I Recommend...

This movie will change the watcher in the same way as a car crash changes a person. This is more an experience than a movie. It won't easily leave your mind. For the rest of your life you'll remember The Holy Mountain. It's an onslaught. There is symbolism and confusing, surreal, absurd imagery in every second. There is not a single frame in this movie where there is not something a little out of the ordinary. It's fatiguing in its insanity. The plot is thin, you'll forget it's there.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a mad man. The stories behind his movies productions are just as interesting as his movies. George Harrison was originally supposed to play the lead. Jodorowsky had to movie the production to New York because he was getting so many death threats. Jodorowsky almost never uses actual actors and the main players in Holy Mountain were put on an actual spiritual quest. Jodorowsky fed them hallucinogens, took them to the mountains and filmed them going through rituals that included subjecting them to their worst fears.

Holy Mountain is probably not Jodorowsky's most well made movie (that's probably Santa Sangre), but it is the most insane thing I've ever seen.

A couple warnings, Jodorowsky's films are filled with nudity. It's wall-to-wall. There's some imagery people might find disturbing. It doesn't last very long though.

The most beautiful movie ever made. Filmed in over 20 different countries. The locations are amazing and all real, there's barely any special effects or CGI in what you'll see. It's amazing from credits to credits, whether it's the ridiculous visuals or the performance of the 6-year-old Romanian actress who co-stars. Ebert said it best: "You might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it."

Directed by Sergio Leone. Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef.

When I think of the word "epic" my mind immediately leaps to this movie. It's almost perfect, there's one scene that drags and the rest flies. The characters cover so much ground, going from one dangerous situation to the next. The score is brilliant. The characters are flat, but nothing could matter less. Action is never very far away. There's even a little bit of humor.

Directed by Stanley Kubrick.

One of the blackest of black comedy. Satire played so straight someone not paying attention could miss the humor all together. In fact, the amazing George C Scott wasn't even told it was a comedy (and somehow he managed to be the funniest in the movie. Some of the most iconic images in movies come from Dr. Strangelove.

A general goes insane and sends planes to nuke Russia. The president convenes his war cabinet to figure out what to do. Peter Sellers plays three roles. Has my all-time favorite ending. And, seriously, I can't stress enough how incredible George C. Scott is.

Directed by David Lynch.

Weird, twisted, confusing, surreal, scary and sexy. A mysterious, beautiful brunette woman stumbles into a blonde woman's life. The brunette doesn't remember anything and together they try to figure it out. Strange visions, seemingly random occurrences and no shortage of shadowy figures. The best thing about Mulholland Dr is that it's a puzzle and it can be solved if you want to put the pieces together or you can just appreciate it as the bizarre masterpiece that it is.

It also has the single scariest scene I have ever witnessed.

Possibly my favorite movie. Funny, weird and insightful about our culture, but in a way where the movie still revels in its own silliness and absurdity. Endlessly quotable. Features my favorite actor: Harry Dean Stanton

Does anything else need to be said about Apocalypse Now? Try to avoid the Redux version.

Directed by Christopher Nolan (the new Batman trilogy, Memento). Stars Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine (you're going to start to realize that I love Michael Caine) and Scarlett Johansson.

One of my most watched movies. It's about an escalating rivalry between two magicians. Excellent cast, story, direction. Without spoiling anything, I'll say some people don't like the ending. I didn't mind it, but just a warning.

Directed by the Coen Brothers.

My favorite gangster movie. Set during Prohibition, it tells a complex story of two rival gangs (the Irish and the Italians) with Gabriel Byrne stuck in the middle. There's some amazing action pieces, but it's not an action movie. The real entertainment comes from watching Gabriel Byrne plot and try to survive.

Directed by Billy Wilder. Stars Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray.

Romantic comedies suck. This one doesn't. It's genuinely funny and surprisingly dark for a rom-com made in 1960. Jack Lemmon manages to be likeable even as he's playing a kind of spineless loser.

Brilliant modern noir. The premise sounds gimmicky and lame. It's high school kids who use '20s slang and have their own crime network.

But it works really well. It's not played with a wink, it's done straight and it's really dark and effective. Maybe the best detective movie of the last 10 years.

Stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

The best religious satire ever. Probably the best Jesus movie too.

Soviet movie directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Very long, very slow, but once you get into the movie's rhythms it seems to fly by. It gets labelled as sci-fi, that's all I'll say. It feels a lot like "Easy Rider" in that it consists mostly of watching people travel and taking in the scenery. The entire ending portion of the movie is really powerful.

There exists an area called "The Zone." If you want to go into The Zone, you need to enlist the services of men known as stalkers. This is a movie about a trip to The Zone.

Directed by John Carpenter.

Just an awesome, balls-to-the-wall crazy sci-fi horror movie. Kurt Russell is the man, Wilford Brimley does some great work. The monster starts insane and only get crazier. It's a movie so good even the dog in the beginning is an excellent actor.

