Curious Productions

One of the great gifts of cinema (among its many gifts) is that there are always great moviemakers and actors all over the world yet to discover.

So one day, a friend, a family member, or in my case, a girlfriend (soon to be my wife!), introduces you to movies that blow your mind and that you never knew existed.

My amazing wife, Martha, introduced me to the movies of ridiculously talented director, Ismael Rodriguez, and his collaborations with equally ridiculously talented movie star, Pedro Infante.  

Discovering these movies (thank you Martha!) was like discovering the best ice cream bar in the world and realizing you will never get sick of its abundant flavors.

Whether you are just an avid movie watcher or a rabid movie maker (or both), your journey to find and watch these movies will be rewarded tenfold.

Often considered the director/actor pair that most exemplify Mexico’s golden age of Cinema (the 1940’s-1950’s), Ismael Rodriguez and Pedro Infante made a string of movies  that somehow manage to have everything: great musical numbers, hilarious comedy, great character acting, moving stories of family and romantic couples, tragic melodrama, inventive cinematic sequences.

One of their most (if not most) famous collaborations, Nosotros, Los Pobres (We, The Poor;  1948) is a perfect example. Infante plays a poor carpenter, Pepe El Toro (Pedro the Bull), who refuses to tell his daughter the truth about her mother.  Everyone in the neighborhood gossips that Pepe may have killed his wife.  Yet we can see that Pepe is a truly good man and so the movie, in essence, is the revealing of what really happened.

While Nosotros Los Pobres is not my favorite Rodriguez-Infante collaboration, it is possibly the one I most greatly admire. Somehow, Rodriguez and Infante shine a light on poverty, find mercy for characters many people judge, tell a riveting (if overly melodramatic) tale of the streets, AND throw in 2-3 classic musical numbers, as well as 4th wall breaking cinematic devices that would make Jean Luc Godard blush.

Here is a video clip of Infante singing Amorcito Corazon, my personal favorite song of all the movies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST0ceoPeV1Y

Pedro Infante IS one of the great international stars of cinema. He is like Toshiro Mifune, Frank Sinatra, and Jimmy Cagney all rolled into one.  He can sing, crack jokes, play intense drama, and damn, if he doesn’t get all the women too.

Ismael Rodriguez is a genius wunderkind kid giddy at the tools of cinema. That Rodriguez, here in the United States, is not spoken of more often in the same sentences that praise Steven Spielberg, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, reflects poorly on those of us who make the omission.  Rodriguez is that good.

Here are just a few recommendations from their many collaborations. These just happen to be my personal favorites (and I still have a number to go!):

Los Tres Garcia (The Three Garcias, 1947): One of Rodriguez and Infante’s earlier collaborations, the movie centers on three competitive cousins, their cigar chomping grandmother (the hilarious Sara Garcia), and a visiting distant female relative the three cousins all fall for romantically.  It’s filled with hilarious cinematic bits (a scene involving three portraits of their fathers is particularly funny), dream sequences, and clever visual bits that keep you laughing with amazement. One of my favorite moments is when Infante dreams that the Female Relative truly loves him. As she embraces him, she asks who the distant women are crying in black (in a dream sequence Bergman would have been proud of). Infante looks at them and says, “Las abandonadas” (The abandoned).  Implying that they are all the women Infante has said no to so that he could be with her.  But what Rodrigues does in the subsequent scenes is really what gives this scene its genius.  The movie DOES not go where you think it’s going to go.

In Los Tres Huestecos  (The Three From Huesteco, 1948): Infante plays all three brothers: a gambler, a priest, and a soldier.  Rodriguez and Infante have tremendous fun playing both on Infante’s celebrity persona as a mujeriego (a ladies man) by having him play a celibate priest who lovingly disapproves of the activities of his two brothers.  

Huestecos also has one of my favorite scenes of all time.  Infante, as the gambler, goes home to his secret forest hideaway (complete with monkeys, exotic birds, etc.). There he has an extended scene of comedy with his wild, tough as nails, five year old daughter, Tucita (which means corn husk because she’s blonde), who loves guns, spiders, and snakes.  When Tucita holds up a tarantula and laughs at her father for not being macho, you’ll know you are seeing a very singular kind of scene.

Lastly, there is my own personal favorite, Dos Tipos De Cuidado (Two Careful Fellows, 1953) which may be the best written, best plotted, best paced of them all.  Pedro Malo (literally Pedro the Bad) and his friend, Jorge Bueno (Jorge the Good), have a falling out at the beginning of the movie over a misunderstanding involving Jorge’s girlfriend.  Without knowing what’s happened, we jump in time by a year, and see that Pedro is living with Jorge’s girlfriend and she’s having a baby.  As the movie unfolds, bit by bit, we learn what has really happened. And now the two Dudes of Caution find out nothing is as it seemed and to do right, they have to help the women in their lives and each other.  A truly Shakespearean comedy of errors ensues.

*** Cinema is filled with director-actor collaborations that are much more than the sum of their parts.  Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune.  Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.  Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina. And here Ismael Rodriguez and Pedro Infante.

There is no format-written or otherwise-that could possibly fully express my love, esteem,and feeling about the body of work of German moviemaker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  Having set myself up now for an impossible task, I shall still  try to do some justice to his unruly yet disciplined, scalpel-like genius.

He may not win you over on the first or second movie of his that you see. They are all so different. Such odd ducks all of them, that it may not be until the third or fourth movie that a creeping feeling will well up in your soul that you are watching the work of one of cinema’s greatest geniuses. 

Fassbinder worked at such a blistering pace, his name is synonymous with an impossible level of output.  He usually wrote, directed, and produced between 3-4 movies a year until his cocaine fueled, sleep-lacking, roman candle death at 37 in 1982.  Fassbinder died a year younger than I am right now and had directed 44 movies, tv programs, shorts in total.  

But quantity is NOT quality.  What makes Fassbinder a Jupiter among the galaxy of international moviemakers is that almost all of those 44 movies were works of genius or near genius, permeated with a whip-smart, razor cutting sensibility that spared nobody.

Here are 5 Fassbinder gems that are personal favorites.  They are feasts all:

KATZELMACHER (1969): One of Fassbinder’s earliest feature films, it plays somewhere between an early Godard movie and a John Hughes movie gone straight to hell.  A group of young disillusioned Germans go about their daily routines, sexual dalliances, relationships, spewing cutting dialogue about their country, themselves, and their lovers.  The movie is stylistically fun and structurally loose but Fassbinder’s withering command of his culture’s and generation’s flaws is already at 200%.  This is nitro-inspiration for any moviemaker starting out.

BEWARE A HOLY WHORE (1971): Supposedly this movie, about a movie crew slowly tearing each other apart during their breaks in their hotel while they wait to shoot a movie by a horrifically manipulative director, is about the making of WHITY (1971), I think, a movie Fassbinder had just written and directed. This movie is hilarious and jaw dropping in that Fassbinder seems to be one of the only moviemakers I know willing to show what a raging a@@h@le and spoiled infant he is.  But that only buys him the permissibility to then go after every one of his crew with equally lacerating vitriol.  

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975):  The heartbreaking story of a good-hearted gay man who is exploited by all his supposed “friends” and “lovers” when he comes into money.  This, for me, is the quintessence of what makes Fassbinder great.  Fassbinder (who stars in this movie and often appeared in his own films and did a great job!) was an openly bi-sexual artist who had several very intense gay love affairs in the 1970’s.  This movie is a testament to his integrity as an artist that he was willing to both celebrate and rigorously question/examine the cosmopolitan gay sub-culture of which he was a part. 

IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS (1978): This movie is my personal favorite and one of my top 30 movies of all time.  It’s the story of Elvira, who got a sex change to please a lover who promptly ignores her.  Elvira tries to make sense of her life and her choices across a three day period.  It’s impossible to describe the sublimeness of this movie.  Fassbinder wrote, directed, shot, edited, and produced it in the aftermath of his long term lover, Armin’s suicide.  It’s almost unbearably emotional.  Along with the best works of Jean Renoir, I submit this movie as the most incisive portrait of what it means to be human. 

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980): Before THE WIRE, before Lars Von Triers’ THE KINGDOM, before all the great TV of the last 15 years, there was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 14 hour German television adaptation of one of the great German novels, BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ.  It follows poor schlub, Hans Biberkopf, newly released from prison as he tries to make it in 1920’s Germany.  Biberkopf, we slowly come to realize, is exactly the kind of German who will be susceptible to fascism, Hitler, and Nazism in the 1930’s.  But we see exactly why.  But not only this, we get a tv series that for 12 hours is basically very naturalistic and then for its final two hours. . .well I don’t want to spoil it.  But it’s one of the most audacious stylistic daring choices I’ve ever seen.  And it inspires me constantly.

