Well, no use beating around the bush when talking about balls, specifically in relation to tripping them. To “trip balls” means “experience a severe drug-induced hallucinatory trip,” basically. Now, movies aren’t literally drugs, but they do provide experiences, and some of them are both hallucinatory and trippy, all by design. Also, for what it’s worth, movies – and the act of watching them – can become addictive, so maybe movies are a little like a (usually) safe and unconventional sort of drug.
On the topic of all this, if you’re still following along and it all makes a degree of sense, here’s a collection of films that best exemplify what it purportedly means to “trip balls.” Or these movies are surreal in ways that’ll make you feel like you’re on some kind of potentially psychedelic trip, to put it all another way. Yay.
8
‘Pink Floyd: The Wall’ (1982)
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Pink Floyd: The Wall is one of those movies that argues, “Actually, it wouldn’t be very much fun to be a famous rock musician,” laying it all out in graphic and eventually very surreal detail. It’s a film version of The Wall, by Pink Floyd, having that entire album play out while giving all the songs (all of them already telling a story, owing to The Wall being a concept album) accompanying visuals, which ensures the narrative and everything being dived into thematically hits even harder.
If it’s not a very long series of interconnected music videos strung together, then Pink Floyd: The Wall is best defined as a musical of sorts, and an incredibly heavy one at that. The rock star at its center has his world fall apart, and his mind, so trying to make sense of exactly what’s really happening and what’s being imagined gets continually harder as the film goes along. You always feel it, though, and it’s consistently horrifying whenever it wants to be, so maybe that’s the most important thing.
7
‘The Holy Mountain’ (1973)
Few art films feel quite as arthouse overall as The Holy Mountain, which pushes right up to the line of self-parody, or possibly crosses it, and then maybe that crossing is also intentional. It’s a movie that is whatever you want it to be. It focuses on a group of people searching for something, all of them picked for unusual reasons, and then the journey is a dizzying and confounding one.
That’s vague, but it’s still making The Holy Mountain sound more coherent than it is. You can embrace the oddness of it all, and get some satisfaction from clicking with a scene or a moment here and there, or you can dedicate lots of time and rewatches to trying to decipher it all (in that way, it’s one of the more Thomas Pynchon-esque movies out there, at least when you exclude the two Paul Thomas Anderson movies that are Pynchon adaptations).
6
‘Alice’ (1988)
Yes, there are movies based on Lewis Carroll‘s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that are family-friendly, and that makes sense, given it’s a children’s novel. But then you’ve also got Alice (1988), which more or less has the fantasy/adventure story you’d expect, yet everything is so much more horrific and nightmare-inducing than usual. What’s mildly creepy in most adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland becomes deeply uncomfortable and genuinely harrowing at times, too.
See, this is an animated movie with a single live-action cast member (playing Alice), and then every other creature is brought to life with stop-motion animation, and the animals are works of taxidermy, which never stops being unsettling. The filmmaker behind Alice, Jan Švankmajer, intended this, saying that he wanted his take on the story to feel more like a dream than a fairy tale. If “dream” is being used broadly enough so that it also encompasses “nightmares,” then yes, he definitely succeeded.
5
‘Paprika’ (2006)
There’s a relentlessness to Paprika that makes it a ride worth taking regardless of how much of it registers in a straightforward or normal way. You get a sense of the premise here, at least as much as you need, because there’s a machine that’s been stolen, which is bad, because it lets therapists see the dreams of their patients. And there are all sorts of ways such technology could be misused, so there’s a struggle, or a chase, or a something to get it back.
And, yes, it’s already jumped off – or into – the deep end, or right off a cliff, maybe, but look at it fall. Paprika is falling with such style. It makes sense for a movie all about dreams, including a chase that goes partly through dreamscapes, to only make a dreamlike sort of sense. With Paprika, it’s hard to keep up with everything, at least on a first watch, but falling behind isn’t really too frustrating when it all feels purposefully disorienting in such a glorious and unique way.
4
‘Brazil’ (1985)
A feature-length condemnation of what might be the hardest to spell word in the English language, “bureaucracy,” Brazil centers on a man named Sam Lowry who is unlucky in a way that makes his life feel like a continually worsening nightmare. He ventures out of the bounds of his everyday life when he becomes infatuated with a mysterious woman, and then what he stumbles into makes the sorts of tangled webs you usually find in even complex film noir movies look pretty straightforward in comparison.
Beyond feeling like a trippy spin on certain film noir conventions, Brazil is also a surreal comedy and a dystopian movie, plus it’s got some fantastical sequences that, at least at times, give it a fantasy feel. It’s a lot, and all that stuff feels like it’s consistently overflowing, but such a sensation adds to how trippy and head-spinning the entire film ultimately is.
3
‘Inland Empire’ (2006)
There are plenty of David Lynch movies that could be included here, with even Dune (1984), which is sometimes pointed to as his weakest film, offering quite a bit if you’re after something trippy (it’s also not quite as bad as some make it out to be). For his most intensely trippy film, though, it’s probably best to go with Inland Empire, which looks at somewhat similar things narratively and thematically to both Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, yet it gets a good deal stranger than either of them… which is saying quite a lot.
Inland Empire is worth checking out for being maybe the ultimate Lynch film, or the Lynchiest of all the Lynch films.
There’s a lot of horror here, and Inland Empire also has this persistently surreal and unnerving feel owing to the way it’s filmed, all very dingy, dark, and intentionally digital. Maybe it’s beautiful in an ugly sort of way, or maybe it’s just off-putting in an, uh, off-putting way. If you’re a fan of Lynch and have yet to see it for whatever reason, it’s worth checking out for being maybe the ultimate Lynch film, or the Lynchiest of all the Lynch films, even though it’s also not quite his best.
2
‘Mind Game’ (2004)
For as strange as Paprika is, at least it feels like it might make something approaching total sense if you were to watch several times or more, taking notes on at least one of those occasions. Another anime movie released around the same time, Mind Game, is a good deal more absurd and difficult to break down, though it is just as compelling in its own strange way.
With Paprika, you could call it a sci-fi/thriller movie, at least a weird one, but then with Mind Game, it feels futile trying to define it as such, even if you give yourself the flexibility to name a handful of genres. It goes from one thing to another and then to another, then you check how much time has passed, and it’s only been about 15 minutes, with almost an hour and a half to go, and at that point, you just have to surrender to Mind Game. It’s absolutely worth watching, but you will be in a daze during it, and then probably for a while once it’s over, too.
1
‘Koyaanisqatsi’ (1982)
Alright, so there is technically a depiction of reality throughout Koyaanisqatsi, owing to it being a documentary, which might make you think it’s not going to be as weird and trippy as the other movies (largely sci-fi and/or fantasy-related), but it’s all in the execution, here. Koyaanisqatsi contrasts the natural world with the industrial one, and shows both in unexpected and awe-inspiring ways… well, with the industrial world, it’s probably more alarming than awe-inspiring.
Or it’s a beautiful/visually striking kind of ugliness contrasted with the more traditionally beautiful landscapes of the natural world. It’s also all edited in a way that adds to the almost roller-coaster feel, with so many precise and purposeful cuts, plus an unapologetically large amount of slow motion and time-lapse footage used. You can get lost in Koyaanisqatsi, feel confused about it, or try to analyze what it’s trying to say without anything by way of narration or interviews. You could even do all of the above simultaneously, somehow.
Koyaanisqatsi
- Release Date
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April 27, 1983
- Runtime
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86 minutes
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Ed Asner
Self – On TV (archive footage) (uncredited)
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Pat Benatar
Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
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Jerry Brown
Self – On TV (archive footage, uncredited)
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