Weird Movies Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD La carne. DIRECTEDY BY Marco Ferreri. FEATURING Sergio Castellitto, Francesca Dellera, Petra Reinhardt. PLOT A nightclub pianist drops everythinghis job, kids, beloved dogto shack up with a mysterious woman who randomly enters his life, pursuing an alternately playful and carnal relationship involving, at various points, a paralysis induced erection, breast feeding at St. Faustinos shrine, storks, and whimso sadism. Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital Blu ray. Two 7. 0s Movies on Video Enter the Valley of the Cult Heroines. With its flat patterns, sinuous lines and entwining forms, Belladonna refracts traditional Japanese graphic art through the prism of the Art Nouveau or Vienna Secession, two movements that were in some ways inspired by Japanese woodcuts. It also echoes the candy colored psychedelia of the Beatles Yellow Submarine 1. Cult Horror Movies The Painting ' title='Cult Horror Movies The Painting ' />Lost Highway is your source for weekly reviews of bmovies and cult films ranging from scifi and horror to the downright weird and bizarre. Enjoy the journey. French science fiction comic book Barbarella and the late 1. San Francisco rock scene. Belladonna is eye popping and ear catching. Cult Horror Movies The Painting ' title='Cult Horror Movies The Painting ' />The score, by the jazz pianist Masahiko Sato, might be characterized as acid twang in its evocation of Pink Floyd and Ennio Morricone. The movies look is as flowery as its title. Still, the delicate lines and pastel splashes of color are frequently at odds with a sexual violence at once explicit and powerfully abstract. Reviewing Belladonna in The New York Times last May, Glenn Kenny called the movie compulsively watchable, even at its most disturbing. The protagonist, Jeanne, an initially shy, sad eyed damsel who might have been the subject of a song by a hippie troubadour, is raped on her wedding day by the demonic local lord and then again, repeatedly, by Satan himself. The Devil speaks with the deep, seductive voice of Tatsuya Nakadai, an actor best known in the West for his samurai roles, and appears in various guises, including that of a disembodied penis. Part abused victim, part avenging riot grrrl, Jeanne takes up witchcraft, ultimately becoming so powerful that the feudal lord who first violated her tries to enlist her as his ally. She refuses or rather, she makes a demand he cannot satisfy and is thus arrested and martyred at the stake. A brief coda added for an expurgated but still unsuccessful Japanese release flashes forward to the French Revolution, identifying Jeanne with Eugne Delacroixs 1. Liberty Leading the People. Photo. From left, Marcia Mc. Broom, Dolly Read and Cynthia Myers in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls 1. Credit. The Criterion Collection Belladonna of Sadness described in a Japanese trailer included as a Blu ray extra as a typical Romanesque anime of intense eroticism and lyrical sorrow is organically outr. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls 1. Criterion, is intentionally so. Directed by the exploitation satirist Russ Meyer 1. Roger Ebert, the movie was an outlandish, intentionally one dimensional revision of the 1. Century Fox hit Valley of the Dolls. The three young women aspiring to show business careers in the original are here three members of a rock band who go to Los Angeles and fall under the spell of the sinister producer Z Man Barzell John La. Zar, an androgynous figure given to orgiastic LSD happenings and flights of mock Shakespearean language. Cast with frequently nude Playboy playmates and veterans of Mr. Meyers earlier films, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a relic of Foxs most delirious period. To reach the youth market, the studio was willing to try almost anything. Fox made or contemplated biopics of New Left heroes Che Guevara and Malcolm X and adaptations of problematic literary adaptations Myra Breckinridge, and The Confessions of Nat Turner, as well as Mr. Meyers X rated comedies. A man who loved his montage, Mr. Meyer directs the film as a succession of gag cartoons, many in close up, with intermittent interludes of soft focus sex. The actresses all wear wigs or seem to as they dance like go go fembots to the ubiquitous bubble gum music that fills Z Mans mansion. The outfits, for men and women, might have provided a template for Paul Thomas Andersons Boogie Nights. Mr. Meyers grand finale mixes bloody mayhem with saccharine bromides, but the films most outr aspect is its innocence. With its flat lighting garish colors and arch, dated slang, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is beyond self parody, a cartoon of a cartoon. NEWLY RELEASEDCANDY Adapted from a notorious novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Christian Marquands 1. The all star cast includes Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Ringo Starr and members of the Living Theater, with Ewa Aulin, a former Miss Teen International, suffering their attentions as a female Candide. On Blu ray and DVD. Kino LorberINSERTS Set in the early days of talking pictures, John Byrums first film now on Blu ray stars Richard Dreyfuss as a dissolute Hollywood director reduced to making stag films in his living room, with Bob Hoskins and Jessica Harper as a gangster and his star struck moll. Although Inserts has been rated X, it is not pornographic itself, Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times in 1. Joe Orton. Twilight TimeKAMIKAZE 8. Shortly before his death, the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder played an eccentric police detective in Wolf Gremms dystopian science fiction film. It suggests a curious but not surprising blend of influences, Mr. Canby wrote in 1. Download Ipod The Littlest Angel. Alphaville, Dr. Mabuse and Les Vampires as well as Fassbinders own films. On Blu ray and DVD streaming from Amazon Video. Film MovementTHE SWINGING CHEERLEADERS Released, mainly to drive ins, in 1. Jack Hills R rated exploitation comedy adds a soupon of female empowerment to copious soft core sex. A favorite of Quentin Tarantinos, the movie is also a footnote to film history repeatedly cited in Errol Morriss 1. The Thin Blue Line. Available in a dual Blu rayDVD edition. Arrow VideoWOMAN IN THE DUNES Hiroshi Teshigaharas visceral, erotically charged, elegantly monochromatic representation of entrapment, based on the novel by Kobo Ab, was a notable art house success in its day. The Times critic Bosley Crowther, who saw the movie at the 1. New York Film Festival, called it a strongly allegorical, strangely engrossing film. On Blu ray, DVD and Amazon Video. 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