MOVIE PICKS

These films are my favorite weird films. They succeed not only at completely immersing you
in their periods and unconventional themes, but may transform you with hidden and more obvious
opinions and agendas. In fact, many of these movies are never shown on TV and are difficult to find
because of their anti-conformist, anti-normal views. These movies also are adept at throwing the
viewer for a loop and really delivering the goods of shock and entertainment.

Liquid Sky - Our heroine lives in New York, clubs by profession, and sleeps
with her professor as part of some half-baked financial arrangement. She gets raped
one night by a clubber she brings home and afterwards is date-raped by her professor,
at which point an unexpected type of feminist revenge begins to unfold, as aliens
choose her as a means to their ends. Intriguing feminist what-if scenario.
Excellent, refreshing lack of sci-fi effects in an otherwise very immediate,
stylish film, stinking of 1980s Manhattan. Great mind-bending soundtrack,
with occasional visual effects courtesy of Andy Warhol.
****4 Seeds

A Boy And His Dog - This movie has a nonexistent plot but pulls it off in very weird style.
Don Johnson is the boy, and looks it in this film. Add a post-apocalypse environment,
a female companion, and a talking dog who mixes the intellectual tone of a philosopher
with the ribald, no-nonsense direction of a ship captain. No, the dog's lips
don't move. He just wags his tongue while his voice narrates in the background.
It sounds ridiculous, and it is, but I got used to it immediately, and you soon accept
him as the smartest character in the cast. On their adventures, they stumble into an
underground 'Kansas', discovering a group of pale and over-rouged town elders led by
Jason Robards, manically issuing memoranda while marching bands provide a constant
din in the background. Loads of social comment, with a surprise ending, well done.
**** 4 Seeds

Once Upon A Time In the West - One of the better Westerns ever, American history
interpreted and scored by Italians Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone.
Henry Fonda is so mean in his evil portrayal of the main villain that his performance
worried his agent at the time about wrecking the actor's bankable
good guy reputation. He and a young Charles Bronson have a score to settle,
as a frontier town lurches from lawless backwater to legitimate town as a stop on the
coming railroad. Great elucidation of how worlds change and how you can't go back.
Leone is very efficient in his steady manipulation of emotions, always lingering
on the details of how some are destined to be left behind, dying in the dirt, under
the sun, boots on.
***** 5 Seeds

Boxing Helena - Helena is the girl so hot and uninhibited that she makes
men lose their minds in front of their mates, while their women writhe in anger.
A doctor has a crush, she laughs in his face, and trouble follows. This movie actually
shocked me, leaving me in disbelief at what I was watching, but used that shock to
make me really examine the terror of being on the receiving end of unchecked male lust.
Surprise ending.
***** 5 Seeds

Brazil - an obvious choice, and more popular at its release than most underground
films, but required alone for its prescience, and prediction of a world
that we now live in many ways, bureaucratic, artificial, with elites
spying on each other and engaging in gratuitous plastic surgery,
with everyone under constant threat of random bombing and/or audit.
Enter corresponding member of guerilla movement, female and gorgeous,
focus of the hero's delusions. George Orwell revisited and created.
***** 5 Seeds

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly - Everyone's seen it, but it's still evocative,
potent, and often startling. Clint Eastwood plays his unspoken cowboy set against an
equally charismatic, and unattractive Tuco, played by Eli Wallach. Throw in Lee Van Cleef,
and a triumvirate of opponents/allies emerges, with all their intersecting motivations.
They chase gold gone astray from the Confederate army in a new Western state, through
a prison camp, a desert, a Civil War front line, and, ultimately, a graveyard.
The cinematography in this film uses Sergio Leone's flare for flaring nostrils,
tight, sweaty shots making each moment more dramatic. Many scenes convey the real challenge
of human survival in the frontier, and the strange glory of dirty villain heroes.
People slaughter each other en masse in war, and the scavengers hang around to pick
over the bodies. The movie also gives its nod to the dying art of chivalry among
gunslingers with perfect visual and audio metaphors. Stirring soundtrack by
Leone's Italian cohort, Ennio Morricone
****4 Seeds

The Hidden - Technically a b-movie because of the horror and the
teenage target audience, but, from the first shot through a bank's video
camera, you know this movie is going to be faster moving and more creative than
standard B-movie fare. Unrelated, non-violent average citizens suddenly start going
berserk in theft and murder sprees, and the local police department, headed by
Michael Noury, struggles to keep up. Kyle McLachlan shows up to offer
assistance, as the serious headtrips begin to invade the police department
itself. Lots of action sequences with fancy guns, cars, and post-punk, pre-grunge
LA street music mixed with perfect soundtrack. Excellent, sharp, colorful production
and funny writing. It's a great 80s sci-fi thriller, with mainstream production values.
****4 Seeds

