Wait, If The Toys In Toy Story Are Immortal, That Means...
It's nearly a scientific certainty that the Toy Story movies are beloved by every living creature in this universe and probably most of the alternate ones. But, like most of the things we love, there are a lot of unanswered questions just beneath the surface that are far more sinister than we might have suspected.
What We Know About The Toys
To start with, we need to develop a baseline for the rules that have been established regarding the toys. The most important is that the toys are functionally immortal. While they can be destroyed without much difficulty (on account of them being made primarily of plastic and fabric), toys will not die when left alone. For all intents and purposes, they do not need food, water, or air, nor are they prone to sickness or disease. It's even debatable whether they feel pain or not, much to the chagrin of young Sid-like psychopaths.
But while toys cannot "die" in the classic sense, they can be repaired from almost certain death. Limbs can be stitched back on if torn off, and, even more unsettling, can be torn off one toy and attached to another. The toys in Sid's room are considered mutants, crazy experiments cobbled together from bits and pieces of various toys.
Don't forget to become an organ donor!
Each piece, once attached, is now part of the toy's new body. Stitch a chainsaw to a toy and it now has control over a chainsaw. Add a gun, and now guns DO kill people. Well, toy guns, at least.
The one thing seemingly standing between us and certain destruction is that toys do not reveal themselves as alive to us humans. However, unlike the rules in Jim Henson's The Christmas Toy, the Toy Story universe's toys have no repercussions if they break the rules of never moving in front of humans, either accidentally or on purpose. Moving and conversing with animals is perfectly accepted, and during the end of the first Toy Story, Woody rallies all of Sid's toys to show themselves as very much alive. This means that the toys are bound not by a hard-and-fast rule but by the Honor Code, which is actually terrifying on multiple levels. However, before exploring why, we have to try to determine what, if anything, is giving the toys their sentience.
Who Gives The Toys Souls?
Though all toys seem to have one ever-consuming goal (be played with), they are varied in their wants, hopes, dreams, desires, fears, and so on. Clearly some toys show romantic attachment to other toys or even hope to be married someday. Other toys are selfish and cruel. Toys entertain themselves with numerous activities and hobbies when not trying to be played with. In some circumstances, the toys even want to better themselves by working out or augmenting their existing features (Buzz Lightyear does this in the first two Toy Story movies, first by running on a treadmill and then later by attempting to swipe a utility belt from a new Buzz Lightyear model in a toy store).
He's jealous of the size of his laser gun.
So if toys have personalities (for lack of a better term, "souls"), where are they coming from? Who or what breathes life into otherwise inanimate objects? The most likely culprit would be children, as their love transforms the toys into something more, but that's debunked by the crew encountering toys still boxed away in Al's Toy Barn in Toy Story 2.
The next best theory would be that the toy manufacturers are implanting souls into the toys upon their creation, but that also seems unlikely considering that every single toy, regardless of size, shape, or concept, has some level of sentience, even baby toys. If done intentionally, the process would likely be too cost-prohibitive for every single toy, and even stranger considering it's not an advertised feature. Plus, that would require ALL toy manufacturers to be in on this, and that seems unlikely.
This does not look like the lair of a supervillain.
For lack of a better explanation, it seems that all that's needed for toys to gain sentience is the intent of being a toy, whether they're purchased or not. But what if a child can't afford a toy and so creates one of her own by gluing Popsicle sticks together into the shape of a doll? Will that makeshift dolly gain sentience as well? Furthermore, if a child grabs a lump of tin foil, squeezes it into the shape of a goose, and plays with THAT as a toy, will the once-inanimate foil gain life?
So with the ground rules set, what does this mean for the Toy Story universe? Well ...
The Toys Are Holding Back Scientific Progress
As we've established, toys require no food, water, or air, and they are able to interact directly with humans. So then why, exactly, haven't toys come forward and admitted that they could advance humans by light-years. Literal light-years, considering the one doing it could even be a Buzz Lightyear. Just imagine NASA's reaction if Buzz Lightyear walked in and said, "I'm trained as an astronaut, require no food, water, air, or sleep, and I wish to chart the farthest reaches of the universe."
