Weir Movies

Some of my favourite movies, but all of them extremely weird.

"Weir" was a typo I noted too late; missed to type in the "d".

And what is your opinion on Zardoz?

Friede, it was SO long ago that I can't even remember, plus I was baked at the time.  Sorry, wish I could recall

II loved it, but I agree Sean Connery in a red diaper is an acquired taste.

I will give a short synopsis of each movie, taken from IMDB:

The Pontsman: A woman gets off a train by mistake and finds herself stranded alone with a peculiar man who doesn't even speak her language.

The Holy Mountain: In a corrupt, greed-fueled world, a powerful alchemist leads a Christ-like character and seven materialistic figures to the Holy Mountain, where they hope to achieve enlightenment.

El Topo: A mysterious black-clad gunfighter wanders a mystical Western landscape encountering multiple bizarre characters.

Viva la Muerte: At the end of the Spanish civil war, Fando, a boy of about ten, tries to make sense of war and his father's arrest. His mother is religious, sympathetic to the Fascists; his father is accused of being a Red. Fando discovers that his mother may have aided in his father's arrest. Sometimes we witness Fando imagining explanations for what's going on; sometimes we see him at play, alone or with his friend Thérèse. Oedipal fantasies and a lad's natural curiosity about sex and death mix with his search for his mother's nature and his father's fate. Will Fando survive the search?

Zardoz: In the distant future, a savage trained only to kill finds a way into the community of bored immortals that alone preserves humanity's achievements.

Mulhhollandd Drive: After a car wreck on the winding Mulholland Drive renders a woman amnesiac, she and a perky Hollywood-hopeful search for clues and answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality.

The synopsis for "Viva la Muerte" is quite long, but then it is perhaps the weirdest movie of them all. Here one of the weirdest scenes from it. Careful, it is quite disgusting, as many scenes in that movie. The scene I mean starts at 1:57





Edited by BaldFriede - November 01 2015 at 20:02

THX 1138 is a movie Jean and I could have starred in.

I never saw it completely; only some scenes. But I remember the bald people. Well, we two are a bit balder than they were even.

Ok, we will. I just found the full movie on youtube. Unfortunately it is with German synchronization; we would have preferred it in the English original. But since we both speak German it is no problem to watch it.


Edited by BaldFriede - November 01 2015 at 20:34

We watched and.. um.. had no real idea what was going on. O.k., there is this totalitarian system, and some people don't fit in -- this is not a new idea, see "Brave New World" or "1984". But in the whole it wass extremely weird.

I should have added "Weekend" by Jean-Luc Godard. Synopsis: A supposedly idyllic week-end trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.

CPicard wrote: I've only seen half of the these movies: - Mullholland Drive: I've enjoyed it, but I don't feel it like being weird... Huh, maybe am I too much of a weirdo myself to be puzzled by this one...? Anyway, for me, it's a perfect example of pure cinema, since the scenario seems to be only driven by pure esthetical researches. - Zardoz: to my eyes, it looked like a version of Logan's Run directed by the Monty Python. I mean, it's not a bad movie, but it's on the verge of ridiculous. I guess the British sense of camp have found its way to the direction. And about the outfits (especially Connery), at least there is a visual coherence... - El Topo: I have heavily mixed feelings about this one. I still can't say it it's the work of a true innovator that I didn't understand, a misdirected and half-missed movie or a stupid joke from a bufoon. By the way, there are a couple I would like to recommend to you: - Hausu: a 1977 Japanese movie about a haunted house. Expect a true surrealist experience! - Alucarda, la hija de las tiniebras (Alucarda, the daughter of the darkness): a Mexican horror movie, about a young girl growing up in a convent only to be confronted to the forces of evil... It may be ridiculous at some scenes (and I admit having laughed more than a couple of times), but the costumes of the nuns and the set-up (the walls of the convent look like a mixture of organs, honey and God only knows what else!)

Oh, I know the standard explanation for "Mulholland Drive", but it has holes; there are too many things in the movie that are not explained by that.

The standard explanation is that the first part is a dream and the second part reality. But in a dream you are always at the scene, even if only as an observer. But the character who is supposed to be dreaming is in many scenes not present at all, which in my opinion collapses the dream hypothesis completely.


Edited by BaldFriede - November 02 2015 at 06:15