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On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.

First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.

Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.

The Pitch: It’s January! Go Gut Yourself

Greetings and welcome to this, The Month That Sucks.

It’s a shame so many of us turn the start of a new year into an excuse to eviscerate our sense of selves and assume so-called “goals” as our burdensome, boring hobbies first thing post-holiday. And yet, countless self-flagellators like myself buy into the idea of annual resolutions. In an effort to evolve and achieve, be it through a Dry January or some broader personal mission pursued throughout the year, we choose to be...

Instead of births, Althusser seeks unforeseen and stupefying eruptions. Autobiography becomes a kind of science fiction. Philip K. Dick might have dreamed up these memoirs without memory, without genesis or origin. More than a philosopher’s account of his life, replicants with mnemonic implants come to mind – as do the vertiginous temporalities that provide the framework for novels such as Ubik and The Man in the High Castle. This conception of temporality extending from future to the past – where the origins amounts to either a lure or an agent of chaos – evokes Dick’s theories, according to which the commonplace understanding of History is only a fiction, and the world we inhabit just one version of reality among others.—Nicolas Bourriaud, The ExformGyörgy Pálfi thrives on low budgets. Rather than a masochistic personal choice intended to sharpen his artistic sensibilities, the tight purse strings are more the result of limited...

Special Mention: Gojira (Godzilla)

Written and directed by Ishirô Honda

Japan, 1954

Ishiro Honda’s grim, black-and-white post-Hiroshima nightmare stands the test of time. This allegory for the devastation wrought on Japan by the atomic bomb is quite simply a powerful statement about mankind’s insistence to continue to destroy everyone and everything the surrounds us. With just one shot (a single pan across the ruins of Tokyo), Honda manages to express the devastation that Godzilla represents. Since its debut, Godzilla has become a worldwide cultural icon, but very little is said about actor Takashi Shimura, who adds great depth as Dr. Yamane; his performance is stunning. Special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya originally wanted to use classic stop-motion animation to portray Godzilla, but time and budget limitations forced him to dress actors up in monster suits. Despite this minor setback, Tsuburaya’s scale sets of Tokyo are crafted with such great attention to detail,...

Gyorgy Palfi's "Taxidermia" is a certain kind of movie that doesn't have a name -- we could call it scato-absurdist-expressionist outrage comedy, with a lineage that stems back to the New Wave Czechs, Makavejev, Monty Python, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Roy Andersson and the Coens, not to mention Takashi Miike, if he were Hungarian, and Guy Maddin, if the Winnipeg master of private ceremonies decided to regress and fully embrace Eastern European vulgarism. Or we could just not bother, and savor the whiplash.

A confrontational Rube Goldberg satire that packs three surreal dick jokes into its first 15 minutes, Palfi's film plunges headlong into its own dialogue about Hungarian culture and the universal love-hate with our bodies, and the level of discourse is just as often lab-brat silly as it is genuinely disquieting. But while plenty of revolted reviewers were happy to chide the movie for its sophomoric excesses, there's no denying its uncompromising brio.

The 2006 Hungarian film directed by György Pálfi is now in select theaters. Following an opening weekend in NY and La, Taxidermia will open at the Northwest Film Center in Portland on Friday, August 21. The film tells the story of three generations of Hungarian men: the grandfather–a military orderly during the Second World War, the father–a competitive speed-eater during the Cold War and the son–a taxidermist during modern times. The film is based on the short stories of Hungarian writer Lajos Parti Nagy and is rife with the surrealist tones of those works. The grandfather has a penis that shoots fire, [...]Post from: Screamstress...

A three-course ordeal of icky sex, Olympian gluttony, and autoerotic dismemberment, Gyorgy Palfi’s “Taxidermia” is consistently vile. Yet it’s also a sustained, unique work of art, and well worth the mess. A triptych, the first two sections of which are based on stories by Hungarian writer Lajos Parti Nagy (the third is an original story by Palfi and his wife, Zsofia Ruttkay, and they also cowrote the screenplay), the film chronicles …...

We have the trailer as well as images in from Here Media and Regent Releasing's "Taxidermia" (a.k.a. "Taxidermie") directed by by György Pálfi. The film sees release on August 14th, 2009. The film stars Csaba Czene, Gergely Trocsanyi, Adél Stanczel, Piroska Molnar and Marc Bischoff. Pálfi also writes alongside Zsofia Ruttkay based on the short stories written by Lajos Parti Nagy. Taxidermia contains three generational stories, about a grandfather, a father, and a son, linked together by recurring motifs. The dim grandfather, an orderly during World War Two, lives in his bizarre fantasies; he desires love. The huge father seeks success as a top athlete - a speed eater - in the post-war pro-Soviet era.