Word: weirdness
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...weird scene even for the Stone Age world of New Guinea. Deliberately, several brown-skinned Melanesian tribesmen made their way down from the top of fog-shrouded Mount Turu. Strapped to the bamboo poles on their shoulders were two concrete survey markers that had been planted on the summit years ago by a U.S. Army team. Behind the bearers trudged 4,000 other natives from New Guinea's jungled East Sepik district, reciting the Roman Catholic rosary and clutching handfuls of precious mud that they had scooped from the mountaintop...
...hurling themselves against attackers with suicidal ferocity. The viewer is brought so deeply into all this that after a few minutes the film begins to take on a surprising immediacy. Like all good science fiction, The Hellstrom Chronicle suggests an alternate reality, then surrounds you with it, inducing a weird sense of disorientation. Despite the melodramatic Dr. Hellstrom, it is a trip much worth taking...
...executive order has led to what Florence calls a "mass of weird confusion" in the Defense Department. The department, for example, refused to make public the list of military installations where liquor is sold to servicemen by the bottle. The Army once classified as a military secret a modern adaptation of the bow and arrow. The Air Force stamped secret on pictures of the interiors of transport planes that had been remodeled with plush lounges for the comfort of traveling brass. The Navy put a secrecy stamp on a report of attacks by sharks on seamen, even though they took...
...Angels, and what's left but another melodrama, one in which beefy Alfred Jarrys play the villains, and everyone else the innocents. A self-defined outlaw gag, but not the kind of outlaws that sign million dollar contracts, the Angels are denied appeal. Though Grace Slick says, "People get weird and we need the Angels to keep people in line"; though a member of the Dead says, "Beating on musicians? Doesn't seem right"; though the Stones and their entourage hired the Angels as guards because they were cheap and because they added a little genuine street-fighting class...
Gradually the stage fills with weird, masked figures from the mists of prehistory: tribesmen in vast, shaggy costumes thumping drums, bonging gongs, pinging cymbals. Enormous idols appear. Frenzied, the primitives swirl and bang and jabber. The shaman speaks: God demands a sacrifice, the greatest sacrifice is sex, a taboo is born...