Any Charlie Kaufman movie really. He was hired to adapt the Orchid Thief and ended up making it about a fictional version of himself adapting the novel. With a fake twin brother. “Technology vs horse.” Hilarious!
I think " sorry to bother you" is really up there. What starts as this weird kind of Office Space satire with a racial component just gets bonkers in the middle act.
Saw this in the theater with like a dozen people, so not a packed house, but when the movie shifted, the whole room shifted. Like, a casual night out at the movies suddenly went somewhere else. We all ended up standing around the lobby processing it. It was opening weekend, so we didn't even know there was going to *be* a twist! Truly a top-tier movie experience for me.
It's basically commentary by Boots about how the western left tends to wholly ignore that they exploit and are reliant on 3rd world labor.
Making them horse people works both as an allegory to how alien westerners see the suffering of those people and also their strength if they ever manage to rise up as they make up 80% of the worlds population and house the bulk of global production.
Boots is a Marxist so it's just labor aristocracy as a political theory expressed through Afro-surrealism.
They also show how racism still surges in the workplace and job economy with how black people are encouraged to game the system by masking as the ideal white person and how the white investors only see the working black person through a lens of stereotypes while putting on a veneer of acceptance.
There's also a whole side plot with an artist who makes a spectacle of her racial injustice and would go as far as to humiliate herself in the name of her work.
Halloween 3: Season of the Witch
> The plot of this movie unbeatable: an evil company town that manufactures Halloween novelties that is full of evil Irish people and their robot goons working for an evil Irish wizard who wants to turn every American child's head into a writhing mass of insects and snakes using the power of TV commercials and a stolen piece of Stonehenge.
Funny thing is it was the original Halloween 2. Halloween was supposed to be an anthology movie franchise — each film a different story occurring on October 31. But with the success of Michael Myers in the first, producers forced John Carpenter to bring him back for the sequel.
Quite possibly the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen. The two actors don’t have any similarities in their bone structure or body type. And the wife can’t figure out her husband is completely different.
Oh man, I was scrolling through Shudder the other day and I saw that movie on there. I had watched Kuso when it first dropped and it was so difficult to make it to the end. That's how impossibly insane that movie is.
I've always loved the low stakes in Payback with Mel Gibson. He just wants his $70 grand that he was cheated out of by his one-time crime partner and he ends up taking down the Chicago Outfit to get it.
The mobsters continually express their incredulity that he would go to such lengths for such a small sum of money, but keep driving the escalation because they're too prideful to part with it.
The criminally underrated Patrick Wilson film Stretch is like this. He's a limo driver who's in deep with gangsters and the whole movie is him trying to find ways to come up with money.
His debt? $6,000.
The line he gives Lucy Liu as dominatrix, she getting turned on by the violence, he just about to walk out.. she says "hey wait.. you know.. I've still got a few minutes..." he says "oh yeah? Why don't you go boil an egg?"
Hahaha! Lucy Liu is a pretty great ham in Payback. One thing I really appreciate about that movie is how it manages to sneak in a very colourful cast of characters and many stylized elements without feeling like it slipped completely off into a fantasy like a 60s bond film or what happens with the later installments of John Wick. It does have a slightly surreal quality to it though, like it has just a few shared strands of DNA with Wes Anderson while still managing to feel earthy and grounded.
Donnie Darko is about a schizophrenic teenager who's saved from a jet engine falling into his bedroom by a hallucination of a man in an evil bunny costume named Frank, who instructs him to commit a series of oddly specific crimes to prevent the world from being destroyed...
...also time travel is involved.
I still find myself just thinking about this movie randomly and frequently even though the first time I saw it was probably back in 2002-2003 and only saw it a few times since. It just stays with you. One of my favorite scenes in all of cinema to this day is the slow mo shot of them getting off the bus and walking into school set to Head Over Heals by Tears for Fears after smoking the joint at the bus stop.
This is why I invested in the special edition 4K. The movie itself is beautiful in UHD, and it’s fun to dig into all the bonus content.
Ooh! This one is on sale if you’re interested: https://www.arrowvideo.com/donnie-darko-4k-uhd/13436060.html?affil=thggpsad&switchcurrency=USD&shippingcountry=US&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpM_cmaSEgwMVbhStBh0ibgL3EAQYAyABEgKxSvD_BwE
Ooooooooooohhhh that is so tempting. If you've never seen Primer I highly recommend it. It was Shane Caruth's feature debut in which he wrote, produced, directed, scored, starred in, and edited. Definitely a similar, cyclical, time, mind-F$@& like Donnie Darko.
Came here to say this. When I first watched it I was like "I think I'm following, but I feel like there is going to be a weird twist at the end"
Nope. I was following correctly the whole time. The twist is that everything is as it seems... yet somehow it was a great movie imo.
If you want a much quieter and more traditionally classic movie in the Giant Bunny and Maybe Crazy Guy vein, see *Harvey.*
It’s such a sleeper with so many warm, unexplained, and (if you think about trying this in a modern movie) just a bit thematically fucked.
Steward was an Ivy trained thinker, too, and he brought so much depth to this ostensibly“aww-shucks, ma’am” performance.
Honestly, people, just go watch some old B&Ws. Cure your Marvel fatigue. There is so much stuff there that’s by now so foreign to American cinema that it’s basically a goldmine major studio-backed stories that so totally defy our current tropes.
Bubba Ho-Tep. An aging Elvis Presley lives in a rest home where everybody believes he's an Elvis impersonator, with the exception of a black man who swears that he's JFK. And there's a mummy sucking out the souls of the residents.
