A Deep Dive into Weirdo Cinema [24] Quiz

Answer: Pass Thru

After Neil Breen tackled magic stones, government secrets, and psychic powers in "Fateful Findings" (2012), he took on the next difficult topics he could get his hands on in "Pass Thru", chiefly the concept of genocidal AI. Acting as the AI in human form, it was yet another instance in which Breen took on the role of a messiah, well above everyone else. That genocide he vowed to commit, killing hundreds of millions of people? Well, he did it, depicting them all as copy-and-pasted assets in the film's closing.

Tactless? Yes. Bold? Absolutely. Breen's tendency to go way too far with topics well beyond his grasp shone through yet again with this one, the stepping stone between his classic 2012 film and his more-popular 2018 offering, "Twisted Pair" (in which he played twins...who were also AI). While "Pass Thru" may not be as memorable, it's hard to skip over any of his cult classic Ed Wood-esque films, each of which he wrote, directed, starred in, edited, produced, cast, designed, catered, and did hair and make-up for.

Answer: Hackers

Starring Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie, "Hackers" hit the scene amidst a wave of future-punk films and, maybe it was a mix between the mediocre script and the overwhelming volume of these types of films in the 1990s, but it didn't do well, inevitably flopping in the box office, not even making back half of its $20,000,000 USD budget.

Where "Hackers" found its popularity was in the decades to follow, being praised for its visual flair and campiness. Miller and Jolie both played the titular hackers (amongst others) as they committed hacker crimes on the new-fangled 'Internet'. Once they went for the big payday ($25,000,000 with a computer worm), they hit hot water, but what else can you do when you set out to HACK THE PLANET!?

Answer: In the Heights

While Lin-Manuel Miranda hit a massive stride with "Hamilton" on Broadway in the mid-2010s, he actually started in theatre with "In the Heights", a musical featuring a cast of Hispanic characters living their lives in Washington Heights (New York City). Though the rights for the film were picked up in 2008, the film never came to fruition until more than a decade later, only releasing in 2021 following a delay brought on by COVID-19.

The film adaptation, directed by John M. Chu (known for "Crazy Rich Asians") proved to be quite well-regarded, receiving critical acclaim for its colourful, lively musical numbers and its general tone-- one of optimism and community and love. Some outlets ranked it amongst the strongest musicals of the 21st century. Despite this, the movie failed to recoup its cost due in part to a smaller theatrical release and a simultaneous release on streaming platforms. It's worth watching in spite of this.

Answer: A "Playboy" playmate

You might expect Bob Fosse to be the type for...well... jazz dance and "Cabaret". "Star 80" was actually his final film, releasing in 1983 to mixed reception before he turned to writing his final Broadway show. The film was based on a true story, specifically about the lurid life and death of Dorothy Stratten, who was featured in "Playboy" magazine in the late 1970s and early 1980s before her Hollywood murder.

Stratten was played by the Oscar-nominated Mariel Hemingway while Eric Roberts played her murderer, Paul Snider, in one of his earliest roles (and, obviously, he would go on to have hundreds of later roles over the next several decades). Much further along after Fosse's death in 1987, many filmmakers would change their opinion of "Star 80", claiming it was a forgotten gem deserving of awards.

Answer: Babylon A.D.

You want to talk about weird films? "Babylon A.D." was weird. Director Mathieu Kassovitz, who previously flopped with the Halle Berry horror-thriller "Gothika" (2003), put Vin Diesel and Mélanie Thierry into the lead roles of this dystopian feature. In this one, a mercenary had to transport Thierry's Aurora around the world, protecting her so that she could give birth and, evidently, die as she was programmed to do. Oh yeah, and there was a computer chip put into Aurora's brain, so she was super-smart. And the Russian mob was after them. And missiles?

Kassovitz disowned the film before it was released and went back to acting instead of directing (for the most part), claiming that the studio ruined the final feature. Somehow it made back its $70,000,000 USD budget, even though critics hated it. Vin Diesel took no hit to his career as a result, instead taking time to focus on the "Fast and the Furious" franchise.

Answer: Guillermo del Toro

Hitting the film festival circuit in the mid-2000s, "The Orphanage" was unlike a lot of prevalent horror of the time. While the industry took a hard turn into graphic violence and atmospheric realism (we're talking handicams), this movie was one in a handful coming from Spanish-speaking directors to live in a world of dark fantasy. At this moment, "Pan's Labyrinth", Guillermo del Toro's acclaimed dark fantasy film, was less than a year old.

