FEATURING: Srdjan Todorovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Jelena Gavrilovic, Katarina Zutic, Slobodan Bestic

PLOT: An ethical and well-intentioned ex porn star collaborates with an Eastern syndicate to
produce a series of art-house pornographic films. In the process he is unwittingly ensnared in the dark, serpentine morass of his film executives’ depraved madness.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite the colorful controversy surrounding A Serbian Film, including claims that it is torture porn and even child porn, the movie is a straightforward—if transgressive—cross-genre thriller, a skillfully blended mix of mystery, horror and suspense elements.  Adventurous viewers who choose to watch A Serbian Film should seek the uncut version.  The controversial scenes are a crucial part of the plot.

NOTE: Director Srdjan Spasojevic was confronted by the international press and informed that his movie A Serbian Film is nothing more than thinly veiled torture porn, perhaps even child pornography.  He responded by asserting that the movie is in fact “a political allegory,” intentionally resplendent with metaphors for the historical, systematic repression of the Serbian people. For example, Spasojevic tells explains that the shocking baby scene “represents us and everyone else whose innocence and youth have been stolen by those governing our lives for purposes unknown.”

Is he being serious?  Or does he believe the most effective way to point out the absurdity of detractors’ allegations and deliberate misinterpretations is to posit an equally absurd response?  A thorough consideration of this controversy is beyond the scope of this review.  The viewer should watch the movie and judge for himself.  I present my own ideas regarding what I think the film discursively accomplishes in the addendum which follows the review.  Whether Spasojevic intends the film to deliver any of these meanings is a matter of speculation.  Despite what I think are some very good points made in the film, it’s my personal belief that he primarily set out to make an offbeat, tense thriller that was shocking enough to be sure to attract attention.  He succeeded.

COMMENTS: Lurid and grim, suspenseful and exciting, A Serbian Film is a well crafted, taut thriller that doesn’t insult one’s intelligence.  Sporting a chic visual signature and structured with a non-linear, temporally shifting plot, this sensational shocker fires off images that range from bizarre and salacious to astounding and stupefying.  By applying the element of satire, A Serbian Film impels its audience to appraise the controversial predicament of contemporary mass-produced culture.  The result is provocative, visceral and shocking.

Milos (Todorovic) is an easy-going family man who used to be a successful pornographic movie actor. Needing additional income, he grudgingly accepts a mysterious offer from an enigmatic production company to star in their flagship project, a series of “high art” experimental adult films. What Milos doesn’t know, however, is that the producer, a government agent named Vukmir (Trifunovic) with obvious Russian Mafia affiliations, is quite completely insane.  Without Milos’s consent, he doses the unsuspecting actor with a futuristic cattle stimulant.

Poor Milos has no idea what is in store. The real details of the scripts are kept secret from him. Production is arranged like a sort of reality show. Multiple cinematographers with digital cameras lead and follow him in real time as directions are fed to him through a small earpiece.

The films turn out to be an avant-garde exercise in taboo extremism. Appalled by requests to violently degrade women and seduce minors, Milos finally grasps the full extent of the producer’s intentions. Deeply disturbed by the crew’s pernicious agenda, Milos possesses a progressive, but genuine moral compass. His conscience compels him to resist. Yet even the actors he works with possess a malignant bent. Behaving like miscreants some of them seem to actually enjoy being degraded.

A classic good and evil struggle ensues between Milos and Vukmir. Vukmir praises Milo’s “talent,” but wants to ferociously exploit him, to use him up, drain him dry, steal his soul and discard him like a paper cup. He schemes to eventually dispatch Milos with an end fitting for an exhausted stag goat. Milos flees, only to be recaptured, sedated, and forced to participate.

Now at the mercy of the sinister syndicate, a sexy, diabolical biochemist keeps Milos subdued with cocktails of powerful, mind-altering narcotics. When the armed crew of jack-booted production technicians is ready to film, she injects her brainchild livestock aphrodisiac into Milos with reckless abandon. In large amounts the potion turns a subject into a bellicose, crazed rapist, easily incited to violence. The producers don’t just want a sexual performance from Milos. They want brute-force physical aggression, and the formula renders even the most abject perversion irresistible to him.