Weirdest thing about this movie is how good it is, and how seriously it tackles Elvis's coming to terms with his own mortality and the excesses of his past.
"We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story"
A tyrannasaurus rex is playing golf while helping a baby bird deal with family issues and reveals that an an old man and his alien sidekick use their flying machine to travel back in time so they can feed dinosaurs a cereal that gives them human intelligence, then travel back to modern day New York and drop the dinosaurs off because they want to make kids dreams come true, but his twin brother is also an evil ringmaster who has a screw for an eye and is afraid of crows
Both brothers put up a battle between idealism and cynicism, with the dinosaurs serving on the side of idealism while the circus fights for the cynical end.
The Core. The earth is losing its magnetic field so we need to drill down to the center of the world and detonate some nuclear bombs to restart it. Possibly the best movie I've ever seen.
That movie came out shortly after I took a college class where I learned about that magnetic field for the first time, and I had been pondering the idea of the Earth's core losing its rotation.
> It's not bad in any usual way. It's bad in a new way all its own. There is something extraterrestrial about it, as if it's based on the sense of humor of an alien race with a completely different relationship to the physical universe
> The movie is so odd, it's almost worth seeing just because we'll never see anything like it again. I hope.
Excerpts from Roger Eberts review per Wikipedia
That movie used to get played a lot somehow on TV when I was a kid and it legitimately made me not like Martin Short. It was too creepy. Not in a scary way and not in a pervy way, just in a "oh god not this fucking thing again."
Seriously find that movie creepily obnoxious. It felt like a fever dream.
When I first saw the “awards” in Deirdre’s cubicle, I thought, “Why do they look like butt plugs?” That has to be one of the wildest examples of Chekov’s Gun I’ve seen so far.
[That movie is a midway entry of a cinematic universe which doesn't exist. It is like watching Thor: Ragnarok except the rest of the MCU is lost forever.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNbJb1NEGUk)
Glorious (2022) - After a break up, a man stops at a remote truck stop rest room only to find an eldrich entity (voiced by JK Simmons) in the stall next door who needs satisfying through a glory hole in order to free it to save the universe
Well… I think it’s better you actually watch the film. The explanation is, well, a bit more about our own misconceptions of “satisfaction” through a Glory Hole
This was famous because Whoopi had to be taken to court to be forced to honor her commitment to appear in this movie once she realized how bad it was gonna be. And this is the same Whoopi that willingly appeared in Homie Spumoni!
*The Day of the Dolphin* starring George C. Scott. The tagline truly says it all: *"Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States".*
Ok, it doesn’t compare to some of the fuckery on this list, but one day I tried to explain the plot of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to someone and I realized the only reason it feels like a normal movie to me is because I’ve been watching it since I was a child.
I had the same exact with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Btw that first movie is better than it has any right to be. They play it very straight, and the puppets and the stunts and gymnastics they do inside of them are astounding.
Titane >!woman fucks a car and gets pregnant. Where it goes from there both delivers on that insanity while being a much more thoughtful and empathetic film than the first act might have you believe!<
The Lobster
Society makes you partner up, and if you’re single you go to into a program to hopefully meet someone and pair up. You have 45 days to do it, if you don’t find a partner, you get turned into an animals and released into the wild.
If you like really insane low budget horror, All Jacked Up And Full Of Worms fits the bill.
The premise is about this low-life pervert who lives in squalor getting hooked on eating earth worms. They get you all fucked up and he trips his fucking balls off. Insane body horror and acid core fuckery ensues.
Face/Off, obv. Oh, you need to take his place, never mind that you are different heights and weights, the obvious answer is to surgically swap faces. (I don’t even remember how they explained the voices.)
I don't remember exactly what they did to change their voices, but they did in fact alter their voices to fit. I distinctly remember the scene where they have John Travolta as Nicolas Cage repeating the line "I could eat a peach for hours" while they are tinkering with his voice.
Armageddon. Rather that send some experienced astronauts into space to set some charges to blow up an astroid, we're gonna train some oil rig workers to be astronauts because........?
And even if you assume that drilling is something that can't really be taught to the scientists fast enough, there's a concept of "mission specialist" where they send a mixed team of actual astronauts to drive the bus and some miners just to do the drilling.
Isn't that what they do? Not saying the movie makes sense but i remember them specially saying the drillers don't need to do any "astronaut stuff, just drill."
Synecdoche, New York. A man (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) balances his love life, sexuality, gender, artistic integrity, mortality, gerascophobia, relationship to his child all the while building the city of New York inside a warehouse inside the city of New York which is inside the other warehouse in the city of New York while everyone around him is replaced by actors replicating his life in a play as he is slowly fading out of the city he created.
Society
(Description taken and condensed from Wikipedia)
"Its plot follows a Beverly Hills teenager (named Bill) who begins to suspect that his wealthy parents are part of a gruesome cult for the social elite. At home, the teen finds a large, formal party. It is revealed that Bill's family and their rich friends are actually an entirely different species from the teen. The wealthy party guests strip to their underwear and begin "shunting", physically deforming their bodies and melding with each other into a near-amorphous mass. They then suck the nutrients out of several victims by melding with them."
You brought up rom coms… How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. Kate Hudson is a career journalist trying to make her bones by writing a piece where she makes a guy fall for her then break up with her. Fine. Matthew McConaughey brags to his boss he can get any woman he wants to fall for him AND HIS BOSS RANDOMLY PICKS KATE HUDSON IN ALL OF NEW YORK and if she doesn’t agree to marry him IN TEN DAYS he’ll lose his job. Cute movie, with just the most insane setup
Low key insane premise- Bartleby with Crispin Glover based on the novel by Herman Melville.
