing monologue suggest that it was all just fate anyway, and Edmond’s search for meaning and the choices he made never made a difference.  In the end, all that happens is we passively witness some inexplicable tragedy happen to an unlikeable man.

Although Edmond‘s angry white male sociopath seems like a faded nth-generation variation of Joel Schumacker’s silly Falling Down (1993), the original play was actually written during the first term of the Reagan administration.  The concept of the angry white male (who Democrats theorized jumped the fence to get Reagan elected) would have had more resonance in that era.  That theory may also explain why Edmond is named after Edmund  Burke, the Irish philosopher/statesman who is looked upon as the father of modern conservatism.  Maybe that explains why both the character Edmond and the movie Edmond seem strange and unmotivated to us today, viewing the film in a different political context.  It also demonstrates why writers should not write to their times (or, at least, should not resurrect old pieces without revising them).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a surreal spiritual fable that riffs on a notion voiced by Edmond that every fear hides a wish. Mr. Mamet shows no interest in offering a tidy psychological explanation for Edmond’s behavior. Hurled at you like a knife, the movie is as reasonable as a panic attack.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“[Producer] Jeremy [Thomas] knew [raising money to make Tideland] would be difficult, particularly because the film is very, very weird. “–Terry Gilliam

DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam

FEATURING: Jodelle Ferland, Brendan Fletcher, Jeff Bridges

PLOT:  Jeliza-Rose is a nine year old girl with an active imagination who is being raised by a pair of junkies.  When her father spirits her away to a lonely, dilapidated farmhouse, then takes an extended “vacation” on heroin, Jeliza-Rose is left to her own devices.  She retreats into an intricate fantasy world where her four doll’s heads are her closest companions, but reality is scarcely less bizarre than her imagination: her neighbors are a witch-like one-eyed woman with an unhealthy interest in taxidermy and her childlike, mentally retarded brother who lives in a fantasy world of his own, spending his days hunting a shark from his homemade submarine.    

BACKGROUND:

• Tideland was adapted from a critically praised novel by Mitch Cullin; ironically, this faithful movie adaptation was critically panned.
• Gilliam made Tideland while on a six month hiatus from directing the big-budget commercial fantasy, The Brothers Grimm (2005). 
• Tideland was a commercial disaster, earning less than $100,000 in its initial domestic run.   
• According to Gilliam, the French distributor did not want to screen this film at Cannes because there is a scene involving farting, which the French find objectionable. 

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Many will remember Jeliza-Rose’s doll’s heads, who make memorably fantastic appearances in an underwater house and flying about inside a man’s ribcage.  But the more indelible image, because it’s repeated so many times, is the view of the broken down farmhouse in front of amber waves of grain.  The look was inspired by the Andrew Wyeth paining “Christina’s World.”  Gilliam often emphasizes the tall gold grass towering over tiny Jeliza-Rose’s head, as if it were surf and she was living in an undersea world.  This ubiquitous aquatic imagery helps to explain the title “Tideland“.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Gilliam has described the movie as a cross

between “Alice in Wonderland” and Psycho, which sounds weird enough on its own terms.  He pushes the envelope of weirdness even further with his trademark visual flair for phantasmagorical set pieces, for example, with a gloriously imaginative sequences of Jeliza-Rose falling down a rabbit hole full of tumbling syringes.  But even if the audience wasn’t planted firmly inside the skull of the 9-year-old heroine, peering out onto this grotesque world through her child’s eyes, the scenario would have been weird, as the world of Tideland is peopled by grossly exaggerated lowlifes who live out their lives on the lonely fringes of plausibility.

COMMENTS:

Tideland is a misunderstood film, which is not automatically the same thing as a great film.  Popular and critical reaction to Terry Gilliam’s movie and the real-world terrors it tosses at it’s 9-year old protagonist was so devastating that the director affixed a defensive disclaimer on the front of the movie stating, “Many of you are not going to like this film…”  He goes on to explain what should have been obvious to every viewer: “This film is seen through the eyes of a child.  If it’s shocking, it’s because it’s innocent.”

It’s a bit surreal that a proper discussion of Tideland must begin by addressing the controversy surrounding the subject matter of the film.  Tideland is about a little girl with addicts for parents, who is abandoned to her own devices and who makes sense of the absurd adult world by using her active imagination to transform it into an equally absurd, but far more colorful and romantic, childhood world.   This outline reads like the basic building blocks of an Important Work of Art.  It’s the kind of story that’s too depressing for massive mainstream consumption, but seems tailor made for the critics. 