The bovine sex stimulant compels Milos to confront the most grim, primal dimensions of biological programming run amok. He finds himself helplessly driven to desperately gratify himself by committing horrifying, depraved atrocities of sexual barbarism. Plunged into a bedlam of psychotic excess, Milos is trapped on the other side of the looking glass. There is no salvation for him. The filmmakers have powerful government and organized crime associations. They’ve thought of everything and covered every angle. Milos must find a way to deliver himself, but how? Subjected to violence and sexual assaults alongside the films’ other subjects, will Milos manage to achieve deliverance before he is ravaged of his last vestiges of humanity?

As Milos plunges into a nightmare of lust and death, some of the sex acts that A Serbian Film depicts are appalling. They are supposed to be sickly pornographic in the fictitious concept of a film within a film. The images are not, however, prurient from the audience’s perspective. Presented through Milos’s point of view as an unwilling participant, copulation is filmed in such a way as to reveal little explicit nudity other than some quick shots of heaving breasts. Rather, the frames are composed in a manner that tricks the audience’s sense of perception. This is a cornerstone of theater and magic; people see what they think they are being shown, or what they want to see.

A Serbian Film contains violence that is controversial because it is sexually related, but the piece brandishes less mayhem than many action movies, and remember, it is a work of horror. Moreover, unlike many action and splatter films, the violence is not a gratuitous exhibition. It furthers the plot and the terror.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 ”In its histrionic dream logic, the movie says as much about Eastern Europe as Twilight does about the Pacific Northwest. Frankly, you’d be better off self-abusing.”–Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York (contemporaneous)

A Serbian Film – sanitized trailer

—————————————————

ADDENDUM:

A Serbian Film Is Socially Apposite and Cinematically Significant

It is tempting to deliberately misconstrue A Serbian Film, but it would be a miscalculation to dismiss this effort for being symptomatic of the controversy that it addresses. Granted, the filmmakers’ primary objective was to create a provocative thriller, an effort at which they impressively succeeded. The film is unique however, not only in its portrayal of a porn star as a sympathetically conscionable character, but in it’s exposition of audience malleability.

Notably, the picture conveys a grim social observation about the runaway train effect of ever-increasingly deviant pornography. This idea doesn’t break new ground. It’s not one that hasn’t been considered independently of A Serbian Film. What makes A Serbian Film so cogent is that it adds a chilling dimension to the contention. When an increasingly fiendish and jaded audience demands snuff movies, who will answer the casting call?

A Serbian Film builds credibility to set the stage for its postulation not just by being shocking, but by employing exaggeration. The movie operates on a dual plain of horror and subtle, dark satire. Some of the imagery illuminates realities so abhorrent that the element of mockery may not be immediately evident. Satire is detectable however, when sensational elements in the film are very slightly over-the-top, without being contrived.

Three concepts are played on: the misguided idea of justifying porn as art, pornographic contrivances in general, and outright perversion. In accordance with the first, Vukmir aggrandizes himself as being a break-through auteur and pornography prophet. For him, this new brand of pioneering smut is nothing short of visionary. Like Theatre of Cruelty French playwright Antonin Artaud, Vukmir conceptualizes the organic essence of theater as consisting of the coarse elements of naked emotion. Plot, storyline, and method are secondary to a surreal atmosphere conveyed with minimalist, but dreamlike sets, and a nearly psychedelic parade of alarming visual sensationalism.

To Vukmir, the highest form of drama, the best-selling subject matter, and thus the best pornography is based on the most striking reality: the reality of horror and victimization. “The victim feels the most and suffers the best,” he proclaims to Milos. Vukmir takes Cinema of Transgression to a philosophical plain. What appears on the screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, taboo and violent pornography is reality, and reality is less than taboo and violent pornography.

Perhaps not as dramatically, real-life pornographers have clung to similar, albeit watered-down versions of these grand sorts of delusions, believing that they employ genuine craftsmanship to produce solid works of art. This has been depicted in the popular media. Examples are found in parodies of the adult film industry, such as the biographical Rated X about the notorious Mitchell brothers, and in the reality-inspired black comedy, Boogie Nights.

In addressing the notion that pornography (as opposed to explicit erotica) can be a valid medium of expression, A Serbian Film‘s aphotic send up of smut strikes some common ground with David Cronenberg‘s Videodrome. In the latter, producer Max Renn discovers a secret, pornographic BDSM torture program. It consists of a nude woman being strapped to a wrought iron grate in front of a clay wall, and savagely whipped, presumably, eventually to death by leather-hooded executioners.