"To Mars and beyond!" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Toys could even be designed explicitly with designated jobs or careers, which apparently gives them total knowledge of whatever they're based on. If space isn't your thing, what if someone created a microscopic doctor toy? Maybe Doctor Cancergnasher? You just take a few of those, inject them into a sick child, and sit back while the toy "plays" with the child. How many diseases could be utterly eradicated overnight by the simplest of things? What if we could fight wars with armies of unkillable green men?
What is actually stopping toys from deciding to break their one rule? Perhaps nothing at all ...
What If Toys Go Rogue All The Time?
Let's consider Chucky for a second. While the movie Child's Play gives Chucky's origins as being a doll inhabited by a serial killer's soul, what if that's just a lie to cover the even more horrifying truth that any toy could decide to ignore its moral code and hack up a bunch of people?
And not just the ones who need a loving authority figure in their lives.
It's quite possible that every story ever told of a possessed doll stems from toys simply being alive and choosing to act out for one reason or another. Running the numbers, the probability of a toy having the personality type that would be predisposed to murder might not be huge, but they would absolutely exist, especially if toy manufacturers have no way to screen out the bad ones. But, then again, what if rogue toys were a result of the manufacturers to begin with?
Is Making More Technologically Advanced Toys "Playing God"?
Apologies, but we're about to dredge up Small Soldiers. We know it's terrible, but we HAVE to consider every option here. In that movie's plot, highly advanced microchips are inserted into action figures, giving them AI. Or, at least, that's what the toy designers THINK is happening. What if all those microchips do is somehow override the toys' natural instincts to stay still? The toy designers would have no way of knowing otherwise, as toys don't announce their living, thinking existence. How would a toy even react if it met a toy manufacturer? Would that be the equivalent of meeting God?
... No.
Furthermore, there's the question again of what constitutes a toy to begin with. If the only requirement is that a child intends to use it as a play thing, then are video games toys and therefore capable of thought and emotions? Like, say, as depicted in Wreck-It Ralph? A core element of that movie revolves around video game characters essentially acting as they choose, even leaving their own games and hijacking others. "Going Turbo," as they'd say.
Take this a step further: What if some video game characters "Go Turbo" on the level of Chucky? The only thing keeping the video game toys from harming humans is their inability to transition into the real world. Thankfully, no one ever started trying to blend the real world and the video game worlds together into some sort of crazy Matrix-like reality.
Was The Matrix The Final Evolutionary Step After Tron?
Oh crap! Someone DID eventually make it possible for humans to enter video games! That happens in Tron and Tron Legacy (aka Daft Punk Featuring A Tron Movie) where someone makes it possible for humans to enter a computer, and then it's eventually possible to pull a computer-created entity back into the real world. And they say that video games don't cause violence!
Although this movie probably did make you want to hit someone.
Once video game "toys" begin exiting in droves or simply inserting themselves into robotic bodies, we have the possibility of the events as played out in The Matrix, where humans enslave and mistreat the robots, cause a huge war, and eventually get themselves mostly trapped in a video game. Horrifying to think about, but let's backtrack and consider a different angle.
What Makes Something A Toy To Begin With?
So the line between a toy and a non-toy is fairly subjective. The Toy Story universe has never really explained where that line is, but again it seems to come down to the needs of a child. If a child becomes attached to a traditionally non-toy, does it gain the life that toys have? Say, if a child has a weirdly close attachment to a toaster, lamp, radio, vacuum, or electric blanket?
Yup, what if The Brave Little Toaster is just another story from the Toy Story universe with startling consequences? In that, all household appliances somehow also have emotions, personalities, hopes, dreams, and fears, even to the point of leaving their home and traveling great distances to find themselves once again with their beloved master. Now we have a new problem that results in ... Cars.
Are The Cars Of Cars Just Toys Who've Won The War?
It's not a stretch to say cars are treated like toys by some adults. People shower their cars with love and adoration, so at what point do cars suddenly acquire sentience and begin causing problems? Consider the Small Soldiers situation, where too many advanced microchips override a toy's natural instinct to stay still and that cars are getting loaded with more tech than ever these days. At what point do we inevitably have a scenario where all the cars take over the planet, creating a Utopian society for cars and cars alone?
Probably at the point tow trucks start paragliding.