*** Fassbinder once said in a questionnaire given to him by grade school children (!) that he never intended to live to see old age.  He was right. I’m angry at Fassbinder for denying me 10-40 more years of his genius.  But I also sense, in that horrible way that almost makes no sense, that it had to be this way to get the movies we got.  He doesn’t strike me as a person who was ever at peace with himself or his world.   But somehow he spun that discontent and frustration and brilliance into 44 amazing cinematic works.

As I inch ever so closer to shooting my first feature film, Spin The Bottle, a voice has whispered to me, from some far off place, to watch movies I love that I haven’t seen for awhile.

I tend to watch a group of about 30 movies at least once or twice a year.  I never tire of them as an audience member let alone a moviemaker.  

But, this voice whispered, maybe re-visiting some of the movies that opened up the cinematic world to you as a teenager and movie student might bring you back in contact with that buzzing feeling you had when you realized all the possibilities.

When you hear such a voice, you should give it its due so it doesn’t go away frustrated and unappreciated.

So I trudged to my local library and rented Luis Bunuel’s 1963 surreal masterpiece from Mexico, The Exterminating Angel, and Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 Polish masterwork, Ashes and Diamonds; two movies I loved when I saw them years ago.

The Exterminating Angel is one of my three favorite Bunuel movies (Viridiana and Los Olvidados  are the other two).  It tells the hilariously surreal tale of a group of rich Mexican city-dwellers who meet one night for a dinner party. At the beginning of the movie, all the servants, save one Butler, feel strangely compelled to leave the Hostess’s house.  After the dinner, all the Rich Dinner Guests feel strangely compelled to stay in one room.  Slowly, to their horror, they realize that some unseen force is keeping them from leaving (and the Servants, By-Standers outside from coming in) and the Dinner Guests slowly descend, across several days, into barbarism, homicidal thoughts, suicide-love pacts, and assorted dark comic hilarity as they try to observe societal manners in a totally surreal situation.

The Exterminating Angel’s underlying subconscious logic is perfect like an unflawed diamond.  You laugh as the Rich Dinner Guests start to snipe at each other.  Resentments surface. Affairs are revealed.  The illusion of the Rich being the “civil class” is comically slammed down.  Yet, the movie is stranger and more mysterious than that. It gets at deeper human truths through a comically non-sensical and nightmarish situation.  I always laugh (like big guffawing belly laugh type laugh) when an unexplained bear appears in the mansion walking up and down the stairs.  Since the guests can’t leave their room, they can only watch the bear in confusion.  What does it mean? Who knows. Does it work?  Completely.

Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 Polish movie, Ashes and Diamonds, was the third in a trilogy of movies dealing with Poland during World War II.  It all takes place across one roughly 24 hour period from the botched assassination of a Communist Minister through the night when the Assassins work up the nerve to try again to the aftermath the next morning.

Ashes and Diamonds achieves something miraculous for me.  While it brilliantly, ironically, intensely examines all the cross-currents that were affecting Poland at the end of World War II-Communism, poverty, the ravages of the war, social ladder climbing, what kind of country Poland would be after its liberation-it is also a deeply moving story about two young people who, against their natures, fall in love across one night.  I think the best movies have a simultaneous clarity and mystery about them.  You feel, subconsciously, that they work and yet you don’t feel beat over the head by a “message”.  Ashes and Diamonds is one of the best examples of this kind of small miracle.  You sense that the young couple (the amazing actor Zbigniew Cybulski, a beatnik Polish powerhouse actor burning with the same modern incandescence as Marlon Brando or Toshiro Mifune, who plays the Assassin, and Ewa Krzyzewska who plays Krystyna, a hardened guarded bartender) represent the frustrated potential of young Poles in the 40’s and 50’s, victims of their country and continent’s brutality.  And yet they are also living breathing young people who have an amazing affair across the night.

Ashes and Diamonds is also one of those rare movies where the amazing atmospheric style, camerawork, cross-cutting, editing completely supports, enhances, and deepens the story.  It is one of the proof positives that content and style can weave together into a wholey unique magical fabric.

Last night, I re-watched Out of the Past (1947), a dynamite noir classic directed by mood maestro, Jacques Tourneur, with my grandfather. One thing kept hitting me: Robert Mitchum is an incredible actor.

Now I know this is no news flash. So maybe, I should just put my bias on the table and make an even more positive statement: Robert Mitchum is one of the greatest actors the U.S. has produced.

What makes his acting so great is also the thing that can often get him overlooked: he so commits to his roles that his incredible performances are inhabited, not flashy.  He becomes his characters in such a natural way that the wide variation and spectrum of his talent isn’t obvious until you look at a number of very different movies. One might say that Tom Hardy, in our current moment (2016), is the closest thing we’ve got to a Robert Mitchum-like actor working today.  

I don’t want to chew your ear off. Lord knows I love to gab.  So I’ll work to be quick about this. Let’s look at five exemplary Mitchum movies that make Mitchum’s incredible range  more widely apparent.

Out of the Past (1947, dir. by Jacques Turner)

A young Robert Mitchum, trying to hide from his past by running a small town gas station, must confront the gangster, his hood, and most importantly the femme fatale mistress (a blisteringly white hot Jane Greer) Mitchum thought he had left behind.  

Mitchum plays a former private investigator  who fell off the straight and narrow in Mexico when he fell in love with the woman he was supposed to be finding for someone else.  This movie is just cracklingly fun and nasty. What’s fascinating is that Mitchum makes a fascinatingly subtle choice in how he plays his role.  Mitchum plays his character as an essentially good guy who senses he can’t fight the bigger forces of fate at play in his life.  He pitches the character somewhere between a humble country priest, a zen monk, and a lowly sinner who owns up to it right away.  Watch the movie. You’ll see. There’s a softness and a tenderness to Mitchum here that is almost child-like.  You’d never expect it from an actor known for his manliness. But it’s just the right choice for the part.

Night of the Hunter (1955; dir. by Charles Laughton)

This is probably the quintessential Robert Mitchum performance.  Few have ever come close to how bat-sh@t committed, terrifying, big this performance is. And yet, it is, again, just the right choice for a movie that really plays as a dark fairy tale on a big American canvas.  Mitchum plays a psychotic, sexually-conflicted criminal who pretends to be a preacher to lure naive small-town women with fortunes to their deaths (at his hands).  He has LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles and, in one of the great all-time scenes, Mitchum delivers his sermon on how these two forces are in a death grip with each other for eternity just by clasping his hands and simulating the fight.  I’ve written about Night of the Hunter several times already. It’s one of my top 30 favorite movies of all time. 

Director Charles Laughton makes a movie that is at turns a horror movie, a dark American fairy tale, and eventually becomes some kind of almost biblical allegory for the family. Mitchum obliges his director with a performance that is always terrifying, unhinged, sinister, unnerving, and yet. . .and yet. . .strangely charismatic, compelling, and empathetic.  Watch the movie. Words can’t describe the performance.

Thunder Road (1958; dir. Arthur Ripley) Thunder Road is one of those strange movies that is lazily made, full of strange cheap choices, and bad filmmaking decisions, and yet is totally awesome. Largely in part because it’s fueled by the high octane sheer panty-dropping coolness of Robert Mitchum. I’m sorry I said panty-dropping but I don’t know how else to describe it.  Bob Mitchum is a moonshine runner who runs illegal booze to the big cities in his souped-up cars under the cloak of night. Women love him.  But they can’t tame him.  Mitchum is a wild cat that will come out of the woods to hang out for a little bit.  But you’re never putting a collar on him.  He’s a mother-f@!$ing wildcat!  Bruce Springsteen wrote a classic song because he loved this movie so much.  I don’t know what else to tell you. You can’t fake cool. You just have it.  Bob Mitchum has it like the world has a need to make babies.

Cape Fear (1962; dir. by J. Lee Thompson)  The original Cape Fear is about as horrifying and boundary-pushing as the 1991 Martin Scorsese directed, Robert De Niro starring Cape Fear of thirty years later.  And the original didn’t have the benefit of an R rating.  This is a great movie with a great terrifying structure.  But what makes it particularly informative is if you watch the two Cape Fears and notice how the performance decisions of Mitchum and De Niro are both brilliant, surprisingly different, and both showcase amazing acting minds.  Whereas De Niro (and Scorsese) choose to play sociopathic criminal Max Cady as an aggrieved avenging angel, Mitchum plays Cady as a feral reptile who just doesn’t care about the difference between right and wrong.  

