Part 1
A second year of these awards, and not only is it a nice breath of fresh air to be indulgent, it feels more important as I considered not even having this, only to realise the necessary to stop and focus on the last year. The delay means that the "year" is between June (18th) 2019 and the middle of June 2020, but the detail of what stood out among so many reviews, and what was gained, is worthwhile regardless pedantic timing.
Ahead of myself, I will say that I intend to take a new subtle direction with the blog, nothing drastic at the moment but that I am going to clean items up. The updates to Blogger.com itself have influenced the look of the work itself, but in terms of what and how I am covering material, I have already detailed this HERE but want to add a new detail. Even from that, I have reconsidered ideas from that blog post to streamline the entire blog further. Until that point where those ideas take full effect, let us close "Season Two" with all the fascinating details of the period.
By starting off with the less the memorable work covered, but hey, start from the bottom and work our way up.
Most Disappointing
The
Summer of the Massacre (2011)
Dishonourable
Mentions: Blubberella (2011); Swept
Away (2002); Double Down (2005); Xtro II (1990)
With any series of reviews, you will unfortunately come across some disappointments. I have decided, as last time, not to use the term "Worst" as it feels cruel and unfair to use the term. This is more so as, subjectively, no film can be the worst even if on a large consensus if it can be proven to have one fan. These for me are those that a) were undermined by the weight of expectation or b) really missed the mark badly. Also, yes, I covered Cats (2019), which has already become a notorious failure, but it still did not get on the list. I would gladly revisit the film, and I have to confess to even having fond memories of it, all in spite of it having been dreadful on that viewing and the fact that, trekking to a cinema to see how bad it could be, it led to me being stuck walking home at night afterwards. This is all because of how "jellicle cats" can sometimes pop into my thoughts unexpectedly.
As for the list itself, morally the remake Swept Away should have taken the award. For its first half it is a serviceable, if inferior, take on Lina Wertmüller's intentionally uncomfortable film on gender politics from 1974. What Guy Ritchie and then-wife Madonna's English language remake did afterwards, with a tale of a chauvinist working class man and a spoilt wife of a rich man stuck on an island together, is wrongheaded and even kept in the mock attempted rape scene for what is now meant to be a sincere tale of doomed romance. The film is one of the most tone deaf projects one could ever conceive, full of utterly putrid syrup in the midst of it which stinks of complete egotism.
But, you have a lot of competition. Xtro II is a rare case of a film even its director hates, belonging to that category of films borrowing from Alien (1979) its entire plot but not doing anything remotely of interest. Double Down (2005) was my first Neil Breen film, and yet even as a defender of very divisive low budget work, it was effectively Breen making himself a hero by way of a convoluted hodgepodge of humanitarian ideas and not a lot of interesting content; the only interesting aspect is that, with its monologues from its director-start over metaphorical imagery, this was effectively non-budget Terence Malick is you think about it hard enough if no way near as good. Blubberella (2011) was unfortunately my first Uwe Boll film on the blog, and whilst it seems pointless to punch down a director everyone else punched down, the sad folly of making this shot-by-shot parody of another of his films, but without preparation or time as research suggests, lead to him fall into some egregious and even tasteless jokes. Blackface tastelessness to be blunt, which should have been idiotic back in 2011, but is worse now to consider in 2020.
The Summer of the Massacre (2011) sadly takes the first position however as, whilst finding a soft spot of special effect creator and director Joe Castro, the film was an unbearable experience above the others. A slasher film anthology with the record for the highest body count has one huge artistic choice, to be as nihilistic and grotesque as possible, that made it tediously awful to sit through. Even if the artistic style, a Bosch-like hell of post-computer effect collage, is compelling to witness, the attitude and tone became unendurable without any point to it. It is a sad award to give out as a result as another film on the list involving Madonna should have won it, but this sadly turned out worse.
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The No-Budget Award
Who
Killed Captain Alex? (2010)/Crazy World (2014)/Bad Black (2016)
Honourable Mentions: Hallucinations (1986); Terror Toons 3 (2015); Scary Movie (1991); Death Metal Zombies (1995)
The title might offend some, who might prefer "Micro-Budget", but this award is named after the podcast No-Budget Nightmares, which was entirely responsible for my interest and open-mindedness to this type of cinema, to which this award is hence a tribute to the show.