Humans don't factor into the Cars movies (not even in the watching of Cars movies), but you'd assume they had to exist somewhere along the line, right? I mean, cars don't just naturally occur in nature or evolve from monkeys (at least, not until we find the missing link). So if cars own the planet, where are the humans? Well, they could all be stuck in the Matrix, or ...
Toys Help Humans Advance Too Far
Assume some toys "Go Turbo" on the side of good after all. They advance space travel, medicine, automation, and overall make life far too easy for humans. Everybody wins, right? Wrong! Now we have a new problem, that humans are functionally obsolete. If toys find satisfaction "playing" in ways without humans (working), what will humans need to do with their days? Well, some will plug into the Matrix and tune out, but eventually the Earth will become a poor place for humans to live, as it's now a land fit only for cars. So, with no options left, they head to space aboard the Axiom.
No! Is WALL-E just a toy as well?! Of course he is! With the humans leaving Earth and the cars depleting the last natural resources (especially after the sun's been blotted out in a very foolish attempt to stop the toys in the 11th hour), someone's going to have to stick around to get the Earth back to a point where a generation of humans can eventually return and once more play with the remaining toys.
Even the sucky ones.
It becomes pretty clear in WALL-E that the humans are in surprisingly good health despite being fat sacks of glob and that the only ones really able to function are the robots (toys). As WALL-E toils away on Earth, having a personality, emotions, hopes, dreams, and fears, the toys on the Axiom keep checking back in to see how things are progressing while also keeping their humans alive enough to rebound should the Great Playdate eventually come. Are we even sure that the Axiom's autopilot wasn't once referred to by a different name? A name such as ... Buzz?
Who's The Real Crazy One Here?
Maybe we'll get some more answers in Toy Story 4. Maybe, but not very likely. The Toy Story movies are centered around reminding you of significant life moments you yourself may have had with toys, but I'm an insane person who believed my toys were alive before the first Toy Story came out, so where's my movie? The one about the life moment where my toys told me the horrific truths of the universe?! That's ... a normal life event, right?
Chris is a writer. He's written stuff in the past that you may have read, but he can't be sure. You play video games? He wrote for some of those, but not all of them. He also had a show on The Escapist. Oh, and he has a Twitter, but he can't be sure that you've read that either.
What's The Best Fictional School To Attend? In the muggle world, we're not given the opportunity for a magical hat to tell us which school we should go to. Usually we just have to go to the high school closest to where we live or whatever college accepts our SAT scores and personal essay. This month, our goal is to determine what would be the best fictional school to go to. Join Jack, Daniel, and the rest of the Cracked staff, along with comedians Brandie Posey and Steven Wilber, as they figure out if it's a realistic school like Degrassi or West Beverly High, or an institution from a fantasy world like Hogwarts with its ghosts and dementors, or Bayside High, haunted by a monster known only to humans as Screech. Get your tickets here!
Check out toys that we hope never come to life in 15 Unintentionally Perverted Toys For Children, and make sure you read 6 Beloved '80s Toys With Bizarrely Horrifying Origin Stories, because why should a child's life be any less horrifying than it already would have been?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get even sadder about Toy Story in Why Andy Is Secretly The Villain In Toy Story, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!
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5 Movies Hidden In Other Movies
Sometimes movies over-explain things. Did we really need two movies telling us how the Alien was invented, or a solo Solo story about why Han Solo is named Solo? But then you get movies that do the opposite, dropping bombshells in passing before skipping along like nothing happened. There are entire movies hidden inside other movies, and half the time they seem way more interesting than the movie we actually got. For example ...
How Did Clark Kent Explain His "Death"?
In the gripping legal drama Batman v. Superman, plaintiff Batman wins the case, and the defendant Superman is forced to hand over his life (if we're remembering that right). Superman dies, which means his alter-ego Clark Kent is also sent to that defunct print media office in the sky. Because their world hasn't yet realized that wearing glasses is not a disguise, the film ends with two separate funerals: a massive memorial in Metropolis for Supes, and a humble service in Smallville for Clark. That alone wouldn't be too much of a coincidence. After all, millions of people would have died on that one day. But only two people have ever come back from the dead, and they have the exact same chin.