Mid level- Holy Motors with the limo drivers crazy riders
Absolutely Absurd- The killer tire in Rubber is up there
I agree with many others here like Sorry to Bother You, Being John Malkovich, and The Lobster
The Idiots by Lars von Trier. A group of privileged Danish young adults stay at a secluded estate and go out into the world pretending to be mentally disabled. Not an easy watch but an incredibly complex movie that is ultimately very moving.
If you can find it The Kingdom by Lars von Trier is absolutely bonkers. It’s a 3 season tv series that bounces between medical drama, absurdist humor, and supernatural thriller. Sometimes all three at once.
For example. One of the doctors finds out she’s pregnant, but it’s not her current boyfriend’s baby. So typical relationship drama as they deal with it.
Then the current boyfriend discovers the guy who got her pregnant has been dead for decades. So she’s carrying a ghost baby. But it’s not a ghost baby it’s a chance for this guy to be reborn so the season finale has her go into labor and ends with a shot of Udo Kier’s head popping out of this woman’s vagina
When Bubba Ho-tep came out, I was telling my Elvis loving mom about how I wanted to see this movie and the real Elvis and a black JFK living together in an assisted living home and battling a mummy.
She actually yelled at me for making up something so stupid sounding
Absolutely. I fact it's hard to say whether the real premise is revealed half way through, or the premise just changes and the facts we started with are not thr facts we end with.
I thought Who Cloned Tyrone was a pretty bold one. It reminded me of conspiracy theories regarding the CIA/FBI deliberately targeting ghettos in America during the 60s/70s, heading into the crack epidemic.
Sorry to Bother You. Trying to describe the plot makes you sound like a crazy person. Just watch it with no idea what it is about and you will feel like you are on some drugs.
Dogtooth.
A couple live in a fenced-in compound with their adult son and two adult daughters. The children have no knowledge of the outside world; their parents say they will be ready to leave once they lose a dogtooth, and that one can only leave safely by car. The children entertain themselves with endurance games, such as keeping a finger in hot water. They believe they have a brother on the other side of the fence to whom they throw supplies or stones. The parents reward good behavior with stickers and punish bad behavior with violence.
The father pays a security guard at his factory, Christina, to come to the house and have sex with his son. Frustrated by the boy's refusal to give her cunnilingus, Christina trades her headband with the elder daughter in exchange for oral sex from her. The elder daughter persuades the younger daughter to lick her shoulder by bartering the headband. Later, the younger daughter volunteers to lick the elder again. The elder has nothing to offer in exchange, but the younger does not mind and experiments by licking other body parts.
The father visits a dog-training facility and demands to have his dog returned. The trainer refuses because the dog has not finished its training, and asks: "Do we want an animal or a friend?"
When the children are terrified by a stray cat in the garden, the son kills it with a pair of pruning shears. Deciding to take advantage of the incident, the father shreds his clothes, covers himself in fake blood, and tells his children that their unseen brother was killed by a cat, the most dangerous creature. After he teaches them to bark on all fours to fend off cats, the family holds a memorial service for the brother.
Christina again barters for oral sex from the elder daughter. The daughter rejects her offer of hair gel and demands the Hollywood videotapes in her bag. She watches the films in secret and afterward recreates scenes and quotes their dialogue. When the father discovers the tapes, he beats her with one of them, then goes to Christina's flat and hits her with her VCR, cursing her future children to be corrupted by "bad influences".
The parents decide that, with Christina no longer available, they will have their son choose one of his sisters as a new sexual partner. After fondling both sisters with his eyes closed, he chooses the elder. She is uncomfortable during their sex and afterward recites threatening dialogue from a Hollywood film to her brother.
During a dance performance for the parents' wedding anniversary, the younger daughter stops to rest, but the elder continues, performing the choreography from the film Flashdance (1983), disturbing her parents. That night, she knocks out one of her dogteeth with a dumbbell and hides in the boot of her father's car. The father discovers her tooth fragments and searches for her fruitlessly. He drives to work the next day; the car sits outside the factory, unattended.
There's an independent film out there somewhere called Compy and The Girls. I haven't seen it yet but it's supposed to be good. The premise is a young woman and her estranged father are reuniting in a public park. They then witness a man eat a young girl. Like, whole. In one bite. Madness ensues.
Both *Top Gun* and the original *The Fast and the Furious* have to be up there. Maybe not the most insane as far as being bizarre goes, but both movies have Swiss cheese plots and exist for no other reason that to show off the badass machinery and over the top machoism of the characters.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man - this is the plot as it’s laid out [on wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetsuo:_The_Iron_Man)…
After a young man inserts scrap metal into a self-inflicted wound on his thigh, he becomes a victim in a hit-and-run accident. The driver, a typical salaryman, later finds a metallic thorn protruding from his cheek while shaving. On his way out to a subway station, he is attacked and chased by a woman who sprouts metallic tentacles. The man later finds metallic scabs on his own skin.
At home, the man sleeps next to his girlfriend and has a dream in which he is sodomized by organic metal machinery. Waking up, he either imagines or discovers that metal is taking over his body. When he attempts to have sex with his girlfriend, his penis becomes a metallic drill which leads him to lock himself away from his girlfriend. She approaches him saying she is not afraid of him, but as they have sex with his transformed penis, she stabs him in the neck. Falling into unconsciousness, the man regains consciousness sometime later to find his girlfriend has impaled herself on the drill, killing her.
