In actuality, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), contrary to the repeated myths, was not a millionaire banker.  He was a successful stock broker.  He did not quit his job.  The stock market crashed and he lost his job.  Gauguin, who had been a “Sunday” painter for years, felt that this was reason enough to pursue painting full time, something he had been longing to do.  It was with this that his wife left him.  Gauguin did not desert his wife and five children.  His wife rejected him after he lost his income as a stockbroker.

Art critic Waldemar Januszczak attempts to set the record straight.  “What’s to like about this man?,” Januszczak asks.  “First of all, there is the art, which needs no defense.  Gauguin painted some of the world’s most alluring woman and put them into several of the world’s most gorgeous pictures, but what I really like about him is that he did it for big and noble reasons.”  And then, most aptly, he says, “There is always more to a Gauguin than meets the eye.”  Januszczak covers those “big and noble reasons,” but falls a little short in the “more than meets the eye” comment (more on that later).

Januszczak follows Gauguin’s travels.  “Take it from me that he had guts by the barrel-load and with the life he lead, he needed them.”  Januszczak takes the viewer through Gauguin’s early history: the premature death of his father, the strict Catholic upbringing in a boarding school as Gauguin was prepped for the priesthood.  Gauguin was having none of it and, of course, he was on his way to his own brand of vocation; but first, he ran off to sail the seven seas.  After a seven year stint in the navy, the twenty-three year old Gauguin landed a job in the French Stock Exchange through the assistance of his late mother’s lover.  Gauguin remained in that position for eleven years.  During that time, he met and hurriedly married Matte.  “This was a tough woman. She smoked cigars, loved dancing and parties, expensive dresses.  She thought she was marrying an up and coming financial wiz kid.  What she didn’t know was that her Gauguin had a terrible secret.  He had got interested in art!”  Most fatefully, Gauguin met numerous painters, including Pissarro and Cezanne.  For Matte, this would prove to be a Pandora’s box.  Gauguin’s great granddaughter, Mette, expands on this: “I don’t think she had any idea of his passion for art.  She saw it as an interesting hobby that kept him out of the bars.  It was a safe hobby for a man to have.  But that began to change.  And she said to my grandfather that she really had no idea that this was in him.  It was really quite a shock to her.  I don’t think she had any real interest in art.”  With the recession, “Matte was reluctant to cut back on her maids.  Gauguin was reluctant to cut back on his art.”  Their posh house had to be sold, and the family bought a less expensive home where Gauguin had his first studio.  Januszczak wanted to take his cameras in there but, “Nuns don’t like to let Gauguin through the door.  They shouldn’t have worried.  Gauguin’s painting here are among his most lyrical, including his paintings of the church.”

During this time,  Gauguin wrote his occupation down as “artist” on his fifth child’s birth certificate.  “It was hard on Matte.  She was so fond of elegant dresses and parties.  She wasn’t interested in poverty.  This was not what she married Gauguin for.  When her uncle turned up on a boat bound for Denmark, she got on it.  She did not consult Gauguin.  He cashed in his life insurance early and followed her.”  It was a humiliating six months in Denmark.  A job as a waterproofing salesman in Copenhagen was disastrous.  Gauguin hated Danish businessmen, and they hated him.  Through political connections, Matte got a job with the conservative Prime Minister giving French lessons to diplomats while  ”Gauguin, the embarrassing bohemian she brought back from Paris, was banished, out of sight, to the attic.  In this little room Gauguin painted his first self-portrait.”  Matte was constantly embarrassed by her husband, his opposing political views, the way he dressed, his lack of income.  She and her family ganged up on him and threw him out.  This happened in 1885, and it is the true beginning of Gauguin’s life as an artist.

Back in Paris, Gauguin took up pottery.  His first works in this medium harked back to primitive imagery and unbridled sexuality.  There is little doubt that Gauguin, deemed a penniless vagabond, felt impotent, belittled in the eyes of his wife, and erotic pottery was his response.  In 1887, Gauguin, with the painter Emile Bernard, spent time painting in the artist colony of Pont-Aven.  At first, Gauguin made his bed with the Impressionists, but he found the movement too stifling.  The artist found his own voice and, posthumously, he came to be seen as one of the fathers of the Symbolist school, of cloisonnism, and of Synthetism.  Gauguin also became fascinated with Theosophy, a kind of philosophical blend of various religions and cultures.  Mystical symbology, Japanese art and primitivism came to have much impact upon his work.

Along with fellow painter Charles Laval, Gauguin spent some time in Panama, even working briefly on the Panama Canal.  He was fired, but he also contracted malaria from his stint there, and it would remain a health impediment throughout his life.  In Martinique, Gauguin wrote a naughty latter to Matte (who he never saw again after 1891) in which he describes an encounter with a woman and a fruit.  “Is it true?” asks Januszczak.  “I don’t think so.  It’s too much like the story of what Eve did to Adam.  Whether it happened or not, fruit as the symbol of desire began appearing in his paintings.”  This is one of the few concessions Januszczak makes to Gauguin’s use of symbolism.  The filmmaker does not delve too deeply into that “more than meets the eye” symbology.  Quasi-religious metaphors and primitive desires become an obsession with Gauguin, who readily identified with the outcast.

Gauguin’s work in Pont-Aven, Brittany, and Arles are more self-assured in composition and more exploratory than his later Tahitian paintings of “alluring women.”  His “Self-Portrait With Halo” (depicting himself both as Lucifer and as a saint), as “Christ In The Garden of Olives,” his “Vision After The Sermon,” “Yellow Christ” (which fuses elements of Buddhism with orthodox Christianity), and “Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ” are among his most startling, arrogant, and masterful canvases.  Gauguin’s ludicrous, self-pitying empathy with the betrayed Christ (painted after a woman he loved ran off with Laval) was “an unlikely route to great work.”

Of course, the nine weeks Gauguin spent with Van Gogh in Arles (1888) resulted in Van Gogh’s infamous lopping of of his ear lobe.  The collaboration between Van Gogh and Gauguin was doomed from the start.  Each artist had found his own (very different) path before their stay at the Yellow House. Regardless, they respected each other’s work, and Gauguin inherited from Van Gogh an admirable “Greed for Yellow.”  Gauguin, like Van Gogh, suffered much from depression and had suicidal tendencies.  After his later, famous Gospel canvas “Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (‘A Buddhist message refracted through a Christian prism’ about the cycle of life), Gauguin, like Van Gogh, also attempted suicide (he failed, only getting sick from the arsenic he consumed).  The reason for this attempt (which, oddly, Januszczak does not discuss) is that Gauguin’s daughter Aline had died unexpectedly.  Gauguin’s remorse and sense of guilt overwhelmed him.  There is a single recorded memory of Gauguin’s public admission of failure.  A friend recalled “he burst into tears and sobbed, I let down my family and he ran out of the cafe.”

Gauguin’s sojourn to Tahiti sealed his fame and he went there twice, never actually finding his much sought after Eden.  Gauguin’s affairs with underage native girls is used as evidence of his hedonism, but as Januszczak explains, “Gauguin had been faithful to Matte for sixteen years before he gave into temptation.”  Incredulously, some art historians even want to hold his mix of Christian imagery with native figures as proof of inherent racism within Gauguin.  This is an absurdly Politically Correct assumption.  Such critics fail to mention that Gauguin also employed Buddhist, Hindu, Judaic, Pagan and even literary imagery (Edgar Alan Poe) into those same canvases.

Gauguin himself exaggerated his hedonism, claiming that one lover was thirteen when she was, in fact, fifteen.  Today, either seems shocking, but we are looking at te situation through twenty-first century filters.  It was much more accepted in years past; my own parents were married at the age of fifteen.  It was not that uncommon.