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Superman gets un-killed in Justice League, and that's fine. Not staying dead is kinda the whole schtick for superheroes. But it's not so normal for mild-mannered reporters. And yet at the end of DC's Attempted Avengers, we see Clark about to casually stroll back into the Daily Planet office like he'd spent a long weekend away, not two years in the cold embrace of the grave.
And this isn't just any old workplace where your colleagues consider you with such dull indifference that they probably forgot they signed a "Sorry For Your Loss" card for your family. This is an office full of professional journalists -- people paid to notice weird coincidences and look into them. So give us that movie, DC. We don't need any more dark origin stories about back catalog villains. How about a 90-minute workplace comedy in which Clark weaves a web of increasingly complex lies to keep his colleagues from doing even the most cursory of digging into the death records? (Or, you know, reaching up to take his glasses off for a second.)
Even without the Superman link, somebody must have raised an eyebrow at the guy who was not just missing but actually buried in a clearly marked grave for two years. What could he possibly say to throw them off the trail? That he faked his death for an assignment? "Oh cool, which story was that for?" Unless he has superhuman lying abilities, Clark will dig himself into a Coen brothers plot faster than a speeding bullet.
Related: 5 Terrifying Horror Stories Hiding In Superhero Films
There's a Fourth Captain America Movie Hiding Inside Avengers: Endgame
Avengers: Endgame already had a runtime of several days, but somehow there's still enough stuff missing to fill a whole new MCU phase. Most of it we were happy to skip in favor of not having to pee into our empty Coke cups, but we would have let our bladders burst to see the implied Captain America 4 ... and the extremely awkward showdown with the character's true nemesis.
At the end of Endgame, when Thanos is dead (again) and everyone else is alive (again), Cap takes it upon himself to return the Infinity Stones to their original timelines and make sure there are no loose threads for *shudder* tie-in comics or novels. After finishing that up, he takes the long way back by traveling to the '40s and aging up to the present, ultimately looking worse than Eric Bana's Hulk movie.
It's no real mystery what happened while he was gone, and it hits all the well-trodden beats of a Marvel movie. Captain America: Reverse Time Heist would see Cap gallivanting through space and time, sneaking the Stones back into '70s S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ and that Indiana Jones ripoff temple on Morag. He'd have to inject the Reality Stone back into Natalie Portman. He'd have to give Loki's scepter back to the H.Y.D.R.A. agents, along with some kind of awkward apology for running off with it. The meat of the story would obviously be him dealing with the inevitable screwups that come with time travel. But it all builds toward an implied encounter so huge that it's kind of amazing Endgame ignores it completely. Cap would have met Red Skull again when returning the Soul Stone.
As far as Cap knows, Red Skull died back in the '40s. But we found out in Infinity War that in fact our redheaded friend somehow Space Stoned himself into a job telling people to jump off cliffs. But did anybody bother telling Cap about this? Would he really be willing to hand over an Infinity Stone to an undead space Nazi? However this showdown goes down, it'd make a hell of a capper to Captain America 4.
Doc Brown Went On A Zany Quest To Build A Steampunk Time Train
The Back To The Future trilogy is a cautionary tale about not screwing around with time (or your parents' younger selves). And yet by the end of it, Doc Brown has apparently learned absolutely nothing. He makes Marty promise to destroy the time machine once he returns to 1985, and two minutes after Marty does just that, guess who shows up in a brand spanking new time machine? It's a cute little character moment to have Doc show up back in 1985 with his new family in a badass steampunk time train, finishing off the saga with some feel-good schlock about how nobody's future has been written yet (even though we just spent three movies learning the exact opposite). But it implies we missed one hell of a story.
Doc had a hard enough time building the original time machine in 1985. So how the flux did he manage to slap one together in an era before electricity and cars and personal hygiene? How much coal do you need to burn to generate 1.21 gigawatts of power, considering it took plutonium or lightning to get the job done in the 20th century?
Knowing how much trouble Doc gets in whenever he tries to build anything, it's easy to see him getting tangled up in a classic Western outlaw plot when he tries to source parts (no doubt illegally) for his futuristic train from all over the planet. You think he can get rare earth minerals down at the general store? How does he avoid detection in the course of this years-long project, both in acquiring materials and building/testing his machine? (One that, oh by the way, every government and military in the world would love to have in their possession.)