Harlen, Renn’s media technician, observes that the torture show is “for perverts only.” Unable to discern any significant difference between the poetically substantial and the superficially sensational, Max fires back, “Absolutely brilliant. I mean look, there’s almost no production costs. You can’t take your eyes off it. It’s incredibly realistic. Where do they get actors who can do this?”

It’s a revealing and sardonically humorous reply, in that Max completely misses the point. The dreadful truth is that those are not actors at all, but genuine victims. Similarly, in A Serbian Film, Vukmir tries to enlighten Milos by demonstrating the cutting edge of profound drama and ready marketability, concepts which are interchangeable to him. During the screening of a film in which a brutish, incognito man delivers a baby and then rapes it, a shocked Milos runs out of the room in disgust. Vukmir roars after him that he has just seen high art, but can’t accept it. “Can it be that you don’t get it? This is a new genre, Milos! The new porn is newborn porn!” He triumphantly shouts.

A Serbian Film wryly, sublimely lampoons pornographic clichés. It not only demonstrates the artificiality of commercial pornography, but also stresses it’s superficiality. For instance, in the above scene to which Milo was just subjected, the mother revels in the rape, ecstatically savoring the penetration of her offspring as if she herself were the sexual vessel. This is an exaggeration of the phenomenon of transferred gratification, a form of male ego-stroking for the sake of audience patronization. A staple of adult films, the most common example occurs when an actress expresses as much pleasure and enjoyment in her partner’s exhibitionistic ejaculation as she would derive from her own climax. A Serbian Film satirizes the absurdity of this canon by taking it to the extreme with the new mother’s ecstasy.

Other grist for A Serbian Film‘s burlesque of triple-x entertainment include the male fantasy of the completely and enthusiastically submissive female. A throbbing Venus-like icon of instant sexual gratification, she worships at the altar of the turgid male sexual organ, and revels in abundant facefuls and mouthfuls of scalding, sanctimoniously-sprayed semen. It is an additional tenet of the pornographic representation of reality that women are merely licentious tureens. They are not to be gently made love to, but rather vigorously assaulted, and it is this axiom that the film enlarges upon so effectively. In Vukmir’s production, the assault evolves from the exaggerated, rough, comically frantic sex of garden variety porn, and explodes into a fury of genuine violence.

This leads to the central tent of A Serbian Film, which is its statement about pornography’s deleterious effect upon contemporary culture by way of the slippery slope. In the story, victim porn is the ultimate, “priciest sell.” In the movie’s setting, this is what the social climate has degenerated to.

Traditionally, many forms of perverse and deviant behavior are condemned or restricted. Society pressures its citizens to deny or suppress facets of the human condition, e.g. inappropriate primal instincts. Due to social controls, relatively few people will ever have to confront the disconcerting fact that under the right set of circumstances, they are capable of just about anything.

Pulling out the stops can produce a cumulative, or domino effect. Like domesticated pets becoming feral without human supervision, a dramatic example can be found in the curious case of the 16th Century Scottish Sawney Beane clan. Having isolated themselves from society, the Beanes became inbred and mad, turning into genetic mutants, living off highway robbery and pickling and eating their victims.

The idea of a cumulative effect applies as well to viewers becoming jaded by progressively far-fetched prurience. As the Randy Marsh character laments about his addiction to Internet porn in the irreverent animated comedy South Park, “I need the Internet to jack off. I got used to being able to see anything at the click of a button, you know? Once you jack off to Japanese girls puking in each other’s mouths you can’t exactly go back to Playboy!”

Given that so much commercial porn seems to cater to the gross-out factor at the very bottom of the medulla oblongata’s intellectual barrel, it’s understandable that Randy has become hardened, so to speak. Indeed, if the bizarre, runaway nature of society’s perversions as reflected in everything from crush erotica and felching, to plushophilia and the sexual aspects of furry fandom is any indicator of what can happen when people are allowed to freely indulge unfettered in their kinky twists, then A Serbian Film posits a provocative proposition. If there is no mechanism in place to limit widespread, commercial indulgence in perversion, will sexual deviance compound on itself until the demand for crush videos and Japanese girls puking gives way to cravings for snuff movies and baby rape?

