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i try not to throw around the term masterpiece because it's quite overused and usually inappropriately but holy toledo! this is a masterpiece rivalling anything i've ever seen! also quite frequently in reviews i see, every frame is a painting. if ever there is a film to fit that bill it's this one! it is a biopic about an artist but wow! still a bit speechless but surprised that this film is virtually unknown!

creepy atmospheric ghost story with a wonderfully ominous soundtrack that sometimes reminds me of the great belgian prog band univers zero and there's cats, nuff said!!

amazingly well crafted fun poetic campy film noir that's unlike anything i've ever seen and i've seen a few things!

pretty gruesome stuff for 1959 and this just one year before the great "Jigoku" by the same director, considered by many to be the first "gore" film

dark poetry

it's a mess but a great mess. my high rating is for the use of highly original cinematic language which i always seek but rarely find

a potentially great film marred by a horrible soundtrack and some other elements. if you know me or have seen my reviews, i'm quite sensitive to this issue and in many cases immediately bail with horribly inappropriate music but this one really captivated me so i tolerated the lame ass music. i'm removing a whole star for this reason but i still recommend this film for purely cinematic reasons

i almost gave this a 3 due to several scenes but there's a lot to love here, especially in the creative/original department. i love the fact that a very large part of the soundtrack involves animal chirping and or animal sounds used very effectively

hallelujah! another obscure masterpiece that i found thanks to this website! sharing the same source material as ken russell's the devils (i believe but too lazy to look up) this predates by 10 years and is very tarkovsky before tarkovsky, maybe he saw it?

i love the craft =lovecraft
great film! special props for the mention of a place called devil's hopyard which is also the name of my favorite place in connecticut

second viewing i'm bumping it up a half star, Ishii being my most recent favorite director ing the ranks of Herzog, Lynch, Kubrick, Tarkovsky and a bunch of other molly fletchers! I think of him as the john zorn of cinema, his early works being radical noisy punk efforts then in the 90's shifting drastically to more artsy hypnotic mesmerizing works bordering at times on new age (dare i say it) much like the zornmeister and those are my favorite works from both

another hypnotic masterpiece by my most recently discovered favorite director gakuryu ishii, who you would never guess from this film is the grandfather of cyberpunk in japan, influencing his younger fellow student friend shinya tsukamoto who went on to make tetsuo the iron man! film folk always speak of the greats, bergman, lang, dreyer, tarkovsky, kubrick, lynch, etc. all these names are well known but who knows ishii? i place him among these greats and in many ways he sures! ay caramba!

beautiful cinematic poetry

quite original creepy flick that has one of the greatest scenes in cinema history then plods along like nothing happened, never attaining or maintaining that gloriously unholy cinematic moment but definitely worth a bump for fans of slow and strange and sound

a little trip down memory lane, i seeing this on the big screen at cinestudio at trinity college, hartford, ct. where i was doing a radio program and this was all the rage, especially with the punks, my program being a little more on the experimental side but we all got along. i love harry dean stanton and i didn't realise the cinematography was by the great robby müller who worked a lot with wim wenders and jim jarmusch and shot paris, texas the same year with harry dean!

"this is the pus wrung from your festering carcasses"
HELL YEAH!

the director hiroshi teshigahara is most famous for the classic "woman in the dunes" which i love but have always preferred "the face of another". now after seeing this masterpiece i once again slide into the minority with my belief that not only is this his greatest film but among the greatest films for it's relentless use of artful cinematic language! this is the fourth collaboration with the writer kōbō abe and the composer takemitsu (of whom i'm a big fan). there's not a lot of music but when it sounds it sounds

quite a vibe with this one that i can't quite put my finger on but it's a bit of overly melodramatic/environmental/exploitation/folk horror, among other things, always artfully rendered and i love it!

frenetic! and what would one expect from the director of tetsuo the iron man? amazing film and what few people know is that shinya tsukamoto was a younger fellow student with gakuryu ishii (formerly sogo ishii) one of my favorite newly discovered directors who is considered the grandfather of cyberpunk in japan and the influence is strong here

surprisingly artsy existential film about rape, murder, suicide and other sordid topics, somehow it sings above and kinda reminded me of another favorite film called shiki-jitsu (ritual) starring and based on the novel by steven seagal's daughter Ayako Fujitani. perhaps it was an influence or just a coincidence

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

another great film from one of my most recent favorite director discoveries, the elusive name changing godfather of cyberpunk ishii and this from 1981!

pure cinema! it's so refreshing to discover these obscure unknown cinematic gems! i'm in awe of this story told entirely with sound and visuals and almost no dialogue. should be a 5 but i remove half a star because i can't get behind all the music and certain aspects but i'm nitpicking, amazing film!!

Watched on Wednesday April 23, 2025.

Crazily inventive Czech madcap farce from 1966 that seems to be influenced by the Batman TV series that also came out that year or maybe vice versa? Really fun flick!

This wonderfully strange film I would describe as hypnotic dream horror and I love it! In my endless search for strange films and horror films and strange horror films I recently noticed an abundance of mannequin films! Guys falling in love with mannequins or mannequins coming to life. This is one of those films and it's great!

