The Strangest Movies in the World

I just saw the strangest movie I’m likely to see this year. It’s a film by Guy Maddin called Cowards Bend the Knee, and it’s playing at the Film Forum now. If you see it, it will be the weirdest movie YOU’LL see all year.

Cowards is shot like an old crank nickelodeon peep-show – it was originally meant to be viewed through peepholes at an installation; consequently, it’s been split into 10 different chapters. It’s in jumpy, weathered black and white, and all the dialogue is done on cards, like a silent movie.

The story concerns a young hockey player named Guy Maddin (but played by someone else), so it may be a bit autobiographical. But just a bit. After all, any movie with captions like “Guy tries to stop the ghost from having an abortion” can’t be completely fact-based, can it?

Essentially, Guy is drawn away from his girlfriend Veronica while she’s on the operating table in the back of a bordello. (Well, hair-stylist by day, bordello by night. Back-alley abortions any old time, it seems.) There, he falls in love with the madam’s daughter Meta, who – as they frolick on a mound of hockey gloves, convinces him to kill her mother and her boyfriend, Guy’s close friend Skippy. She wants revenge because THEY killed her father and chopped off his hands.

She has the hands. They’ve been dyed blue with hair styling chemicals (Skippy had thrown them under the sink), but they’ve been preserved in a jar. And…

Meta drugs Guy, and tells the doctor to give him an involuntary hand transplant. Unbeknownst to anyone, he simply paints Guy’s hands blue, and calls it a day. Guy, thinking his “new” hands want revenge, goes on a killing spree. And, in one odd shower scene, a butt-buzzing spree. Don’t ask – I’m not even sure I could explain.

There are plenty of other odd things in the film, and you can discover them for yourself. There’s also plenty of nudity, some of it startling– it is a peepshow after all.

Then again, this may not be the strangest film I’ve seen, since right beforehand were three shorts, two by Madden and one by the Quay Brothers. The Quay Brothers’ "Phantom Museum” is the most unsettling of the bunch – it’s a wordless tour through a museum of medical instruments. Parts of it are quite haunting.

The Madden shorts are silly, disconcerting fun. In “Sombra Delarosa,” a mother must wrestle death – “El Muerto!” in a mexican wrestling ring to prevent her daughter from committing suicide after her husband dies. And then there’s “Sissy-Boy Slap Party.” The name really does say it all – but it still has to be seen to be believed.

It really does.

Rob
(“I turn my back for five minutes, and there you go—slappin’ each other!”)