Easily one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. It's a perfect parody of '70s blaxploitation movies. The more blaxploitation movies you've seen, the more you'll enjoy it. But if you've never seen any, it's still hilarious. And it gets more and more ridiculous. There's a ton of quotable lines and the guys who made it created it because they love the genres.

The lead actor and director even came up with back stories for a fictional lead actor and director of the movie Black Dynamite. So, Michael Jai White plays Black Dynamite, but he also pretended he was a fake '70s football star named Ferente Jones who got into acting and played Black Dynamite. Just another crazy level to the movie.

Directed by Spike Lee. Stars Spike Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, John Turturro, Rosie Perez, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis.

Maybe the best movie about race ever made (go fuck yourself, Crash). The writing is great, the characters feel real and stylized at the same time. It's both dramatic and really funny. A ton of memorable characters.

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Stars Adam Sandler, Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

It's a romantic comedy about crazy people. Just emotionally maladjusted people with a ton of issues. Adam Sandler is amazing in this as a very lonely man with anger issues. A little bit of whimsy, a little bit of dark comedy. Features the best (read: craziest) pre-sex, dirty talk. And also one of the most heartfelt and emotional hero vs. villain confrontations when Sandler confronts Hoffman, who plays a mattress store owner who also runs a phone sex line that blackmails callers.

French movie that is like watching a boatload of whimsy. Audrey Tatou plays a young woman who meddles in other people's lives. Sometimes it's for the better, sometimes...eh..It's an incredibly charming movie that just kind of makes you smile.

Directed by David Lynch.

I wouldn't have been able to handle Holy Mountain if I had never seen Eraserhead. It was a movie that changed my notion of what a movie could be. I knew movies could be weird, I didn't know they could transcend to such mind-melting levels of strange.

Eraserhead unsettled me in a way that no film had previously. It was like watching a nightmare, but it's so engaging and surreal that you can't look away. It's a masterpiece and it's inspired so many film makers.

I can't remember where I read it, but I came to the movie after I read an interview with Charles Bukowski. He said he got HBO and the first thing he saw was Eraserhead. He was blown away. He was excited because he thought that's what all movies were like. Then was severely disappointed with the rest of the movie he saw.

And that's kind of what movies like Holy Mountain and Eraserhead do. They move the goalposts of "weird" back. You'll hear people describe something (like Tim Burton) as being so weird. You'll only be able to think about how they don't know what strange is, because they haven't seen the very edge of the bizarre.

Directed by Robert Altman. Stars Phillip Baker Hall.

One actor, one location and that's the entire movie. It sounds like it would be boring, but it is one of the most engaging movies I've seen. It helps that the actor is amazing and he's playing a post-presidency Richard Nixon getting drunk and ranting into a tape recorder. I don't get half the references Nixon alludes to, but it doesn't matter. Hall's intensity drives the movie so well, it feels like it's only half it's running time. There are action movies that don't grab me the way this does.

It also does an amazing thing and makes you feel for Nixon. Great ending and a unique movie all around. Inspired Paul Thomas Anderson greatly.

Don't watch Greaser's Palace unless you've already seen El Topo. Greaser's Palace is interesting because it's like the Asylum Films version of a Jodorowsky movie. It's obvious that Robert Downey Sr. saw El Topo and tried to do that the same thing and it does not work.

Still, there's some interesting stuff. There's an obvious Christ figure, but it's an obvious Christ figure that wants to be a singer and dancer. So, you get a few musical numbers. And there's a dickish ghost. And it's a weird western, which I always like on some level.

Japanese.

One of the craziest movies I've seen. It was partly written by a child and it shows in the best possible way. It's like Scooby Doo mixed with Evil Dead 2 mixed with just off-the-wall madness. Everything is strange: the sound, the editing, the angles, the special effects, the plot. There's not a single frame of normalcy. Even when normalcy is being shown it's through a weird super-happy Brady Bunch filter.

A bunch of friends go to a haunted house and things go poorly.

I picked this up while I was scouring Amazon trying to find movies like Eraserhead. Unfortunately, this movie shares nothing with Eraserhead aside from being low budget and in black and white. Fortunately, it's fairly interesting.

It's a sci-fi musical about a smuggler hired to bring a young man to Venus to be a sex slave to the Venusian woman. The smuggler is pursued by a crazy, homicidal man called The Professor. The music isn't bad.

Directed by David Lynch. Stars Nicholas Cage, Laura Dern. Also, Willem Dafoe, Harry Dean Stanton, Crispin Glover.

Wild At Heart is the Lynch movie that Lynch fans don't seem to like. I don't know why. It's full of Lynchian weirdness. It's his take on the road movie. Two people traveling, trying to find the perfect place, but only moving further into despair. It's funny and bizarre. Lynch directing Cage is great, crazy directing crazy.

A few words on Nic Cage, because he pops up a lot on this list. People think Cage is a bad actor. He's not, he's not at all. He's a person who is terrible with money so he has to take any role he's offered, because acting is just like any job. And since he's generally acting in shit why should he care?