Gauguin sought to escape the phoniness of a bourgeoisie society which had deemed him a failure.  Tahiti was, he thought, his Lost Horizon, but he found the influences of Christian missionaries had infected the culture there.  He was, yet again (at least psychologically) exiled.  Januszczak gives an amusing anecdote regarding Gauguin’s frequent clashes with Church clergy.  A bishop had riled him and Gauguin responded, in clay, by making the bishop into a horned devil.  “The bishop was not amused.”

Gauguin’s mid-life crisis gave way to serial affairs and eventually resulted in syphilis.  Ravaged with the disease and destitute, Gauguin, working as journalist in Tahiti, took sides with the natives against the French colonists, was fined, and sentenced to three months in prison for “libeling” the governor.  As he was appealing his sentence, on May 8th, 1903, Gauguin took a large amount of morphine and died of a syphilitic hart attack (or, as some have claimed, a suicide).

His last few paintings are among his most sublime images,  anonymous male figures on white horses, riding into the shore line.  Predictably, Gauguin became a huge success after his death and he was a major influence on Picasso (a whole book could be written about that).  Despite a few quibbles, Januszczak’s film is superb and an essential way to get to know one of the greatest painters since El Greco.  It is an apt and overdue tribute for which Januszczak deserves considerable credit and gratitude.

Still, I cannot help but think back to a few years ago when the Indianapolis Museum of Art spent untold millions to purchase and exhibit a large collection of Gauguin’s Pont-Aven works.  A life-size puppet of Gauguin greeted children at the festive grand opening.  Contrast this with Paul Gauguin himself, dying penniless, in the middle of the night, in the mud, in a hut, in agony, alone except for the company of his dog named Penis and never knowing if anyone really gave a damn whether he painted or not.

And Paul Gauguin was an immoralist?

DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin

FEATURING: Mark McKinney, Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medeiros, Ross McMillan, David Fox

PLOT: During the Great Depression Lady Port-Huntley, a legless beer baroness from Winnipeg, organizes a contest to discover which nation produces the saddest music in the world, offering a $25,000 prize.  Musicians from across the globe descend upon the city, including three members of a Canadian family: a father (representing Canada) and two brothers (one a Broadway producer representing America, the other an expatriate cello virtuoso playing for the honor of Serbia).  It turns out that the family has a twisted history with each other, and with the contest organizer, involving amnesia, medical malpractice, broken hearts, betrayals, and beer.

BACKGROUND:

• The Saddest Music in the World was based on a screenplay by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go), but was extensively rewritten by Guy Maddin and his writing partner George Toles (for one thing, the setting was moved from 1980s London to Canada in the Great Depression).
• With a budget of 3.5 million Canadian dollars, this was the largest budget Maddin had ever worked with.  Unfortunately, the film made back less than $1 million at the box office.
• Maddin sent Rossellini copies of the “legless” performances of Lon Chaney in West of Zanzibar and The Penalty to watch in preparation for the role of Lady Port-Huntley.
• The Saddest Music in the World was the second Maddin feature released in a busy and amazing 2003; Cowards Bend the Knee (also Certified Weird) debuted at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January, while the relatively more mainstream Music was first shown in August at the Venice Film Festival.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Isabella Rossellini’s bubbly new gams, which she proudly displays while dressed as Lady Liberty as dancing girls dressed as Eskimos lie on their backs kicking their heels in the air, all set to the heartbreaking strains of the melancholy ballad “California, Here We Come!”

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Guy Maddin’s promiscuous mix of retro-film techniques, including

Original trailer for The Saddest Music in the World

iris lenses and a primitive two-strip Technicolor process, that drops us into an artificial, alternate movie world that never really existed.  These visuals illustrate a preposterous plot packed with the delightfully absurd coincidences that were the coin of early melodrama—everyone of importance in the movie has a dark, hidden history with everyone else—all interrupted by screwball one-liners and absurd Busby Berkeley-style production numbers.  It’s as if random selection of melodramas and musicals made between 1915 and 1935 had been carelessly stacked on top of each other, and over the years the degenerating nitrate gradually melted into a single filmstrip.

COMMENTS: The Saddest Music in the World is the strangest, and funniest, movie about sorrow you’ll ever see.  Chester, a down-on-his-luck Broadway producer, is unable to feel sadness, and proud of it.  An ominous stock fortune teller from the film’s prologue warns him he must “look to your own miseries… otherwise, you are a dead man!”  But when Lady Port-Huntley recounts the tale of how she lost her legs and asks him, “doesn’t that make you sad?” his chipper response is, “life’s full of surprises—take away those surprises, and life’s a pretty dull proposition!”  This Canadian transplant takes a typically “American” approach to sad music: “it’s gotta be vulgar, and obvious—full of gimmicks.  You know, sadness, but with sass and pizazz!”  His final contest entry—a spectacular number with scantily clad dancing Eskimos memorializing a kayaking tragedy—lives up to that promise.  It’s also an apt description of the movie: sadness, but with sass and pizazz.

At first former “Kid in the Hall” Mark McKinney’s hardboiled, campy performance as Chester seems like its going to be a trial to watch for feature length, but the longer the movie goes on, the more it grows on you—the more appropriate his blithely vapid approach to a vapid character becomes.  McKinney’s got a swell Depression-era mien, at least, for a palooka.  He can’t feel sadness, but he’s better off than his estranged brother Roderick, who’s eternally bereaved over the death of his child and disappearance of his wife.  Roderick always dresses like a beekeeper at a funeral, and he has become so sensitive that the sound of someone breathing through their noise can drive him to hysterics.  He didn’t feel that he was sad enough on his own, so he took on the national sorrow of Serbia, becoming “Gravillo the Great,” the world famous “maestro of melancholy.”

Chester can’t feel sadness, and his brother can’t feel joy.  Roderick can’t forget his personal tragedy, and Chester’s mistress, the nymphomaniac Narcissa, can’t remember anything about her history.  Clearly, these are characters who operate only at the extremes. Legless Lady Port-Huntley, the domineering baroness bent on cornering the American beer market when Prohibition ends, is almost the normal one in the bunch; but she, like all the others, is slowly revealed to have bats in her belfry, too.

Lady Port-Huntley’s plan to increase brand awareness south of the border quite logically involves hosting a depressing battle of the bands, of global scope.  The contest has families across the world glued to their radios.  The first challenge pits a Siamese flautist backed by birdsong (he’s put out his parakeet accompanists’ eyes so they’ll have “a bit more soul” in their chirps) against a Mexican mariachi band, who sing a mother’s traditional mourning song for her dead child (the lyrics implore the tyke to stay in his grave and not come back as a ghost to suckle at her breast).  A buzzer announces each contestant’s turn to play, while the crowd guzzles Lady Port-Huntley beer; the winner celebrates advancing to the next round with a slide into a swimming pool-sized vat of ale.  Other marquee musical match-ups include a Canadian pianist vs. by African tribal drummers playing pygmy funeral music, and the Serbian cellist taking on a Scots drum and bagpipe corps.  Spanish flamenco ensembles and sad Italian clowns get their shot at jerking prizewinning tears, as well.  Melodramatically, in the end it all boils down to a contest of brother versus brother: the American Broadway producer versus the Serbian virtuoso.