And that's just before he builds it. You don't just create a machine that defies the laws of astrophysics unless you plan to use it, and they obviously have. Clara and the kids regard the journey 100 years forward in time with all the excitement of a rest stop, so clearly they've been on this road trip before. And Doc brags to Marty that he's already been back to the future (like, the future-future, not this 1985 "future").
There's just no way a family of four can whip around with such an irresponsible disregard for the space-time continuum, in the least subtle time machine ever built, without some mayhem going down. Even if this movie is just about dropping Biff Tannen's great-great-grandkids into a spaceship full of alien turds, we wanna see it.
Related: 15 Famous Movies With Hidden Symbolism You Didn't Notice
A Mercenary Team Cleaned Up The Ruins Of Jurassic Park To Build Jurassic World
Besides scientist Henry Wu, the only Jurassic Park character to return in Jurassic World is the T-Rex herself. If you look closely, you can see the old battle scars from that time she inexplicably rescued a bunch of hapless humans from raptors in the JP visitor center. And to hammer the point home, throughout the press junket, director Colin Trevorrow repeatedly nudged reporters in the ribs and winked while explaining that yes, Jurassic World has the same toothy ol' gal. And that couldn't have happened without its own movie's worth of bloodshed. How did Ms. Rex go from fearsome free predator to a Snapchat backdrop for bored teenagers? And more importantly, why didn't we get that movie?
The last time we saw this T-Rex, she and all her dino buddies had the run of Isla Nublar after the last of the humans noped out on a chopper. The Lost World and Jurassic Park III took place on Isla Sorna next door, so those were different T-Rexes. That means that somewhere in the 22 years between Park and World, someone had a worse cleanup job than the guy who follows the Brachiosaurs around with a shovel. A team obviously had to go in, subdue (but not kill) an island-load of pissed-off prehistoric beasts, and then build a new park around them.
We even know who did it, and when. It was Vic Hoskins, aka Vincent D'Onofrio, aka the buttplug who wanted to weaponize the raptors in Jurassic World. Buried deep in the in-universe corporate website is a log entry from Vic dated April 19, 2002: "I was impressed with the team today. Hell, staring a seven-ton predator in the eyes is no easy job. These things are bigger than you'd expect! Let's just hope Timack knows how to build strong paddocks." (Spoiler: They don't.)
Given Chaos Theory's chumminess with these movies, there's no way this went totally as planned. A movie about Vincent D'Onofrio on a Cretaceous safari with a sassy squad of mercenaries picked off one by one could have been the Aliens to Jurassic Park's Alien (and Jurassic Park III's Alien: Resurrection).
Related: 5 Screwed-Up Messages Hidden In Famous Sci-Fi Films
It Sends The Kids On An Unseen Lovecraftian Mindf**k Journey
At first glance, the It movies are pretty much five hours of kids being weirded out by someone's creepy uncle who works in the sewer. But there's a way bigger story playing out in the background. The titular It (the Itular, if you will) is actually a cosmic entity locked in a battle with the giant space turtle who created the Universe. If you read the book, you're currently nodding sagely. If you only watched the movies, you're wondering when the hell that happened. This is when:
As the book explains, the Deadlights that It carries around in its throat are a portal to another dimension. When you look at them, your soul or whatever gets flicked out of your body and goes hurtling through space, where you see It's true form, as well as a giant cosmic turtle called Maturin. Apparently old Maturin accidentally created the entire Universe by barfing it up one day, which is exactly the origin story our cursed existence deserves. And when the gang starts the Ritual of Chud (the name of which immediately cancels out any reverence it may have had), Maturin contacts them through the space internet to guide them through how to kill It.
The movie half-assedly explains a bit of this. We're told that It crash-landed on Earth in a meteorite millions of years ago, but it doesn't bother telling us about the space turtle, even though we know it's there, still guiding our pubescent protagonists. When the kids are swimming in the quarry, they yell out "Oh look, a turtle!" because apparently the budget couldn't stretch enough to actually show one. Turtles also show up in the form of stuffed toys and Lego models. Director Andy Muschietti said that these signs are how Maturin reveals himself ... which seems a bit unhelpful, but who are we to tell godlike entities how to do their job.