The fact is Nic Cage is crazy. He's at his best when he gets to act crazy because that's what he has the most fun with. He's not a one trick pony. He can act seriously. You can see this in Weather Man, Leaving Las Vegas, Matchstick Men, etc. People say Nic Cage is a bad actor because it's easy to judge people at their worst. Nic Cage is a great actor, he's super entertaining to watch. He just happens to be human. Humans get bored with their boring jobs. Thankfully, every couple years something comes along that he can get into.

Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Not Jodorowsky's first movie, but his first good one. It makes a lot more sense than Holy Mountain. It has an actual plot. The imagery isn't as relentless. Unfortunately, it kind of falls apart a little towards the end.

The first half of the movie is a riff on Westerns. It's about a gunfighter named El Topo, who claims to be God, who hunts down and kills a group of bandits. He rescues a woman (and abandons his son), who convinces him to duel the four master gun fighters that live in a desert. Each master represents a different religion or philosophy. Later, El Topo is betrayed by the woman. He wakes up in a cave populated by deformed and inbred outcasts. He agrees to clear out the cave entrance so they can be connected with the outside world.

El Topo is often called the first midnight movie. It was championed by John Lennon and paved the way and inspired so many other surrealist directors. El Topo (and Santa Sangre) are on Roger Ebert's list of great movies. It's amazing a movie that is so influential is so obscure.

The boy in the movie is Jodorowsky's actual 6-year-old son. In the very beginning, he has his son bury a picture of his actual mother who Jodorowsky had separated from, and one of his actual toys given to him by his mother. It's pretty safe to say Jodo is an irresponsible parent. The woman El Topo rescues was kind of just a transient, acid burn out woman Jodorowsky found wandering around. He took her into his house, she lived with his family.

Has one of my favorite quotes: "The mole is an animal that digs tunnels under the ground, searching for the sun. Sometimes his journey brings him to the surface. When he sees the sun, he is blinded.”

Directed by Christopher Nolan. It's amazing that the same man is capable of making Memento and the Dark Knight. It's kind of a rare thing, even for really great directors, to have such versatility. Nolan and the Coen bros are the best examples.

A thriller about a man with short-term memory loss where the scenes play in reverse chronological order.

Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Jodorowsky's most straight forward film, but still very strange, and his take on horror movies. Also his best looking movie with some really beautiful visuals.

I don't want to say much about the plot, but it's basically about a boy who grows up in a circus and is taken to a mental hospital after a traumatic event. Years later, his mother returns and he acts as her arms.

Stars Tim Robbins.

A Vietnam vet experiences surreal and disturbing hallucinations.

Directed by Werner Herzog. Stars Nic Cage...and Xzibit. There is no connection with the original Bad Lieutenant.

Just crazy directing crazy. Nic Cage is an incredibly unhinged police lieutenant who is addicted to pain killers and other drugs. He's investigating a multiple homicide and dealing with his own gambling debts.

It's a balls-to-the-wall crazy movie. Cage throws it into overdrive and there was incredibly weird story and style choices, such a lizard vision. There's some pathos in there too and it doesn't feel forced.

It's basically a pagan sex musical mystery.

While the remake is a lot of fun for how terrible it is, it's also interesting because it removes everything that was unique or thought provoking about the original. There's a lot of themes about prevailing values and perspective.

Stars Rudy Ray Moore.

The most ridiculous blaxploitation movie ever made. RRM is a stand-up comedian and he's so good that rival comedians start killing his family...and him. In exchange for him and his family being brought back to life, he agrees to marry the devil's daughter. He's also given a magic cane.

That's not even a third of the crazy that's in this movie.

See also: Dolemite, Avenging Disco Godfather

Directed by David Cronenberg. Stars James Woods.

Super mindfuck of a movie. James Woods is a TV producer specializing in pornography, he wants to find harder stuff. One night he finds a mysterious and disturbing show called Videodrome. As he tries to track down the source he gets pulled into a strange war between two opposing...I don't really know. But the Videodrome is effecting Woods in terrible ways.

There's insane hallucinations(?) and visuals. If you're squeamish, this might not be your best choice.

Stars David Bowie and Rip Torn.

Another slow, hypnotic '70s movie with wall-to-wall nudity. Light on plot, but it still grabs you somehow. David Bowie plays an alien who comes to Earth to get water for his dying planet. He gets consumed by human society, though. There's some strange visuals and it's weird to see Rip Torn before he became the most grizzled man in the world. Fun fact: This was filmed at a time when Bowie was doing a crazy amount of cocaine.

It's tough to say why, but I found this movie very unsettling. Also, beautiful and hypnotic. Set in 1900 in Australia, a bunch of school girls and a teacher from a private school go missing during a picnic. The rest of the movie deals with the fallout of their disappearance.

Almost every frame of the picnic is amazing to watch. You could take any frame and it would make a great picture. The direction and composition is dream-like.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky.

A man builds a computer that produces a seemingly random 216 digit number. Various groups are trying to get their hands on this man's work. Strange black and white thriller involving mathematics and Jewish mysticism.