There’s a shot late in the movie where Mitchum slinks into a river and disappears, like a crocodile moving in on its prey. It’s a great shot and it’s a great performance.  I don’t know what else to say. Mitchum is terrifying! Watch it.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973; dir. by Peter Yates) This is a very good movie that grows on you over time.  A very well-observed scrappy novelistic movie about small time hoods, Boston, informers, the Feds, and the whole merry-go-round of prison and the street that most criminals get on and never get off of.  Mitchum, well into his 50’s, still dominates every single scene he is in as gun runner, Eddie Coyle, trying to figure out a way to stay out of jail by feeding information to the Feds.  It’s hard for any actor to make a ‘rat’ a likable character. And yet Mitchum not only makes him likable and empathetic but even makes sense of why rats are rats.  This guy has a family. He loves his wife and kids.  He doesn’t want to see them go on welfare. He’s bright but not too bright and he knows it. You just feel for the guy.  Again, just as at the beginning of his career, Mitchum makes surprisingly tender and unexpected choices that are perfect for the part he is playing.

*** Okay, so I love Robert Mitchum. Along with Jimmy Stewart, James Cagney, Toshiro Mifune, Giulietta Masina, Gena Rowlands, Marlon Brando, Takashi Shimura, Gunnar Björnstrand, Charlie Chaplin, Gene Hackman, he is one of my favorite actors.  

Some actors can do one thing but they do that one thing really well.  Other actors have tremendous range and it’s evident in everything they do.  But then there is a class of actor-Mitchum, Hackman, Shimura, and Bjornstand being in that class-who are so talented, grounded, organic, that their ridiculous range is almost never acknowledged.  

CURE (1997; Japan): Oh man.  I don’t even know what to say about this one. I saw it with my friend at the Nuart in West Los Angeles in 1997 when we were both still teenagers. When it ended, we walked two blocks down to a diner that no longer exists, sat, and just stared at each other for five minutes with no idea what to say.  What better compliment to pay a movie that is so utterly terrifying as to almost defy description.  But describe it I shall! The movie follows a serial killer who gets others to kill for him, through hypnosis, and the detective assigned to try to solve the very mysterious case.  Because most of the people kill themselves or their loved ones for no explainable reason, the case unnerves the detective (and the audience).  Made by Kyoshi Kurosawa, CURE horrifies because of its unnerving rhythms, editing, cinematography, atmosphere.  And it all slowly builds to a final scene that will, if you’re like us, leave you literally speechless.  Kurosawa in this movie and his follow-up movie, PULSE (a dynamite horror movie about ghosts on the internet, yes it works), seems to be getting at something about modern society as disease or infection.  How our modern world is alienating all of us much more effectively than any zombie apocalypse ever could.  This movie is the most recent on the list. And one of the most unexplainable.

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974; USA): Yo folks! In case there’s any confusion, all the movies on this list are the originals.  I’ve seen dynamite remakes for sure but please, if you’re going to watch these movies, go to the source! Go back to 1974 when Tobe Hooper made this barbed wire gem.  I avoided this movie like a supervirus for years and years and years.  I’ve never (up to this day) liked the “slasher” sub-genre of horror.  It’s just not for me. And I mistakenly thought THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was part of this genre.  Finally, in my adulthood, I watched it. I’m so glad I did. Never have I seen a movie with so horrifying a first half effortlessly do a twist into a hilariously dark and bleak comedic second half. That’s the dirty little secret nobody tells you about this movie. Its final third, especially the horrifically comedic scene around the “family” dinner table, is laugh out loud funny.  Intentionally.  This movie really captures, better than almost any other, that terror and laughter are complementary colors. Don’t get me wrong, this movie is NOT for the faint-hearted.  It is gory and horrifying. It follows a group of stupid teenagers who stupidly wander into a house off the backroads and discover that house filled with a murderous, deformed, horrific, family of cretins.  But it’s just dynamite in its filmmaking and dark sense of humor.  

DEAD ALIVE (1992; New Zealand): Made early in the career of Peter Jackson (yes, LORD OF THE RINGS Peter Jackson), this one is truly an out and out horror-comedy.  There’s actually nothing really scary in the movie just incredible, jaw-dropping real gory effects that keep getting more and more mind-boggling. For my money, this is still the movie to beat for real makeup, gore, practical special effects. The first time I saw it, I had a dry-heaving coughing fit. I was laughing but I was also gagging. I almost threw up. I mean that as a compliment. Jackson does something brilliant here. He turns the “zombie” story on its head. Instead of a bunch of people trying to prevent zombies from getting in, one very dutiful son (whose emasculating mother has been bitten by a zombie monkey) tries to keep all the zombies in.  His house.  Things don’t go very well.  The movie is hilarious.  A Zombie Priest has sex with a Zombie Nurse and they have a Zombie baby.  Peter Jackson recreates a by-gone 1950′s like New Zealand cleverly with models.  And the whole movie builds to a final third battle royale in the house that includes an unforgettable scene where our Hero uses his lawnmower to try to get through the zombie hordes.  Oh, this movie is so good. Just maybe. . .don’t eat right before watching it.

JAWS (1975; USA):  Of course JAWS!   It’s probably stupid to point out that JAWS is so great because it’s just credible enough to make us think it might actually happen.  Many folks I know who saw the movie in the theaters in the mid 1970′s literally credit it with instilling a fear of swimming in the ocean in a whole generation.  Hell, JAWS makes you afraid to swim in your pool. This movie is almost a mathematical equation in how you instill terror in an audience.  Terrifying opening scene? Check. Increasingly terrifyingly imaginative attacks? Check. Check. Check.  Second half that is a pressure cooker of terror and suspense. CHECK!  JAWS also re-affirms what many filmmakers discovered intentionally or accidentally throughout the years.  Like eroticism, terror often is at its most effective when we don’t really see too much of the thing we’ve come to see.  You have to save it for just the right moment, usually towards the end. And you have to build.  And build Steven Spielberg does. Like a mother’ f@$*ng master. Also, the movie is a masterpiece because of the dynamite writing, performances, and interactions of its three leads-overwhelmed Sheriff Roy Scheider, frustrated shark scientist Richard Dreyfuss, and grizzled Ahab-like fisherman Robert Shaw. The movie alternates between comedic humanity, the adventurous, and the terrifying. A formula Spielberg seems to understand better than almost anybody. 

PSYCHO (1960; USA): PSYCHO and JAWS are linked in so many ways, it probably makes sense to put them back to back.  They both, on their sheer power alone, ushered in new eras of moviemaking. They are both two of the most terrifying movies ever made. They both hold up decades later in jaw dropping fashion. And they both are directed by two filmmakers who seem to understand the audience and its wants better than anyone else in the entertainment industry.  It is hard to overstate the importance of PSYCHO. Although by now, its images and tropes have been so strip-mined that modern audiences too young for the original could be forgiven for wondering what the big deal is about a movie in black and white that seems so familiar.  But can you imagine what it must have been like in 1960 (Eisenhower was still President!) for an audience to see a movie where a cherished character was killed in the first 30 minutes, another cherished character was not at all what they seemed, and the ending pulled the rug out from everyone’s feet yet again?!?!?  The movie follows bank clerk Janet Leigh who steals money and whose guilty conscience seems to manifest itself at the out of the way Bates Motel at which she stops.  She befriends kindly, meek clerk Norman Bates, whose domineering mother lives in the house up the hill.  And then. . .well. . .the shower scene. . .the voices. . .the house. . .the mother. . .just see it. 

On this November 2nd, 2015, Day of the Dead, just after Halloween, I am moved by spirits from realms unknowable, to honor my top 11 horror movies. Why 11? Because I couldn’t bring myself to winnow it down to 10. There are many more amazing horror movies that I left off this list.  Alien, for instance, is an amazing horror movie but because I consider it Sci-Fi horror, it will probably go on a future Sci-Fi list.  Also, my most recent entry is 1997′s Cure but there have been amazing horror movies made all around the world in the last 20 years (Abre Los Ojos, The Others, Rec, Audition, Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project, to name just a few). But I digress. The time is nigh. Horror is one of those genres, that more than most, can touch on the mysterious, the transcendent, the unknowable, in our lives. But it can also be a surprising vehicle for satire and comedy, while at the same time scaring every bodily fluid out of you.  Let’s explore!

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968; USA): In many ways, one of the UR-texts (along with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, more on that later) for modern horror. You probably don’t even need to hear the summary to guess the story. Zombies! But NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD does so much well, it’s actually surprising that very few movies have been able to match it since.  A group of strangers find themselves holed up in a farmhouse after a strange outbreak seems to turn anyone bitten by one infected into a mindless, brain-eating ghoul.  If that wasn’t enough, the people inside the house are torn by tensions of race, family (parents are hiding their infected girl in the basement), and leadership (everyone wants to be leader but very few can keep their head). Made for a nothing budget by horror master, George Romero, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD does everything so much better than almost any other horror movie. It’s exciting, human, horrifying, terrifying. And its biggest wallop comes in a surprisingly biting ending that comments more on our own inhumanity than that of the zombies.  See it now! Please! 

DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978; USA): Okay, so this movie is why there are 11 movies on this list. Yes, it’s the sequel to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Yes, it’s actually more satirical and funny than scary. But it’s undeniable to me. This is one of the greatest horror movies ever made. George Romero did here for horror what Francis Ford Coppola did with GODFATHER II! Romero made a sequel that was even better than the amazing original.  Here, the zombie outbreak gets out of control of the hands of the law and the government. A rag-tag group of people manage to make it to a shopping mall. They quickly hole up there, blocking up all the entrances. At first, everything seems almost paradisiacal. The group has all the food, clothes, video games, items they could want. They’re in a mall! But slowly, as the zombies amass outside, the group realizes they are in a hell of their own making.  Objects, items, and consumerism are a poor substitute for freedom, safety, society.  The metaphor is undeniable in this movie. Just as he did in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, Romero takes aim really at the living and the United States. And here he scores a prophetic bullseye that warns us where our culture could be going if we don’t do a values check. This movie is laugh out loud hilarious AND gag-inducingly gory.  Be prepared. The gore effects, especially at the climax, are almost unbearable. 

FREAKS (1932; USA): Made by early horror maestro Todd Browning (director of the Bela-Lugosi starring DRACULA), this movie will last with you the rest of your life.  Be prepared. The people in this movie are different from “regular” people.  Todd Browning cast the movie with people who did have abnormalities-everything from being little people to missing limbs to having misshapen heads to being hermaphroditic-but his anger is directed at “the normal people”.  Browning’s movie is one of my personal favorites, not because it makes me scream (though it is atmospherically terrifying) but because it makes me cry.  With righteous fury, he asks us, who are the real freaks?  The ones with physical abnormalities or those who lie, cheat, steal, murder, manipulate, and exploit behind pretty faces?  The story follows a carnival troupe on tour and a “beautiful, normal” woman who seduces a Little Person away from his true love to try and get at his money.  This Gold-digger, with the help of her Strong Man lover, tries to murder her Little Husband.  But the “Freaks” realize what’s happening and take matters into their own hands.  One of the great all-time movies. Period.  And terrifying too. Don’t worry. 

NIGHT OF THE DEMON/CURSE OF THE DEMON (1957; UK):  This is one of those movies I cherish because my sister and I came across it all by ourselves. It was just on one night and we came in on this great scene involving two really bizarre “psychic” sisters.  We were hooked.  I went back and re-watched the whole thing and loved it even more.  I was even more pleased to discover later on that this movie is a personal favorite of Stephen King’s and was directed by none other than Jacques Tourneur (a favorite director of Martin Scorsese), one of the great low budget directors of the 1940′s, who made the classics Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, and Out of the Past. In the hands of less-talented moviemakers, this story would have been hammy to the extreme. And, it still is pretty hammy. But in Tourneur’s hands, the movie becomes a strange meditation on skepticism, misguided ambition, devil worship, cults, the occult, the night itself. The movie follows a skeptical American Professor in London as he slowly uncovers an underground devil-worshipping cult.  The movie is just dynamite from scene to scene in its ever-escalating atmosphere, bizarreness, characters. But it is also one of those great movies that, better than most, explores the perennial question about whether or not the supernatural, the unexplainable does truly exist. And what would we do, as skeptics, if confronted with it? A lot of fun, with some laughable effects here and there. The movie is a small miracle in that it overcomes its limitations to become something truly mysterious and great. 

THE SHINING (1980; USA):  I list these movies in no particular order. I love them all equally for many different reasons. But THE SHINING holds the distinction of being the first movie that kept me up for a week.  It probably didn’t help that I saw it at 8 years old, way too young (thank you divorced parents and easy-going father!). But everything about this movie shows you just how epic horror can be. Scenes that make no logical sense but make a disturbing sub-conscious sense. Images that are at one both sublime and horrific.  A true sense that a supernatural level could exist to the universe but one that would make very little comforting and logical sense to us. And two amazing, go-for-broke performances from Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall.  Director Stanley Kubrick got to the horrific truth at the heart of the novel, maybe too clearly.  Isolate the nuclear family in a location away from any outlet or escape and they will become murderous in their hatred for each other. Ghosts don’t help either. Stephen King has always hated this adaptation of his novel and I understand and sympathize.  His novel has redemption, warmth, and humanity whereas Kubrick’s movie version is despairing, horrifying, and in some ways, slightly hopeless. But put together, they make a fascinating double take from both sides of the mirror on the supernatural, the family, and insanity.

It’s good to be uncomfortable. It’s great to be uncomfortable. It’s damn hard to be uncomfortable.  

We don’t want to be uncomfortable. But to do anything worthwhile requires discomfort.

John Cassavettes lives in the land of discomfort. His movies-Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, Love Streams, among them-revel in discomfort. I’m not sure Cassevettes would see it that way. But I always find myself squirming on my couch as I watch his movies. They are so immediate, so unpredictable. The situations are so embarrassing, unexpected, naked. They are hard to watch because they explore those aspects of our lives that really are the source of our greatest struggles.  Not killing a dozen spies or battling an interplanetary cult leader. But battling ourselves, our daily limitations, as we try to find out what it means to be good lovers, wives, husbands, parents, friends. And often failing and falling right splat on our faces.

But if you stick with his movies, as his brave characters often stick it out, you get to a place of truth and affirmation. You get through the gauntlet and you get to Yes.

That’s maybe the most amazing thing about Cassevettes’ body of work.  Cassavettes doesn’t flinch from the daily beating the thugs of time mete out in the alleyways of existence.  But then he also shows his characters getting up and walking back out into the midday crowds, and getting to “Yes”.

A Woman Under the Influence is one of the greatest movies ever made. Period. Full stop. You go through hell. But you get to Yes.

Gena Rowlands gives one of the great performances. Her every line reading, every instinct in this movie is like putting your hands on those two metal knobs in that old arcade game that tested how much electricity you could take (yeah, that game actually existed, check it out). You are touching a live wire. You are watching a woman inhabit a role beyond what any actor would appear to be capable of.

A Woman Under the Influence is Cassavettes’ and Rowlands’ King Lear. Lear is my favorite Shakespeare play. But it is draining. I don’t know how anyone could perform the Lear part more than a few nights.  The emotional commitment would be unbelievably daunting.  But the greats make that commitment. Gena Rowlands makes that commitment.

If you haven’t seen Woman, it focuses on the nervous breakdown of Mabel Longhetti, a mother and wife trying her best, her husband Nick’s struggle with having her committed, and her eventual return to the house. But really, the movie is about the daily insanity anyone faces trying to live up to her or his role as a lover, spouse, parent, partner, individual in a society that chokes rather than embraces.

Woman is an ocean of discomfort. When Nick (the amazing Peter Falk) breaks a “the kids are at my mother’s, we have the night to ourselves” date with Mabel at the beginning of the movie because he has to work overnight,  Mabel sleeps with a stranger she meets at a bar.  And yet in Cassevettes’ hands our sympathies just deepen. For BOTH characters.  We can see that Nick has probably broken a hundred dates. We can see that Mabel tries to do her best and yet suffers under Nick’s uncontrollable temper and lack of really seeing HER.

There are countless scenes that return us, again and again, to this battlefield of discomfort. Nick brings all his construction crew co-workers home for a lunch and Mabel tries to play host but ends up embarrassing Nick.  Later, Mabel throws a party for her kids and concerns a Father with her erratic behavior.

This leads to a 10 minute sequence where Mabel has a full breakdown in the living room.  There are moments in art when you realize immediately, because your whole body is buzzing, that you are witnessing greatness.  I get that feeling reading the last chapters of The Grapes of Wrath and One Hundred Years of Solitude. I get that feeling listening to Richard Pryor’s last bit about the wino lecturing the junkie in his 1971 Live and Smokin’ comedy concert movie.  I get that feeling watching Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk in this breakdown scene in A Woman Under The Influence under John Cassevettes’ direction.

Cassevettes had the courage to commit to (and fight for) his inner voice of how he saw the world.  And consequently, his movies bear his singular stamp.  They are a shock because he was committed to a style as alive, vibrant, inconsistent, intense as life itself.   You have to stick with his movies. But he gets it right.  He illuminates truths about existence we often can’t bring ourselves to wrestle with. Because these truths bring discomfort.

A Woman Under the Influence is about as right as anyone can get it. It’s uncomfortable to watch.  Beautifully uncomfortable. You go through hell. But you get to Yes.  