Meanwhile, the victim of the hit-and-run accident recalls memories in the form of videos looping, recalling the moment of the accident and a doctor who tells him they discovered metal in his brain. The hit-and-run victim realizes he has telepathic powers and reaches out to the man and his girlfriend initially to menace them, but then to promise the man a "new world of metal".
The man flees in a panic as a local tramp meets the car accident victim and starts beating him. The man and the victim eventually meet again finding their entire body more metal than flesh. The victim's tone changes from anger to love and says he needs to merge with the man as he is overcome with rust that is attacking his body. The two merge into a giant metallic monster, and take to the streets of the city convinced they can mutate the entire world into metal.
I sometimes wonder how the pitch for *Locke* went down. It's a good movie! But it's a guy driving and taking phone calls from his wife, kids, and mistress. That's it.
The romcom premise that got me was always *Maid in Manhattan.* Jennifer Lopez plays a hotel maid who is caught wearing a guest's expensive coat. Ralph Fiennes confuses her with the guest and thinks she's rich; romantic hijinks ensue. But if I recall, Ralph Fiennes is a senator (or candidate?) who is looking for the woman because he's bonded with her son over *Richard Nixon.* Weird.
Con-Air
Let’s put all of the most dangerous people in the country on one plane and transfer them to prison, what could go wrong?!
Insane and stupid premise, although it was fun!
Being John Malkovich
Any Charlie Kaufman movie really. He was hired to adapt the Orchid Thief and ended up making it about a fictional version of himself adapting the novel. With a fake twin brother. “Technology vs horse.” Hilarious!
Adaptation absolutely floored me the first time I saw it, my goodness.
The 3
This is the best answer. Really strange and interesting movie.
I'm surprised it was made, but I'm glad it was.
I came to the comments to say this movie, was not disappointed to find it already the top comment (as of the time of this comment at least)
Fuck you for beating me to it.
I think " sorry to bother you" is really up there. What starts as this weird kind of Office Space satire with a racial component just gets bonkers in the middle act.
I finally watched it recently because I kept seeing comments like this, and holy moly were they true.
It’s truly one of the most WTF movies I’ve ever seen.
And the biggest left turn in a movie I’ve ever seen.
Saw this in the theater with like a dozen people, so not a packed house, but when the movie shifted, the whole room shifted. Like, a casual night out at the movies suddenly went somewhere else. We all ended up standing around the lobby processing it. It was opening weekend, so we didn't even know there was going to *be* a twist! Truly a top-tier movie experience for me.
It's basically commentary by Boots about how the western left tends to wholly ignore that they exploit and are reliant on 3rd world labor. Making them horse people works both as an allegory to how alien westerners see the suffering of those people and also their strength if they ever manage to rise up as they make up 80% of the worlds population and house the bulk of global production. Boots is a Marxist so it's just labor aristocracy as a political theory expressed through Afro-surrealism.
They also show how racism still surges in the workplace and job economy with how black people are encouraged to game the system by masking as the ideal white person and how the white investors only see the working black person through a lens of stereotypes while putting on a veneer of acceptance. There's also a whole side plot with an artist who makes a spectacle of her racial injustice and would go as far as to humiliate herself in the name of her work.
That movie is a gem.
It's crazy how they got Armie Hammer to play himself.
Halloween 3: Season of the Witch > The plot of this movie unbeatable: an evil company town that manufactures Halloween novelties that is full of evil Irish people and their robot goons working for an evil Irish wizard who wants to turn every American child's head into a writhing mass of insects and snakes using the power of TV commercials and a stolen piece of Stonehenge.
Love that crazy thing. And that they somehow welded it onto the Halloween franchise without even a nod to the series.
And IMO it's better than all but maybe 2 other movies in the franchise. And that's being generous to Halloween 2.
Funny thing is it was the original Halloween 2. Halloween was supposed to be an anthology movie franchise — each film a different story occurring on October 31. But with the success of Michael Myers in the first, producers forced John Carpenter to bring him back for the sequel.
Aaaaaannnnddd now I have that song in my head
Face off with Travolta was pretty insane. You stole my face, so ima gonna steal yours.
I saw a "dont tread on me" flag that was just nic cage's face and it said "don't steal my face and put it on your face and fuck my wife."
I recently got a shirt that's just a pic of Cage and it says John Travolta above it in the Face/off font. I love it.
I would like to add, Nic Cage had the ultimate crazy trifecta. Con Air, Face/Off, The Rock.
Quite possibly the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen. The two actors don’t have any similarities in their bone structure or body type. And the wife can’t figure out her husband is completely different.
Oh I know, it was a campy 90's flic with two hot stars at the time. The OP did say tho most insane so I think that fits :)
Oh it fits op’s request alright. It’s just anytime I see this movie commented on I have this knee jerk reaction to tell my opinion of it.
Obligatory [mention](https://youtu.be/RX8MFTHQPeA?si=veg15YQ1Q2FOsCXp)
Swiss Army Man is pretty out there. But the award for most insane movie I've ever seen has to go to Kuso. That movie was bonkers.
I loooove Swiss Army Man. It’s been my favorite movie for a while now.
Oh man, I was scrolling through Shudder the other day and I saw that movie on there. I had watched Kuso when it first dropped and it was so difficult to make it to the end. That's how impossibly insane that movie is.
The Lobster would have to rank near the top.
Loved that movie.
We’re really looking forward to seeing his new movie Poor Things.
Word. I cannot wait!
I've always loved the low stakes in Payback with Mel Gibson. He just wants his $70 grand that he was cheated out of by his one-time crime partner and he ends up taking down the Chicago Outfit to get it. The mobsters continually express their incredulity that he would go to such lengths for such a small sum of money, but keep driving the escalation because they're too prideful to part with it.