Watched on Tuesday April 22, 2025.

wow! i'm flabbergasted and don't know what to say after this initial viewing but this ranks among the greatest films i've seen and perhaps i'll do a better review in the future. if this plays in a local cinema i'll definitely BEHEADING there

Only for fans of slooow cinema, this dreamy, murky, mysterious film kind of tells the story of a village on the coast of Galicia, Spain where a diver who for many years would retrieve the corpses of sailors from shipwrecks, disappears, catapulting the town into a catatonic state that reminded me a bit of my favorite Herzog film "Heart of Glass" where in a village famous for their ruby glassworks, the foreman dies without revealing the secret of the ruby glass, causing the village to go mad, the cast famously hypnotized by Herzog. While not as good as that masterpiece, this film is worth a look if you're ok with the glacial pacing.

great great film marred by some cheesiness and especially a horrible piece of music that appears early on that made me turn it off. i tried again and it's really fantastic but unfortunately that piece of music returns in the end, so i remove a star

Watched on Tuesday April 15, 2025.

welcome to the grey world. grim, bleak, relentlessly dark and unlike anything i've seen! arthouse slow cinema at it's finest, as if bela tarr or tarkovsky decided to make a murder mystery but very much it's own thing, highly recommended dark poetry!

from the same director as the wonderful "The Boxer's Omen" comes this tale of ghosts, vampires, manicurists, possession, optometrists and other sordid affairs. nowhere near as bat shit crazy as the aforementioned film but what is? this one relies heavily on atmosphere and artsy creepiness. great soundtrack and yes it's absurd but if you can get beyond that it's a fine bumpy ride!

trashy, gnarly, grotesque, artsy, totally demonic, quite absurd and loads of fun! as far as film titles for films that are actually great, i think "jesus shows you the way to the highway" is the greatest and will never be sured but this is a worthy contender

first of all, i don't think music is a competition, i've always despised the battle of the bands and the sports mentality behind it, same with film, which is why i don't like the oscars or any awards programs. that being said, led zeppelin is the greatest rock band ever and whole lotta love the greatest rock song ever and this filmic version totally rocks but i was quite shocked that they just ended there! i think i'm in the minority because led zep 2 is my favorite but they went on to amazing things not documented here. great film!

wow! i love it when i randomly stumble upon unsung, unknown gothic polish horror films that cry masterpiece and maybe fall short but perhaps with a second viewing? great film!

i can't rate this film because i only watched the first story (of which there are three i believe) and i was loving it and ready to give it 4 stars and maybe even 5 until horribly inappropriate music shattered the experience and again at the beginning of the second story so i bailed. music is so important and can make or break a film. keep that in mind, wood bee filmmakers

yikes!

wow! another film by the same director is in my top 4 if you look above but here i was totally taken by surprise. i had an idea of what this film was but i was only partially right. surreal, revolutionary, psychedelic, proto punk and ultimately personal, which all art should strive to be

complete and utter masterpiece!

Watched on Thursday March 20, 2025.

great demonic film with nuns on an island, nuff said.

Watched on Saturday March 15, 2025.

watched back to back with "I've Heard the Ammonite Murmur" and despite both being incredibly unique i seemed to find a connecting thread, both being told mostly cinematically with fantastic dreamy surreal images, the former being more sweet and romantic and this one more like the dark industrial sister

Watched on Wednesday March 12, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 12, 2025.

un Tilda end of the world

after a second viewing i've bumped it up to 5 stars! what i originally perceived as flaws are elements that only enhance the overall strangeness, which is immense! ney flute performed by the master kudsi erguner!

hot damn in the wintertime!

incredibly artful masterpiece that ranks among the greatest films i've seen

Although i'm a big fan of Lynch, Jodorowsky and Carnival of souls, they're not on the list because everyone and their grandmother knows them by now. I'll be updating the list as I discover more obscurities

• The Man Who Thought Life
• Goodbye, 20th Century
• The Damned House of Hajn
• Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
• Enys Men
• Horrors of Malformed Men
• August in the Water
• Pastoral: To Die in the Country
• The Temptation of St. Tony
• The Shout

...plus 98 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• August in the Water
• Mirrored Mind
• Electric Dragon 80.000 V
• Labyrinth of Dreams
• Angel Dust
• Dead End Run
• Punk Samurai Slash Down
• Shuffle
• The Crazy Family

with the exception of dune, i love all these films. i noticed that my preferences were different from most lists or reviews i've seen, so i thought i would put in my two cents

• Twin Peaks: The Return
• Inland Empire
• Lost Highway
• Mulholland Drive
• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
• Wild at Heart
• Blue Velvet
• The Straight Story
• Eraserhead
• Twin Peaks

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

a soundtrack, or lack of one is a vital part of any film. whereas most people focus on story, visuals and acting, the sound weaves it's magic more subtly, sometimes almost becoming an additional character. it can enhance a film but also ruin it if sappy or inappropriate music is used, as in a good percentage of hollywood films. here's a couple of nice ones, i'll add more as i .

• Psycho
• Dead Man
• Twelve Monkeys
• The Holy Mountain
• Punch-Drunk Love
• Grizzly Man
• Nosferatu the Vampyre
• Paris, Texas
• Pink Floyd: The Wall
• The Last Temptation of Christ

...plus 28 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.