6 Obscure New Movies More People Should Be Excited About
Any casual Cracked reader knows that we spend an unnatural, almost obsessive amount of webspace telling you about the neverending hell-cycle of garbage that is the imploding studio system.
But on the cheery side, independent and direct-to-VOD films like Snowpiercer, Boyhood, and that one where Scarlett Johansson is a naked penis fly trap are on the rise. To celebrate such, we're once again bringing you some soon-to-be-confounding low-budget films that deserve big-budget hype.
Reality Is The Work Of A Madman, Starring Napoleon Dynamite
Anyone with a Netflix account has access to an 80-minute film about a sentient car tire that learns the ability to telekinetically demolish the skulls of any human it pleases. That's an understandably divisive movie that's waiting for you to watch it right now, and it's called Rubber.
"Ribbed, for her murder."
Now take that film's same lunatic director and apply Jon Heder, the guy who played Napoleon Dynamite. What do we get from that?
Committed to an asylum?
Right. While those images totally speak for themselves -- we'll go ahead and explain anyway. The film is called Reality and -- from what we know of the festival reviews -- is a series of interweaving and bizarre stories about such topics as the rat-man pictured above playing the host of a four camera cooking show. According to Heder's Instagram, the mask was originally going to be of a horse -- which we assume was changed because that would have just been fuckin' weird, right?
Additional plot gibberish includes a little girl who finds a VHS cassette tape inside the guts of a hunted boar, and a producer making a film about TVs that use radio waves to kill people. Yes, the least weird plot point sounds like Videodrome.
The Voices Stars Ryan Reynolds (Who Talks To Animals, Kills People)
Saying that Ryan Reynolds is the kryptonite of superhero films is unfair; the actor has cursed plenty of non-superhero films as well, all despite being generally no less annoying than some other box office draws we can think of.
Wait, don't fret. Robert Pattinson is next on the list.
But maybe there's hope, because the 'Nolds newest appears too crazy to fail as it follows a bathtub factory employee who, when driving a co-worker home, hits a deer with his car and ends up mercy killing it after the deer starts verbally begging him to. Then he goes ahead and kills his co-worker as well, because killing is way more fun in pairs.
...Not unlike the only thing you're looking at in this picture
That's when it starts to get kind of weird... as our budding psycho decides to bring the woman's severed head home to get the advice of his pet dog and cat who, yep, totally can talk to him -- one in a Scottish brogue and the other a kindly Southern drawl.
They want to secede from the UK because of Obamacare.
Oh right. The severed head also talks. Can't forget that.
Ryan Reynolds? Severed head? Shit, now we got rage flashbacks to Wolverine: Origins.
The rest of the film is apparently Ryan Reynolds discussing his mental problems with his two pets and an undead head he keeps in his refrigerator like the Leatherface version of Pee Wee's Playhouse. Later, he decides that the head is lonely, so he goes ahead and gets a few more to join her in the fridge -- all of them as chatty as the first one. So if you know anyone whose two favorite movies are Homeward Bound and American Psycho, give them the good news, as it might inspire them to let you out of their basement.
Since the days of Karloff and Lugosi, Hollywood has been saturated with so many iterations of blood-lusting sex ghouls that your average movie watcher would rather be punched in the taint by Van Helsing than sit through another generic Dracula film. Yes, Norway is about vampires, but the fact that it revolves around a gaggle of nosferatu is probably the tamest detail of a film where the main character's "heart will stop beating" if he stops boogying like a freak.
It's like Speed on speed.
Yeah... literally. If he stops dancing then his heart will literally stop. And if you're wondering why he looks like a strung out member of Duran Duran, that's because this film takes place in 1980s Greece as it follows our jiggy hero hanging out in an Athens dive bar called Disco Zardoz. From that gem of a concept, he meets a drug dealer and a prostitute to accompany him on... and we're quoting... "an adventure that leads them to the bowels of the earth." More specifically, the "Kingdom of Mathousalas" that apparently exists in Earth's core. Sure!
Although the exact nature of this trek is scantily detailed on the synopsis, the following trailer stills seem to indicate that the whole ordeal was adapted exclusively from David Bowie's nightmare journal.
Not to be confused with Bowie's "good dream" journal, which is 70 pages of nude self-portraits.
Jean-Luc Godard Made A 3-D Film To Deliberately Drive You Insane
Quick lesson in 3-D: two lenses are placed closely together so as to match human eyes. Those two recorded images are then projected into the theater to match the two different polarizations of the glasses they make you wear - which is why you can close one eye and make the illusion disappear.