Can we take a cue from history? There is nothing new about barbarous savagery and violent sexual perversion. They have been around for a long time. For instance, during looting and pillaging of those they conquered, Attila’s Huns would engage in a form of monstrous gang-bang in which numerous soldiers would dismount from their horses and fall upon a single woman. The first three men occupied her primary orifices, the additional rapists would cut their own in her body cavity.^[1]

In ancient Rome, bestiarii trained all nature of wild beasts, from horses to lions to giraffes, to rape immobilized girls for a leering public. Author Daniel P. Mannix describes a scene in which a prostitute and her pimp were tricked into performing an exhibition of lovemaking positions in the arena, and just when the crowd was growing bored of watching, a wild bear was released to rip the couple apart and devour them mid-coitus. This delighted the audience who considered the stunt to be a very good joke.^[2]

Historians attribute the origins of the eventual Roman Colosseum spectacle to a boxing style, gladiatorial match staged between three pairs of slaves in 246 BC. Arranged by Marcus and Decimus Junius Brutus Scaeva to honor the memory of their deceased father, the event drew a large crowd to the Forum Boarium in Rome. One thing led to another and centuries later, the Roman mob was showing up regularly at the Colosseum to behold an astounding width and breadth of atrocities.

This is an oversimplification of course. The factors giving rise to the nature of the games in the Colosseum are varied and complex. It is nevertheless illustrative of the notion of the runaway train phenomenon that occurs when an audience is cultivated around, and continually bolstered with aberrant debauchery and violence.

Obviously perversion unraveling to its extremes is nothing new, but its mass production and global distribution are relatively recent developments. Avenues of modern exposition now include Internet sites that deliver video satiation at the touch of a button. One can “jack off,” as Randy Marsh so elegantly phrased it, to anything from coprophelia and foot fetishes to bestiality and child pornography.

This form of electronic dispensation makes paper and ink publishing of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days Of Sodom seem as antiquated as waiting for a town crier to shout breaking news. It is this high tech and widespread commercial marketing of outrageous deviance that A Serbian Film addresses. The movie impels a consideration of the domino effect of an increasing demand for perversion in concert with unprecedented, broad dissemination. It does so with a striking and engaging bearing that abstains from being preachy.

This makes A Serbian Film as thought-provoking as it is horrifying. That’s important because perhaps we should consider the consequences of a commercial brutality industry. Going back to the Max Renn Videodrome quote above, if the runaway train of cultural degradation should in fact, give way to another era of Colosseum-style cruelty, “where will we find the actors who can do this?”

1. G.L. Simons, Simon’s Book Of World Sexual Records (Random House:1982)
2. Daniel P. Mannix, Those About To Die (Ballantine: 1974)

Chaplin later said that if he had known the actual extent of the horrors perpetrated in Nazi Germany, he could never have made The Great Dictator.  His detractors went so far as to accuse him of merely being angry at Hitler for stealing his mustache.  Of course, Chaplin had been making films against government oppression and the struggle of the little man almost from day one.  Additionally, Chaplin’s half-brother’s father was Jewish, giving him further motive to lampoon the dictator.  Chaplin’s mistake was that he spoke out against Hitler and the Third Reich before the United States entered the war.

Whether or not the Jewish Barber is the Tramp has been debated for years.  He is not referred to as the Tramp, but he is certainly a Tramp-like character, and that is really enough.  But, for the first time, Chaplin is uneasy with his iconic character.  After seeing the Tramp in all of his silent eloquence for years, hearing him speak in the opening WWI sequence is  greatly disconcerting.  This opening is awkward, and Chaplin reveals that verbal humor is not his strength.  Jokes about gas and, later, plays off the words “Aryan” and “vegetarian” fall embarrassingly flat.  His Tramp doughboy had done better lampooning the Great War in First National’s uneven Shoulder Arms (1918), which may be the first anti-war film.  Still, the Marx Brothers bested Chaplin in both of his anti-war films with their hilariously surreal and biting Duck Soup (1933).

When The Great Dictator picks up in Nazi Germany, the film improves, albeit sporadically.  Not surprisingly, Chaplin’s best moments are in two and a half silent vignettes.  In the first, the Jewish Barber is in a scuffle when Paulette Goddard’s Hannah accidentally hits him over the head with a frying pan intended for one of the bullying Nazi soldiers.  The Barber’s brief, dazed dance trot down a ghetto street, past shop windows painted with the word “Jew,” evokes anxious humor.  Unfortunately, this brief scene is only half silent.  The scene is framed with slapstick interplay between the Barber and the stormtroopers—ranging from buffoonery with a paint dipped brush to an attempted lynching—which further weakens its impact.  All of this is akin to Keystone Cops antics.  Something more unsettling was desperately needed.

