Bizarro Classics
Updated 21 March 2003
5000 Fingers of Dr. T Roy Rowland directed this 1953 Dr Seuss film. It is still available on VHS and many people in the 60's enjoyed it while taking drugs, but that's illegal now.
El Topo This Jodorowsky classic is impossible to find on video but it is unquestionably a classic in weird cinema. It must be 2 1/2 hours long and is a non stop hallucination caught on film. It's great, please, somebody, send us a copy.
FREAKS If you are reading this, there's a 90% chance you've seen this granddaddy of le cinema bizarre. This Tod Browning extravaganza is in a class by itself. Filmed with a troupe of circus freaks it was a little too strong for modern sensibilities and lay buried for a few decades. Briefly, it is the tale of a high flying hussy trapeze artist who seduces little hans away from his diminuitive fiance. She marries him for his money and drugs him into submission. The freaks come to Han's rescue and chickenize the trapeze artist. Zip and Pip are in this. Good stuff. FullMoon pictures has done an awful remake called "Sideshow" with fake freaks. 1932 one hour Unrated
Le Chien Andalou Salvador Dali had a hand in this off the charts strange film that is the cinematic portrayal of something only he understood.
M Peter Lorrie is a whistling child molester/murder in this Fritz Lang talkie. Similar to Freaks, the street urchins band together in the cause of justice. Truly scary. When I first saw this, I waited around at the end because I thought the film had broken. Skip the remake from the fifties. 1931 100 minutes
Eraserhead This may be the only movie other than The English Patient that I walked out of. Not technically a classic, it is in black and white and may well have inspired the sets for Pee Wee's Playhouse. David Lynch made this, but he got better. 1978 90 minutes Unrated
Last Year at Marienbad. Recommended
by Jenny who has impeccable taste. She wrote "Black and White French film from the 60's. A bunch
of upper-classers gather for a retreat at a foreboding gothic
castle, massive POV shifting, constant voice overs, it's almost
like reality stands still, turns in another direction, and then
starts again. One of the strangest movies I have ever seen" ..Coming from her, that is quite a statement. Now on DVD.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) Recommended by Emile Husson who tells us: "...Avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren crafts a rip-roaring montage set in her own mind and accompanied by a free-form soundtrack of drumbeats, voices and instruments most likely created for the film and destroyed immediately afterwards. Laced with psycho-sexual imagery, the film invites the audience to interpret the images and themselves as Deren wends her way through a series of impossible circumstances that fold into one another in multiple loops and an occasional philosophical figure-eight. This should fill your minimum daily symbolic requirement for mirrors, flowers and hooded figures." Thanks Emile ! She may have made it all up, but it sounds enticing.
Plan 9 From Outer space An Ed Wood extravaganza voted the cheeziest film ever made. It was Bel Lugosi's last, in fact he died during production and Ed used his dentist as a stand in to finish the film.
Bajrangbali If you think Americans invented Superman, you've never seen a Hanuman film. This monkey god star of the epic Indian poem Ramayana , has all the super hero moves without having to moonlight at the Daily Planet. Bajranbali is in color and the extra-special effects will compensate for the hard to assimilate myth. Do not watch this movie under the influence of mind altering drugs, it could prove fatal. Starring the incomparable Dara Singh 175 minute Unrated Hindi w/subtitles on DVD/VHS
4000 Maniacs Very bloody if I recall correctly.
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