Why do I watch these films? Unpredictability and their sense of hard earned filmmaking on little budgets. Death Metal Zombies (1995) is the stereotype for what this type of cinema is, a shot-on-video zombie film with homemade production and goofiness, but it lives up to that title and even managed to get a soundtrack of actual death metal to boot. In contrast, it can be debated that Scary Movie (1991), not to be confused with the 2001 parody film, is not as low budget enough to qualify, but it would be a shame to not give this long unavailable regional production one nod in this series of posts. Entirely built around a single idea, that there might be a killer hidden themselves in a haunted house and a character as our lead who is already of a nervous disposition before he learns of this, Scary Movie works as a low budget horror film. Not complex in narrative, not unpredictable, but idiosyncratic and moody and all you could wish for.
In complete contrast, Terror Toons 3 (2015) really is the kind of mad production that is an acquired taste, in the same grimy ballpark of The Summer of the Massacre (2011) but thankfully, from Joe Castro as well, contrasting that earlier production by being so much intentionally stranger and having a sense of humour, even if it is a grotesque humour that will put some people off. Meanwhile, Hallucinations (1986), in which three young men, with no other resources or cast members, shot this horror film on video at home, is both strange but also has everything that encapsulates these films' instinctual motto, that they originated from ordinary film fans like myself managing to put a production together regardless of their restrictions.
But one film director and his home community above every other has to take the prize. A studio which takes that motto, and became an honest-to-God fairy tale that happened in real life, a timeline shown in three films taking the prize all directed by Nabwana (I.G.G.) Isaac Geoffrey Godfrey. Never was there a beautiful tale, than the community of Wakaliga, and their Wakaliwood studio, throughout the 2010s than when Who Killed Captain Alex, a low budget action film made in a community where they literally had little resources, exploded online in popularity and a sincere love thankfully took over than irony. The timeline is skewered as Crazy World came after Bad Black, because it was premiered in a final version in 2019 at the Toronto International Film Festival, but they show the progression and love I.G.G. clearly put in his work. So this award rightly goes to the commandos of Ugandan action cinema.
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Best Production
Honourable Mentions: Serial Experiments Lain (1998); Psycho (1960); Don't Hug Me. I'm Scared (2011-16); In Fabric (2018)
Also it is worth mentioning is Our Lady of the Turks (1968) and Horse Money (2014), two wildly different types of films that could have easily taken this award, which as my award is a nod to all aspects to production from the cinematography to the production design itself.
All the films that have gotten honourable mentions are such a diverse selection, which shows just what "production", and the craft of everyone involved in any project, can entail and should not be ignored. From all the various forms of animation used in Don't Hug Me. I'm Scared to Psycho in its original context, a risk in Alfred Hitchcock's career that required him to film in monochrome with the camera crew from his television work, to Peter Strickland's alien and weird horror film with tinges of British hauntology and Serial Experiments Lain, the one TV series on the list, being an anime series which was allowed to be experimental whilst working on a television schedule, this is a fascinating handful to watch to see how, in live action and animation, diverse and unique productions can look.
The winner The Lighthouse really encapsulates this in creating its own world, a pre-20th century reality, of nautical Lovecraftian horror which went out of its way to even use archaic camera equipment from the early 1900s to having a 1.19:1 aspect ratio. Again, any of these projects could deserve the award; The Lighthouse admittedly wins because somehow this film was released by a major American studio in 2019 and was a success without compromise to its vision.
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The Weirdest
And now for one of the indulgent awards, as I have always adored the Weirdest in cinema, and culture in general, and I relished this as much as last year to write even if structually this looks very different on page to the other awards.
How do you define the weirdest in a blog about the abstract? A question asked in the first award posts, but the answer was simple then and now - those works which truly baffle in their existence, whose histories are peculiar, or are weird by purpose or accident. It is an award where some of the most abstract and even surreal work might not even appear, because this list is designed for the "weird" of what I have covered is less about the mood, but the stories and contexts for work that baffle the mind instead.
It is also the category with probably the biggest list of candidates, leaving some off due to the size of the list. Our Lady of the Turks (1968), Camelo Bene's first film, is a strange and surreal odyssey, but I would consider that it is not "weird", even if it does have the peculiar sight of Bene injecting his own buttock in the middle of the outdoor section of a cafe. The Bride of Frank (1996), a true obscurity of no budget filmmaking from New York City, is practically as rancid as most of its content deliberately is, a peculiar slice of tangent ridden weirdness. And Rinse Dream's Nightdreams 3 (1991), whilst will be seen as a disappointment after the aesthetically rich adult films like Cafe Flesh (1982), is still the less conventional porn film you could watch in its continuous repetition and extreme level of limited production value. It also says a lot that Xtro (1983), Hallucinations and Ticket of No Return (1979) did not even get on the list either, and many viewers not used to this type of cinema would find them strange.