The second and third silent vignettes are shared between the Barber and the Great Dictator (also played by Chaplin).  The Barber’s shaving of a customer, choreographed to the music of Brahms, is a brilliantly polished bit of quicksilver business and has nothing to do with the rest of the film.  (The shaving sequence had been attempted in a previous short and is a good example of how Chaplin re-worked ideas).  It is the Tramp’s best moment in the film, however.  In the final silent vignette, The Great Dictator nearly copulates with a balloon globe of the world.  Oddly, it is in the portrayal of Hitler, rather than the Barber, that we see more of Chaplin’s Tramp shining through.  The Dictator hearkens back to the earliest Keystone Tramp characterizations, when the little fellow could be cruel, selfish, and remarkably antagonistic.  (Later in his career, Chaplin’s First National Tramp has a moment, in The Pilgrim [1923], when he delivers a sermon in a hyperkinetic, uncannily Hitler-like stance).  Chaplin clearly invests most of his energy into this new character.

The Barber’s cutesy relationship with Hannah is forced and occasionally irksome, although through no fault of Goddard, who is probably Chaplin’s best leading lady.  Her role here is not the level of her compelling Gamin in the Modern Times, but she is Chaplin’s equal in ways that Edna Purviance, Georgia Hale, and Virginia Cherril, good as they were, could not be.

In 1917 Chaplin lost his great on-screen nemesis, Eric Campbell, to a car accident.  Chaplin’s films thus lost the sense of rudimentary mystery that Campbell’s foil gave to the Tramp.  The closest Chaplin came to having a worthwhile nemesis again was in Jack Oakie’s “Napolini” (i.e. Mussolini.).  Although Oakie has been rightly praised for his performance here, time  has also somewhat rusted his Chico Marx-like caricaturization.  Almost as good, although his appearance is brief, is Henry Daniel’s Herr Garbitsch (likely based on Joseph Goebbels).  Daniel, as usual, supplies macabre precision to his villainous role, although he is, overall, too sophisticated for the part.  The Great Dictator benefits from Chaplin’s attention and development of his co-stars Goddard, Oakie, and Daniel, but the film also frequently flounders by being littered with flat, obvious jokes.

The speech at the end is as naive and as heart-felt for its age as John’s Lennon’s “Imagine” was three decades later.  Chaplin steps out of character here, and critics of the period were right in their assessment that the speech throws the film off.  In hindsight, the oration is a  coda of sorts for Chaplin’s Tramp, although, again, verbal expression amounts to a new, nervous language for the actor.  The creation and the creator merge into a persona of maudlin sentimentality and extravagant social satire.  To criticize Chaplin for either is to criticize Chaplin as a whole.

Chaplin said if the Tramp ever spoke, he had to say something important.  Imagine, a filmmaker actually believing a film needs to have a point.  For all of its flaws, The Great Dictator is an important and enjoyable film.  Whether it’s important or enjoyable enough is debatable.

*The Criterion extras are sprinkled with The Great Dictator‘s seeds.  “Chaplin’s Napoleon” is a short “visual essay” detailing an abandoned film on the French dictator.  More interesting is the short King, Queen, and Joker, directed by Chaplin’s brother Sydney. It contains one of two blueprints for the barbershop sequence (the second is a scene cut from First National’s Sunnyside).

Another fascinating document in this impressive criterion package is film critic Michael Wood’s impassioned essay in defense of the film. Chaplin was probably grateful, considering all the negative heat he received from other quarters.

DIRECTED BY: Aramis Sartorio

FEATURING: Aramis Sartorio, Caleb Emerson, Vincent Cusimano, Kimberly Kane, Camilla Lim, Karen Sartorio, Gia Paloma

PLOT:  Struggling actor Tommy Pistol isn’t much of a success, but he doesn’t let that hinder

his dream of becoming a star, even when his wife and child leave him.  Left alone with hot dogs, porn and a penis pump, Tommy dreams his dreams of success and stardom, but even in dreams, things don’t turn out as he hopes.  And his reality is just about to get even worse…

COMMENTS:  It’s not inaccurate to call TGDOTP a Troma-esque grossout horror-comedy anthology, but that description leaves out quite a lot. It’s also a cautionary tale about obsession, fame and filmmaking in Los Angeles with autobiographical elements.