That’s all strange enough, but Maddin can’t resist adding surrealistic embellishments, like the sleepwalkers roaming the snowy streets of Winnipeg, the talking tapeworm who psychically controls Narcissa, and the hockey teams who break into spontaneous serenades.  And, most obviously, there’s the director’s fond embrace of weird primitive monochrome aesthetics: the grain in the film so thick it’s becomes like smoke covering the picture; the way the iris lenses keep the center of the scene in crystal clear focus while the edges of the frame bend and melt away; the way Klieg lights hitting pancake makeup make Isabella Rossellini’s face glow with an unearthly brilliance.  There are color sequences here, too;  scenes tinted blue for memories, red for nightmares, and glorious Technicolor for climactic production numbers (and, for some reason, funerals).  But even the color scenes are blurred, faded and hazy; the reds and blues are so unnaturally prominent, it looks like each frame has been clumsily colored in by hand.  Maddin is entranced by the awkwardness of style found in decaying old movies, by the way they imperfectly capture the visual world, the way they exaggerate the extremes of light and shadow and turn the ordinary into the strange.  Maddin’s art is all about finding the beauty in imperfection—in imperfect shots, imperfect plots, imperfect thoughts.

Comedy is also a form of imperfection, found in the gap between the world as it’s supposed to be and the world as it is.  The Saddest Music in the World is, first and foremost and without apology, a comedy, with jokes that collide at the corner of calamity and hilarity.  The film contains the single funniest double amputation ever filmed.  Roderick always carries with him a jar, containing his dead son’s heart, preserved in his own tears—and if that’s not funny, I don’t know what is.  The screenplay is crammed with sappy, snappy lines that spit in the eye of sorrow: Chester’s pithy “Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass!”; a radio commentator’s observation that “no one can beat the Siamese when it comes to dignity, cats or twins, but I’m embarrassed to say that before now I’d never taken Siamese sadness all that seriously;” and Lady Port-Huntley’s famous pronouncement, “if you’re sad, and you like beer, then I’m your lady.”   What, in life, is a happier subject to laugh at than the concept of sadness itself? Guy Maddin is too lighthearted to ever create a truly sad, heartrending movie; but if he does, I’ll be disappointed it he doesn’t name it The Funniest Joke in the World.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What Maddin makes of [the plot] is a comedy, yes, but also an eerie fantasy that suggests a silent film like ‘Metropolis’ crossed with a musical starring Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald, and then left to marinate for long forgotten years in an enchanted vault.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…the weirdest, freest-wheeling, most obsessively inventive motion picture you’ll see this year. Parts are confusing, parts are berserk, parts are exasperatingly slow. But in a wold of cookie-cutter movies, Maddin’s movies are like nobody else’s — funny, Romantic, as deliriously overwrought as a drug lord’s wedding.”–John Powers, LA Weekly (contemporaneous)

“Maddin… is so in love with his own kooky ideas that he hasn’t bothered to comb through them for any real meaning. He takes his zany devices — beer-filled legs! Who’da thunk of that? — and churns them up with old-movie-melodrama tropes, and the result is not magic but a peculiar kind of experimental-movie mud.”–Stephanie Zacharek, salon.com (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Sad Songs Say So Much – Maddin’s mock-serious (“today I paid a scenic painter $2,000 not to sleep with the Polish soprano who’s been singing in the lunchroom the last three days”) production diary for The Saddest Music in the World, published in The Village Voice

DVD INFO: Surprisingly, MGM Home Video bought up the DVD rights to The Saddest Music in the World and issued an excellent package (buy) that lacks only a director’s commentary to make it the ultimate Saddest release in the world.  The disc features the original theatrical trailer along with three minutes of teaser trailers organized around the various “sad-off” musical matches from the film.  Even better are the fifty minutes of featurettes, divided into two mini-docs—”Teardrops in the Snow” and “The Saddest Characters in the Word”—both narrated with arch humor (“how does such a strange and wonderful picture get made? Arcane, almost cabalistic methods are required…”) by a voice actor who simultaneously channels Orson Welles and Vincent Price.  But the best treats of all are three complete Maddin shorts: the melancholy mood piece “A Trip to the Orphanage” (which stars Maria de Medeiros and is possibly a deleted scene from the movie—a small bit of it does actually appear in the film); “Sombra Dolorosa,” in which a bereaved widow wrestles death to save her daughter from suicide (!); and, best of the best, an extended four-minute cut of “Sissy Boy Slap Party” (1995), a sort of pre-Code homoerotic Three Stooges fetish short that must be seen to be believed.  (These three short films are reviewed in more detail in this post).

MGM’s decision to purchase DVD rights for Saddest Music may have something to do with a perceived need to fill out their catalog of musicals, since they soon released it as part of a baffling ten-disc collection of musicals (snuggled up with such strange bedfellows as A Chorus Line and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) (buy).  It’s also in a 4-disc collection (buy) along with The Phantom of the Opera (2004), Without You I’m Nothing, and Absolute Beginners!

The Saddest Music in the World is also currently available on Video on Demand (rent).

(This movie was nominated for review by “alexis” who called it one of her “favorite weird ones.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: David Hewlett, Andrew Miller

PLOT: Two losers must learn to abide each others’ company when the entire universe

outside their house disappears, leaving them alone in a vast field of nothingness.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  The outlandish premise and accompanying visuals make this speculative buddy comedy mildly weird; it’s also an above average independent effort.  Nothing lacks that certain something, however, that would put it over the top and turn it into one of the best weird movies of all time.  Don’t feel sorry for talented director Vincenzo Natali, though; he has other films which have a shot at making the List.

COMMENTS:   Apropos of Nothing, this is a difficult film to review.  In the first place, the title invites awful puns (I was tempted to give it a negative review just so I could write “Nothing could be better than this”).  The more serious issue with reviewing the movie is that, since it’s set in a literal nowhere with only two characters on screen for the vast majority of the time, its success depends entirely on the ingenuity of the script, and it’s hard to critique without giving away too many spoilers (I almost wrote that it “leaves us with Nothing to discuss.”)  Nothing is a celebration of the co-dependent friendship between Andrew, an agoraphobe who has inherited a ramshackle home located underneath the junction of two elevated interstates, and Dave, an abrasive loser who needs a place to stay and someone who can tolerate his company for more than five minutes at a time.  As the film starts they have set up a comfortable symbiosis, with Andrew supplying a pad nerdy bachelor pad with cable TV and lots of video games, and Dave taking care of tasks like grocery shopping that would be impossible for his neurotic, homebound friend.  Things quickly devolve into chaos through a series of unlikely disasters that result in the harried Andrew and Dave wishing the world would just disappear—which, incredibly, it does.  This unexplained event leaves the two alone in a vast field of blank white that stretches off to the horizon, with only whatever junk is left inside their house for provisions.  The inventive script milks this minimalist idea for all it’s worth, exploring every aspect of Andrew and Dave’s relationship, and throwing in a new metaphysical twist to keep things moving along just when it seems like it’s exhausted all the possibilities nothing has to offer.  Director Vincenzo Natali delights in exploring the uses of “white-screen” technology to frame his scenes, whether its in the beginning when Dave is afraid to step off the front porch and into the void, or at the very end when the advancing nothingness has left him only the barest of visuals to work with.  Thespians Hewlett and Miller are appealing in their roles, though neither is a born comedian.  The writers, Andrew Lowery and Miller, seem more interested in coming up with new ways to stretch the premise than in making the audience laugh; there are few obvious gags or punchlines.  But by pushing the idea of nothing as far as it can go, removing all extraneous characters and sets and stripping the drama down to just two actors, Nothing comes across as quite experimental, like the solution to a writer’s challenge to create a story “about nothing.”  It resembles a lighthearted, unpretentious riff on Waiting for Godot.  I wouldn’t necessarily make a big deal about Nothing, but its worth checking out to see how a movie can still entertain using only two characters acting against a blank screen.

