Something Weird

Something Weird is an aptly titled anti-gem from the late, great Herschell Gordon "Gore Gore Girls" Lewis, the man who made splatter matter. While it doesn't feature the excessive gore of his more infamous films like Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs, Color Me Blood Red, or The Wizard of Gore—all of which are celluloid turkey cluckers serving as frameworks for gory, if incredibly fake, mutilation homicides—this film still manages to stand out, though for different reasons. Let the good times bleed!

Something Weird features little in the way of gory mutilation (save for some facial butchery and a few stalk-and-slash killings that get somewhat bloody), and there's not a single fetid whiff of rotting, severed, puke-inducing pig entrails in sight. Instead, we get an ugly old witch, a psychic, a psycho, a handsome 1967 hunky heartthrob who does karate, and well, a ghost. If we could throw Mrs. Chicken into the mix, as Micki Knox so eloquently put it, it would complete the bizarre ensemble.

Something Weird is indeed a bit weird, at least as far as exploitation films go, as it doesn't seem there's much here to exploit. A guy named Corbin Mitchell (Tony McCabe) gets zapped while working on a telephone or electrical pole and develops psychic powers. He also ends up with a badly mutilated face. He goes into business, discovers a book called the "Bible of the Witches," and poof! Faster than you can say "Elizabeth Montgomery," a stooped, cackling old crone ("Mudite Arums," which sounds like an anagram) appears. She looks about twenty-two and forces Mitchell to become her lover. She’s the most hideous Jack-in-the-Box in this entire wretched mess of a movie, popping up at the weirdest points with her scarifyingly ugly Halloween-store face and nails-scraping-a-blackboard vocal intonations.

Mitchell meets Ellen Parker (Elizabeth Lee), whose mind he cannot read, and who is actually the ugly old hag Witchie-Poo in disguise. He submits to being her slave, and Ellen/Witch gets down and dirty (or at least low and juicy) with the Kung Fu fightin' cop or Fed Alex Jordan (William Brooker), who tries to solve the mystery of who’s been running around committing mad slashing murders (hint: it’s one of the "good guys").

Along the way, Mitchell resurrects a ghost and takes LSD. The ghost appears in a church, reminiscent of Valda Hansen in Ed Wood's Night of the Ghouls, a rare Wood gem that went unreleased for decades because Ed couldn't afford the lab bill (it’s a better film for being vastly more entertaining). Jordan gives Mitchell LSD, though it's unclear why, and Mitchell proceeds to have the most boring psychedelic experience ever depicted on the silver screen.

Jordan, by the way, has a style of acting that’s reminiscent of a mid-Sixties anti-drug government propaganda educational film. (The kind they would have played via an actual projector back in 1982, where the ancient, crumbling film often malfunctioned, creating a weird "clipping" noise before breaking, producing cool acid house projections on the roll-down movie screen.)

Something Weird, alas, is not quite weird enough. The end features a long, almost interminable jog through some city streets, all set to an uninspiring jazz score. Jordan doesn’t fare well in the end, but that’s to be expected, I suppose. I don't know what the hell happened to Mitchell, and frankly, I don’t care. The ubiquitous Witch Hag is the final image here and the most compelling one.

"Even ugliness seems like beauty," to quote the redoubtable Mr. Knox. And in this picture, you take it where you can get it.

Something Weird (1967, full movie, 720p upscale)

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