by ·Comments Off on Long Weekend (1978, Colin Eggleston)

Good tagline: “Their crime was against nature – nature found them guilty.” This refers to the lead asshole, on a camping trip with his unwilling wife, who trashes and destroys and kills every natural thing he comes across. He flicks wildfire cigs out the window and runs down a roo before they even arrive, then shoots a manatee he thought was a shark, is always brandishing axes and missile weapons.

Can these matching jackets save their marriage?

The wife didn’t want to be here in the first place, won’t let him touch her because she has a headache this year. He persists, both with her and with his camping-by-brute-force mission. An eagle attacks him, weirdly, then a possum bites him, righteously. A half hour before the movie’s over we’re still in anything-could-happen mode. After the wildlife frustrations and the wife threatening to exit the campsite and the marriage, husband kills her with a speargun, then he tries to fuck his way out of the swampy forest in a 2WD Nissan. At this point we know he’ll die – and he does in the funniest way, getting run down by a truck when a cockatoo attacks its driver.

When not spending time with the horrible humans the movie offers a parade of cool creatures. This was the back half of my Australian weirdo-horror double-feature. From the writer and cinematographer of Roadgames, Eggleston later made a (bad?) vampire movie featuring the expectant husband from Body Melt.

by ·Comments Off on Body Melt (1993, Philip Brophy)

I love finding uniquely bizarre movies like this one, wacko in all the best ways. Our pharma villain is introduced nude, injecting her man with a serum that will turn him goopy by sunrise. After looking up an address on his rad computer, he makes it all the way to the cul-de-sac where he was trying to warn(?) the residents that they’re all unwitting test subjects of the secret drug.

It’s vacation time, and the cul-de-saquers head out on their adventures. Slick-haired Paul (narrator of the Adam Elliot shorts) goes to the airport and sees people who aren’t really there. Two young guys on a road trip stop to get a new windshield where freaky kids are eating kangaroo adrenal glands. Family of four start melting (the son dies unrelatedly in a freak skateboarding accident), while the pregnant couple stay home and experience placenta-attacks. I’m not sure of the drug’s intended purpose, but the lead scientist’s ex-partner (father of the gland-chewing kids) ran off with the special ingredient that makes people not explode. Too much raver music, otherwise a perfect movie, the sole feature by a gang of art weirdos.

Did I mention it’s Australian?

by ·Comments Off on Cartoons watched April 2024

The Emperor’s New Clothes (1953, Ted Parmelee)

Everyone pretends they can see the emp’s “invisible clothes” until a kid gives the game away. The writing and dialogue is odd, Emp’s face-symmetry oval is visible, UPA maybe not firing on all cylinders here.

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The Unicorn in the Garden (1953, William Hurtz)

A pleasant man finds a unicorn eating his flowers one morning, wakes up his shrew wife to show her. She calls the cops instead to have him committed, but when they arrive he acts cool and she’s hopping around talking unicorns so they nab her instead.

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Steamboat Willie (1928, Walt Disney)

My favorite out-of-copyright Disney short… but wait, why did I not know that this movie is a cavalcade of animal cruelty? Mickey throws things at a parrot, a cow is force-fed, A goose and a goat and pigs are turned into musical instruments, a cat is swung by its tail, a baby pig is kicked. On top of this the ship captain aggressively chews tobacco and Minnie gets lifted by her undies. On the plus side, Mickey invents the Anvil Orchestra.

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A Corny Concerto (1943, Robert Clampett)

Two mini-musicals as Elmer conducts Strauss.
McKimson, Tashlin, and Stalling – all the boys turned out for this one.

1. Porky and his dog hunt Bugs in time to the music.

2. A quacking swan rejects the grey duck until he violently rescues her babies from a vulture.

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Felix in the Ghost Breaker (1923, Otto Mesmer)

Why does the Felix DVD open with a text crawl telling us that after Mickey Mouse stole Felix’s merchandise sales, producer Pat Sullivan’s wife “fell or jumped from a hotel window?” Why not add that Pat had a history of incompetence, was a convicted child rapist, and drank himself to death the following year? Anyway, we’ve all decided to give New Jersey’s own Otto Mesmer the credit for Felix and these films, and Otto continued the Felix legacy for another sixty years.

