Movie Details
| Title: | Confessions of an Opium Eater | |
| Director: | Albert Zugsmith | |
| Year: | 1962 | |
| Genre: | Drug | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.27.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.27.06 | Weird Wednesday | so... I was in Tuscon for christmas visiting with family that seemed to pass out at the strike of 8:30... so I didn't get any full movies watched all week, until I returned to Austin on Wednesday and made it to this Weird Wednesday oddity. After an unrelated intro that felt like it belonged in some saturday serial, Vincent Price stars as a roughneck sailor type (yeah, weird right?) who stumbles into... some sort of plot or adventure or mystery or something. This movie is... well, it's like... hmmm. OK, either a lot of these old b-movies were this... comfortable with its lack of cohesion and logic and they were just all lost to time and this is the first one I've come across or there is no other movie like this ever made. Absolutely nothing about this makes sense in any kind of real world fashion, but you watch it long enough and it starts to make its own kind of sense. Every word out of Vincent Price's mouth is some obtuse quote or reference to eastern philosophy... he always seems to find these secret passages out of nowhere that he has no problem with using that leads him to weird cheap-set locales and midget captives. When he takes the titular opium (smoked, not eaten by the way), he just kind of does it because he's there - not really for any plot or character reasoning - but it does lead to the best part of the film: a nighmarish trip sequence followed by a silent slow-motion chase sequence. At least it starts off as a chase sequence but quickly becomes a series of rooms that Price casually enters, looks around, then leaves. Then there's a pig butcher and a talking bird gets shot and Price wakes up... was it a dream or reality!??!? This movie is so bizarre. It helps me that a few characters are from my reality and seem just as weirded out at being trapped in this world than I would be. The girl will say something like "help. get me out of here" but of course Price would answer with something like "as many stars as in the gutter after it rains." This movie needs to sink in some more. Usually that's a good thing. |