15. Speaking of adult films, what does one say of Batpussy (1973)? No one can confirm who made it, what the actual names of the amateur cast are, and how it came to be. The only way someone has possibly confirmed where it was made is due to a tattoo on the lead male's buttocks. All we know is that it is likely the first parody adult film, in which Batman is now a woman who travels by way of Space Hopper, that the main couple's bickering is a little bit close to home, and that a print was discovered in an old closed cinema. That print became an obsession for the company Something Weird Video, and now we can watch it in a 2K Blu Ray Restoration. If that isn't weird, what is?
14. Speaking of inexplicable, explain how television studio NBC came to creating Steel Justice (1992) as a television pilot? A cyberpunk dystopia is one thing that can sell as a premise, with a stereotypical moody male cop, but then you add an ageless wizard trying to teach him how to be able to grow small things into large things. Then add that the cop has a toy robot dinosaur possessed by the soul of his slain son, which when turned big in the conclusion is an excuse to use real life spectacle Robosaurus as existing spectacle, a literal machine-vehicle hybrid used in spectacle shows to crush cars and project fire from its flamethrowers. Not surprisingly, this did not get a full season, but God only imagine how they would try to write episode 2.
13. Terror Toons 3 (2015) came as a grimy, sick and compelling bizarre surprise. I revisited the original 2002 Terror Toons out of a curious sense of nostalgia, fully aware I hated the film when I watched it a long time ago, but softening to its existence as an adult regardless of it not being my cup of tea. Thanks to Terror Toons, its director Joe Castro, an obscure and prolific micro budget director who works as well as a practical effects designer, is in my radar to watch as much of his work as possible and cover it, particularly out of a growing fascination with individuals like him who make many films over the years in this territory. It is also as much because of this perplexing mash-up of a film-long massacre of a hospital, and a perverse take on Little Red Riding Hood with added werewolf cock and homoeroticism, a concoction that drilled itself into my brain. The aesthetic alone, an early Carcass grindcore album cover for Saturday morning cartoons and done with digital collage, is something you have never witnessed.
12. Managing to be even more horrifying - how has an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats (2019) managed to get onto this list? Oh boy, how could it not, from the controversy surrounding just a trailer, to director Tom Hooper's misguided idea to create digitally realistic cats sculpted from their human cast members, to the actual experience of the production when watched. From the fact the premise is twisted the longer you think about it - a death cult when humanoid cats win the chance to die in a talent contest - to all the sudden intrigue of an alternative early cut with the buttholes on the cats un-erased which became a Twitter phenomenon in early 2020, I find myself every time thinking about Cats being amused and delighted by it. Rarely do mainstream Hollywood disasters really qualify as strange, but this managed to be a rare example of such.
11. Continuing on with music, Broken (1993) in its mere existence is strange. When a famous musician, Trent Reznor, feels so trapped in his record contract he felt he had to have a fake snuff film horror short commissioned to accompany his angry industrial metal album, it is not something you commonly see. Even the history and elusiveness of the creation when you include it in the short's narrative, that it has never been properly released or how many times Reznor has been aware of it being "leaked" over the decades, (secretly by himself in many cases), adds to its bizarre nature as a production.
10. Raul Ruiz deservedly gets a place on this list, and like last year when he got on this list, it is two films for the price of one. The Golden Boat (1990), one of his only American films, is bizarre as a dreamlike and dark tale of a killer who doesn't die, shoes in piles being discovered on the streets of New York City, and Ruiz taking clichés from American television and soap operas and mangling them. The Wandering Soap Opera (2017) structurally has a poignant but added oddness; long after his death in 2011, Ruiz is still having films premiere in film festivals because he made so much and because his widow Valeria Sarmiento, bless her as an accomplished film maker in her own right and editor of many of his productions, is uncovering unfinished projects and releasing them in a final form. This, a project from a filming workshop, has the added poignancy of being the first time he stepped back on Chilean soil, an exile from his homeland, whilst still being as strange as The Golden Boat, between people developing eggs out of their armpits and soap operas about people watching soap operas.
9. Even Raul Ruiz though might have found All This and World War II (1976) perplexing though. As it is a 20th Century Fox project, unless the rumours are true the prints were destroyed after its theatrical run, this is another title that the House of Mouse are going to sit on and do nothing with. It would be difficult to try to sell why it even came to be mind though, and I would not be surprised that, even if Hell froze over and we got a public release, many would watch it without scratching their heads. Blame the attempt to cash on Beatlemania, even into the seventies after the Fab Four split up, as it led to their music being rerecorded by the likes Rod Stewart or Keith Moon, spliced to a visual archive history of how World War II started and ended. It is one of those projects I cannot believe actually existed. Rob Stewart barking Get Back whilst Nazi goose-stepping footage is manipulated to make them look like they are retreating is at least creative; trying to explain I Am The Walrus covered by Leo Sayer over the Pearl Harbour attack or the Americans in the Pacific War in combat is absolutely perplexing, and that is just one such example.