Naked Lunch - David Cronenburg directs and Sam Wattenberg stars in
a movie very similar to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in intent, but first
by about eight years, with a worlds better actor as its lead hallucinator,
and with hallucinations that are far more entertaining, ludicrous, and inciteful.
It doesn't try to wrap things up with any drugs-are-bad (or good) punctuation.
It just explores a critically-acclaimed writer (William S Burroughs) and his search
through a drug-induced haze for survival amid a cast of freaks who collect around and
occasionally inspire him. Burroughs' is a writer "stuck in interzone" whose priority is
"filing reports", ambivalent to money and other's lives. Drugs are the catalyst for his genius,
but they won't provide an escape from guilt or his seeming digust with humanity
in general. The movie seems to condone drug use with its exciting visuals and Burroughs'
production in a state of unconscious focus, but the life looks grimy from the outside.
This movie is as much about David Cronenburg making the film itself such a visual
trip juxtaposed to Burroughs visual poetry as it about any moral lecture.
You'll need luck in finding a copy to purchase or rent, since its ambivalent
views on homosexuality, drug abuse, and glorification of anti-conformism
have made this film, made in 1987 and now part of the Fox catalog, a bright
target for Rupert Murdoch's disappeared film list.
****4 Seeds

High Velocity - Ben Gazarra plays the mercenary who comes out
of retirement for one more job, to rescue Keenan Wynn, a real bastard
of a Western executive who runs rough-shod over his servants in a
generic third-world country (the film was shot in the Phillipines) and
eventually gets himself kidnapped. Gazarra is hired to pull him out.
Sound like Rambo or Gropenfuhrer? Well, it is, except that this film
realistically deals with all the possible outcomes of such a dangerous
foray, and the moral contradictions involved when western mercenaries
meet third-world terrorists. Or are they freedom fighters? Far too
anti-elitist to catch on TV too often, but a brilliant portrayal by
Gazarra of a genuinely likeable man involved in very ugly work.
Locations in the Phillipines make this a very gritty, convincing film.
**** 4 Seeds

Meet John Doe - America considers veering left in the thirties, as Gary
Cooper plays a sometime minor-league baseball pitcher hired for a radio show stunt
who ends up connecting with so many listeners that he catches the attention of
politicos who want to groom him to be their policy figurehead. Directed by
Frank Capra in early film noire, this is an anti-corporate film, but more
anti-fascist, and remarkably prescient, presaging Hitler's rise in pre-WWII
Germany. Barbara Stanwyck is captivating as the woman who creates John Doe's
(Gary Cooper's) persona, as is Cooper's sidekick, a railroad-jumping hobo who soon
has more of the media circus than he can stand. Definitely still Hollywood, but one of the
best of all political corruption films and dreamlike in its black and white cinemetography with
1930s New York as the backdrop.
****4 Seeds

Burn! - This movie shows and benefits from Marlon Brando at his finest, the star
still potent in his thirties. Burn! is the antithesis of all England vs Spain colonial
films made in Hollywood. The characters are all filthy and unwashed, there is
no damsel in distress, and the heros are the working class nobody ever bothers
to show in other films set in the Caribbean. Brando plays a sometime mercenary,
who befriends the leader of a slave rebellion, only to use him as a pawn in a scheme
for his employers. Incredibly moving acting all around, with a plot searing with
betrayal and heavy morality, which leaves stunned with a burden of shame for the
heinous deeds done by Europeans in the New World. Never shown on US tv, derided for
being 'untidy' in production, this film is a little too blatant for flag-wavers with
its raw, hard look at the destruction of lives in the Caribbean. Beautiful for
its decidely low-tech correspondent, on the run style, using footage of 70s Haiti.
I saw this movie in a foreign country, and none of us could believe what we were seeing.
*****5 Seeds

Mindwarp - This movie definitely fits the low-budget, B-movie
classification, but what it lacks in budget, it makes up for in creativity
and plot. In a post-Armageddon world, the elites have built an underground
survival chamber where the heroine's mother lives on a sort of life-support
system, tied into virtual reality, where she goes from being an opera diva
to reporter to adventurer. In short, virtual reality is her life. Outside this cocoon, the
poorer masses have fallen into a blood religion dominated by a single,
maniacal dictator, who employs a nifty machine that grinds people whole,
with a faucet for their blood, just like a juicer. The heroine decides to
escape the numbing tedium of virtual reality world, only to have to fight
for her life against the blood cult with the aid of the film's hero, whom
she meets en route, as they both try to risk venturing to the surface.
A b-movie, but I give it high marks for conveying a chilling anti-tech
message and an utterly horrific, claustrophobic mood on minimal resources.
**** 4 Seeds

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