If the same story had been told as a relatively straightforward drama, it might indeed have been lauded as a brave and incisive work of art (as was Mitch Cullin’s source novel).  But something happens between that one-line thematic blurb and the film that finally appears.  Gilliam places such powerful, grotesque imagery on the screen–although it’s often transformed by Jeliza-Rose’s overwhelming imagination into something innocent and beautiful–that he lost the goodwill of most of the critics. 

There’s truth to the notion that some things that work in prose, where the reader’s mind can pick and chose which details to visualize, are too ugly to depict on screen.  This is a criticism I find true of Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where the author Hunter S. Thompson’s whimsical and satirical intent is subverted by the literal depiction of puke and debauchery that turns it into a screed against pyschotropic drugs.  But I don’t find this objection to be true of Tideland.  The juxtaposition (more precisely, the co-existence) of the ugly and the beautiful, the jaded and the innocent, is essential to the artistry of this movie.

There are two scenes in particular that send audiences rushing to the exits.  The first is an early scene where Jeliza-Rose cooks heroin for her rock n’ roller daddy, then injects him.  This scene shouldn’t seriously shock anyone, although it should serve notice to those with weak stomachs for human frailties that they may want to select more amiable escapist fare.  In a movie with many bizarre and improbable flourishes, this is one note that rings uniquely true; a junkie father might really assign that task to his daughter, and the daughter would probably treat it as a regular chore, like washing the dishes.  The girl has no adult knowledge or fear of heroin or syringes; it’s simply something she does for her beloved daddy nightly, and the only effect she notices is that papa drifts off into a dream of his own.  Through Jeliza-Rose’s eyes, there’s nothing degraded in her duty; the audience alone supplies that judgement. 

The other ”offensive” scene, for those who haven’t been chased away yet, occurs at the very end of the film.  Jeliza-Rose and the developmentally disabled adult Dickens have been developing a tense but sweet pseudo-romance throughout the third act.  This innocent flirtation comes to a deliberately provocative boil near the end of the movie when the ersatz couple’s lovey-dovey kissy-poo games threaten to develop into something unspeakable.  Again, Jeliza-Rose is innocent; she knows nothing of adult sexuality, and imagines that babies come from kissing.  Dickens, who himself has the mind of a 9-year old, is equally blameless.  He has been nothing but playful and chivalrous towards Jeliza-Rose, but we can’t forget that though he’s psychologically a boy, he is biologically an adult male, and he may not be able to control himself or even understand what he is doing if he’s overcome by natural impulses.  Gilliam pushes the inherent ironic tension between the innocence of these characters and the horror of what we fear might, and pray not, happen as far as he can, building our apprehension to an almost unbearable pitch.  It’s a masterful directorial manipulation in which we are forced to supply the terror the characters cannot, and it’s the one experience that many audiences cannot forgive Gilliam for putting them through.

There’s hypocrisy in that judgement, however.  The scene is provocative, but not exploitative.  It’s not meant to titillate pedophiles in the audience, or thrown out carelessly to shock.  It’s a scene that’s filled with intense human drama (because such a scenario is imaginable) and artistic effect (because of its immiscible blend of purity and sinfulness). By putting two views simultaneously before the viewer, the innocent childish interpretation, and a cynical adult one, the scene is calculated to force the audience to reflect on its own role in creating the drama, not merely to satisfy morbid lust.   Were a director to build up the same sort of Hitchcockian tension using a homicidal stalker and a woman who doesn’t know she was being hunted, audiences wouldn’t bat an eyelash, but would instead delight in the deliciously edgy suspense.  But place a child in the same position, and put the oblivious victim in danger not of her life but of her virtue, and the reaction flips.  We’re jaded to the murder of adults (or sexually mature teenagers), which is standard entertainment in blockbuster thrillers.  Gillaim has found one of our few remaining cinematic taboos to milk, and some people simply believe that this part of human existence must be permanently hidden from view, however honorably the subject is approached.  I disagree.

The one legitimate criticism that arises from this line of thinking  is that the child actor’s own innocence might have been compromised by the performance.  It’s a reasonable possibility, but one that suggests that we’re still projecting our own knowledge of the filthiness of the adult world onto children.  There’s no reason that the actress Jodelle Ferland had to understand the mature aspects of the script any more than the character Jeliza-Rose did: in fact, such an understanding might have jeopardized her ability to project the necessary innocence.  It’s doubtful that the director or crew sat her down before scenes and explained to her the horrors of heroin addiction, or the mechanics of adult intercourse, in graphic detail.   