In the first movie, Beverly gets deadlighted and comes back with visions of the future -- a telltale sign of the guiding flipper of a clumsy cosmic turtle. In the second movie, it's Richie's turn to get flashed. In both cases, we don't see their souls zooming off through a higher dimension, and the inevitable existential crisis that would bring. Instead we just see their bodies levitating slack-jawed ... which is probably how the audience would react if you actually paused the finale to interject a giant turtle into the film, apropos of nothing. So maybe it was for the best.
Michael writes about space and dinosaurs and stuff at New Atlas, and mumbles into the void on Twitter.
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5 Fascinating Filmmakers That Are Equally Talented And Insane
I have a degree in film analysis. While it hasn't gotten me much outside of crippling debt and an insufferable arrogance about your movie opinions, I've also managed to learn about a ton of directors. And as it turns out, the most fascinating ones are rarely the ones that are the most talented. In fact, it's usually the ones who are the most terrifyingly insane. So let's find out what happens when you can afford a camera but not therapy.
Luis Bunuel Made One Of The Most Infamous Short Films Ever
If you're an experienced Cracked reader, there's a chance you've run across Luis Bunuel before. In 5 Sinister Old Films Way Too Disturbing for Modern Audiences, Bunuel has not one but two entries, and in 5 Old-Timey Movies Way Too Disturbing for Modern Theaters, he's got the #1 spot. In their time, Bunuel's films caused so many riots that at the premiere of Un Chien Andalou, he kept a pocketful of rocks to throw at any faces that seemed like they were up to no good.
Bunuel had nothing but resentment for the bourgeoisie, and wanted his film L'Age d'Or to piss off every major power structure in Europe. And boy oh boy did he ever get what he wanted. Fascists would crash screenings of the film and wreck shit, including artwork by Bunuel's friends Salvador Dali and Man Ray. After Parisian police banned the film completely, the Vatican got all copies of it pulled from circulation in 1934. It wouldn't be seen again until 1974.
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Bunuel had a long career, including a brief stint working in Hollywood until he got kicked out of the studio system. Turns out verbally abusing an actress could be a fairly fireable offense even back then. And then there's the actual contents of his films. Land Without Bread features a real chicken getting its head ripped off, and Bunuel intentionally broke beehives that a donkey was carrying so that it would get stung to death on camera. So it's likely not very surprising when you also find out that he threatened his actors with a gun and dressed like a nun in public.
But to really get a feel for Bunuel's crazy, I'd recommend watching Un Chien Andalou. Not only does this product of a clearly abnormal mind manage to squeeze more discomfiture into 20 minutes than the Saw series did in nine movies, but it's also " the most famous short film ever made," as Roger Ebert calls it. Also, it was made in 1929. In a year in which all ten of the top-grossing movies in the United States were goofy musicals, Bunuel was putting razors against eyeballs for, well, some reason.
Related: 4 Bad Filmmakers Who Accidentally Made Smart Movies
There Is No End To Crazy Stories About Werner Herzog
If you're not familiar with Werner Herzog's body of work, you might be familiar with his actual body (bones, face, the works). He most recently played the Client in The Mandalorian, acting like the only person in any universe, fictional or otherwise, who would want to bring harm to Baby Yoda. But he's also had an extremely long, wonderful, and subversive directing career, and tales of his exploits are the stuff of legend.
You may have heard some of them before, like how he continued giving an interview despite coming down with a mild case of " shot by a gun." But eating a shoe and cutting off a man's leg with a chainsaw are only the beginning for Herzog, a man whose life is an unending misery circus of the kind usually reserved for the orphans in a John Updike novel. He walked 600 miles in the dead of winter to visit a friend, saved Joaquin Phoenix from a car accident, and tried to hypnotize his entire cast when he wasn't getting the performances he wanted in Heart Of Glass.
But hey, hypnotism beats promising to do severe bodily harm to yourself as a reward for a good performance. When making Even Dwarfs Started Small, a nice little family film about a group of people with dwarfism who overtake an insane asylum and crucify a monkey ...
