A Barely Adequate List of Bizarre Movies

I'm not really familiar with the site Blogcritics, but you get one guess as to what they're all about.
Yeah, it's a bunch of people talking about movies.

Anyway, they've posted a list of the Ten Bizarre Movies of All Time. Which is a terrific idea for a Top Ten movie list. I wish I'd thought of it. Really. Because if I had, I would have filled it with really trippy, crazy, off-kilter, unpredictable movies. Movies that don't mess with your head so much as unscrew it, use it as a cocktail shaker, and then awkwardly reattach it to your neck stump.

But that's not exactly how the blogcritics approached the last. Here's their list:

1. Mulholland Drive
2. City of Lost Children
3. Happiness of the Katakuris
4. A Clockwork Orange
5. Vanilla Sky
6. Suicide Club
7. Naked Lunch
8. Pi
9. Six-String Samurai
10. Songs from the Second Floor

Okay, to be fair, one of these I haven't yet seen. Songs from the Second Floor. I really want to see it, and we have it at the video store, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

But the rest of these movies aren't terribly bizarre. Well, okay, Naked Lunch. That has typewriters that look like cockroaches and speak through disembodied assholes that sound like William Burroughs. That's pretty goddamn bizarre. And Happiness of the Katakuris is definitely weird, but any Takashi Miike movie would probably qualify for this list.

But those other nine...I mean, the Blogcritics say this about Mulholland Drive, one of my favorite films thus far this decade:

One of the most unexplainable films (except for the hard to find Lost Highway) I have ever seen.

Okay, it's not even that hard to explain Mulholland Drive. See, the whole first half of the movie is a dream that Naomi Watts' character has. In reality, she's an actress who has fallen out of the spotlight, who has been left by her lesbian lover who herself is on the verge of bigtime successin Hollywood. In her dream world, she's a new, fresh young starlet solving a noir-ish movie mystery.

There. Done. That's the most bizarre, unexplainable film of all time? Man, that's not even the most unexplainable David Lynch film of all time. (Eraserhead?)

And, just for the record, Lost Highway isn't really hard to find (and is also somewhat more impenetrable than Mulholland). We have a copy at Laser Blazer, and I've seen them at Amoeba as well. Just be careful if you buy it, because the transfer sucks ass.

Also, including Vanilla Sky and not the original Spanish version, Abre los Ojos is kind of an insult. All the bizarre stuff was done first by Amenabar.

And Clockwork Orange is kind of odd and intense, but I wouldn't really go so far as to call it "bizarre." It's only the visual design that's weird - the story's quite straightforward and easy to follow. Maybe we just have different definitions of bizarrity.

Anyway, having a list like this and not including any Bunuel or Polanski or Alejandro Jodorowsky or Peter Greenaway or Chris Marker or Seijun Suzuki (I mean, Youth of the Beast?) or Pasolini or Tarkovsky or Herzog or any of our greatest, weirdest, most truly unhinged filmmakers is just kind of pointless.

So, I figured I'd encourage my fellow bloggers and online snarks to come up with their own suggestions for a Bizarre Movie List. Seriously. Cause I want to see more cool, bizarre movies. Here's a list I came up with just now, off the top of my head, in no particular order:

The Candy Snatchers (d. Trueblood)

This features perhaps the most bizarre performance I've ever seen from a child, and the kid was the director's son! A boy credited only as Christophe (seriously) plays a deranged/autistic/messed-up young boy who stumbles upon, and eventually foils, a kidnapping plot. The most bizarre scene: a fat bearded guy who doesn't appear for the rest of the movie mocks the child for being 8 years old and unable to speak.

Salo (d. Pasolini)

Definitely the most disgusting film I've ever seen, but it's also pretty bizarre. In a satire/condemnation of the idle Italian upper class (set during the Fascist years, but made in 1976), Pasolini retells the vile Marquis de Sade novel "120 Days of Sodom." So the whole movie is an artistically made, well-filmed series of scenes in which a bunch of old guys perform unspeakable, depraved acts on little children. How bizarre.

Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice (d. Misumi)

This Japanese take on the "Shaft" character finds maniacal samurai cop Hanzo the Razor fighting corruption by raping lots of women. See, his interrogation process for men involves horrible torture, but for women involves forcing himself on them until they submit, eventually telling him everything he wants to know. In the sort of needlessly bizarre twist that elevates this disturbing 1972 feature (that became a trilogy!) to Bizarre Classic status, Hanzo trains by thrusting his penis repeatedly into a bag of rice suspended from the ceiling.

The Devils (d. Russell)

I've just realized that all of these selections so far come from the 70's. What can I say, it was a weird decade? But I'll get off the topic after this one. All I need to do to express the weirdness of this 1971 Ken Russell freakout is post the IMDB description:

Cardinal Richelieu and his power-hungry entourage seek to take control of pre-rennaisance France, but need to destroy Father Grandier - the priest who runs the fortified town that prevents them from exerting total control. So they seek to destroy him by setting him up as a warlock in control of a devil-possessed nunnery, the mother superior of which is sexually obsessed by him. A mad witch-hunter is brought in to gather evidence against the priest, ready for the big trial.

Mr. Arkadin (d. Welles)

See? This wasn't made in the 70's...It's Welles' most flat-out strange movie, a twisting, nearly nonsensical noir filled with terrible acting, ridiculously unconvincing sets and make-up and sheer brilliance. Welles plays an amnesiac Slavic billionaire named Arkadin, who hires a common hood to find out the truth about his past.

The Apple (d. Golan)

A disco musical about a dystopian future in which an evil music conglomerate known as Bim (owned and operated by the devil) brainwashes the population through horrible funky disco music that I will never get out of my head, ever. This Israeli production is quite possibly the worst movie ever made, and it's absolutely the ugliest. Everyone's covered in sequins at all times. An amazingly bad film that should be seen by everyone.

That Obscure Object of Desire (d. Bunuel)

You have to get the greatest surreal filmmaker of all time on any list of Bizarre Films. This one, Bunuel's final film (gulp...from the 70's...), finds Fernando Rey obsessed with a woman who, while teasing him, refuses to submit to his advances. What makes it really bizarre (aside from a strange subplot about terrorism) is how Bunuel uses two actresses, who switch off during the film, to play the female lead role.

Forrest Gump (d. Zemeckis)

Okay, the movie itself isn't really weird. I just find it bizarre that so many people like it.

Marnie (d. Hitchcock)

This is my favorite late-era Hitchcock film, and it's also one of the most strange, creepy and personal films the guy ever made. Tippi Hedren plays an enigmatic, conniving, adrift and quite possibly insane woman named Marnie, who finds a mentor, husband, psychologist and parole officer all tied into one when she meets Sean Connery's Mark.

Monty Python and the Meaning of Life (d. Jones & Gilliam)

I've watched this film enough times to get kind of numbed to it's utter insanity. The movie is filled, absolutely packed full, of trippy absurdity. I mean, that "Find the Fish" segment is probably the most bizarre sequence from any film on this list.

Yellow Submarine (d. Dunning)

The Beatles travel under the sea in a yellow submarine to help the people of Pepperland fight off evil-loving monsters called Blue Meanies, using only the power of music and warm, radiating candy-colored laser beams of love.

How bizarre.