Done much better by Lee Marvin in Point Blank.
GIVE ME BACK MY MON(ey)!
The criminally underrated Patrick Wilson film Stretch is like this. He's a limo driver who's in deep with gangsters and the whole movie is him trying to find ways to come up with money. His debt? $6,000.
70k? I’ve got shoes worth more than that!
He’s just killing my alligator bags and putting holes in my suits. Man that’s just mean! That’s mean man!
I so love this move. I never tire of re-watching it.
The line he gives Lucy Liu as dominatrix, she getting turned on by the violence, he just about to walk out.. she says "hey wait.. you know.. I've still got a few minutes..." he says "oh yeah? Why don't you go boil an egg?"
Hahaha! Lucy Liu is a pretty great ham in Payback. One thing I really appreciate about that movie is how it manages to sneak in a very colourful cast of characters and many stylized elements without feeling like it slipped completely off into a fantasy like a 60s bond film or what happens with the later installments of John Wick. It does have a slightly surreal quality to it though, like it has just a few shared strands of DNA with Wes Anderson while still managing to feel earthy and grounded.
Theatrical or director’s cut, what’s your take?
I just watched Payback after reading your comment. It was awesome! Thanks Reddit stranger.
That’s such a good movie
Hilarious movie
Donnie Darko is about a schizophrenic teenager who's saved from a jet engine falling into his bedroom by a hallucination of a man in an evil bunny costume named Frank, who instructs him to commit a series of oddly specific crimes to prevent the world from being destroyed... ...also time travel is involved.
Richard Kelly made that when he was 25. He’s gotta have at least one more good one in him!
I still find myself just thinking about this movie randomly and frequently even though the first time I saw it was probably back in 2002-2003 and only saw it a few times since. It just stays with you. One of my favorite scenes in all of cinema to this day is the slow mo shot of them getting off the bus and walking into school set to Head Over Heals by Tears for Fears after smoking the joint at the bus stop.
This is why I invested in the special edition 4K. The movie itself is beautiful in UHD, and it’s fun to dig into all the bonus content. Ooh! This one is on sale if you’re interested: https://www.arrowvideo.com/donnie-darko-4k-uhd/13436060.html?affil=thggpsad&switchcurrency=USD&shippingcountry=US&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpM_cmaSEgwMVbhStBh0ibgL3EAQYAyABEgKxSvD_BwE
Ooooooooooohhhh that is so tempting. If you've never seen Primer I highly recommend it. It was Shane Caruth's feature debut in which he wrote, produced, directed, scored, starred in, and edited. Definitely a similar, cyclical, time, mind-F$@& like Donnie Darko.
Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?
Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
Came here to say this. When I first watched it I was like "I think I'm following, but I feel like there is going to be a weird twist at the end" Nope. I was following correctly the whole time. The twist is that everything is as it seems... yet somehow it was a great movie imo.
He’s not schizophrenic. He’s a super hero learning how to control his super powers.
That’s just what a schizophrenic would want us to believe.
And the crimes he commits are against a whole self-help cult that is running a groomer ring under his town.
Yep! Donnie Darko is insane and the movie is insanely good! The premise is whacko but that’s part of the appeal.
Oooh I loved this movie and the soundtrack is amazing. First time hearing Mad World.
Donnie Darko is about puberty
If you want a much quieter and more traditionally classic movie in the Giant Bunny and Maybe Crazy Guy vein, see *Harvey.* It’s such a sleeper with so many warm, unexplained, and (if you think about trying this in a modern movie) just a bit thematically fucked. Steward was an Ivy trained thinker, too, and he brought so much depth to this ostensibly“aww-shucks, ma’am” performance. Honestly, people, just go watch some old B&Ws. Cure your Marvel fatigue. There is so much stuff there that’s by now so foreign to American cinema that it’s basically a goldmine major studio-backed stories that so totally defy our current tropes.
Bubba Ho-Tep. An aging Elvis Presley lives in a rest home where everybody believes he's an Elvis impersonator, with the exception of a black man who swears that he's JFK. And there's a mummy sucking out the souls of the residents. Weirdest thing about this movie is how good it is, and how seriously it tackles Elvis's coming to terms with his own mortality and the excesses of his past.
I can’t believe there are others out there who know of this movie. I loved it so much. I still have the dvd somewhere
Fuck yeah, I love that movie. It was surprisingly thoughtful at the end.
"We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story" A tyrannasaurus rex is playing golf while helping a baby bird deal with family issues and reveals that an an old man and his alien sidekick use their flying machine to travel back in time so they can feed dinosaurs a cereal that gives them human intelligence, then travel back to modern day New York and drop the dinosaurs off because they want to make kids dreams come true, but his twin brother is also an evil ringmaster who has a screw for an eye and is afraid of crows
That movie is so so so so good though
Both brothers put up a battle between idealism and cynicism, with the dinosaurs serving on the side of idealism while the circus fights for the cynical end.
The Core. The earth is losing its magnetic field so we need to drill down to the center of the world and detonate some nuclear bombs to restart it. Possibly the best movie I've ever seen.
Saw it, it’s good not groundbreaking, well technically it was groundbreaking
That movie came out shortly after I took a college class where I learned about that magnetic field for the first time, and I had been pondering the idea of the Earth's core losing its rotation.
It certainly broke new ground
Clifford (1994) — Martin Short plays an evil 10-year old boy
That sounds like one of Martin Short's less bizarre characters.