Unfolding as a series of dreams, the first, “Snuff Said,” has a young Pistol fresh off the train, answering an ad on a web site to act in a movie.  It turns out to be a snuff film, but Pistol, not being the sharpest tool in the box (so to speak), thinks that it’s just extremely realistic special effects.

The second dream, “10 Minutes of Fame”, sees Pistol sneaking onto a location set of a major film and gradually worming his way to become the assistant of the star—Arnold Schwartzenegger!  He accidently kills Arnie and takes his skin, which gives him the ass-kicking skills to take out the rest of the crew.

In the last dream, “Attack of the Staph Spider”, Tommy is a porn director whose lead actress is bitten by a radioactive spider in the alley just prior to the shoot.  Things do not turn out like “Spiderman,” unfortunately—the actress develops boils and starts leaking addictive fluids, which end up infecting the crew.  Meanwhile, Tommy’s biggest problem is getting the makeup person to make her presentable so the shoot can go on.

The humor is pitch-black; as in most of the Troma-esque lot, the grossness factor is pushed pretty much past the hilt, then doubled.  All of the characters in the dreams are, at their best, amoral to immoral; but in a satire about fame and filmmaking, that’s probably an accurate portrayal.  It also helps that the movie’s pretty damn funny.

What raises TGDOTP a notch above most of its cousins is that the grossness isn’t merely for the sake of grossness—there’s actually some substance behind it.  “Tommy Pistol” is actually Sartorio’s nom de porn when he was acting in adult films such as Repenetrator, The XXXorcist and Neu Wave Hookers.  Deciding to branch out, he made “Staph Spider” as a short, then pursued other opportunities as a struggling actor in Hollywood.  Although his wife did not leave him, many other elements in the film—being late for auditions, getting fired from ‘real’ jobs and dodging creditors—Sartorio probably knows all too well, as well as the other side of Hollywood: sketchy characters willing to do anything to anyone; narcissistic actors; and the desperation and self-delusion of everyone in town, especially those attempting to find their big break.  It may be exaggerated, but there’s a definite sense that there’s some personal experience involved.  The best example is a scene in the first dream, which mocks the aside to camera in JCVD, but also functions in the very same fashion.  And surprisingly, the movie ends in a sad and strangely graceful place, something completely unexpected, and also appreciated.

The acting is strong—better than you would expect in films of this ilk; and tech is pretty good, especially in the effects.  The humor is not going to appeal to everyone, obviously, but those who ‘like it black’ will enjoy it, especially the segment about Schwarzenegger.

Ultimately, it’s not a weird film, despite the over-the-top humor.  Most reviewers have been calling this Troma-esque, and Troma, especially “balls-to-the-wall, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink grossout humor Troma” is just not “weird” anymore.

Even calling it a “horror-comedy’ isn’t quite correct, but a “horror-comedy” is a much easier sell than a “pitch-black Hollywood satire.”

The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol facebook page

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this film was provided by the production company for review.

FEATURING: Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy, Hope Davis, Elle Fanning

PLOT: Three separate plot strands—about a self-destructive actor under house arrest, a

writer trying to get his series past the pilot stage while being filmed by a reality TV crew, and a video game designer whose car breaks down in the middle of nowhere—intertwine in a mysterious way, with the same actors playing different characters in each mini-story.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Any doubts I might have had about considering this pretty good, pretty strange movie as a candidate for the List were allayed when I heard writer/director John August proclaim “we’re a weird movie, for a lot of reasons…” on the “making of” DVD featurette.  If the director deliberately set out to make a weird movie, who am I to refuse to consider it?  But, while August’s movie scores above average in terms of both quality and of weirdness, I’m not sure that it’s combined totals are high enough to inaugurate it as one of the greatest weird movies of all time, at least not on the first ballot.