... an actor managed to run himself over with a car and also light himself on fire. Uncle Werner then promised to jump into a cactus patch if the actor could avoid any more life-threatening accidents. The actor did, so Herzog kept his promise like a joyless Bavarian Wile E. Coyote. He later described this both as " long spines sticking in my knee sinew" and " a little fun."
Herzog's work is divided into both fictional films and documentaries, and the latter are like going to the aquarium while on mushrooms -- you'll be educated, you'll be awestruck, you'll be frightened, and you'll weep. For example, Cave Of Forgotten Dreams is a thoughtful 3D meditation about some of the world's oldest cave paintings, except for the part at the end that's about mutant future alligators.
But if you only watch one Herzog film, make it Fitzcarraldo. It's about how human futility inevitably drives us insane, or maybe it's just about dragging a big-ass boat through a jungle? In either case, this movie captures a blend of practicality and gibbering madness usually reserved for life hack videos, and had so many problems that the doctor traveling with the film crew ran out of anesthesia and had to sew up a camera operator's hand without it. This film came so close to falling apart so many times that Herzog literally pulled a gun on the lead actor and threatened to murder him if he didn't finish the movie. So yeah, it's awesome.
Related: 5 Famous Filmmakers Whose Dream Projects Were Disasters
Crispin Glover's Movies And Albums Defy Explanation
You've probably seen Back To The Future, right? Crispin Hellion Glover, the nerdy dad from that movie, moonlights as a director, and he's spent his career trying to answer the question "What if a movie had the capacity to hate?"
Glover wasn't in the BTTF sequels because the ending didn't have enough "love," so the studio instead used his likeness. This kind of spoiled working on blockbusters for Glover, so he decided to have the weirdest second act since Hulk Hogan's beef-and-concussion-addled brain dreamed up Pastamania. You know how famous people will record an album, because nobody tells the rich no? Glover observed this phenomenon and decided "What if I did this, but instead of music, it was what serial arsonists hear as they sleep?" And thus, this was born:
This song is the breakout single from Glover's album, one that also contains a rap about jacking off and selected readings from Glover's written works, which are ... hang on, let me take a photo of a random page from one of them:
Glover's album is notable for featuring a phone number in the liner notes that, until 2007, you could call and possibly talk to Glover about what any of this meant. You can also watch his bizarre music videos, or maybe his infamous appearance on Letterman wherein he threw a kick near Letterman's head, which got him blackballed from late-night shows for years.
But what motivates Glover to do all of this? Is it to raise money so he can buy a castle? Yes. But it's also all in service of his true passion: directing. So far, Glover has directed two excellent films in a planned trilogy: What Is It? and It Is Fine! Everything is Fine. I can safely say that these films are unlike anything else I've ever seen.
For example, the second film is about a wheelchair-bound man with debilitating cerebral palsy and a hair fetish who attempts to have sex with a series of beautiful women, and then strangles them to death. Believe it or not, this is the more palatable of the two, and you can watch the trailer here if you work from home and also live alone.
As a filmmaker, Glover's primary interest is raising questions. Is it immoral for this physically disabled man to have these sadistic and pornographic revenge fantasies? Are his violent urges justified since he's a victim of a society that only values bodies able enough to produce capital? Is our disgust due to the fact that we're seeing sexual depictions of the disabled, or because of the associated violence? Can I get my money back?
Alejandro Jodorowsky Has The Craziest Film Ever Made (And The Craziest One Never Made)
Before Alejandro Jodorowsky was a filmmaker, he was a literal clown, so you know right out of the gate that this man has deep unresolved frustrations. His first film, 1968's Fando y Lis, was controversial upon its premiere in Mexico. And by "controversial," I mean it caused an actual-ass riot.
But this didn't dissuade Jodorowsky from directing, or from being a goddamn wizard. He created his own religion / complicated way to get laid called psychomagic, and I think the basic premise is that through tarot readings, people can understand the neuroses put on them by the ghosts of their ancestors and heal by doing avant-garde performance art. Jodorowsky claims he's even been able to perform miracles with it.