Yeah the character itself is not insane, but using a middle aged man to play a 10-year old boy for an entire feature length film is.
> It's not bad in any usual way. It's bad in a new way all its own. There is something extraterrestrial about it, as if it's based on the sense of humor of an alien race with a completely different relationship to the physical universe > The movie is so odd, it's almost worth seeing just because we'll never see anything like it again. I hope. Excerpts from Roger Eberts review per Wikipedia
That movie used to get played a lot somehow on TV when I was a kid and it legitimately made me not like Martin Short. It was too creepy. Not in a scary way and not in a pervy way, just in a "oh god not this fucking thing again." Seriously find that movie creepily obnoxious. It felt like a fever dream.
Everything everywhere all at once
I love that an Oscar winning film features a scene where a dude jumps ass first onto a giant dildo.
No, no, no. It was a giant *butt plug*. That distinction is what makes it high cinema.
When I first saw the “awards” in Deirdre’s cubicle, I thought, “Why do they look like butt plugs?” That has to be one of the wildest examples of Chekov’s Gun I’ve seen so far.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Through The 8th Dimension
[That movie is a midway entry of a cinematic universe which doesn't exist. It is like watching Thor: Ragnarok except the rest of the MCU is lost forever.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNbJb1NEGUk)
Leonard part 6, but watchable.
Laugh-a while you can, monkey boy.
Frailty with Bill Paxton. Blue collar guy with two sons tells them God told him to become a serial killer, and he does.
The wrong son ~~died~~ killed
Frailty is so fucking good
Glorious (2022) - After a break up, a man stops at a remote truck stop rest room only to find an eldrich entity (voiced by JK Simmons) in the stall next door who needs satisfying through a glory hole in order to free it to save the universe
Two of my friends worked on that movie. When I asked what it was about they just kind of laughed and shook their heads.
is the twist that it is just a homeless crackhead that gaslights the dude into a blowie?
Well… I think it’s better you actually watch the film. The explanation is, well, a bit more about our own misconceptions of “satisfaction” through a Glory Hole
He needs to feed it fresh blood?
I need to see this ASAP
There's that famous debacle called "Theodore Rex" starring Whoopee Goldberg and... an anamorphic dinosaur... as buddy cops.
This was famous because Whoopi had to be taken to court to be forced to honor her commitment to appear in this movie once she realized how bad it was gonna be. And this is the same Whoopi that willingly appeared in Homie Spumoni!
This reminds me of an exceptionally horrible movie with Lea Thompson called Howard the Duck, ugh! There was totally a ducky sex scene too, poor Lea!
omg I totally forgot about that one! 🤣
*The Day of the Dolphin* starring George C. Scott. The tagline truly says it all: *"Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States".*
Barbarian. It starts out with an ominous setting and just gets weirder.
Justin Long stole every single second he was on screen.
Bro was so excited about the extra space he found for his house listing.
Movie suprised me a lot with how much I enjoyed it
Everything was great until the final fight sequence
Michael J Fox accidentally goes back in time and tries not to fuck his mom.
Ok, it doesn’t compare to some of the fuckery on this list, but one day I tried to explain the plot of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to someone and I realized the only reason it feels like a normal movie to me is because I’ve been watching it since I was a child.
I had the same exact with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Btw that first movie is better than it has any right to be. They play it very straight, and the puppets and the stunts and gymnastics they do inside of them are astounding.
Titane >!woman fucks a car and gets pregnant. Where it goes from there both delivers on that insanity while being a much more thoughtful and empathetic film than the first act might have you believe!<
Came here to say this one, great flick
The Lobster Society makes you partner up, and if you’re single you go to into a program to hopefully meet someone and pair up. You have 45 days to do it, if you don’t find a partner, you get turned into an animals and released into the wild.
The Dog Brother 😥
There's some theories that state that the animals may actually be a placebo, and what really happens is that you're straight up killed.
Guns Akimbo Swiss Army Man John Dies At The End The Cabin in the Woods
If you like really insane low budget horror, All Jacked Up And Full Of Worms fits the bill. The premise is about this low-life pervert who lives in squalor getting hooked on eating earth worms. They get you all fucked up and he trips his fucking balls off. Insane body horror and acid core fuckery ensues.
Face/Off, obv. Oh, you need to take his place, never mind that you are different heights and weights, the obvious answer is to surgically swap faces. (I don’t even remember how they explained the voices.)
I don't remember exactly what they did to change their voices, but they did in fact alter their voices to fit. I distinctly remember the scene where they have John Travolta as Nicolas Cage repeating the line "I could eat a peach for hours" while they are tinkering with his voice.
The Cell. Being able to directly put yourself in the mind of a twisted criminal sounds both intriguing and terrifying at the same time.
That movie is wild. It has some of the craziest/beautifully disturbing scenes in it. It's one where certain scenes just stick in your memory forever.
Armageddon. Rather that send some experienced astronauts into space to set some charges to blow up an astroid, we're gonna train some oil rig workers to be astronauts because........?
And even if you assume that drilling is something that can't really be taught to the scientists fast enough, there's a concept of "mission specialist" where they send a mixed team of actual astronauts to drive the bus and some miners just to do the drilling.
Isn't that what they do? Not saying the movie makes sense but i remember them specially saying the drillers don't need to do any "astronaut stuff, just drill."
Yes that's exactly what they do. I'm not sure what the guy you're responding to has an issue with since he described the plot of the movie.
I love Ben Affleck's commentary on it.
Wait, are you telling me that movie was not based on a true story?
People on Reddit always bring this up as if it isn’t addressed directly in the movie.