I love the Kenji Misumi-directed Zatoichi movies: Fight, Zatoichi, Fight; Zatoichi and the Chess Expert; Zatoichi Challenged; and Samaritan Zatoichi.   For me, discovering Japanese director Kenji Misumi was akin to discovering a restaurant tucked away in some anonymous strip mall that turned out to serve the best shabu-shabu in Los Angeles.

Whenever I recommend Kenji Misumi movies to my movie friends, I often say “He’s the Don Siegel of Japan”. I might as well say “Don Siegel is the Kenji Misumi of the United States.”  But really Kenji Misumi is Kenji Misumi. And Don Siegel is Don Siegel.  What they do share is some supernatural ability to take pulp material and make it transcendent.  

The Zatoichi series, which I believe eventually produced dozens upon dozens of entries in both the Japanese cinema and TV, follows a roguish blind masseur, given to gambling, who beneath all his vices has a heart of gold. He has a deadly way with a sword and is guided by destiny to wander the violent, near lawless cities and roads of old-time Japan helping the victimized.  Entry upon entry, Zatoichi is interrupted from his drinking and gambling to save a baby, avenge the innocent.  He always seems to stumble into these situations.  It’s like fate grabs him by the collar and throws him in front of the next person who needs his help.

These movies are all anchored by the towering performances of Shintaro Katsu, who somehow found a way to find humor and joy and new nuances in the character each and every time he performed him.  

The touch of director Kenji Misumi is what somehow elevates these entries to something truly magical. Misumi takes the writing and Katsu performances and creates amazing set-piece after amazing set-piece with them.  The Misumi movies are framed, edited, conceived in delightfully cinematic ways that just provide hours of pure joy.  

Misumi, Katsu, and the writers always find great juxtoppositions in sequences to somehow contrast Zatoichi’s blindness with his talent with the sword.  His roguishness with his tender heart.  His love of humanity with his essential loneliness. And each of the Misumi entries finds new ways to express that Zatoichi’s blindness is also his greatest asset fighting murderous gangsters who underestimate him.

In Zatoichi Challenged, the movie ends with a stunning sword fight in the snow on an empty city street.  Samaritan Zatoichi has a great sequence where Zatoichi discovers he can win at a carnival game because of his acute hearing. As he throws balls and knocks down the passing faces, the Woman he’s traveling with, who has just started to warm up to him, remembers that this is the same man who slaughtered her brother.  The scene suddenly cross cuts between Zatoichi knocking down the carnival faces with slow motion shots of Zatoichi slicing and goring men who fall to their death.  

It’s hard to put your finger on the Misumi magic. That’s probably what makes it great.  And he made movies that were just as, if not even greater, in other series: Lone Wolf and Cub (released here as the awesomely re-conceived Shogun Assassin), Hanzo the Razor (with a beyond description interrogation/seduction sex scene that includes one of the most unique POV shots of any movie I’ve ever seen), among others.

Misumi took the material and wove gold from it. Like an inspired tailor tasked to churn out coats for a cut-rate department store, Misumi manages to make stylish quality clothes that fly off the rack at a price nobody can beat.

Don Siegel's 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi horror movies.   You've probably seen it without realizing you've seen it. Dozens of movies since have blatantly, secretly, and illicitly borrowed from it.  

The plot is the stuff of science-fiction and horror nirvana.  Dr. Miles J. Bennell (played by a wonderfully ever increasingly paranoid and manic Kevin McCarthy) begins to suspect something is wrong with the people in his small town.  They are all behaving. . .emotionlessly.  Slowly, horrifically, he comes to realize that aliens are growing pods which, when placed next to a sleeping human being, get their tendrils into the person, recreate the person's form minus that pesky personality, then kill their host. 

The problem for the good Doctor is that first, this sounds absolutely bat sh@t crazy to anyone he tries to tell. And secondly, the aliens are pretty smart at detecting whistleblowers.  And soon, the whole town is after him and Becky Driscoll, played by Dana Wynter, a department of health worker, before they find someone who actually believes them and possibly stop the invasion.

This 1956 version is still my favorite of all the various remakes, spin-offs, variations.  There is a wonderfully unsettling scene where we see a family (now all pod-people aliens) through a window, prepare a pod to put in baby's crib so that baby can join them in their parasitic-alien 1950's suburban bliss.

Yeah. You feel that? That's ice water runnin' through your veins cause that's stone-cold horrific.

Directed by one of my favorite American directors, Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, Madigan, The Beguiled, Charley Varrick, Hell is For Heroes, Escape From Alcatraz; seriously, watch as many of Siegel's movies as you can, he is somehow economical at the same time that he's gritty and stylish), Invasion starts with a great opening scene (Kevin McCarthy running onto a freeway and screaming at cars to listen to him) then flashes back to what caused all this madness.

The movie tears through its plot with little preciousness or pretension.  You feel that it aims to tell a damn good story, scare you, and not stick around to wear out its welcome.  

What makes Invasion a masterpiece, and you've probably heard this before, is that its subtext is so perfectly matched to its story.  Made in the 1950's, you can either look at the Pod People Body Snatchers as an astute left-wing allegory for the national hysteria of the McCarthy-era "Your neighbor could be a communist!" mania or as a crafty right-wing allegory for the fear that "Your neighbor could be a communist! Really."  

Siegel himself, in his autobiography, A Siegel Movie, admitted that he was making a movie about his fear of a certain homogenization he felt happening in the 1950's but that it was separate from the Cold War tensions of the time.  Nevertheless, the allegory hit the bullseye and still resonates today.

I love Body Snatchers because it one-ups the zombie genre. As much as I love zombie movies, they are, in a way, about the horror of infection.  Body Snatchers, on the other hand, is about the horror of losing one's soul.  Of becoming something else against your will.  Of being used by some malevolent powerful force as a husk of your former self.  

What makes Invasion of the Body Snatchers so unsettling as well is that some human beings in these movies always view this transformation as welcome.  They argue with the protagonists that there's nothing about the human race, as it is, much worth admiring or saving.  Why not have a superior alien civilization take away all our pain, suffering, worry, imperfections?  Why not take that big blue pill that anesthetizes us from the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to? 

Thus Body Snatchers complicates the zombie question.  Almost nobody, in any zombie movie, wants to be bit by a zombie, no matter how blurred the line is between disgust for human-monsters and empathy for the zombies.  But in Invasion of the Body Snatchers type movies, the question is inconveniently posed about whether we might be better off giving up our imperfect, petty, unpredictable, emotional, erratic souls.  And if, like Dr. Miles, you believe we most certainly are not better off-that we must strive, imperfections and all, towards the better angels of our nature, while still embracing our messy selves-you find that sometimes you are up against a large portion of the world. 

The 1950's was a beautifully fertile wild garden for horror and science fiction.  Along with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the decade produced dozens of great B sci-fi horror movies like Them! (about huge radioactive ants that get in the Los Angeles sewers), War of the Worlds, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and the original The Thing, to name just a few.

All these movies explicitly dealt with the Pandora's Box of unease, paranoia, and fear that the atom bomb, World War II, scientific advancement, and the carving up of the world along ideological lines had unleashed on an American population that just wanted to believe everything could be simple, unfussy, and beautifully suburban. But of course, what goes on in those suburban homes after midnight, in the dark, behind closed doors. . .

William Holden is a great actor. An amazing actor.  Yet I don't feel we praise him enough. Or pay enough attention to him.  

He somehow managed to be in one or two all-time classic movies for each decade of his working career starting in the 1950's; a record for which any moviemaker, behind or in front of the camera, would feel blessed. 

His style almost seems to be like that of certain great directors-John Huston, Howard Hawks, Jean Renoir-who often adjusted their approach to the material so that the material, the story, the overall impact is what you would take with you.  Not just one amazing shot or special effect.  

Holden always seemed to understand what the story needed in terms of performance and he would make sure to give just that performance. That's a talent. That's the greatest gift any moviemaker can give to a movie. 

Holden started the 1950's starring in Sunset Blvd (1950), arguably director Billy Wilder's greatest masterpiece and possibly the best movie ever made ON the movies.  An acidic, gothic insider's look at the corrosive effects of Hollywood and fame on the psyche. This is a movie that David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and countless other great moviemakers revere.  Here Holden plays down on his heels screenwriter, Joe Gillis, who ends up becoming a gigolo lover to faded and deranged movie star, Norma Desmond (played in a screen-scorching performance by real life faded movie star, Gloria Swanson). 