Nothing was Vincenzo Natali’s third film, after the existential sci-fi puzzler Cube (1997) and Cypher (2002), an overlooked thriller built around the concept of brainwashing.  Natali has given David Hewlett at least a small role in each of the four features he has directed.  (Andrew Miller also appeared in Cube).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A crackpot piece of CGI surrealism by the director and stars of Cube, Nothing is a wildly inventive example of how much can be done with not much at all… tells a universal story, minus the universe.”–Jason Anderson, Eye Weekly (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Alfred,” who, as a Canadian, felt obligated to nominate it, but also said it was “very very funny, and weird.”  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Nimród Antal

FEATURING: Sándor Csányi, Eszter Balla, Bence Mátyássy, Gyözö Szabó, Lajos Kovács, György Cserhalmi

PLOT: Bulcsú, a Budapest metro transit cop, copes with eccentric passengers and incompetent coworkers as he pursues a veiled serial killer.  Living and sleeping in the tunnels, Bulcsú is bullied by tormentors, chases gang members, dodges trains and follows a mysterious girl as he tracks a murderer who pushes passengers under speeding engines.  As the killings continue unabated, suspicion eventually turns toward Bulcsú himself.

BACKGROUND:

• Director Nimród Antal was born in Los Angeles (of Hungarian ancestry) and moved to Hungary to study filmmaking at the Hungarian Academy of Drama and Film. He made his first feature film, Kontroll, then returned to the U.S. to direct conventional Hollywood products, most recently Predators (2010).
• The city of Budapest allowed Antal access to the subway system to shoot the film during the five hours per night the trains did not run.  A man claiming to be the Director of the Budapest Metro appears in a prologue to the film to stress that Kontroll is a work of fiction and that real Metro employees do not behave in the ways depicted.
• Kontroll won the Prix de la Jeunesse (Prize of the Young) at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. It was the first Hungarian film to screen at Cannes in twenty years.
• Antal cited Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Terry Gilliam, Martin Scorsese, and Beat Takeshi as influences on Kontroll.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The most enduring image is a metaphor for the troubled Bulcsúis’s transcendence.  The kontroller hides in the underground sanctuary from the real world above. But the outside is only a symbol.  Bulcsúis is really seeking refuge from himself and his feelings.  Uncertain about his own emotions, and lacking in confidence, avoiding the world above is his way of postponing self-confrontation.  What then, can be more symbolic of his waiting deliverance than the symmetrical image of the great, silvery, central escalator leading to the bright lights and certain reality of the surface?  Bulcsú knows he must eventually ascend it but he has not yet the courage to face that eventuality.  Will his love for the mysterious, bear-costumed Szofi become the key to unlocking his emotions and freeing himself?

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Kontroll is a fantasy that stands alone in its enigmatic singularity.

Original English language trailer for Kontroll

The film craftily assimilates drama, suspense and social satire into a multifaceted story in the unusual setting of an Old World subway.  Director Antal surprisingly succeeds at combining an unlikely set of plot elements.  He decants the chaos of social rambunctiousness, the absurdity that entails when authority dictates regulation at the simplest levels of its jurisdiction, and a survey of attitudes and life’s daily ironies into an imaginative story.  The resulting integration creates a unique, alternative viewing experience.

COMMENTS:  Hydraulics hiss, rails clatter, and trains blast at high speeds in the dimly lit, neural convolutions of the Budapest underground.  A man runs for his life through a tunnel between two trains.  A hooded figure emerges from cracks in the wall to launch the unwary under oncoming subway cars.  A puzzling girl (Balla) haunts the maze-like passages disguised as a bear.  Ticket inspectors engage in madcap jousts and chases with each other when they are not comically pursuing a colorful assortment of freeloading ruffians.  A host of eccentric characters cavort and couple in a subterranean round-table of flickering signal lamps, iron and darkness.  The dungeonesque rail network is a facsimile of the social essence in which human comedy and causality are highlighted in a microcosmic imitation of life.

Bulcsú (Csányi), dwells in the middle of the extensive sunken recesses of the Budapest subway. He eats, sleeps, lives and works entirely in the sub-terrestrial grid of the underground system. He dines at passenger cafeterias and auto-mats.  He deadheads through the endless concrete passages and corridors of the colossal subterranean complex, and never abandons his somnambulist lifestyle to ascend into the sunlight of the city above.

Bulcsúis is a “kontroller,” a member of a team of ticket inspectors who strive to corral the barely controllable anarchy of harried masses and hostile riders.  Like Ernest Borgnine’s Argus-eyed character “Shack” in 1973′s Emperor Of The North Pole, he and his motley crew of fellow controllers are charged with ensuring that no member of the public garners a free ride.

Similar to the New York City transit police, Budapest ticket inspectors operate in teams of four or five, bonded by their sooty, untoward jobs, by the tumultuous cacophony and bedlam of the subway system, and by their dread of an abusive general public.  Their mission is no easy task, for the metro clients bitterly resent the enforcers.  Those who have purchased their tickets are irritated to have to show them.  Those who didn’t purchase are loath to be found out.  The situation is conducive to the film’s exposition of the social attitudes and ironies.

The freeloaders fabricate a variety of excuses and attempt to derail the controllers with con games, evasion and escape.  Irritability turns to outright hostility as interlopers threaten Bulcsúis with Old World hexes, used syringes and physical violence.  Such affronts are presented by the nicer passengers.  Even worse are the gangs of paint-faced, pipe-wielding hooligans, a la Walter Hill’s The Warriors.

Coping with the gloomy dank solitude of his surroundings and the irascible, wily riders, Bulcsúis must also contend with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy lorded over by a cantankerous locomotive of a foreman (Cserhalmi) who has no patience for Bulcsúis or his misfit colleagues.  There exists a hierarchy among the controller teams, based on performance and ticket quotas.  Bulcsúis’s band of controllers is coming up dead last.  Compounding their disgrace, the little aggregation of underdogs is on probation for breaking rules.  Assigned to the worst details, Bulcsúis’s order of ruffians competes against a rival ticket police faction whose members strive to make life miserable for them.

Complicating the situation, in the late of night a mysteriously cloaked figure has taken to darting out onto desolate platforms.  Platforms lights flicker mysteriously as the attacker prepares to strike.  More phantasm than human, the reaper’s jolting strikes are like an arcing flash of sparks from a train contact shoe hitting a crossover ramp. Propelling unsuspecting passengers under speeding trains, he quickly vanishes again into the cloistered recesses of the maze of burrows and shafts.  The control boss assigns the control crews the task of apprehending the assassin, but given his contempt for the squad it is obvious that he harbors little confidence that success is a station on their line.

Along the route of his trials and misadventures in the tunnels, Bulcsúis cavorts with a host of quirky, intoxicated riders and employees, such as the lush- faced Béla, who used to drive trains on the surface until he crashed one due to “lack of braking distance.”  Another is an elusive love interest in a bear suit who enigmatically appears and disappears like a poltergeist.  She is Bulcsúis’s Ariadne.  He shadows her.  The wake of her passings through the transit system guides Bulcsúis like a trail of yarn. Aggregated in the cyclic rituals of riders, rogues, and routines in a Gothic metropolis of perpetual night, he relentlessly pursues the girl and the abstruse slayer through the labyrinthine underworld like a modern day Theseus.