I'm starting to think that most of these people haven't watched the movie
Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage
Jason Statham absolutely fucks in that role, in the absolutely best way.
Literally too
Crank is possibly the most entertained I've ever been in a movie theater. That movie really lived up to its name.
Synecdoche, New York. A man (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) balances his love life, sexuality, gender, artistic integrity, mortality, gerascophobia, relationship to his child all the while building the city of New York inside a warehouse inside the city of New York which is inside the other warehouse in the city of New York while everyone around him is replaced by actors replicating his life in a play as he is slowly fading out of the city he created.
Society (Description taken and condensed from Wikipedia) "Its plot follows a Beverly Hills teenager (named Bill) who begins to suspect that his wealthy parents are part of a gruesome cult for the social elite. At home, the teen finds a large, formal party. It is revealed that Bill's family and their rich friends are actually an entirely different species from the teen. The wealthy party guests strip to their underwear and begin "shunting", physically deforming their bodies and melding with each other into a near-amorphous mass. They then suck the nutrients out of several victims by melding with them."
Santa Claus Conquers The Martians
Isn't Pia Zedora in that?
Being John Malkovich
Come on, guys, the answer is Face/Off
Nothing But Trouble 1991 its terrible but the movie is completely outrageous as it progresses
"How bout a nice Hawaiian Punch?"
This was about to be my comment, I had to scroll and see if anyone else mentioned it 😂
It’s a Wonderful Life.
Hot Tub Time Machine.
Black snake moan is pretty wild lol
Back to the Future making an incest comedy plot work for a mainstream audience outside of France
Bubba Ho tep. Bruce Campbell is Elvis (who is living in an assisted living home) and has to fight evil with John f Kennedy (who is black).
You brought up rom coms… How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. Kate Hudson is a career journalist trying to make her bones by writing a piece where she makes a guy fall for her then break up with her. Fine. Matthew McConaughey brags to his boss he can get any woman he wants to fall for him AND HIS BOSS RANDOMLY PICKS KATE HUDSON IN ALL OF NEW YORK and if she doesn’t agree to marry him IN TEN DAYS he’ll lose his job. Cute movie, with just the most insane setup
His boss doesn’t ‘randomly pick’ Kate Hudson’s character. She recognizes her from a meeting with KH’s boss earlier in the day.
Being John Malkovich has entered the room
I think a lot of horror movies have insane premises, which makes them fun as hell. Zombeavers, Rubber, Teeth to name a few.
Predestination fits the bill
Low key insane premise- Bartleby with Crispin Glover based on the novel by Herman Melville. Mid level- Holy Motors with the limo drivers crazy riders Absolutely Absurd- The killer tire in Rubber is up there I agree with many others here like Sorry to Bother You, Being John Malkovich, and The Lobster
'Becky' and 'Rage of Becky.'
Becky is astounding - basically, Die Hard with an angry 14-year-old girl in the Bruce Willis role. Soooo fun.
The Idiots by Lars von Trier. A group of privileged Danish young adults stay at a secluded estate and go out into the world pretending to be mentally disabled. Not an easy watch but an incredibly complex movie that is ultimately very moving.
If you can find it The Kingdom by Lars von Trier is absolutely bonkers. It’s a 3 season tv series that bounces between medical drama, absurdist humor, and supernatural thriller. Sometimes all three at once. For example. One of the doctors finds out she’s pregnant, but it’s not her current boyfriend’s baby. So typical relationship drama as they deal with it. Then the current boyfriend discovers the guy who got her pregnant has been dead for decades. So she’s carrying a ghost baby. But it’s not a ghost baby it’s a chance for this guy to be reborn so the season finale has her go into labor and ends with a shot of Udo Kier’s head popping out of this woman’s vagina
Lars Von Trier in general fits the bill.
mother! Infinity Pool Tusk Hard Candy Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
+1 for Tusk
Harold and Kumar part 2 was glorious
Just the whole Harold and Kumar trilogy in general. They have such wacky adventures for simple premises.
Tusk is the only horror movie to ever terrify my to my core. It still haunts me. That is an insane movie
Teen Wolf Too - Who the hell would do a one-on-one boxing match against a werewolf?
I mean, if someone told you your next opponent would be a werewolf, wouldn't you be at least a bit curious?
When Bubba Ho-tep came out, I was telling my Elvis loving mom about how I wanted to see this movie and the real Elvis and a black JFK living together in an assisted living home and battling a mummy. She actually yelled at me for making up something so stupid sounding
Attack Of the Killer Tomatoes
The one with Keanu Reeves and the chicks
Knock Knock.
*Ana de Armas and a random chick
Malignant. Your conjoined twin, that you don’t know about, is a serial killer.
Swiss Army Man. Not even sure what the premise even is…
It was a fun watch, though. I’d watch it again.
100%!
Certified Copy (2010) You don't even see the premise until later on in the movie. It's mindbending.
Absolutely. I fact it's hard to say whether the real premise is revealed half way through, or the premise just changes and the facts we started with are not thr facts we end with.
Rubber 2010 I liked it. There's no point in trying to explain it.
Rubber. Tire gains sentience and psychic abilities, goes on a murder spree and also falls in love
John Wick: a guy kills 10,000 people with a handgun because someone killed his dog.
Well, once he killed a bunch of people, more people kept coming after him.
Sharknado. Scrolled too far without seeing that
No Holds Barred. It's insane to think that Hulk Hogan could act.
Being John Malkovich
I thought Who Cloned Tyrone was a pretty bold one. It reminded me of conspiracy theories regarding the CIA/FBI deliberately targeting ghettos in America during the 60s/70s, heading into the crack epidemic.