Holden went on to star in a string of hit 1950's movies but finished the decade with the crown jewel, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), the epic World War II action-adventure movie that, along with Lawrence of Arabia (1962), is considered director David Lean's best work. Here Holden plays Shears who escapes a Japanese prisoner of war camp then has to lead a team back to it to stop crazed British Officer, Alec Guiness, from completing a bridge that will help the Japanese in the war effort. 

Now after this, we don't hear from Holden for awhile (in terms of classic movies) but suddenly, out of nowhere, he shows up as the star of The Wild Bunch (1969), often considered director Sam Peckinpah's greatest movie.  Holden plays Pike Bishop, the leader of a group of ultra-violent bank robbers in the waning days of the dying Wild West. This savage, brutal western is the Rosetta Stone of the modern action movie. It introduces slow-motion bullet ballets, anti-heroes, and buckets of blood.  Holden also gets the movie's most famous line right at the start: "If they move, kill 'em." 

You might chalk all this up to just the way the industry worked.  A certain chancy movie needed a decent leading man and Holden was always willing to take a chance.  But I don't think you can really stop there.  Holden nailed black comedy (Sunset Boulevard), escapist comedy (Sabrina),  action-adventure (Bridge on the River Kwai), westerns (The Wild Bunch).  

But if you need any proof that Holden was an actor, that he could turn in a performance that could be, at turns, hilarious, solemn, outraged, vulnerable,  you can go right to the masterpiece he made in the 1970's, Paddy Chayevsky and Sidney Lumet's satire on TV, Network (1976).

Again Holden plays one of the leads, aging TV network news producer, Max Schumacher.  But here, Holden is required to deliver two to three page monologues, sometimes within one shot, full of complex ideas, emotions, humor, and he totally delivers.  Along with Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Network is arguably the greatest American satire ever made.  And William Holden stars in it.

THREE GREAT BLACKSPLOITATION MOVIE

Okay. Three fizzy soda pop can size entries.

The Blacksploitation movie.  The genre produced amazingly explosive, energetic, singular works and great soundtracks.  My three personal favorites are: 

SUPERFLY (1972; directed by Gordon Parks, Jr., written by Phillip Fenty, starring Ron O Neal. Music by Curtis Mayfield)

What's so funny is that as much as this is one of the go to movies anyone mentions when they talk about Blacksploitation movies, it is surprisingly one of the rawest, truest, most vibrant.  It lives up to the hype. It beats the hype. It TKOs the hype!

The movie is violent, super erotic, raw, affecting while being brutally unsentimental.  And the Curtis Mayfield score.  Basically untouchable. You can put Mayfield's score next to Max Steiner's score for GONE WITH THE WIND or your favorite John William's score and it easily holds its own as one of the greatest soundtracks ever produced for a movie. 

There's an almost jagged bitter cynicism in SUPERFLY but what keeps it from being cynical is that it is despairing.  Ron O Neal's SUPERFLY can beat any white person in the movie, but he can't beat the system. 

BLACK CAESAR (1972; written and directed by Larry Cohen. Starring Fred Williamson. Music by James Brown).  BLACK CAESAR and SUPERFLY basically tell the same rise and fall of a gangster story.   They basically feel like sibling movies, approaching the same subject matter from slightly different viewpoints.  If SUPERFLY is a movie told from the inside; BLACK CAESAR is the movie that takes a little step back and looks at the system as a whole.  You can sense from the beginning that Fred Williamson has his priorities all wrong. He's trying to climb the gangster ladder just to prove he can have and own anything the white man can have and own.  But you see he's wasting his talent and rage on a rigged game.  

This movie has one of the most cathartic scenes I've ever seen.  A white racist corrupt Cop constantly extorts and harasses Fred Williamson.  Late in the game, Fred Williamson finally gets some revenge.  In a really unsettling and unexpected way.  I read a Larry Cohen interview where he said that this scene, the revenge scene, always got the biggest applause up in Harlem.  When you see it, you'll probably understand why.

Plus, BLACK CAESAR has one of the greatest James Brown tracks I've ever heard: "Down and Out in New York City ". It is the sh@t!

Listen to it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw18rTF5OIQ

COFFY (1973; written and directed by Jack Hill. Starring Pam Grier)  COFFY and FOXY BROWN, the movies Pam Grier and Jack Hill made back to back are two consummate entertainments.  You can see why Quentin Tarantino basically shaped JACKIE BROWN, twenty five years later, as an homage to these two movies.  In both these movies, Pam Grier basically kicks a lot of ass.  Corrupt white ass. Corrupt black ass. Corrupt male ass. Corrupt female ass.  Basically what you learn is that if you f*&k with Pam Grier's boyfriend or her sister, she's gonna put razor blades in her hair and you're gonna bleed (this is an actual amazing scene in one of the movies).

So whenever you write a list, you always leave out something. Then, days or weeks later, the glaring omission hits you like a two by four wielded by an angry neighbor you forgot to invite to the party.  And you don't feel angry at the neighbor. You SHOULD have invited them to the party!  It's not a party without them.

#11 on my list of Amazing Crazy Cult Movies  would be Timothy Carrey's 1962 opus masterpiece, THE WORLD'S GREATEST SINNER.

It's bat-sh@t crazy but with an amazingly incisive point about culture, greed, religion, and spirituality.

The story follows Clarence Hillard, a bored insurance salesman, who decides to get into politics. He funds his campaign by seducing rich old women and excites crowds with revival tent Elvis Presley like rock shows.  He becomes an instant sensation, forms his own fascist-like political party, changes his name to "God Hillard", and whips people into frantic riots at his rallies. 

So far, the arc of the movie, as nuts as it is, makes a kind of sense. What you won't expect is where the movie goes at the end, even though, the movie really has been preparing you for the ending the entire time.  

Timothy Carrey is known to most people as the unforgettably tall, owl-eyed, character actor from Stanley Kubrick's THE KILLING and PATHS OF GLORY and John Cassavettes' THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE.

When you watch this movie, it's clear that he probably shot it when he could across a number of years.  The filmmaking is rough and patchworky to say the least. But it has a crazy primal power, great energy, and forward momentum. You keep slapping your head each time the movie gets more and more nuts until suddenly, the ending open palm slaps you across the face and you have something like an epiphany (at least I did).

Scored by a very young Frank Zappa, beloved by John Cassavettes who harangued Martin Scorsese for years to see it,  loved by Scorsese, THE WORLD'S GREATEST SINNER has a definite there, there.

Now be warned, as with all these movies, if you don't like rough, nutty, "I can't believe this got made", type movies, this isn't for you.  But if you love discovering gems in the rough, this is one of the most precious. 

For more information on THE WORLD'S GREATEST SINNER, visit:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056703/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

The craving to make a top 10 list of my favorite "Crazy Cult" movies hit me like a strange wind in the night. So let's float away on it. 

My definition for a crazy cult movie is a movie that is so strange, off the wall, unbelievable, you find yourself slapping your head multiple times in amazement that somehow this thing got made. . . and yet, you feel the movie is truly a visionary masterpiece.

The Crazy Cult movie is distinct from the "So Bad, It's Good" genre of movies which might include such unintentionally brilliant gems as "Ninja 3: The Domination", "Birdemic",  and  "The Apple".  These movies are incredible.  You should absolutely invest in a 12 pack, a quick text to your adventurous friends, and a bucket of something fried and/or cheesy, and watch these stat.  

But the "So Bad, It's Good" genre might be defined as movies that strike you as having come to their weird brilliant genius unintentionally.  

The "Crazy Cult Movie" is a movie whose production history might share a lot with the "So Bad, It's Good" movie.  The distinguishing difference is that you feel a "there" there. The vision of the moviemakers, while possibly nutzoid and from another planet, is as (or as near as) profound, stimulating, fascinating as the visions of our greatest moviemakers.  Just more jaw droppingly so.

So with that being said, here are my top 10 favorite Crazy Cult Movies at the time of this writing. If you can handle crazy weirdness in its multi-colored forms, I highly recommend all of these. They are life changing.

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (USA, 1970):  Directed by indie "Nudie Cutie" King, Russ Meyer, and written by a very young Roger Ebert (yes, the most famous US movie critic of all time, Ebert), BTVOTD may be my all-time personal favorite.  An innocent all-girl rock and roll band (?!), The Carrie Nations, come to Los Angeles and find themselves swept away in sex, drugs, rock and roll.  But this barely describes the experience of watching the movie.  

BTVOTD is at once a comedy, an overheated melodrama, a musical (with totally legit rock and roll numbers), a horror film, a satire, an avante-garde Russian montage movie.  It veers wildly from tone to tone, is one of the best edited movies of all time, has some of the craziest montage/superimposition scenes you will ever see, and ends with an extended moralizing voice over from a Narrator we never knew was there until the last 5 minutes of the movie.