The viewer who allows himself to be driven away by Tideland‘s ugliness will miss out on a lot of beauty.   Jodelle Ferland’s performance is wonderful.  She’s as enchanting and adorable as Lewis Carroll’s Alice.  Her performance is  heartbreaking, because we recognize sordid circumstances of her life that she can’t see.  Remarkably, Ferland also performs five characters: she speaks for and carries on dialogues with her four doll’s heads, each of whom has a different voice and personality, throughout the film.  Brendan Fletcher’s Dickens is also an amazing portrait.  He captures the nervous tics, the strange halting speech and the even stranger preoccupations of the mentally retarded that involuntarily repulse us, but he too is so sweet and innocent that we are won over to his side.  He’s pitch-perfect.  Jeff Bridges’ deranged, notice-no-evil rock and roll junkie, despite being the ultimate unfit parent, is an amiable clown whom we almost like against our will.  He also hits the right note, because it’s necessary that we almost like him: he’s tender and playful enough towards his daughter that we can understand why she dotes on him. 

The fantasy sequences are visually sumptuous, especially the underwater centerpiece.  They also are the key to the redemption-through-imagination theme of the film.  When Jeliza-Rose imagines three of her lost doll’s heads flying around happily inside the cathedral-like ribcage of her father, we realize how essential her fantasy world is for her to survive her real-life losses. 

The film as a whole is far from perfect, however.  The audacity of Tideland‘s vision is strong enough to buoy it above sea level, but the execution is often questionable.  The real problem with the film is that it’s fairly clear where Jeliza-Rose’s imaginary world ends, and the real world begins, but there is not enough contrast between the two.  Tideland‘s reality is too bizarre.  Jeliza-Rose’s choice is not between reality and fantasy, but between an irrational dream and an irrational nightmare. 

There are too many false notes in the “real” world.  Jennifer Tilly’s plays the improbably named “Queen Gunhilda” unrealistically as the ultimate trailer-trash parody.  But the little girl’s casual acceptance of even such a queer mother’s death, her complete lack of bereavement, is so implausible that it leaves a sour steak on her otherwise lollipop-sweet charm.  And the entire character of Dell, who at the same time is every kid’s inner picture of a witch, yet another irresponsible and completely self-absorbed adult, and the single most disturbed exhibit in Tideland‘s menagerie of weirdos, goes a step too far.  It’s no fault of actress Janet McTeel, who plays the role given her well, but Dell is superfluously weird;  it’s just too inconceivable to think that yet another bizarre character could be thrown in our poor waif’s path.  Jeliza-Rose deserved at least one real adult to interact with before the credits started to roll.  A movie that posits two levels of reality should play fair in at least one; reality should be something relatively recognizable, so the fantasy world can provide a legitimate flipside.

The movie also suffers from pacing problems.  It meanders about episodically for almost an hour before recognizing that the friendship between Dickens and Jeliza-Rose is the driving force behind the narrative.  More importantly, the ending is too abrupt.  The heroine is placed in horrible jeopardy, but yanked away to safety at the last possible moment.  Although some plot elements come together at the end, the resolution is rushed, and in the end we feel like we’ve suddenly been awakened from a dream by a frantic alarm.      

In his disclaimer to the film, Gilliam advises, “I suggest you try to forget everything you’ve learned as an adult–the things that limit your view of the world.  Your fears, your prejudices, your preconceptions.  Try to rediscover what it was like to be a child, with a sense of wonder, and innocence…”  With all respect to the director, that’s only half the advice he should have given.  To truly appreciate Tideland, to experience all it’s irony and suspense and artistry, you must see it simultaneously through one eye of a child, and one of an adult.  If your childish eye has been stung out by a swarm of bees, like hopeless Dell’s, you may be permanently unable to view Tideland for what it is: both beautiful and disgusting, and flawed like this sinful world itself.

 WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…sees the fanciful helmer overindulging his dark side with a slice of Gothic nastiness… Way too disturbing for kids and too weird for most grown-ups, ‘Tideland’ is likely to wash up in boutique distribution where Gilliam’s name will pull in only his most devoted fan base.”–Leslie Felperin, Variety (contemporaneous)

“…unrestrained inventiveness is both the blessing and the curse of Gilliam’s wack-job of a film, whose anti-conventionality (and anti-commercialism) is a breath of eccentric air even as its narrative and stylistic lack of self-control ultimately results in something of a catastrophe… employing a tsunami of askew camera angles and fish-eye lenses that are less inspired than simply insistent, Gilliam turns his film into a phantasmagoric funhouse bereft of rhythm, basic coherence, and, finally, much in the way of fun.”–Nick Schager, Slant Magazine (contemporaneous)

“…easily one of the most audacious, weird and unapologetically outrageous films I have ever sat through. In certain respects, it is questionable—but I remained intensely engaged as I watched the thing unfold before me.”–Matthew Hayes, Montreal Mirror (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Tideland official site: contains 3 clips along with the trailer, wallpapers, screensavers and icons, interviews with Gilliam and Cullin, and more.

IMDB LINK:  Tideland (2005)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Alice in “Nightmareland”: Panel member Sergi Sánchez defends the controversial choice of Tideland as Best Film at the 2005 San Sebastian (Spain) film festival

Stuart Jeffries meets Terry Gilliam:  Guardian piece about Gilliam and Tideland.  Contains an audio link to the 30 minute press conference with Gilliam and Mitch Cullin from which the quotes in the article are taken.

Gilliam, Searching for His Audience:  A Washington Post profile and retrospective of Gilliam’s career with an emphasis on Tideland

Terry Gilliam begs for financing for Tideland on the street:  Youtube clip of the director scrounging for pennies and nickels outside the Comedy Central studios

Tideland, a Terry Gilliam film, Cropped:  A visual demonstration of the cropping of the theatrical image that occurred in the transfer to DVD

DVD INFO:  The only available Region 1 (North American) version is the two disc “collectors edition” which features commentary by Gilliam and co-scripter Tony Grisoni, a 45 minute making-of documentary filmed by director and fan Vincenzo Natali (Cube), two shorter mini-docs, 5 minutes of deleted scenes, and interviews with Gilliam and producer Jeremy Thomas.

This release caused a furor among film buffs because the DVD transfer is presented in a 1.77:1 aspect ratio rather than the 2.35:1 ratio shown in theaters (see “Other Links of Interest” above).

Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Alien Trespass:  A stylized spoof of 1950s drive-in sci-fi fare.  Reviewers have been unkind (only 27% positive at Rotten Tomatoes).  Alien Trespass official site.

C Me Dance:  Story of a teenage dancer who develops the ability to convert people to Christianity, which cheeses off the Devil and brings him to suburbia.  It seems sincere, which is the necessary substrate for camp.  It’s highly unlikely anyone will ever release a good movie that contains textspeak within the title.  C Me Dance official site.

Gigantic:  Self-described ” funny, surreal love story” about a mattress salesman who dreams of adopting a Chinese baby and finds true love when a customer falls asleep on one of the mattresses.  This indie comedy looks more “quirky” than “weird,” but no one can know for sure without watching it.   With Zooey Deschanel and John Goodman.  Gigantic official site.

NEW ON DVD:

A Cat in the Brian (1990):  Everyday life is causing an Italian grindhouse director (director Lucio Fulci, playing himself) to flashback to scenes of cannibal orgies from his own movies.  He sees a psychiatrist who may be even nuttier and more depraved than the director.  Unapologetically ultraviolent. 

Cthulu (2007):  If you always wondered, “what eons-forgotten actress has the eerie, alien look which best evokes the Old Ones of H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos?” and came up with the answer “Tori Spelling,” then this just might be the movie for you.  Based on the Lovecraft story “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”    

Tehilim (2007):  Allegorical tale told in documentary style about an Israeli family who use various methods of coping when the father inexplicably disappears.  Nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes in 2007.

Tokyo Zombie (2005):  It’s been called a Japanese Shaun of the Dead, which suggests something gorier and more extreme in the violence department, and wackier and more unhinged in the comedy department.  Directed by Sakicho Sato, who scripted Ichi the Killer, so it has a weird pedigree. 

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Ghosts of Mars (2001):  From borderline weird cult director John Carpenter (Big Trouble in Little China) comes this unofficial remake of his earlier action classic Assault on Precinct 13, this time with the action happening on Mars.  This movie had few defenders even among Carpenter fans, and almost none elsewhere.  With Ice Cube.

What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.