8. Tusk (2014) is another "mainstream" film which is strange in its existence. If it had just been an ironically bad film as I had been led to presume it to be, where Kevin Smith came up with the premise on an episode of podcast, getting fans to vote whether to make a walrus based horror movie or not, then I would have not covered Tusk unless out of morbid curiosity. That he decided to make a film that is sincere in its darkness, both in the gruesome practical effects and the psychological drama it involves, but also has an extended dialogue about poutine causing extreme diarrhea is a juggling act that got the film on the list.
7. Sincerely made and entirely without potential irony, Surviving Edged Weapons (1988) is an instructional training video for police officers about tackling knife and bladed weapon attacks. Not a parody, an actual instruction training video few might know of, and I only know of because some people have created a little cult around it. The testimony is sincere, and it should be respected for its thought and emotion on the subject. The video also starts with a caveman shanking another one with an edged weapon and gets stranger from there, hence why it is here. From unexpected Satanic panic set pieces to a literal wig splitting, this instructional video is compelling as much as cult film viewing as it has to be admired for its heart on its sleeve.
6. Some may consider it cheating to include an entry from last year's class on this year's category again, and next year I am banning rewatches from these awards. Before that rule comes into play, let us cheat once because last year I mentioned how I was still thinking of the web series of Lasagna Cat (2007-2017), feeling my review back then (multiple parted too) was not good enough and deciding to return to the project here. Here I can close the book on this massive Fatal Farm project, still in hindsight on of the most ambitious and peculiar projects for the web you can find, in its ambition in the second season, that came ten years later out of the blue, to a five plus hour final episode which ends on a gruesome reincarnation metaphor for the Garfield newspaper strip. It is something so magnificently unique it does deserve to cheat and appear twice.
5. On the Air (1992) managed however to be even weirder from merely a few episodes because, whilst he only directed the first episode and wrote the last, it is a cancelled David Lynch television series where he was allowed to make a comedy. It has all his idiosyncrasies and peculiarities but with a new touch that, after starting the series on a high in the pilot, his Twin Peak era collaborators had to try to follow him. They managed to, and with increasingly added numbers of ducks along the way, this comedy set on a ninety fifties variety show is weird.
4. Following from this, the next two entries are the micro budget oddities. Wicked World (1991), which has gained a Blu Ray release from American Genre Film Archives, is a problematic film at times, trying too much in its extremity and with a dated view on political correctness, but from the lead actor of Things (1989), this Canadian exploitation production is a strange production. Built over multiple decades, cut and placed together with an erratic pace, and an end credit sequence as prolonged as the choking sequence from Hip Hop Locos (2001), it became one of the highest ranked films this year in terms of the Abstract Rating and for good reason.
3. Just beating it however is Love on a Leash (2011), also from an actor who on her own imitative created a shot on digital film, as erratically put together but from the 2010s in which a princess and a frog fairy tale is depicted with emotional whiplashes, incredible amounts of darkness before you get a happy ending, and an annoying jokey voice over for a talking dog.
2. In terms of a premise that managed to stand higher above everyone else than this however, Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998), in which he remade Alfred Hitchcock's seminal thriller shot-by-shot, is undoubtedly one of the strangest projects to have ever been executed. It is a deeply flawed, baffling and yet a production which, as someone who admires the original film but does not consider it Hitchcock's finest, has a compelling nature to it trying to update not only the premise but update it in (almost) exact replica as a cinematic séance. Again like Cats, but a significantly better film for all its failings, this is a rare Hollywood production which does confound in its existence.
1. What is the only thing above it and everything else, the project whose history is so weird that it wins the award as well as built its notoriety over the years before I encountered it? One of the most notorious and strangest productions to have come from mainstream American television, in which the king of gritty cop shows, executive producer Steven Bochco, decided to make another for the new decade of the ninety nineties but make it also a musical. When Cop Rock (1990) plummets, it is embarrassing, but when it succeeds, it is spectacular. Trying to still tackle police corrupt and crime in Los Angeles, uncomfortably prescient to the Rodney King beating and following riots that would take place in Los Angeles only a few years later, it is ambitious with one of its main plot threads being a corrupt cop shooting an African American suspect dead, but also has songs shown in elaborate dance sequences between ballads to hip hop. Even today due to the unfortunate issues we are still tackling in terms of racism and the place of police, this show has managed to stay relevant, even if there is also a song about selling babies on the black market. The contradiction makes it still peculiar to sit through, and when it was good, I found it deserved so much more praise than it ever got back in its day.
To Be Continued....