Filmed on location in the Budapest subway system, the second-oldest in the world, Kontroll is visually arty and distinctive.  Balázs Hujber’s production design proffers more back-lit, slowly turning fans than Alan Parker’s Angel Heart.  Kontroll‘s optical signature is replete with sharp angles, symmetry and vanishing points.  Part of the appeal of Kontroll is its unusual subterranean setting, which fosters a variety of novel and striking imagery. Antal delights us by capturing the symmetry of the structural installations such as the rows of ceiling lights in the stations, the neat columns of trains docked for the night, and the central vanishing point formed by tracks fading into the darkened abyss of long tunnels. These symmetries contrast with and accent the chaotic events that unfold, and the disordered lives of the characters caught up in them.

Scenes are stylishly illuminated by flares, and the red glow of warning signals.  Montages and perspectives of progressive motion along subway tracks, tunnels, and steep escalators propel the production to its final destination.  Kontroll also advances tense action sequences along the rails as Bulcsú races against the clock and oncoming trains.

There are cat and mouse hunts, chase sequences, drama, romance, and satirical sequences such as when a succession of subway workers convey their issues to a psychiatrist and a man chokes on a French fry while being lectured about the dangers of cholesterol.  Despite the contrast between its inherent components of humor and thrills, Kontroll manages to balance these diverse elements.  In combination with a chic cinematic motif, the film successfully packages a uniquely enchanting, very weird viewing experience into a thoughtful, arty satire.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Anyone familiar with Carnival of Souls will lock on to the aspiring allegory. Bulcsú never surfaces from the underworld. Neither does the movie—literally or figuratively.”–J. Hobermann, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

“Smoothly switching gears between the surreal and the everyday, this is as unpredictable as the Northern Line but offers a much more memorable ride.”–Matthew Leyland, BBC (contemporaneous)

“…if ‘Kontroll’ doesn’t develop at least a modest cult following, I’ll eat my copy of ‘The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film’… what works so memorably about ‘Kontroll’ is its delicious, almost lustful capturing of seedy ambience, and its creation of a post-Kafka world that seems both unreal and totally convincing.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: Kontroll (2003)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Thinking Man’s Nimrod – Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central interviews director Nimrod Antal on Kontroll‘s American release

DVD INFO: ThinkFilm’s Region 1 DVD (buy) comes with no extras whatsoever.  The release has also been criticized for not being an anamorphic (optimized for widescreen TVs) transfer.  Kontroll is a visually stunning burgeoning cult film that could clearly benefit from a top-notch re-release; remastered, it would look great on Blu-ray.

CONTENT WARNING: This short contains brief animated nudity and a scene of mild sexual content.

FEATURING: Desmond Harrington, Melissa Sagemiller, Udo Kier, Rip Torn

PLOT: In a deviant twist on the Pygmalion myth, a man’s infatuation for a life-like sex doll

evolves into a sinister love triangle when he becomes involved with a coworker.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Love Object, like Lars And The Real Girl which came after, is about a lonely introvert who buys a realistic sex doll for companionship.  Like Ken in Love Object, Lars comes to yearn for a coworker, but has trouble making a connection.  Lars and the Real Girl is a cute movie about the human spirit, and the socialization and evolution of a lonely man.  With the help of his doll and coworker, Lars comes out of his shell, grows and triumphs. In this way, Lars And The Real Girl, while employing a weird vehicle to make its point (the love doll) is more or less a mainstream comedy-drama, no more odd than a Cyrano de Bergerac theme such as Roxanne (1987).

Love Object, however takes a twisted path.  The weird idea of needing the love doll is used to define the protagonist’s nature, but it gets stranger from there.  Ken’s obsession with the doll is not a positive step in the evolution of his character.  It leads him down a dark perverse path toward madness, violence and ruin.  The plot is sick and creepy, the content perverse, and it is skillfully handled, making Love Object a good candidate for the designation of being truly weird.

COMMENTS: It’s tempting to insert some sophomoric humor into this recommendation, but the jokes would be all too predictable.  Despite delivering many elements of black comedy, the overall tone of this surprisingly violent sardonic yarn is serious.  Love Object grimly depicts a bizarre theme with good pacing and artfully blended visual continuity.

Kenneth Winslow is the kind of cold, compulsive dullard who alphabetizes his jock straps.  Taking more interest in the technical world than the human one, Ken writes instruction manuals for electronics —you know, the ones nobody reads.

A joker at work shows Ken a photo of an alluring girl named Nikki, and he is at once smitten.  Nikki is a life-like sex doll, so realistic that Ken can’t detect the substitution.  No devil with the ladies, a light bulb goes off in Ken’s head, maybe both of them.  Undeterred that Nikki isn’t a real girl, Ken visits the doll manufacturer’s website and orders a Nikki model.

Back at work, a sweet, gorgeous assistant is assigned to help Ken with a demanding project.  She really likes Ken.  Like the charmer he is he gives her the cold shoulder.  Ken likes to work alone.  There is also a sense that love-shy Ken is actually attracted to Lisa, but too awkward and intimidated to interact with her.

Nikki soon arrives at Ken’s condo, packed in an awkward, coffin-like, crate.  Overcome with licentious desire, Ken unpacks his surrogate girlfriend and lunges at her in a frenzy of misplaced, abject lust.

Oddly, Ken finds that humping a lump of silicone and plastic isn’t that fulfilling.  Is something missing here?  Ken decides to personify the doll, shopping for her and dressing her in nice executive clothes, makeup, doing her hair.  Presto!  The suave and romantic Ken falls in love.

Ken notices an uncanny resemblance between the doll and his unwanted assistant, Lisa.  He gets another flash of insight.  Ken studies Lisa, and applies her trappings to Nikki, making Nikki resemble her.  Eureka!  As Ken’s “relationship” with Nikki develops however, so does his real relationship with Lisa.  He has been warming up to Lisa in spite of himself. Not satisfied with one woman, Ken keeps Nikki and starts to identify Lisa with Nikki and vice versa.

The more contact Ken has with Lisa, the more he likes her and wants to connect with her, but he doesn’t know how.  Too timid to communicate with Lisa on an intimate level, Ken fashions Nikki into a substitute for intimacy with Lisa.  Conversely, Lisa becomes the animated embodiment of the personality that the inanimate Nikki can’t project.  Ken’s jumbled emotions for doll and coworker become transposed and confused as he assigns one persona to the other and vice versa.

During this time, Lisa falls for Ken and they become intimate.  Losing his capacity for separating fantasy from reality, Ken takes Lisa shopping for the same clothes he purchased for Nikki.  Their relationship takes off.  Nikki was good practice.

Meanwhile, Nikki has developed a life of her own, and she’s none too happy about Ken’s burgeoning love for his coworker.  When Ken comes home late with lipstick on his collar, Nikki abusively dominates him in a fit of bondage, discipline and sadomasochism.

As tensions mount at home and work, the landlord becomes too curious.  Nikki becomes unmanageable, and Ken finds his relationship with Lisa jeopardized.  He must take decisive action.  The charade cannot continue!  Three is a crowd and somebody is going to have to go.  But who?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…uncomfortably totters from psychological suspense to black comedy to pull-out-the-stops horror, never quite lives up to its bizarre premise, and despite its audacious subject matter, it will even have difficulty attaining future cult status.”–Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)

Love Object trailer

“INDIEWIRE INTERVIEWER: Are there any themes or images you find too upsetting or disturbing to show?

MIIKE: Normal things.”

