Much to her dismay at times, Kristi married a movie nut – made worse by his preference for flicks that are, well, just weird. I can’t help it. I love movies to begin with, an addiction that goes back to working weekends by myself in a server room with nothing much to do except wait for things to break, while watching an endless parade of movies on my portable DVD player.
The weird movies aren’t supposed to be taken literally. They hit the human condition from an oblique angle, coming up a take on human truth that would be obscured by a more conventional story. That’s what makes really good fantasy fiction – not in the furry-hobbit-ring-quest sense, but instead stories that are speculative and weird and a little like looking at the world through a funhouse mirror. You get the Alice In Wonderland effect. Everything is a bit off, a bit shifted, but the human condition is thrown into a sharper light for it.
Some of my all-time favorite weird movies:
Stranger Than Fiction. A rut-bound IRS auditor (Will Farrell, in a surprisingly serious role) starts hearing a woman’s voice (Emma Thompson) in his head, narrating his life in the third person – and before long, forecasting his imminent death. His only means of avoiding this fate is, with the help of a local lit professor (Dustin Hoffman), to unravel the dynamics of the voice’s “story”. Great movie for English lit geeks.
Brazil. What can I say, it’s a Terry Gilliam flick about a 1984-esque UK, the socially oppressive nature of bureaucracy, and the profound self-delusional power of the human spirit. And bad plastic surgery.
Pi – Faith In Chaos. Darren Aronofsky’s (Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain) debut indie film about a math genius, obsessed with finding a steady numerical pattern underlying the stock market, who gets a lot more than he bargained for when he finds it.
A Scanner Darkly. The best Philip K. Dick adaptation ever made. In a U.S. under constant, all-pervading government surveillance, an undercover narcotics cop – hopelessly addicted to a nasty new street drug called Substance D – is tasked with investigating a D addict who may be deeply connected in the drug’s distribution network. The suspect: him.
Primer. The smartest time travel film I’ve ever seen. A couple of suburban Apple-esque garage hackers accidentally invent a limited form of time travel, and use – and abuse – it the way most average modern real-life suburbanites would. Incredibly smart movie, one you’ll have to see at least twice before really appreciating what the hell is going on. Brilliant, brilliant indie flick.
I Heart Huckabees. This one’s just too bizarre for words. An extremely odd movie about corporate conventionalism, featuring “existential detectives” played by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin. Great film, just way weird.
And probably my favorite all-time weird movie..
Bubba HoTep. Okay, follow me on this one.
Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell) didn’t die in 1977 – that was a damned good Elvis impersonator who swapped lives with Elvis, leaving Presley to live a happy, carefree and unentangled life as an anonymous performer again. Then the real Elvis lost the only proof that he was the real Elvis. Then he broke his hip and ended up in a nursing home in rural Texas, old and bitter and regretful and unbelieved by everyone, trapped forever in the life of an Elvis impersonator. The only one who believes his story is John F. Kennedy – an elderly black resident who insists that the government dyed him black and has part of his brain in a jar in Washington.
When a cursed Egyptian mummy invades their nursing home, only Elvis and JFK – unbelieved and generally considered highly dotty – are left in position to fight it.
Bubba HoTep is my all-time favorite weird movie, just because it’s an entirely insane story idea (based on a novella by Joe R. Lansdale) and has no business working – but it does. And well. What would otherwise be just a goofball idiotic Elvis monster romp actually becomes a highly poignant story about aging, regrets, and reflections on fame, courage and life.
You guys got any over-the-top weird movies that you love and could recommend?