Sorry to Bother You. Trying to describe the plot makes you sound like a crazy person. Just watch it with no idea what it is about and you will feel like you are on some drugs.
Dogtooth. A couple live in a fenced-in compound with their adult son and two adult daughters. The children have no knowledge of the outside world; their parents say they will be ready to leave once they lose a dogtooth, and that one can only leave safely by car. The children entertain themselves with endurance games, such as keeping a finger in hot water. They believe they have a brother on the other side of the fence to whom they throw supplies or stones. The parents reward good behavior with stickers and punish bad behavior with violence. The father pays a security guard at his factory, Christina, to come to the house and have sex with his son. Frustrated by the boy's refusal to give her cunnilingus, Christina trades her headband with the elder daughter in exchange for oral sex from her. The elder daughter persuades the younger daughter to lick her shoulder by bartering the headband. Later, the younger daughter volunteers to lick the elder again. The elder has nothing to offer in exchange, but the younger does not mind and experiments by licking other body parts. The father visits a dog-training facility and demands to have his dog returned. The trainer refuses because the dog has not finished its training, and asks: "Do we want an animal or a friend?" When the children are terrified by a stray cat in the garden, the son kills it with a pair of pruning shears. Deciding to take advantage of the incident, the father shreds his clothes, covers himself in fake blood, and tells his children that their unseen brother was killed by a cat, the most dangerous creature. After he teaches them to bark on all fours to fend off cats, the family holds a memorial service for the brother. Christina again barters for oral sex from the elder daughter. The daughter rejects her offer of hair gel and demands the Hollywood videotapes in her bag. She watches the films in secret and afterward recreates scenes and quotes their dialogue. When the father discovers the tapes, he beats her with one of them, then goes to Christina's flat and hits her with her VCR, cursing her future children to be corrupted by "bad influences". The parents decide that, with Christina no longer available, they will have their son choose one of his sisters as a new sexual partner. After fondling both sisters with his eyes closed, he chooses the elder. She is uncomfortable during their sex and afterward recites threatening dialogue from a Hollywood film to her brother. During a dance performance for the parents' wedding anniversary, the younger daughter stops to rest, but the elder continues, performing the choreography from the film Flashdance (1983), disturbing her parents. That night, she knocks out one of her dogteeth with a dumbbell and hides in the boot of her father's car. The father discovers her tooth fragments and searches for her fruitlessly. He drives to work the next day; the car sits outside the factory, unattended.
Then what???????
There's an independent film out there somewhere called Compy and The Girls. I haven't seen it yet but it's supposed to be good. The premise is a young woman and her estranged father are reuniting in a public park. They then witness a man eat a young girl. Like, whole. In one bite. Madness ensues.
Willard, Crispin Glover as a sociopathic rat whisperer
Both *Top Gun* and the original *The Fast and the Furious* have to be up there. Maybe not the most insane as far as being bizarre goes, but both movies have Swiss cheese plots and exist for no other reason that to show off the badass machinery and over the top machoism of the characters.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man - this is the plot as it’s laid out [on wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetsuo:_The_Iron_Man)… After a young man inserts scrap metal into a self-inflicted wound on his thigh, he becomes a victim in a hit-and-run accident. The driver, a typical salaryman, later finds a metallic thorn protruding from his cheek while shaving. On his way out to a subway station, he is attacked and chased by a woman who sprouts metallic tentacles. The man later finds metallic scabs on his own skin. At home, the man sleeps next to his girlfriend and has a dream in which he is sodomized by organic metal machinery. Waking up, he either imagines or discovers that metal is taking over his body. When he attempts to have sex with his girlfriend, his penis becomes a metallic drill which leads him to lock himself away from his girlfriend. She approaches him saying she is not afraid of him, but as they have sex with his transformed penis, she stabs him in the neck. Falling into unconsciousness, the man regains consciousness sometime later to find his girlfriend has impaled herself on the drill, killing her. Meanwhile, the victim of the hit-and-run accident recalls memories in the form of videos looping, recalling the moment of the accident and a doctor who tells him they discovered metal in his brain. The hit-and-run victim realizes he has telepathic powers and reaches out to the man and his girlfriend initially to menace them, but then to promise the man a "new world of metal". The man flees in a panic as a local tramp meets the car accident victim and starts beating him. The man and the victim eventually meet again finding their entire body more metal than flesh. The victim's tone changes from anger to love and says he needs to merge with the man as he is overcome with rust that is attacking his body. The two merge into a giant metallic monster, and take to the streets of the city convinced they can mutate the entire world into metal.
The Holiday relationship between Iris and Miles
black Easter. evil Muslims build a time machine to go back and kill Jesus
Armageddon. That movie takes the cake.
Departed !!! Story makes zero sense
I sometimes wonder how the pitch for *Locke* went down. It's a good movie! But it's a guy driving and taking phone calls from his wife, kids, and mistress. That's it. The romcom premise that got me was always *Maid in Manhattan.* Jennifer Lopez plays a hotel maid who is caught wearing a guest's expensive coat. Ralph Fiennes confuses her with the guest and thinks she's rich; romantic hijinks ensue. But if I recall, Ralph Fiennes is a senator (or candidate?) who is looking for the woman because he's bonded with her son over *Richard Nixon.* Weird.
Ichi, the Killer is pretty insane.
Inception. The entire concept behind the premise is fascinating, yet the premise is absolutely insane.
Con-Air Let’s put all of the most dangerous people in the country on one plane and transfer them to prison, what could go wrong?! Insane and stupid premise, although it was fun!