Weirdest films you've ever heard of or seen

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I'm sure I've seen plenty of weird films, but the two that come to mind are:

Better Off Dead

Cabin Boy (horrible acting but hilarious)

1. Salo (Never watched. No one should ever have the misfortune of watching this. Even reading the Wikipedia entry is hard.)

2. Empire (1964, by Andy Warhol. Eight hours of real time footage of the Empire State Building. Also never watched)

3. Un chien andalou (1929. 16 minutes. This is that movie where a woman's eye is cut open (actually an animal's eye was used). Produced by Luis Bunel and (no surprise) Salvador Dali)

4. Memento (Like "Benjamin Button", but with amnesia)

5. Eraserhead (directed by David Lynch. Like everything Lynch has ever been involved in, is extremely strange and intensely watchable)

6. Being John Malkovich (Man find a tunnel in his office building which leads into the mind of the actor John Malkovich (who plays himself) and after 15 minutes is deposited on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. He sees profit in this. One of the finest dark comedies of the last ten years)

7. Better Off Dead (a very bizarre 80's teen comedy. Also has John Cusack in it, who is tremendous in any role he's in)

8. A Scanner Darkly (based on a book that was already a pretty big mindscrew. The fact that its in rotoscope - a combination of live action and animation - makes it exactly as weird as should be)

9. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (the ultimate document of the shortlived Japanese Cyberpunk film craze of late 80's and early 90's. Bizarre to every extent)

10. El Topo (one of the finest Mexican films ever made. John Lennon's favorite film. Began the "Midnight Movie" craze of the 70's that continues to this day. Also fantastically strange.)

Last edited by DocStrange on 14 Dec 2008, 9:50 am, edited 1 time in total.

You'd love Brazil.

Dwain Esper made some weird movies in the 1930s featuring random inserted footage of things like cats and dogs fighting, for example... .

Maniac is the tale of a vaudevillian serving as an assistant to a doctor who is attempting to raise the dead. He succeeds in raising one dead person with the help of the assistant impersonating the coroner, but the doctor demands "a victim with a shattered heart". Fighting cats and dogs scare the assistant away from the morgue, so the doctor declares "Coward! You have failed me in the greatest moment of my life! Wuhahahaha!", and pulls a gun out of a drawer. Offering the gun, he says "I get it. You work with me you have faith in me. Take this, take it and take your life and I will give it back to you. This beating heart will beat in your body and just think of it you will live! Muhahahah! Live! Muhahahahaha! Live!"

With that the assistant shoots the doctor. "Murder. How horrible. And of my benefactor". He soon discovers that the doctor would be missed and he never would, so he disguises himself and impersonates the doctor. But, oh no, a patient has arrived, believing himself to be "the ourang-outan murderer from Poe's Murder in the Rue Morgue". He stumbles about not knowing what to do so he reaches for the doctor's sachel and finds "Super-adrenaline.... I can't use that. I know... water... That will do no harm and I'll be rid of them". He mixes up the two syringes and injects the patient with superadrenaline. Famously, the patient declares...

"Stealing through my body, creeping through my veins, spilling in my blood, Oh, darts of fire in my brain! Agony! I can't stand this torture! This torment! I can't stand it, I won't I won't!"... He then grabs the revived corpse and takes it away...

We later learn that their pet cat is called Satan. We learn that the neighbour raises cats and rats for fur... "The cats eat the rats, the rats eat the cats, and I get the skins". At one point he claims that the cat Satan has "the gleam" and so he pops out his eye, and observes that "It's not unlike an oyster... or a grape!" and swallows it...

Ah, but there's so much more... including a catfight with hypodermic needles. If you want I can post the links to the Internet Archive from where you can watch Maniac or another Esper picture, Marihuana.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097108/

Unfortunately, once you've watched a movie like this, you can't unwatch it.

The Golden Compass

Yeah, that one was pretty weird. I liked it, it was dull at times but hilarious at others. They used the main theme of that movie for the into of the "Dilbert" animated series!

Begotten

Spirited Away. Period.

As quoted from my Dad ; 'Were the people who made this movie using pot?'

A movie called The Cell.

Weird in a bad way.

A Clockwork Orange
Mask

Apparently without permission, too. Elfman was asked about it in an interview and he said he hadn't heard anything about that. He seemed quite surprised.

The movie Carrie based on Stephen King's novel. After watching it, I felt so depressed and disturbed.

Unlike the myriad of twistedly wierd Japanese and other asian films, The Happiness of the Katakuris is actually pretty light, yet full of wierd. Probably not for young kids, but nothing that would make a nun blush (that I can recall).
It is about a small inn up in the mountains that gets a visitor who ends up killing himself. The movie then busts into a musical bit that comes out of nowhere. It then decends into a hilarious story where the family is clearing out bodies left and right. A bizarre claymation scene caps of the strange movie. I loved it.

i was rather confused after watching dead man. not as much in the middle but at the end. it was so dream like.

Last edited by tinky on 22 Jan 2009, 11:12 am, edited 3 times in total.

Where did you hear that? Elfman wrote the Dilbert theme himself, choosing to recycle his earlier Forbidden Zone theme because it was not well-known. He had Steve Bartek of Oingo Boingo as his usual orchestral arranger.