Be forewarned (here and with all the movies on this list), this movie is filled with elements that would offend a lot of people (tons of nudity, crazy genre tone changes, a yo-yoing story), but if you can dig it, you're gonna dig it.  Meyer somehow sets out to make the "Citizen Kane" of the 60's/70's era. . .and does!

REPO MAN (USA, 1984):  Written and directed by Alex Cox, "Repo Man" follows young punk Emilio Estevez as he drifts from jail to getting a job repossessing cars around Los Angeles.  This movie somehow manages to be a hilarious look at Reagan-era America,  a humanist celebration of the slight to very-off people you work with in the workplace and a sci-fi movie.  That's right y'all!  Aliens and time machines and government conspiracies.  "Repo Man" is hilariously funny and episodic and semi-auto biographical.  Kind of like a Fellini movie meets a 1950's Sci-Fi B movie meets a 1980's comedy.  Harry Dean Stanton kills it as the Repo Man who teaches Estevez the ropes.  Oh, so good!

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (USA/MEXICO/DUTCH, 1973):  Alejandro Jodorowsky has finally gotten the recognition and placement in the canon he always deserved.  The writer/director of a handful of the craziest movies you will ever see-EL TOPO, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, SANTA SANGRE, THE DANCE OF REALITY-Jodorowsky makes deeply unsettling, yet life-affirming, spiritual vision quest movies that are laugh out loud hilarious and beyond-description bizarre.  THE HOLY MOUNTAIN may be his masterpiece.  It's hard to give a plot summary here since the movie starts with the Spanish colonization of the Americas as re-created by frogs. . .

But if I had to give a description, I'd say, an Alchemist, through the selection of tarot cards, puts together a group of travelers from different planets to unseat the Old Gods at the top of the Holy Mountain. . .yeah, well, it was worth a try. 

Jodorowsky's movies are often a series of brilliantly, if nuttily, conceived scenes that stitch together to explore his favorite obsessions: spirituality, sex, the battle between the sacred and the profane, the pursuit of transcendence in a petty, violent world.  

DO NOT watch these movies if you get easily disturbed or confused.  DO watch these movies if you want to see brilliance.

RICKI-OH, THE STORY OF RICKI (HONG KONG, 1991):  Okay, this one is violent.  It's also laugh out loud hilarious.  THE DAILY SHOW used a clip from it (a guy's head exploding) for years as its "Moment of Zen".  RICKI-OH tells the story of innocent Martial Arts youth, Ricki, as he is unjustly imprisoned in possibly the worst prison of all time, and has no choice but to fight every single weirdo who wants to take him on. And defeat them in the most comically graphic ways possible. 

RICKI-OH almost tilts to "So Bad, It's Good" but it does feel like there's a "There" there.  It's hard to explain. The moviemakers seem pretty aware and in control of the movie's wildly inappropriately comic violent tone.  There's also a great cutaway sequence of Ricki peacefully playing the pan-flute and meditating on a sound stage to remind us he is a man of peace forced into this position.  Though it has nothing to do with the plot of the movie at all. 

Yes, are you starting to feel it now. . .

HOUSE (JAPAN, 1977): The first movie from Japanese TV commercial director, Nobuhiko Obayashi, shares a lot of stylistic traits in common with BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS.  It seems to be everything at once: a comedy, a musical, a ghost story, a horror film, an avant-garde special effects extravaganza.  

A group of Japanese High School Girls go to visit one of the girl's Aunts in her country house only to discover the Aunt is a blood sucking ghost bent on extracting their essences to return her to her youth.

There's a rock band in it and one of the actors randomly turns into a pile of bananas.

Again, there's some kind of strangely beautiful "there" there about the "becoming" that happens in adolescence.  The movie also has "you have to see it to believe it" special effects, like a piano that eats one of the girls, and a head that flies out of a well against a beautiful sunset. 

VISITOR Q (JAPAN, 2001):  I once recommended VISITOR Q to a wonderfully kind woman after our second get-together.  I suspect it may have contributed to our not having a third get-together.  I definitely should have pre-faced my recommendation with a better warning.

VISITOR Q is essentially a movie where each scene ups the "taboo, you can't show that in a movie" factor of the scene before. Then it blows your mind by revealing itself to be a beautiful meditation on the nature of family.

Written and directed by prolific Japanese badboy, "I never met a genre I didn't like" master, Takashi Miike, VISITOR Q is one of the few movies I've seen that fully embraced its video-shot aesthetic and turned out a gonzo masterpiece.  It is also, possibly, one of the hardest movies I've ever had to sit through.  It deals with incest, drug abuse, necrophilia, before its "I totally didn't see this happy ending coming" happy ending.

I don't write these lines glibly. VISITOR Q is a genuine masterpiece and, in my opinion, one of the best movies of the past 20 years.  But it also does push commercial cinema about as far as it can go before it breaks.  Everything you see is a fiction and it's shot very comedically.  But the movie constantly seems to be asking you to think about things you'd rather not think about.  And that's what makes it great. 

ERASERHEAD (USA, 1976): It feels strange to write about ERASERHEAD as a crazy cult movie because at this point, I feel it's more of just a straight-ahead masterpiece.  But with mini-cooked chickens that dance off the plate, a deformed woman who sings about heaven in the main character's radiator, and a baby that looks like an alien horse, all shot in black and white, it still probably qualifies.  ERASERHEAD is one of the most strangely incisive looks at young parenthood you will ever see.  It focuses on a Young Man (played wonderfully by Jack Nance) struggling with commitment, marriage, parenthood. But as with everything Lynch does, ERASERHEAD goes to an even deeper place.  Some kind of other-worldly place where these concerns are subsumed in even deeper existential mysteries.  Just a flat-out brilliant movie. 

FREAKS (USA, 1932): One of the cycle of original Hollywood horror movies made in the 1930's (that includes FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA, THE WOLF MAN, THE MUMMY, etc.) but one that has never been remotely matched though a few moviemakers have tried, FREAKS tells the story of Circus Performers where a Little Person marries one of the "Normal" Beautiful Female Performers who proceeds to manipulate him for her own personal gain.  

This movie is at once wonderfully atmospheric, deeply disturbing, and profound.  Though you might see the metaphorical strings right away (the so-called "Freaks" are much more tolerant and humane than the so-called "Normal" people of society who are truly the monsters) that doesn't detract at all from the movie's power.  

"Freaks" is absolutely the pinnacle of what a horror movie can do: deliver chills and scares while at the same time making a much more disturbing point about our present society that is impossible to ignore.

SPIDER BABY or THE MADDEST STORY EVER TOLD (USA, 1967): Writer/Director Jack Hill has made a treasure trove of wildly entertaining movies.  You can pick almost any one from THE BIG DOLL HOUSE to COFFEY to SWINGING CHEERLEADERS to SWITCHBLADE SISTERS and you'll see great entertaining pictures with tons of satiric wit and intelligence.  

But SPIDER BABY may be the masterpiece.  In many ways, it's a variation on FREAKS.  A group of money-grubbing distant family members come to a house to lay claim to an inheritance.  They discover three Orphaned Children with a strange disease that causes them to regress developmentally once they hit adolescence.  It only gets worse for the visitors from there.

Like every movie in this list, SPIDER BABY seems to tap into an underground well of meaning about the contemporary American condition.  It seems to be about the sudden confrontation of the hollow "celebration" of family values that sometimes masquerades as a front for someone's  selfish schemes with the reality of what "family" can sometimes really mean.  

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (USA, 1992): I actually didn't think I was going to have David Lynch on this list twice.  David Lynch really is one of the all-time greats, up there with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, Woody Allen from that rough generation/crop of moviemakers.    But TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME is, for me,one of those movies that's not celebrated 1/10th in the way it should be. 

I'll just say it, I think TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME is Lynch's crowning masterpiece.  The best movie he's made to this point. BLUE VELVET and MULHOLLAND DRIVE are, by far, more seamless, consistent movies.  But TPFWWM, like all the movies on this list, seems to get at something a bit deeper than anything else Lynch has ever done. He somehow creates a disturbingly precise metaphor (about incest and child abuse) then widens out beyond it to also explore the transcendental universe that might yet exist even given these unfathomable atrocities.  

A few months ago, the American Cinematheque put on a wonderful program of Satyajit Ray movies at their Aero Theater in Santa Monica.  I immediately rearranged my schedule, ate it on sleep, and made it out as often as I could.  Satyajit Ray movies are so amazing and so infrequently played that when they do play, the only proper response for me is to drop everything and see as many of them as possible.