That's how it's been since the emergence of the gimmick which, by the way, is drawing less and less of a crowd per year on account of it being the cinematic equivalent of a guy who won't stop playing guitar at a party. And while companies are trying like mad to make 3-D more comfortable for the audience, French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard has gone ahead and embraced the other side of the coin. You know, the one covered in eye blood.
And tears from ears.
Imagine you're watching a 3-D movie scene with two characters. Now imagine your brain wrenching into a series of agonizing skull cartwheels when one of those two characters suddenly leaves the shot. You begin to claw at your face in confusion before realizing that each eye is actually seeing a totally different image: One of the first character, and the other following the second... which is exactly what happens in Godard's newest Goodbye to Language -- your standard experimental mindfuck heightened by the filmmaker completely separating the 3-D camera lenses while shooting.
And himself from fucks given.
But it's not all aisle seizures and headaches, for the film showcases every part of the newly discovered spectrum -- from beautiful and standard 3-D shots, to slightly separating your vision so as to see around corners that you normally wouldn't, to the full on ocular pandemonium of following two scenes at once. To put that all in sex terms: if 2-D is first base, and 3-D is second base, this film would be like giving the umpire a rimjob.
Chris Pine Looks Simply Insane In Stretch
After introducing his gritty crime chops with Narc, director Joe Carnahan proceeded to make films about explosion tank skydiving, Liam Neeson fighting wolves, and Nazi Captain Kirk murdering future Batman. And now?
Afterward, he flies off in his homemade biplane.
Yep, that's Chris Pine rocking the Mad Max goggles and looking amazingly not Chris Pine-like. Can you believe that shit? Wait, correction:
The biplane crashed and dropped him outside of time.
Can you believe that shit? That there Skycaptain Hobo Of Tomorrow is also Chris Pine -- unrecognizable as shit and once again rocking the apocalypse eyewear in the latest Carnahan flick Stretch -- which is apparently about a chauffeur who takes a job from an insane billionaire. From there's it's all cock graffiti and robot faces, which we're all going to have to see the film to contextualize beyond this:
As if robocock needs context.
With an additional cast of Jessica Alba, Norman Reedus, Patrick Wilson, Ed Helms, Ray Liotta, and fucking David Hasselhoff, one would assume this film would be on the hearts and minds of every God-fearing citizen of the United States -- and yet,despite coming out this fucking month, has had next to no marketing attached. While we'd normally blame this on the film being too bat-balls crazy to advertise, considering that it has an easily sellable Chris Pine ass shot, our second guess is that we're dealing with the Ark Of The Covenant of film -- too deadly to unleash but too powerful to destroy.
A Never-Before-Seen Documentary About The Holocaust... Directed By Alfred Hitchcock
Speaking of things that Indiana Jones points rocket launchers at -- 1945 wasn't the best year for the Nazis. Allied forces swept over Hitler's collapsing dickhead empire and captured unthinkable horror with an extensive film record of the concentration camps.
The idea was to create a documentary exposing the evil of the Nazi regime so as to show German citizens exactly the kind of bullshit they had been supporting. Eventually the film was scrapped by the British government in the interest of a more tactful method of reconciliation, but not before bringing in Alfred Friggin' Hitchcock as a "supervising director" to aid the stark narrative of the film in post-production. After that, the film was scrapped and forgotten...
Along with Hitler's brain and Nazi-fusion.
At least until 40 years later, when a US researcher rummaging through the vaults of London's Imperial War Museum stumbled upon a film can labeled F3080 and found the lost and unofficial Hitchcock film footage almost entirely succumbed to time... until now. Thanks to three years of laboring frame by frame, the reel is not only fully restored, but has been assembled so as to match the original shot lists for the film. The whole ordeal will be lumped into a documentary about how this film came to be called Night Will Fall.
A film so scary that it made Hitchcock cry for a week.
So while we all love Chris Pine's ass and dancing vampires -- unflinching Holocaust footage supervised by an expert in cinematic discomfort should probably be something people are lawfully required to power through, no matter how upsetting. Also, it's narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, who totally seems like the kind of person Hitchcock would have tried to bang.
Tell David about the movies you're most excited for on his Twitter.
For further wackadoo cinema, check out 4 Ridiculous Monsters Who Are Getting Their Own Horror Films and 4 Signs 'Mad Max 4' Is Probably the Craziest Movie Ever Made.