DIRECTED BY: Takashi Miike

FEATURING: Yûta Sone, Shô Aikawa, Kimika Yoshino

PLOT:  Minami is a journeyman yakuza whose boss Ozaki is going insane, and who has been ordered by higher-ups to see to it that he is killed.  Since Ozaki once saved his life, Minami is conflicted about the assignment; but fortunately, an accident seems to take care of the problem for him.  That is, until the presumptive corpse disappears while he is stopped in a strange town outside of Nagoya, and Minami launches a desperate search for his boss that leads him into a surreal labyrinth of malleable identities.

BACKGROUND:

• Gozu was one of five movies the prolific Miike made in 2003.
• “Gozu” means cow’s head, and the full Japanese title translates literally as Grand Theatre of Perversion and Fear: Cow’s Head (sometimes translated as Yakuza Horror Theater).
• Like many of Miike’s films, Gozu was originally intended as a direct-to-video release.  A successful Cannes screening got the movie noticed, and it was able to get wider theatrical distribution.
• Harumi Sone, who plays the small role of the Inkeepers Brother, is the father of star Yûta Sone, and the executive producer of the film.  He brought the idea of casting his son in a yakuza film to Miike, though it’s reasonable to suspect he had a more traditional film in mind.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a film full of shocking imagery, the obscenely drooling cow-headed man who slowly approaches Minami to lick his face stands out.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Gozu may be the culmination of Miike’s “weird and perverted”

English language trailer for Gozu

phase, loaded with his particular fetishes and combining the two genres he works best in: horror and the yakuza (mobster) film.  With its Eraserhead-like aura of personal alienation and fearsome psycho-sexual nightmares, bizarre identity shifts, and a cow-headed man as a mascot, Gozu‘s weirdness is never in doubt.

COMMENTS:  Sexual repression always makes a good base for a weird movie.  Our libidos are socially maladjusted morons, and we constantly have to shush their inappropriate suggestions for novel avenues of gratification, whether they be with objects, beasts, dead people, or family members.  They bedevil us with passing fantasies we shouldn’t, and wouldn’t, want to be fulfilled in reality.  When they make seemingly reasonable demands—such as that we throw ourselves at that hunk or hottie with the twinkle in his or her eye—they can do the most damage of all, if the person they’re pushing you to mate with is all wrong for you.  You just can’t take the things to a well-heeled dinner party, unless you train them well to keep their big mouths shut.  So we muzzle our inappropriate sexual impulses and force them deep down into the subconscious, but we can only hope to contain them for a while.  In dreams and nightmares, these cellared desires bubble up through the floorboards of our conscious minds. 

When these fantastic, taboo images bubble up into Takashi Miike’s daydreams, he collects and bottles them and makes them into the stars of his latest cinematic horror show.

If sexual repression is an excellent base for a weird movie, then awkward yakuza foot soldier Minami is a perfect tent pole to drape a weird plot on.  He’s an adult virgin, and quite possibly a repressed homosexual.  As much as he wants to keep to himself and to remain a non-sexual being, he’s surrounded by characters who simultaneously tempt him to give in to his urges, and repulse him with their disturbing otherness.  The head of his criminal organization is an aging Lothario who requires a peculiar form of anal stimulation to perform.  In his wanderings through a nightmare suburb of Nagoya he encounters transvestite waiters and a horny, post-menopausal lactating innkeeper who can’t keep her hands or her milk to herself.  A man with a pigmentation disorder that makes him look like a half-painted kabuki actor tries to impose upon Minami to let him spend the night in his hotel room.  Beast-men in tighty-whities lick him in his dreams.  And when he finally meets a nice girl who’s into him… well, let’s just say he has justifiable reasons to be conflicted about the relationship…

Gozu begins with a standard sort of gangster dilemma: Minami has been ordered to dispose of immediate boss, a man who once saved his life and whom he considers a brother, but also a man who has become dangerous and unbalanced.  Though twisted, the plot follows yakuza film mechanics and tropes just enough to ground us. But it quickly becomes obvious that the real action and conflict is inside Minami’s head.  Only twenty minutes in, when he reaches a strange cafe on the outskirts of Nagoya where the chef wears a conspicuous black bra under his sheer white shirt and a local yammers insistently and continuously over the phone about how hot it was yesterday, it’s clear that Minami isn’t in reality anymore.  Ozaki’s (possibly dead) body disappears and the gangster must hunt for him throughout the bizarre burg. That digression becomes a pretense for a series of strange adventures where the mild-mannered mafiosi will be made maddeningly uncomfortable by the unwanted attentions of the suburb’s weird inhabitants, all who seem to be giving him the grand runaround while coming on to him.  Just as things events to be wandering off into a black plot hole, the world of the yakuza comes crashing back, and the story picks up steam again as it heads towards a bloody and perverse sexual nightmare climax where maestro Miike tops himself yet again—in fantastic imagery if not in pure shock value.

The chief (and perhaps the only serious) complaint about Gozu is that it bogs down in the middle section, during the search for Ozaki.  Miike is intent on impressing us with the Nagoya suburb’s surreal scenery, but like a bad tour guide he tires us out by being more interested in the sights than we are, and through giving us more information than we need.  The purpose of the tour is to imbue us with a sense of dread, of being out of place in an unknown land of strange and vaguely hostile customs, but Miike keeps plodding along after that goal has been successfully achieved.  Some events hang in the air.  There is an intriguing bit with an old sage who makes Minami answer a Sphinx-like riddle before agreeing to help him, threatening to take something important away from him if he answers incorrectly.  It seems like a perfect setup for a callback later in the script—what is the thing that’s important to Mianmi that’s might be in jeopardy?—but the character and the hint are dropped.  Yet other inscrutable incidents, such as the thin whitish fluid that drips from the inn’s ceiling into Minami’s soup, form uncanny connections later in the script.  Much of this meandering middle section seems off-the-cuff, almost improvised, and although Miike stumbles into some great set pieces, after seeing multiple scenes that don’t go anywhere, the anxiety welling up in our breasts starts to feel more about ourselves rather than Minami.  Will we ever find out what has happened to Ozaki, or has the script become unmoored?  Are we about to drift off into a sea of purposeless weirdness, wandering from one eccentric encounter to another until the movie arbitrarily ends?  Fortunately, a brilliant dream sequence jolts Minami and the script back on track, and like a roller coaster after a long climb, the story hurtles down into a dark tunnel at a breakneck pace.

Miike revisits many of the fetishes he explored two years earlier in Visitor Q, but here the sexual imagery is more nightmarish than fetishistic.  Lactation in a middle aged woman is again featured prominently, along with explicit and implicit incest.  A “vagina dentata” scene again plays a key role in the climax.  Gozu‘s perversions, while way beyond the pale, are less extended than those of Visitor Q.  Besides being shorter and less lurid, they are lit in darkness or a sickly yellow glow, rather than the garish sunlit video of the earlier film.  The change of emotional tone (from day to night) and genre (comedy to horror) makes Gozu less shocking, while at the same time feeling deeper, more affecting and more effectice.  The two films serve as a good example of how a change of context totally changes the impact of almost identical material; when Visitor Q asked me to laugh at incest and necrophilia, it left me with a dirty feeling.  Gozu, on the other hand, feels cathartic, like I’ve encountered something dirty within myself, but triumphed over it and cleansed it from my soul for a while.