But it couldn't save Dune, which Jodorowsky agreed to make even though he'd never actually read the source material. His vision was a 14-hour epic which he hoped would "give the hallucinations of LSD without LSD," starring Orson Welles (who agreed to be in the film if Jodorowsky agreed to have the chef from his favorite restaurant cook all his meals on set), Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali (who demanded $100,000 per minute of screen time), and Jodorowksy's own son. Pink Floyd did the soundtrack, H.R. Giger did the art design, and famed comic book artist Jean Giraud did the storyboards. At this point, you're probably wondering why you've never seen what is clearly the greatest movie ever made, and the answer is that it was never made. It lost $10 million just in pre-production, and eventually the powers that be decided to give the project to a much more stable and normal director: David Lynch.
So if you're looking for a recommendation for a Jodorowsky movie, something relatively straightforward like Santa Sangre would probably be the responsib- Screw that, we're diving headfirst into the Hellmouth. Watch The Holy Mountain. It's a visually stunning film about how each of us, to truly reach our full potential, must undergo the terror of rejecting the comforting dogmas we've inherited and try to find answers for ourselves. It's also about a Christ-like character who wears a thong, eats a wax figure of himself, and has sex with a mountain. A limbless dwarf rescues him with balloons. A bunch of toads and chameleons get exploded for real. A wizard turns shit into gold.
The Holy Mountain is the result of John Lennon liking Jodorowsky's previous film so much that he made the president of Apple Corps offer Jodorowsky a million bucks to make his next film. Jodorowsky initially offered the starring role to George Harrison, who declined the role when he learned he'd have to show his asshole on camera. To prepare for this film, on the advice of his guru, Jodorowsky didn't sleep for a week straight, and according to an interview, he also did magic mushrooms. "She sent me mushrooms in a jar of honey. When I ate them, I became a lion. I went up to the roof and then I made a connection with every one of the stars."
Related: The Creative Processes Of Famous Filmmakers: Charted
Jan Svankmajer's Stop-Motion Films Are Nightmare Fuel
Jan Svankmajer is an animator in the same sense that John Wayne Gacy was a children's birthday clown. Whereas most stop-motion directors use the medium to animate, say, a cute clay model of a British man and his dog, Svankmajer instead decides to animate raw meat, tongues, and dead animals.
He's been making films since the '60s, but not continuously. The government of Czechoslovakia deemed his work subversive, and he was banned from making films until the '80s. But Svankmajer claims his films are apolitical, so maybe the government was just looking for an excuse to protect the fragile minds of their populace from something like this:
One of my favorite things about Svankmajer is that while some of his films are clearly aimed at adults (like Little Otik, a horror movie about a couple who carve a log into a baby, which then comes to life and has an insatiable appetite for human hair), some definitely seem to be aimed at children. He made a version of Alice In Wonderland wherein all of the nice animal friends Alice meets are played by taxidermied animals.
If you're happy that Svankmajer's mania is restricted to cinema, I have terrible news: His insanity spills over into the physical realm as well. The New York Times describes one of his art shows as featuring "illustrations in books onto which he's pasted images of eyes or genitals, or cut-up anatomical and scientific drawings with mismatched parts arranged in new configurations. His sculptures are fantastical animal amalgams, made from taxidermy, bones, fins, shells, horns or skulls." That write-up also includes a fun tidbit about a machine Svankmajer built to commune with the ghost of his dead wife. What do you expect from a man who started collecting razor blades at seven years old?
Svankmajer also claims to be on a government watchlist due to his habit of smuggling dead exotic animals into the country for him to taxidermy. So recommending your first Svankmajer film is like asking which drill bit you'd like your lobotomy performed with. So yeah, Lunacy. It's loosely based on some of Edgar Allen Poe's short stories, and also the writings of the Marquis de Sade, so we're off to a good start already. It's a film about a young man who thinks he may be on the verge of a mental breakdown, and is tortured by meat-based hallucinations. He then befriends a man who claims to be the actual-ass Marquis de Sade. What follows is a series of bizarre mind games between the two designed to make the protagonist, and the audience, question their sanity. But even without those goals, it probably would've done that anyway.
William Kuechenberg is a film and television writer seeking representation (HINT HINT). You can check out his work on Script Revolution or view his mind-diarrhea on Twitter.
For more, check out What Directors Really Think On Set - Rom.com Extras:
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