I’ll watch just about any movie.

There are movies that I won’t go see in the theater, but will watch on DVD. Then there are the movies that I won’t watch on DVD, but will watch on television when there are no other options. (Such logic explains how I happened to catch “XXX” starring Vin Diesel last spring on FX.) Sure, there are a few movies I refuse to watch, and even that category is open to revision. For instance, I never really had much of an urge to see “Dude, Where’s My Car?” but after writing about stoner movies last week in this blog, I’ve decided that maybe I should try to catch it sometime. On TV, that is, and only to deepen my understanding of the stoner movie genre and, uh, cinema in general.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, because this post is devoted to truly bizarre, strange films, and I don’t want readers to think that’s all I watch. That said, I’ll admit to a particular interest in films that contain eye-popping, surrealistic imagery, and are generally regarded as deranged fantasies. Such movies are not for all tastes, but even the bad ones will make you shake your head and say, “Well, I’ve never seen anything like THAT before.”

Last week I watched “Haxan,” a 1922 Danish documentary that sought to prove that the witches of medieval times exhibited the same symptoms as female mental patients at the turn of the century. What makes the film unique are striking, disturbing vignettes: witches flying through the sky on their broomsticks, Satan seducing a young woman, possessed nuns, etc. There are close-ups of torture implements and scenes of priests interrogating women accused of witchcraft, all accompanied by beautiful classical music. The film is an odd mix of history, tongue-in-cheek humor (the narrator dryly observers that the Middle Ages weren’t a good time to be an old, poor woman, but that it wasn’t all that easy to be young and pretty, either) and advocacy for better mental health treatment for disturbed women. I’d certainly never seen anything like it before, except maybe F.W. Murnau’s great version of “Faust” and some of the other weirder examples of early German expressionism (“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” anyone?), and it was impossible to take my eyes off the screen. The disc includes a shorter version of the film, released in 1968, featuring narration by gravelly-voiced beat author William S. Burroughs and a jazz soundtrack, and so I watched a little bit of that before deciding that it just wasn’t very good. Shocking, I know.

As if “Haxan” wasn’t weird enough, I decided to watch “Werckmeister Harmonies,” from the avant-garde Hungarian director Bela Tarr, a few days later. Tarr supposedly influenced Gus Van Sant’s recent films (“Gerry,” “Elephant,” “Last Days”), which are either exasperating or brilliant, depending on your point of view. I’d heard good things about “Werckmeister Harmonies,” but I was also somewhat wary of it. It’s listed as one of Roger Ebert’s great movies, but in his essay on the film he writes, “Bela Tarr’s ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ (2000) is maddening if you are not in sympathy with it, mesmerizing if you are. If you have not walked out after 20 or 30 minutes, you will thereafter not be able to move from your seat.” So that gives you a sense of the film. If you can stand to watch it for longer than a half-hour, you may decide it’s one of the greatest films ever.

My friend Bruce and I were able to make it through the entire film. About 10 minutes into it, Bruce said, “I’ve never seen camera work like this,” and I agreed that we were watching something unique. The film takes place in an economically depressed Hungarian town, and involves the arrival of a circus featuring a giant, stuffed whale and a charismatic demagogue called The Prince who (SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE COMPLETELY BIZARRE ENDING OF THIS VERY STRANGE FILM!) incites the townspeople to violence. The look of “Werckmeister Harmonies” is never anything less than arresting. It’s shot in elegant black-and-white and, for those of you who are impressed by feats of technical wizardry, uses only 39 camera shots despite a 145-minute running time. At some point, Bruce said, “This film has become incomprehensible,” but we couldn’t stop watching, and I continue to have nightmares about the giant eyes of that creepy stuffed whale.

OTHER TRULY WEIRD WORKS OF CINEMA

“El Topo,” by the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky. I didn’t much like this film, a violent western filled with muddled religious symbolism. (It’s also one of Ebert’s great movies.) It was released in 1970, and I think it was popular with people who liked to drop acid and go to midnight films. Watching it in a completely sober state of mind really taxes one’s patience.

“Songs From the Second Floor:” This surrealist Swedish film is set in an office building, as civilization collapses and weird things happen. There’s arson, and flagellants, and when a man is fired he falls to the floor and wraps his arms around his boss.

Any film by the Canadian director Guy Maddin: I’ve only seen a couple of Maddin’s films, but I mention him because he has a new film out that’s received rave reviews, “My Winnipeg,” and another film, “Brand Upon the Brain,” was just released on DVD. His 2004 film, “The Saddest Music in the World,” a black-and-white film that involves a beer baroness who offers a $25,000 prize to the person who can compose the saddest music in the world, and his 2003 film “Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary,” a black-and-white silent film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s performance of Dracula.