One of my favorites of the program, and one that has really been on my mind as we start out in pre-production on our own feature, SPIN THE BOTTLE, is Ray's 1965 short movie THE COWARD.  I believe that it originally played in India on a double bill with another short, THE HOLY MAN (a very funny, satiric look at religious con men) when it was first released, and this was how I saw it (the names of the movies rhyme in Bengali-KAHAPURUSH/MAHAPURSH).

THE COWARD is the story of Amitabha Roy (played by Ray regular Soumitra Chatterjee), now a famous screenwriter, who, when his car breaks down in rural West Bengal, accepts the hospitality of a local landowner Bimal Gupta (Haradhan Bannerjee) given to drink and endless talking, to spend the night at his nearby plantation only to discover that Gupta is married to Roy's long ago love, Karuna (played wonderfully by Madhabi Mukherjee), whom he hasn't seen in some years. 

The movie takes place across that night and the next day as it flashes back (in amazing and wonderful associative editing) to Amitabha and Karuna's own love story when they were young, poor, struggling adults.  And we slowly come to understand why the movie is called THE COWARD as we see the choices Amitabha made that pushed Karuna out of his life.

The movie is so well told, structured, plotted that to say more would be a crime.  You just have to see it. Satyajit Ray was one of those directors who had an absolute grasp on every element of moviemaking: camera framing, editing, performances, storytelling, music, emotion.  His movies are deeply emotional and human while somehow, even in their tenderness, showing themselves capable of tremendous bite and satirical observation.  

He is a filmmaker of such talent and refined taste that to watch his movies is an honor. Like being invited to the dinner table of the most talented, gracious person you have ever met and then getting two hours of her or his uninterrupted time.  

There's more on Ray at our Spin The Bottle blog:

http://spinthebottlemovie.tumblr.com/  if you have an interest in reading about DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST (1970), another of his movies that is deeply inspiring as we start our trek to shoot SPIN THE BOTTLE.

It's funny to watch Peter Jackson's first three full length features now in the context of the juggernaut international moviemaker he would become.  All the trademarks are there: his incredible talent for using special fx in the service of a story beat or emotion, his giddy adolescent (in the best possible way) love with what movies can do, his crazy ability to move the camera in go-for-broke ways that nonetheless never distract from the narrative.  

It's also not hard to connect the dots back from the supremely confident experienced moviemaker who took a chance and put ten thousand horrific Orcs in a lightning storm ready to storm Helm's Deep (in one of the great sequences of the last fifteen years in THE TWO TOWERS) back to the mischievous young moviemaker who thought it was a good idea to have a sequence where aliens in denim vomited into a bowl and then had their leader joyously drink from that bowl. 

Yet, I have to admit, I yearn and hope that Jackson will soon return to the filmmaking of his youth and make one more totally politically incorrect jaw dropping gross out hilarious horror comedy like he did with the unofficial trilogy of BAD TASTE, MEET THE FEEBLES, and DEAD ALIVE. 

Although each of these movies is distinct and different, together they are united by sequences so raunchy, gross, brilliant that dry heaving never felt so good.  You can feel a moviemaker who knows he's going to get you to gag and then to laugh. It's a really strange wonderful set of reactions.  

Let's look at each of the movies individually: 

BAD TASTE (1987) Jackson's first full feature length movie took several years to make on a shoestring budget.  It's title is like a gauntlet being thrown for all of Peter Jackson's early work.  It will all be in "bad taste" but it will also all be undeniably brilliant. The story basically follows a trio of Alien Hunters who have come to a town overrun by aliens (who just look like humans in denim) to kill them and find their spaceship.  When they finally stumble upon alien headquarters, they discover an alien corporate plot to harvest humans for inter-galactic McDonald's People burgers.  Peter Jackson plays two roles in the movie along with directing, writing, and producing all the special effects. I read somewhere that he actually made a lot of the alien prosthetics by cooking the material in his Mom's oven. 

BAD TASTE feels like the most awesome movie the kids on your block ever made after school and I mean that as the highest compliment (because a lot of those movies are more entertaining than the uber-professional ones).  It has got a great sequence where Peter Jackson is literally torturing himself (as an alien) on the edge of the cliff.  When you add into this that he was also directing the movie, the whole sequence takes on a kind of jaw dropping meta-quality. Actors fire rocket launchers and blow up sheep. A house turns into a spaceship. An alien hunter with a chainsaw literally jumps into the mouth of an alien and saws his way to the other side.  There's the aforementioned vomit punch bowl sequence.  It's just undeniably awesome.

MEET THE FEEBLES (1989) at first appears to be totally unrelated to BAD TASTE. But it becomes very clear that the same talented, twisted, gleeful mind is behind both movies.  MEET THE FEEBLES is an NC-17 rated riff on THE MUPPETS. A nervous Hedgehog, his first day on the job as a production assistant, is introduced to the depravity,  sex, drugs, and amorality behind the scenes of a New Zealand puppet variety show known as "The Fabulous Feebles Variety Hour".  There's a Vietnam Vet Frog who shoots heroin and has "Deer Hunter" like flashbacks (with muppet rabbit Vietcong).  There's a Rat who is shooting a porno in the basement with a Cow.  The Walrus Producer is having an affair with a cat behind the back of the Hippo Starlet who goes crazy with jealous rage.  It's a pretty crazy movie.  

What makes it so awesome is that again, Peter Jackson figures out great homemade effects, puppets, costumes, gross out sequences that totally transcend the budget.  He also takes glee in offending absolutely everyone which is a brilliance in and of itself.  This is what I miss about early Peter Jackson.  That 'go for broke' quality in a gross out sequence or totally inappropriate joke.  

In some ways, these early movies are the cinematic equivalents of brilliant Richard Pryor, Dave Chapelle, Lenny Bruce, or Bill Hicks stand up comedy riffs. They're willing to possibly shock the audience if they have a core belief that the scene, story, or moment has some kind of real merit.  

And as juvenile, low budget, and ridiculous as MEET THE FEEBLES is, it is also a total success. You have NEVER seen anything like it.  And as long as you can laugh at all the envelope pushing, you will have a singular cinematic experience.

DEAD ALIVE (aka BRAIN DEAD; 1992) is, in many ways, Peter Jackson's breakthrough movie.  Although it would be his next movie, the incredibly disturbing and expertly controlled HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994) that would catapult him to international fame, DEAD ALIVE is really the flag planted on the moon moment.  

DEAD ALIVE, interestingly, feels like a combination of the concerns of BAD TASTE and MEET THE FEEBLES taken to the next level.  The hen pecked Son of a Domineering Mother falls in love with a Spanish Shop Girl.  Mum disapproves. Then Mum gets bitten by a zombie monkey and turns into a zombie herself.  Loyal Son tries to take care of Mum and keep her from the neighbors. But Mum starts biting the neighbors.  And pretty soon, Son has a house full of zombies.  Which he then mows down with a lawn mower.  Along the way, we're treated to a Zombie Priest having sex with a Zombie Nurse who then gives birth to a Zombie Baby. We're treated to zombie intestines that try to hang people. And most mind blowingly, we're treated to a fifty foot zombie mother trying to force her son back into the "womb".  Yeah.  You get the idea. This movie leaves no taboo on the table.   

What makes it truly great (and one of the best zombie movies ever) is that despite all its gross out humor and taboo busting, it's at heart, a very sweet natured romantic comedy.  Here, more than ever before, we see Peter Jackson able to balance seemingly impossible tones (sweet natured and gross out horror).  We also see the continued genius special effects solutions to budget issues. Jackson introduces 1950's New Zealand in a sweeping camera shot that films a model of the town complete with model cars, model trolley cars, model people.  In a way, this is a wink to the opening of one of my personal favorite Alfred Hitchcock movies, THE LADY VANISHES (1938), which also uses models to introduce a town. 

  DEAD ALIVE is filled with laugh out loud gross out moments.  It's counter productive to list them all. Just treat yourself (if you can stomach the constant gore) and rent this movie ASAP.

***

Peter Jackson is an inspiring moviemaker. Period. Full stop.  Every new movie he makes is worth seeing.  Even the flawed and mortally compromised (by its PG-13 rating) THE LOVELY BONES showed Jackson stretching himself and returning back to creepy atmospheric drama and character study. 

Maybe it's wrong and backwards-thinking to hope that a moviemaker will return to a certain style or energy of their youth.  They did it and it was right for that time.  Maybe Jackson in his 50's just doesn't feel the same urge to gross out and offend that he did in his 20's and early 30's. And that makes sense.  

But still, I secretly hope that there is at least one more go for broke gross out horror comedy in Jackson.  They are so purely enjoyable and unbelievable.  They're inspirations just to watch. There's something important and heartening to know that someone still has the guts, humor, and vision to make them.

For more information on:

BAD TASTE: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092610/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

MEET THE FEEBLES: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097858/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1