Gozu is a decent into the knotty psycho-sexual thickets of the subconscious.  On the surface, it’s a tale of betrayal and loyalty among thieves.  Minaki’s guilt, and the searing conflict between doing his duty as a yakuza and the brotherhood he feels for Ozkai, is the text that slowly becomes the subtext.  The taboo and grotesque sexual imagery, delivered in an undeciphered code of symbols, rises to the forefront, and the gangster antics recede into the background.  The world of mob backstabbings comes to represent the world of the amoral libido, rather than the other way around.  In the movie’s deliberately inverted dream logic, the struggle between the our sane impulses and our demonic sex drives is more real and basic than the infighting between criminal factions.  The ending is ambiguously happy, just after a moment of incredible horror.  Gozu could be read as an allegory for repressed homosexuality, but the erotic cues are much broader than that.  Miike’s polymorphous perversity, his tales of incest in an inn where breast milk flows like wine, suggest that’s he’s after chasing something deeper and weirder; that he’s conjuring up all the repressed urges seething just below our civilized facades.  Give into them, and we may suffer the same fate as Minami.  Or, maybe it’s the act of repressing them that hurls him into a nightmare.  It’s a hard line to toe, but finding that balance between controlling and feeding our libidos is part of being human.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…arguably outweirds all previous efforts in the prolific Japanese director’s eclectic canon.”–Davide Rooney, Variety (contemporaneous)

“Anyone unfamiliar with Miike’s weird and twisted assaults on cinema might be best advised to think twice before submitting themselves to this insane-in-the-membrane outing. In fact, even hardcore Miike fans will probably be left in a tailspin by Gozu’s bizarre psychodrama.”–Jamie Russel, BBC (contemporaneous)

“‘Gozu’ may ramble for scene after bizarre scene with few real shocks along the way, but Miike draws us, together with his flummoxed hero, ever deeper into his creepy, sex-charged dreamscape, until he springs his climax like a razor-toothed trap.”–Mark Schilling, Japan Times (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: Gokudô kyôfu dai-gekijô: Gozu (2003)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Anything But Banal; Takashi Miike on “Gozu” and His Ups and Downs – interview with the director from indiewire.com

Interview: Takashi Miike – from ign.com comes another Miike interview promoting the release of Gozu

Japanese Director Miike: An Acquired Taste – a National Public Radio audio segment profiling the career of Miike, inspired by the release of Gozu

Gozu at Movie-Censorship.com – [WARNING: graphic images] a listing of the differences between the US R-rated version and the uncut version.  Mainly of historical interest since the R-rated version is not on DVD.

DVD INFO: The single disc Pathfinder release was packed with extras, but is now out of print (search for used).  In its place (as of December 2009)  is a 2-disc “collector’s edition” courtesy of Cinema Epoch (buy), who is re-releasing Miike’s most popular titles in new editions.  Unfortunately, the 2-disc edition was not the version used in compiling this review, and Cinema Epoch has not (as yet) supplied information as to what’s included on the discs.  We will update this section when and if we find out what comprises the collectors edition, which is the only one now commercially available.

[(This movie was nominated for review by reader “John.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)]

DIRECTED BY: Nimród Antal

FEATURING: Sándor Csányi, Bence Mátyássy, Eszter Balla, Gyözö Szabó, Lajos Kovács, and György Cserhalmi

PLOT: A Budapest metro transit cop copes with eccentric passengers and coworkers as he

pursues a veiled serial killer.  Living and sleeping in the tunnels, Bulcsú is bullied by tormentors, chases gang members, dodges trains and follows a mysterious girl as he tracks a murderer who pushes passengers under speeding engines.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Kontroll is a fantasy that stands alone in its enigmatic singularity.  The film craftily assimilates drama, suspense and social satire into a multifaceted story in the unusual setting of an Old World subway.   Director Antal surprisingly succeeds at combining an unlikely combination of plot elements.  He decants the chaos of social rambunctiousness, the absurdity that entails when authority dictates regulation at the simplest levels of its jurisdiction, and a survey of attitudes and life’s daily ironies into an imaginative story.  The resulting integration presents a unique, alternate viewing experience.

COMMENTS:  Hydraulics hiss, rails clatter, and trains blast at high speeds in the dimly lit, neural convolutions of the Budapest underground.  A man runs for his life through a tunnel between two trains.  A hooded figure emerges from cracks in the wall to launch the unwary under oncoming subway cars.  A puzzling girl (Balla) haunts the maze-like passages disguised as a bear.  Ticket inspectors engage in madcap jousts and chases with each other when they are not comically pursuing a colorful assortment of freeloading ruffians.  A host of eccentric characters cavort and couple in a subterranean round-table of flickering signal lamps, iron and darkness.  The dungeonesque rail network is a facsimile of the social essence in which human comedy and causality are highlighted in a microcosmic imitation of life.

Bulcsú (Csányi), dwells in the middle of the extensive sunken recesses of the Budapest subway. He eats, sleeps, lives and works entirely in the sub-terrestrial grid of the underground system. He dines at passenger cafeterias and auto-mats.  He deadheads through the endless concrete passages and corridors of the colossal subterranean complex, and never abandons his somnambulist lifestyle to ascend into the sunlight of the city above.

Bulcsúis is a “kontroller,” a member of a team of ticket inspectors who strive to corral the barely controllable anarchy of harried masses and hostile riders.  Like Ernest Borgnine’s Argus-eyed character “Shack” in 1973′s Emperor Of The North Pole, he and his motley crew of fellow controllers are charged with ensuring that no member of the public garners a free ride.

Similar to the New York City transit police, Budapest ticket inspectors operate in teams of four or five, bonded by their sooty, untoward jobs, by the tumultuous cacophony and bedlam of the subway system, and by their dread of an abusive general public.  Their mission is no easy task, for the metro clients bitterly resent the enforcers.  Those who have purchased their tickets are irritated to have to show them.  Those who didn’t purchase are loath to be found out.  The situation is conducive to the film’s exposition of the social attitudes and ironies.

The freeloaders fabricate a variety of excuses and attempt to derail the controllers with con games, evasion and escape.  Irritability turns to outright hostility as interlopers threaten Bulcsúis with Old World hexes, used syringes and physical violence.  Such affronts are presented by the nicer passengers.  Even worse are the gangs of paint-faced, pipe-wielding hooligans, a la Walter Hill’s The Warriors.

Coping with the gloomy dank solitude of his surroundings and the irascible, wily riders, Bulcsúis must also contend with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy lorded over by a cantankerous locomotive of a foreman (Cserhalmi) who has no patience for Bulcsúis or his misfit colleagues.  There exists a hierarchy among the controller teams, based on performance and ticket quotas.  Bulcsúis’s band of controllers is coming up dead last.  Compounding their disgrace, the little aggregation of underdogs is on probation for breaking rules.  Assigned to the worst details, Bulcsúis’s order of ruffians competes against a rival ticket police faction whose members strive to make life miserable for them.

Complicating the situation, in the late of night a mysteriously cloaked figure has taken to darting out onto desolate platforms.  Platforms lights flicker mysteriously as the attacker prepares to strike.  More phantasm than human, the reaper’s jolting strikes are like an arcing flash of sparks from a train contact shoe hitting a crossover ramp. Propelling unsuspecting passengers under speeding trains, he quickly vanishes again into the cloistered recesses of the maze of burrows and shafts.  The control boss assigns the control crews the task of apprehending the assassin, but given his contempt for the squad it is obvious that he harbors little confidence that success is a station on their line.

Along the route of his trials and misadventures in the tunnels, Bulcsúis cavorts with a host of quirky, intoxicated riders and employees, such as the lush- faced Béla, who used to drive trains on the surface until he crashed one due to “lack of braking distance.”  Another is an elusive love interest in a bear suit who enigmatically appears and disappears like a poltergeist.  She is Bulcsúis’s Ariadne.  He shadows her.  The wake of her passings through the transit system guides Bulcsúis like a trail of yarn. Aggregated in the cyclic rituals of riders, rogues, and routines in a Gothic metropolis of perpetual night, he relentlessly pursues the girl and the abstruse slayer through the labyrinthine underworld like a modern day Theseus.