"El orfanato" followed a couple moving into a massive oceanside home with the intent to make it an orphanage, but what they discovered there was the perhaps-unsettled ghosts of the children who lived there before, their deaths left unsettled. It is perhaps one of the greatest examples of gothic horror of the era.

Director J. A. Bayona would catapult into further fantastical films like "A Monster Calls" (2016) and "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" (2018) later in his career, also covering episodes of Showtime's "Penny Dreadful" and the Amazon Prime fantasy "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power".

Answer: A horse

Oh "Alluda Majaka!"... This Telugu-made film from India in 1995, clocking in over two and a half hours (kind of the norm for these Tollywood titles), featured a complicated and winding plot following a family's ongoing drama with marriage, business, and trouble with the law. Lessons were learned, often through nefarious needs and involving arranged weddings, and there were even police chases, a consequence of wrongful accusations and prison breaks.

There were two scenes to note, and both almost make the film worth watching through start-to-finish. The first of these is the one the internet latched onto in the decades to follow in which the main character, Sitaram, on the run from the law, rode a horse through the city and, trapped, turned the running horse onto its broad side to (somehow) slide under a vehicle, coming out the other side unscathed and without a loss of momentum. Notably, the actor was injured during this sequence and production was temporarily halted.

The second scene, a musical number near the conclusion of the film, featured numerous dancing Donald Duck mascots in what I can only described as a cursed Andhra Pradesh theme park. I truly can't recall the relevance, but I can absolutely recall the images, etched into my brain. And isn't that what cinema is all about?

Answer: Rodents

How this movie had a cast including Sam Rockwell, Tracy Morgan, Penelope Cruz, Jon Favreau, Nicolas Cage, and a handful of others, all as guinea pigs and a mole, is a bit beyond me. This CGI live-action/animated movie posited a world in which the U.S. government employed talking rodents to solve the plots that were most detrimental to the well-being of humankind. In the case of the movie, they had to stop a plan to wipe out all life on Earth via a computer virus called Clusterstorm which would, first, destroy a lot of microchips with malware and then second, create enough space debris to fall on Earth and kill everyone.

Oh yeah, and the perpetrator was the mole amongst their ranks. As to how he would survive... I guess he'd dig?

While massively popular for Disney from a box office point of view, "G-Force" failed to garner virtually any critical support and its returns in theatres diminished quite quickly after its first week. Director Hoyt Yeatman, who directed the film, never directed a movie before or after this one (though he had a long career in visual effects, even receiving an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for his body of work).

Answer: Belial

You want B-movie schlock? Well "Basket Case" is certainly something in that realm. About a man named Duane who arrives at a New York City hotel with a big, wicker basket, the movie follows the horrific events that unfold when he needs to feed the creature he's carrying-- his former conjoined twin, named Belial. The pair, telepathically linked, become a menace to the prostitutes of early 1980s New York and the doctors that split them up, and it all leads to a natural end in which they're found out. Despite the movie having a seemingly unambiguous ending, two sequels came to pass over the next decade.

"Basket Case" is weird, gonzo stuff. Belial-- the brother in the basket-- is a weird, gooey-looking puppet, and honestly, that's the stuff of memories. Made on a shoestring budget with amateur actors throughout, it was the weird type of mix between psychological oddity and gross-out horror that made it perfect to become a cult classic. Director Frank Henenlotter would later make "Brain Damage" in 1988 and "Frankenhooker" in 1990.

Answer: Aliens

It took seven years before the cinema saw a full-fledged sequel to the 1979 horror film "Alien", but when "Aliens" released, it was clear that gold was struck. While "Alien" was all-out horror, following the crew of the Nostromo as they attempted to survive an alien killing machine, its sequel, directed by James Cameron, took a turn into action-horror, following a group of Colonial Marines (commissioned by Weyland-Yutani) as they headed to a colony on LV-426, the very spot where the Nostromo found the alien eggs.

"Aliens" was a massive success, catapulting James Cameron to fame in the sci-fi space (before he directed "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2"), garnering Sigourney Weaver a rare horror/sci-fi Best Actress nod, and cementing a legacy for the franchise, even if its next few instalments weren't quite as well-rounded.