17. Primer

(Shane Carruth, 2004)

What’s The Story? Engineer buddies Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) design a superconducting machine in Aaron’s garage. Then, er...

What’s It About? ...they realise that the machine can be used as a portal to ‘travel’ back to the time it was turned on - it works by creating a time loop.

As Abe says, it’s like “two ends of a street and both are cul-de-sacs”. So, entry to/exit from the machine can only happen safely at either the past or the future end of the street.

If you enter at the past end, you enter the back-side of the loop and, when you exit at the future end, you’ve effectively travelled back in time – but never further back than the start-up time of the machine.

Uh-huh...

Weird Fact: Shane Carruth made the film for $7,000 and had to keep it ultra-lean. The 78-minute running time came from cutting just two minutes out of the 80 originally shot.

16. Head

(Bob Rafelson, 1968)

What’s The Story? The ‘60s. Processed-pop moptops The Monkees slosh around in a stream of consciousness featuring musical numbers, spinny-eyed psychedelic asides, genre dress-up lunacy and even the odd dash of Vietnam satire.

What’s It About? Basically, it was Monkees co-creator Bob Rafelson – and cameo star Jack Nicholson – getting out of their heads and devising a lurid action-painting satire of the band’s birth, phoney existence and spectacular commercial death. It didn’t work. And no one bothered to go see it.

Weird Fact: Guitarist Michael Nesmith’s mum invented Tipp-Ex in the ‘50s. When she died, Nesmith inherited $25 million of her estate.

15. Boxing Helena

(Jennifer Lynch, 1993)

What’s The Story? Creepy surgeon Nick (Julian Sands) nurses Helena (Lynch Sr fave Sherilyn Fenn) after she’s hit by a car.

Well, actually, he develops a deranged obsession with her; removing more body bits than strictly necessary in a bid to ensure she’ll never leave his caring clutches...

What’s It About? Advanced acrotomophelia (amputee fetish) driven by paranoid megalomania, aggravated by Helena’s own Stockholm syndrome (captive’s perverse attachment to captor).

Nick’s urge to utterly ‘possess’ Helena completely overrides her increasingly disturbing lack of extremities, while the stress of Helena’s resulting ordeal plays havoc with her emotional response.

The gleaming great cherry of spookiness on top of this deeply odd cake? Director Jennifer Lynch was the inspiration for dad Dave’s weird opus Eraserhead.

Weird Fact: Kim Basinger paid heavily in court for doing a runner on her original casting as Helena (“It was the best $8m I ever spent”).

Next: Huckabees, Jacob's Ladder, Schizopolis...