A ghost is tormenting a farmer and his animals, Felix leads it away with a bottle of rum (which ghosts love) then holds it at gunpoint (future note: Felix is armed) until the farmer arrives for the scooby doo ending. When did ghost breaking become busting… there were Ghost Breaker films through 1940, and Ghost Busters and Chasers in the early 1950s, then busting became the default after the famously unprofitable 1984 film.

In the 1920s Felix looked like a snaggletoothed black cat – I’m more familiar with his 1930s character model.

Useful meme for later this election year:

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Felix in Hollywood (1923, Otto Mesmer)

That’s more like it – now Felix is pranking people. He makes his wannabe-actor owner rich through shoe sales, then the owner is off to Hollywood to find a job in the movies. Felix does get another gun… his magic bag of tricks wasn’t invented until the 1950s but he disguises himself as a black bag to stow-away to Hollywood, where he meets caricatures of nobody I recognized (reportedly Gloria Swanson, Ben Turpin, Tom Mix, and Cecil De Mille) and poses with Chaplin. These are mildly meta, then, since he’s already in a movie, and in the previous one the ghost came towards camera and threatened the viewers.

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Face Like a Frog (1988, Sally Cruikshank)

Absolutely wild all-things-possible animation at a frantic pace, like a PG-rated 1980s Superjail. I guess a frog gets seduced into entering a spooky house, then escapes through the basement. I was gonna say this has insane music for a short, turns out it’s by Danny Elfman, same year as Beetlejuice.

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Quasi at the Quackadero (1976, Sally Cruikshank)

Quasi (pronounced KWAH-zee) lives a decadent life in bed watching TV programs of other people doing work. Anita and Rollo take him to a psychic carnival, plotting to lose him there, and succeed in knocking him down a “time hole” into the dinosaur age. All the best animators come from New Jersey. The score composers wrote a book called “The Couch Potato Guide to Life” which is also about getting warped from watching too much TV.

After Quasi’s disappearance, Chairy found a new home in Pee Wee’s Playhouse:

The roll-back-time mirror also rolls back your clothing:

And with that I’ve seen all of Jerry Beck’s 50 Greatest Cartoons, and written up all but nine in the book – five of those being Tex Avery shorts. Now to rewatch those nine, and find the sixty-ish runners-up. A man’s life work (watching cartoons on the couch) is never finished.

by ·Comments Off on Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971, Dario Argento)

“Death’s a commercial necessity.”

This absurd murder conspiracy movie was the perfect follow-up to a Final Destination sequel. Logical movies are boring, illogical ones are stupid, but movies that follow their own dream logic, where a woman in a busy daylit park can suddenly, while lighting a cigarette, become all alone at twilight, then get chased through a hedge maze, ending up trapped between cobwebbed stone walls… what was I saying?

Drummer and Wife:

Drummer Roberto is being tailed by guy in suit, follows the follower into a theater, but it’s a setup, where he’s photographed killing the suit guy. Paranoid, he tells his blonde wife everything, . Detectives get involved, a terrible gay private eye is hired, the drummer’s cat gets kidnapped, he visits a coffin convention with “God” Godfrey and a wacky Professor. In the middle of all this, a hot cousin stays over and wants to give him a massage in the bath. After the cousin’s incredible death scene, her retinas are scanned to find an image of the last thing she saw, which leads to the drummer’s wife. The drummer and his wife are good in this (some side characters are very dubbed) but the wife’s last-minute psychological backstory keeps reverting to Italian before she fatally flees from the house.

God with his parrot Jerkoff:

Intense filmmaking, this worked better for me than Crystal Plumage or Deep Red. The lead guy was also in a Bea Arthur movie. His wife Mimsy Farmer has a great Italian horror career – Autopsy, Fulci’s Black Cat, The Perfume of the Lady in Black, and something from the Cannibal Holocaust guy. The cousin was in The Disappearance, Stuart Cooper’s followup to Overlord.

by ·Comments Off on Friends and Strangers (2021, James Vaughan)

“Is he a bit of a weirdo?”
“No, I think he’s just earnest, like one of those sincere guys.”