Filmed on location in the Budapest subway system, the second-oldest in the world, Kontroll is visually arty and distinctive.  Balázs Hujber’s production design proffers more back-lit, slowly turning fans than Alan Parker’s Angel Heart.  Kontroll‘s optical signature is replete with sharp angles, symmetry and vanishing points.

Scenes are stylishly illuminated by flares, and the red glow of warning signals.  Montages and perspectives of progressive motion along subway tracks, tunnels, and steep escalators propel the production to its final destination.  Kontroll also advances tense action sequences along the rails as Bulcsúis races against the clock and oncoming trains.

There are cat and mouse hunts, chase sequences, drama, romance, and satirical sequences such as when a succession of subway workers convey their issues to a psychiatrist and a man chokes on a French fry while being lectured about the dangers of cholesterol.  Despite the contrast between its inherent components of humor and thrills, Kontroll manages to balance these diverse elements.  In combination with a chic cinematic motif, the film successfully packages a uniquely enchanting, very weird viewing experience into a thoughtful, arty satire.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…if ‘Kontroll’ doesn’t develop at least a modest cult following, I’ll eat my copy of ‘The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film’… what works so memorably about ‘Kontroll’ is its delicious, almost lustful capturing of seedy ambience, and its creation of a post-Kafka world that seems both unreal and totally convincing.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Brian Yuzna

FEATURING: Jeffrey Combs, Jason Barry, Elsa Pataky, Simón Andreu

PLOT: A brilliant young med school graduate gets himself assigned to the institution

where Dr. Herbert West is imprisoned so that he can enlist the good doctor’s assistance in continuing his forbidden experiments in reanimating the dead.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Beyond is a welcome third installment in the Re-Animator saga that continues the series’ tradition of going way over-the-top, but though it’s deranged, nonsensical fun, it’s not even the weirdest entry in its own franchise.

COMMENTS: Fans of the taste-challenged Re-Animator series should be pleased with this charmingly grotesque third sequel, which zips along briskly with a delightful disrespect for logic to a phantasmagorically bloody zombie prison riot finale.  Jeffery Combs, now middle-aged but still looking like a eternally perturbed boy genius, returns as Dr. Herbert West to inject his deadpan wit into the proceedings while the world goes mad around him.  A large part of Dr. West’s mad charisma comes from the fact that he’s constantly sowing seeds of chaos by pushing forward into realms where man was not meant to meddle, then staring at the carnage with a slightly befuddled frown as yet another reanimated corpse unexpectedly turns homicidal.  Obsessed and opportunistic, he’s a nerdy Dr. Frankenstein with an unabashedly amoral streak, who always emerges from his own foul ups unscathed while his unlucky companions end up in the charnel house.  West’s experiments on rats in prison have led him to believe that he can use electricity to restore the souls of re-animated corpses and keep them from killing off the nubile women who always happen to be standing around whenever a new zombie pops up.  This time around, it’s a Doogie Hauser-esque young prison MD who risks everything to help West better the lot of mankind by mixing up a new vat of glowing green reanimation juice, but through a long string of unfortunate occurrences ends up getting kickboxed about the head by a hot zombie dominatrix for his troubles.  Even though this entry aims more for comedy than horror, the atmosphere is eerie: what’s spookier than a half-abandoned post-riot prison, with sounds of massacres echoing in the background while burning toilet paper rolls cast the shadows of iron bars on gray stone walls?  The crazed climax gives us about as many zombie-hyphenates as any reanimated corpse fan could hope for: zombie-rats, zombie-girlfriends, a half-zombie, zombie-vision, zombie-fellatio.  There’s also a pill-popping prisoner who gets hooked on reanimation fluid, leading to the flick’s most bizarre and surreal gag, and a “cockfight” that must be seen to be believed.  All in all, Beyond Re-Animator should leave your lower jaw hanging reasonably close to the ground, which is all we ask for in any movie with “Re-Animator” in the title.

Technically inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, though not at all uncanny, Beyond Re-Animator is set in mythical Arkham, Massachucets.  To get that New England ambiance down perfectly, Yuzna hired a team of regional filmmakers—guys like screenwriter José Manuel Gómez and executive producer Carlos Fernández—guys with mucho dinero, who understand that an authentic Massachusetts prison looks exactly like something you’d find on the outskirts of Barcelona.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…leads to a wonderfully degenerate 30-minute final sequence that involves not only lotsa gore and f/x but also some genuinely surreal visual wit.”–Jonathan Holland, Variety (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Uwe Boll

FEATURING: Jonathan Cherry, Ona Grauer, Clint Howard, Jurgen Prochnow

PLOT:  Teenagers go to the Isle of the Dead for the “rave of the century,” but ravenous

killing machines from somewhere within the zombie genus spoil the party.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Uwe Boll’s weirdest idea is to periodically insert brief, totally unrelated clips from the House of the Dead video game into fight scenes in the House of the Dead movie.  It’s not enough of a gambit to make this into a truly weird movie, but combined with the film’s transcendental, comic dumbness, it’s enough to make it an interesting curiosity.

COMMENTS: I think the people who have voted House of the Dead into the IMDB bottom 100 movies are too hung up on little things like believable characters, continuity, acting that doesn’t embarrass the performers, and dialogue that respects the intelligence of the target audience.  Those are fine qualities in, say, a movie about a poor seamstress who falls in love with a consumptive poet in 19th century England, but they’re just window dressing in a movie about pumping as many bullets into the heads of as many zombies as possible in 90 minutes.  Uwe Boll understands this, and, with an honesty that proved too brutally revealing for the 2003 movie watching public to handle, he delivered an experience in House of the Dead that’s the equivalent of sitting in front of a video game screen for an hour and a half, watching blood spatter, without even having to frantically press buttons for the gory payoff.  I could say many uncharitable things about the inessential technical qualities of House of the Dead, but I can’t say that I was ever bored watching it, or that it reminded me of any other film in existence.  The unbelievable seven minute centerpiece alone should save it from being listed among the worst movies of all time.  Set to a relentless rap/metal metronome meant only to pump adrenaline, not generate suspense, it features photogenic, scantily-clad teens grabbing a cache of automatic weapons and slaughtering legions of living dead extras while Boll experiments with Matrix-style “bullet time” effects.  Blood spatters; heads explode; college girls in low-cut, skintight American flag jumpsuits reveal ninja-quality melee skills; grenade blasts fling bodies through the air; guns inexplicably change from rifles to pistols in the blink of an eye.  All the while, video game footage flashes onscreen, complete with health bars and “free play” notices.  There’s an energy and misplaced love of brain-dead action moviemaking here that’s brilliant, in its own way.  It’s as effective a parody of the first-person shooter mentality as will ever be committed to celluloid.  Add in shameless gratuitous nudity and pepper with headscratching verbal exchanges (“You did all this to become immortal.  Why?” “To live forever!”) and you have a movie that is unforgettable in its stupidity.

If you gave this exact same material to a competent hack like Michael Bay, he would work it over, smoothing out the rough patches of dialogue and continuity errors and polishing it to a dull, marketable, mediocre sheen.  Given a modicum of acceptable storytelling and a surface appearance of competence, audiences wouldn’t feel so insulted—although the joke would be on them, since at bottom the result would be just as dumb.  I much prefer the rough-hewn, all-too-human character of Boll’s work, which is at least interesting in its flaws.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…cheese of the purest stripe, bafflingly bad to the point of being oddly charming in its brain-dead naivete.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)