6. The Epic of Gilgamesh, or This Unnameable Little Broom (aka Little Songs of the Chief Officer of Hunar Louse) (1985)
What The...? This one has a handful of alternative, equally odd titles, which seem merely to be rearrangements of the same words to a different end result, such as This Unnameable Little Broom and Little Songs of the Chief Officer of Hunar Louse (Being a Largely Disguised Reduction of The Epic of Gilgamesh), and then there's Tableau II. The first Tableau was the classic, obviously. If you're not on board with this yet, confirmation that it's terrible comes with the revelation that the film is a surrealist puppet film, starring a character called Gilgamesh, a weird, hydrocephalic dwarf boy riding his tricycle around a "sandbox kingdom." Naturally, on his journey he tries to seduce a bird skull with a prostitute, and trap it with a giant fleshy vagina apparatus. Nicholas Winding Refn is in talks to remake it. Probably.
Is It Any Good? Sometimes you suspect that a film-maker is either deeply unhinged, or likes to take recreational drugs on work days: This Unnameable Little Broom is as close as possible to a genuine confirmation of that. It's only 11 minutes long, but it's a joyride of oddities, without so much joy, and it will leave you with a hangover.
5. The Heart Of A Lady As Pure As A Full Moon Over The Place Of Medical Salvation (1955)
What The...? Never since Dawson's Creek have such obviously over-age actors played students, as in Not As A Stranger, the Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra film that was curiously given this odd title when shown in Hong Kong. Mitchum's stoic medical student marries for money, to pay his tuition fees, and then shuts himself off emotionally in order to progress through his training, becoming an inflated ego with a perfectionist complex that makes claims of infallibility that his actual skills can't deliver on. He fails to save his mentor on the operating table, then has an emotional break-down and identity crisis, crawling back to his wife, who he didn't love and cheated on, to ask for help to save himself.
Is It Any Good? It's a well-meaning affair, and the cast is great, but it's all terribly dour and sullen, even with Sinatra on board and there's no real over-riding flavour at the end, other than confusion at why medical students who are supposed to be young are clearly fully-grown men, advancing closer to middle-age than academic years.