Oh Guy Maddin is definitely in the weird category.
MrsTobinL loves his stuff. Cowards Bend At The Knee is the only one I have watched all the way through.
The phrase âThe forks. The forks beneath the forksâ from My Winnipeg is sort of code for bizarre film experiences between the significant other & I.
(At a recent local screening of his latest, The Forbidden Room, followed by a Q&A, he apparently was asked multiple times by audience members why he makes such strange & difficult films. Which just seems impolite.)
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Why not. While not something I want to watch as a habit I find them interesting and worth seeing. Just cause you canât put your brain on idle and enjoy the show does not make it something to avoid.
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Thank you for all the recommendations of films. Xx
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You should catch Pistol Opera, the 2001 sequel to Branded to Kill. Even more picturesque, even more funny, even more incomprehensibly plotted.
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Thereâs a showing near me next month as part of a local cinemaâs retrospective on his career. You better believe that I have tickets. 
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I would call that one more camp horror than weird but one of my favorites. Also fun even if it pretty much is the same thing Dr. Phibes Rises Again.
For more cinematic oddities, check out The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre. The fellow who runs this site has compiled an incredibly varied list, from respectable arthouse to revolting gore. He sorts them into three tiers, Recommended, Interesting, and Worthless. I often donât agree with his rankings and his capsule reviews can come off as rather reactionary (donât recall any racism, but thereâs definitely some homo- and transphobia in there), so I recommend you just ponder the titles and ignore the commentary.
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Now that I think about it, the latter: Return of Dr. Phibes, was what I was thinking of. You could tell the 70âs was in full swing with that one.
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We have any Svengoolie fans here?
Iâve been trying for a while to record as many episodes as I could, edited commercial-free, in as high a quality as possible.
Have a few, but then he switched to all B&W 50âs films, which donât have quite the charm of his poking fun at stuff from the 70âs and 80âs and newer.
Been trying to find a reliable source for older ones, like from when I was a kid⌠No dice yet.
the one thing that I regret about not having cableâŚ
I have a huge Antenna I use. But Iâm in broadcasting range.
PM me, and I can share what I have thus far, just 2-3 episodes. Think I have 2 kicking around waiting to be cut and reencoded.
EDIT: Forgot I set a recording schedule last year with Windows Media Center. Have a bunch of new ones waiting to be processed. 21 episodes, but mostly the newer B&W old movies.
Warholâs horror films (Flesh for Frankenstein / Blood for Dracula; Warhol was a producer on both) are entertainngly cheesy, but peak Warhol was Empire.
He aimed a camera at the Empire State Building in the evening, and left it running untouched until 3am the next morning. The film is a completely unedited eight hour long stationary shot.
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Hmmmm⌠According to IMDB, Warhol merely âpresentedâ Flesh for Frankenstein, he was not the producer. IMDB does credit him with producing Blood for Dracula, but even this may not be accurate and/or meaningful. From what I recall from my (long ago) Warhol readings, he merely lent his name to these films, with no creative involvement whatsoever. Granted, one could say the same about his âproductionâ of the first Velvet Underground album, but at least he was (sometimes) in the room while they were recording.
It should also be noted that there has been other confusion about the credits for BfD as, for a long time, Antonio Margheriti was credited as the director in Italy (and perhaps other territories).
Highly recommended films though, especially Dracula.
This has been a most educational and inspiring topic to discuss with you. I now have a long list of films to view. Because I love the weird, and in many ways I think we all do. Thanks
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Itâs like crowd sourcing from Cthuluâs henchmen. Love this scene.
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Iâm guess Iâm not much into weird movies but Iâd put The Piano on the list.
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I saw that. I think my kindergarten sent out permission slips and we all went? or my friends and I talked about it in school, anyway. I donât really remember anything about it at all except I want to say the animation was really good (as you noted.) The parts where they âcame aliveâ had a lot of colors and very magical/epic-looking.
Years later I read my grandparentâs old illustrated copy of the original story and it was really good, I thought. I stayed with my grandparents while i was in 3-4th grade and again 6-7th, canât remember which time it was. I remember thinking it would be for babies, but I was just curious about it because it was so old; it really hooked me, though.
Iâm gonna mention Tetsuo, the Iron Man. Thatâs about as weird a movie as Iâve seen. ah, @anon75430791 has mentioned it.
And Lynch, of course. Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are fairly well-known but much weirder than his usual. Ditto Cronenberg stuff (Crash, Spider, everything, really.)
the Peter Sellers film Being There is pretty weird, maybe not in the same way as most of the films ITT, but still far-out. In the same sense, Kung-Fu Hustle is a weird movie thatâs designed for a general audience. theyâre both weird without demanding anything of the audience, I guess.
I like â80s weirdâ but mainstream movies like UHF, the Tapeheads, Something Wild, Buckaroo Banzai and Repo Man. Hardly obscure, but weird compared to the average film. I just recently saw Body Double on TV, thatâs an â80s weirdâ film thatâs actually more far-out than the others; it intentionally breaks down the ârealityâ experienced by the protag, and the viewerâs experience of ârealâ versus the fabricated nature of movies is manipulated a lot (the protag is a hollywood actor.)
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Basically: Richard Williams is the guy who did the animation for Roger Rabbit, but before that heâd been working on a personal project for about a decade at that point, and needed money. He was hired on to help animate Raggedy Ann & Andy for cash, but when the director quit, the producers begged him to direct it himself. He refused until they told him he could hire his own crew. So he hired basically every amazing legendary animator he could find: Emery Hawkins, Grim Natwick, Art Vitello, Corny Cole, Tissa David, Art Babbitt, Eric Goldberg, Tom Sito, the Kroyers, and tons of others. So as a movie itâs sort of weird and awkward and not so great, but the animation is often jawdropping, and the Joe Raposo songs are pretty great.
Richard Williams animated Raggedy Andy himself, and itâs kind of crazy to watch.
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I guess it depends on your definition of weird. Movies like âEl Topoâ or âEraserheadâ are kind of âobviously weirdâ, but I like movies that make you think weird thoughts, a good example is âThe Man From Earthâ, one of those movies where people are just standing around discussing ideas. âMindwalkâ is another good example, and Iâm sure we are all familiar with âMy Dinner With Andreâ, but have you ever seen âThe Wifeâ from 1995 also starring Wallace Shawn? Thatâs basically an exploration of social discomfort, watching a bunch or people slowly have mental breakdowns.
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