People are saying “mate” and “no worries,” and somebody “has a lie down” – this must be Australia. This is the kind of indie cinema where every scene is shot from the coolest angle they can manage – not quite The Girl and the Spider-level, but I approve. Almost not worth keeping track of all the characters and their intersections (centering on Ray and Alice), but just when you think it’s gonna be about a platonic roadtrip, the second half goes to unexpected places with paranoid Under the Silver Lake vibes.

Confirmed: Australia

Chloe Lizotte in Cinema Scope:

Once Friends and Strangers ultimately reveals itself as an absurdist comedy, it retrospectively becomes clear that the film’s momentum has stemmed from its accumulation of seeming non-sequiturs.

by ·Comments Off on Baron Prásil (1962, Karel Zeman)

Zeman’s followup to Invention for Destruction is another absolute wonder. Actors filmed b/w and composited somehow with variously tinted objects and backgrounds. Still don’t know how this was done – saving the making-of doc for after I watch the dinosaur feature.

The story opens with astronaut Tony landing on the moon and discovering the Baron (Munchhausen), who calls him a moonman and takes over the narrative (I don’t think Tony speaks in the first half). Baron returns them to Earth, but a fantasy version, the jet planes in the opening scene replaced by flying monsters.

They rescue a kidnapped princess from a sultan, she falls for Tony, and the Baron spends the rest of the movie trying to convince her that he’s more impressive that boring old Tony (true). Along the way they jump their horses off a cliff, create a tobacco smokescreen to confound the sultan’s fleet, get swallowed by a whale and scooped up by a giant bird, ride a cannonball, escape from prison and return to the moon via rocket-propelled castle tower, all in about half the runtime of the Gilliam version.

by ·Comments Off on World of Tomorrow 3 & Stump the Guesser

World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (2020, Don Hertzfeldt)

Hertzfeldt comes up with his biggest horror yet: embedded-HUD popup ads. A future Emily backup clone contacts a past David and sends him on a disfiguring journey to retrieve secret messages about the clandestine between-time assassinations of various Davids by other Davids. It’s twisty! And excellent, and full of more wonderful quotes, and I’ll be watching these forever.

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Stump the Guesser (2020, Maddin/Johnson/Johnson)

The Odenkirk-looking Guesser (The Editor from The Editor) is renowned for his abilities, but when he runs out of guessing milk, things go bad and his guessing license is revoked. But during this time he falls in love with his long-lost sister, spends some time scientifically disproving theories of heredity in order to marry her, but things go badly at the end when he has to guess which door she’s behind. Some fun leaps of logic and distorted visuals here, but I wasn’t feeling it as much as other Maddin films.

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Accounting for some other things watched recently… The Mads from MST3K have been doing monthly live shows. I checked out Glen or Glenda, a movie that’s so busy explaining itself that it never gets to the movie, and told Neil:

That was… really fun. That’s the most I’ve enjoyed a MST3K-related thing since the end of the sci-fi channel years. I don’t know if it’s because of their obvious affection for the material, or if I’m just in the right mood. I’d never seen the feature either – shame on me, after digging the Tim Burton version for 25 years now (oh you just tried to watch it, is it cringey now? Is it Johnny Depp’s fault?) and the Mads nailed it in their intro when they said this movie has everything, but it also has nothing.

Next was The Tingler, which I already just barely remember (also explainy, features Vincent Price)… then the truly baffling, tensionless version of The Most Dangerous Game called Walk The Dark Street. I think the guy from The Rifleman played the baddie. Then some shorts I should track and name, but am not gonna.

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Hannah Gadsby’s Douglas is her stand-up comedy special to follow Nanette, which was the special to end stand-up comedy, and yet she pulls off the follow-up by creating another perfectly-constructed show and this time being breathtakingly funny. That sounds like a cliche, but I had to pause the show to catch my breath.

And Katy and I watched something called Australia: Land of Parrots, which is everything you’d dream it would be, and I should just play it on a loop.