COMMENTS: I have to be careful in discussing The Nines not to give away much more than you’d discover on your own by reading the blurb on the back of the DVD case.  When you pop the disc into your player, you can expect to see three different stories—”The Prisoner,” “Reality Television,” and “Knowing”—acted by the same core trio, each playing different roles in each tale.  Besides the actors, locales, song lyrics, a television series, and—especially—the number “9″ recur in each of the divergent plot lines, drawing correspondences and reverberances between these various worlds.  There is a thread connecting each strand; and although the first two stories, at least, are engaging on their own terms, it’s figuring out that overarching plan that supplies most of the interest.  One thing that can be discussed (and praised) without spoiling anything is the acting.  Hope Davis plays, variously, a horny housewife, a conniving TV producer, and a hiker in the middle of nowhere; Melissa McCarthy tackles the triumvirate of a bubbly public relations expert, the mother of a mute girl, and herself, the “Gilmore Girls” actress.  But it’s previously unheralded Ryan Reynolds who’s the real revelation here.  As a dimwitted, self-destructive Lothario actor and an erudite gay screenwriter, he projects two such diverse personae that you almost can’t believe it’s the same actor inhabiting both roles.  (His third role is, oddly, a bit blander, but you won’t mind after watching the first two perfs).  The bizarre first raises it’s head in story one when the actor character freaks out after trying crack for the first time, but drug hallucinations are expected, conventional type of Hollywood weirdness.  The continued appearance of the number 9 everywhere marks the ascendency of the odd, and things get into a high weird gear when a character decides to suddenly expresses her inner feelings through a musical number.  Working against the film’s weirdness, however, is the fact that the mystery dissolves too early, and everything becomes perfectly logical (according to the movie’s speculative conceit) long before the end rolls around.  The tone of The Nines is primarily a moody psychological thriller, but each segment contains a dramatic core, and there are numerous satirical jabs throughout—especially at the world of television (the second segment comes from the author’s real life travails trying to bring a series to life in a cutthroat corporate world where backstabbing is a routine duty performed over a power lunch).  The different styles blend surprisingly well, but the movie’s overall emotional impact isn’t what it aims for, primarily because the central character turns out to be difficult to relate to. Comparing The Nines to one of Charlie Kaufman‘s metaphysical conceits is appropriate; it’s in the same ballpark, at least (though Kaufman, come to think of it, tends to hit his ideas out of the ballpark).  Multilayered, The Nines ultimately could be interpreted as anything from (cosmically speaking) a treatise on man’s relationship to God, to (on a concrete level) a reflection on the addictiveness of video game culture.  If those diverse interpretive possibilities don’t stir your curiosity, I’m not sure what will.

The Nines is John August’s first feature directing credit.  The Sony DVD includes August’s hilarious short film, “God,” with Melissa McCarthy, which is about a woman’s (literal) relationship with her Creator.  August has also written several Hollywood screenplays, most notably for the Tim Burton projects Big Fish, The Corpse Bride, and the upcoming feature version of Frankenweenie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…weirdly engrossing head-scratcher of a metaphysical puzzle movie…”–Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Urushial.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam

FEATURING: Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Michael Palin, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Peter Vaughan, Bob Hoskins, Charles McKeown

PLOT:  Sam Lowry is a lowly, unambitious bureaucrat working in the Records Department in an authoritarian society “somewhere in the Twentieth century” who frequently dreams he is a winged man fighting a giant robotic samurai to save a beautiful woman.  An error results in the government picking up a Mr. Buttle as a suspected terrorist instead of a Mr. Tuttle; Buttle dies during interrogation.  Sam visits Buttle’s widow to deliver a refund check for her dead husband, and finds that the upstairs neighbor, Jill, looks exactly like his dream woman; he transfers to the “Information Retrieval” Department to access Jill’s personal files and learn more about her, but ends up running afoul of powerful government interests.

BACKGROUND:

• Brazil is the second part of Gilliam’s unofficial “Imagination” trilogy, which began with Time Bandits and ended with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.  Time Bandits is told from the perspective of a child, Brazil from that of an adult, and Munchausen from an elderly man.  Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm and Monty Python buddy Michael Palin all appeared in Time Banditsas well.
• Terry Gilliam co-wrote the script for Brazil with Charles McKeown (who also plays Harvey Lime here, and would later collaborate on the scripts for The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) and playwright Tom Stoppard.  The three together were nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.  Novelist Charles Alverson also worked on an early version of the script, but he and Gilliam had a falling out and he was not credited for his work, although he was paid.
• Besides Best Original Screenplay, Brazil was also nominated for a Best Art Direction Oscar.
• The movie is named after its theme song, Ary Baroso’s 1939 “Aquarela do Brazil” ["Watercolors of Brazil"].  “Brazil” represents the exotic, colorful world (with an amber moon) that Sam dreams of escaping to. According to one story, the film was originally to be titled 1984 1/2, but the title was dropped over worries about lawsuits from George Orwell’s estate (a fine adaptation of 1984 had been released the previous year).
• Robert De Niro read the script and lobbied to play the part of Jack, but Gilliam turned the star down because he wanted Palin in the role.  De Niro accepted the role of Tuttle instead.
• Brazil has a legendary distribution story.  The film was released overseas in Gilliam’s original cut, but in the U.S. Universal Studios did not like the unhappy ending and attempted to recut the film, reducing it from 142 minutes to 94 minutes and editing the ending in an attempt to give it a happy ending.  (This studio cut of the film later played on television and has been dubbed the “Love Conquers All” version of Brazil).  Gilliam opposed the changes and feuded publicly with Universal Studios head Sid Sheinberg, blaming him personally for holding up the movie’s release, appearing on the television program “Good Morning America” and holding up a picture of Sheinberg, and paying for a full page ad in Variety reading “Dear Sid Sheinberg, when are you going to release my movie?”  Against studio orders, Gilliam screened the uncut film for free at the University of Southern California.  Curious critics attended the screenings, and before the movie had been released to U.S. theaters, the Los Angeles Film Critics voted Brazil Best Picture of 1985.  In a compromise agreed to by Gilliam, Universal cut only 11 minutes from the complete version, left the unhappy ending largely intact, and released the movie soon after (reportedly so as not to jeopardize its chances at winning an Academy Award).
• Calling its style “retro-futurism,” Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet credit Brazil‘s art design with influencing their vision for Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children.  Brazil’s junkyard of the future look also directly inspired the visual sensibilities of movies such as Dark City, Tim Burton‘s Batman, and 2011′s Sucker Punch.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Some may nominate Sam’s dream of soaring as a mechanical angel battling a giant robotic samurai, or the torturer posed in his decrepit doll’s mask in the foreground with his tiny victim chained in the center of a massive open-air tower in the distant background, but it’s Katherine Helmond’s personal plastic surgeon gripping and stretching her facial flab impossibly tight that’s the most striking, incisive and unexpected of Brazil‘s many visual non sequiturs.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Terry Gilliam explained his vision for the milieu he molds in Brazil

Original trailer for Brazil

as one that’s “very much like our world” but “just off by five degrees.”  He was shooting for an atmosphere that’s uncannily familiar, something just strange enough to shock the viewer while still highlighting the absurdities of modern existence.  Watching Brazil‘s many surreal touches—as when what appears to be a giant boozing tramp peers over a horizon dominated by cooling towers painted sky blue with white clouds—most viewers will conclude Gilliam overshot the five degrees at which he was aiming.  But in the unlikely event the rest of the film isn’t strange enough for you, wait for the finale in which Gilliam pulls out reality’s remaining stops, including a scene where a man is literally killed by paperwork.

COMMENTS:  Terry Gilliam wasn’t kidding when he located Brazil “somewhere in the twentieth century.”  Though sometimes considered as science fiction, this film is not set in a future that could someday be, but in a fantastic alternate world miscellaneously mixing mechanized elements from the bloody industrialized century that brought us totalitarianism, terrorism, two world wars, and air conditioning.  The architecture of Brazil‘s society brings to mind the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s and 1930s.  The Information Ministry is fronted by a giant art-deco eagle that merges sleek modernist abstraction with fascist statuary.  The characters’ wardrobes are temporal wormholes that open somewhere between the 1920s and 1950s; even low-level functionaries wear felt hats and gray three piece suits to work.  (Katherine Helmond’s leopard-skin high-heel hat is an obvious sartorial exception here; it could only have been fashionable in the stoned 1960s or the tacky 1970s).  The propaganda posters that litter the movie’s every wall (with cheery slogans like “loose talk is noose talk”) are variously patterned on Soviet and Nazi (and even British) wartime posters or cheery advertising from 1930s magazines.  Television is omnipresent, but it mostly broadcasts movies and shows from the 1940s and earlier (Casablanca, black and white Westerns and the Marx Brothers are featured presentations).

Although Sam’s dream sequences where he flies on golden mechanical wings and fights a giant robotic samurai are done with then state-of-the-art effects (that stand up beautifully today), Gilliam mostly mines cinema’s past for Brazil‘s stylistic elements; this grab-bag of film techniques further belies the supposedly futuristic setting.  The drab gray color schemes of the city mimic monochromatic film.  Dramatic shots, lighting, odd camera angles, and abstract designs hearken back to German expressionism of the 1910s and 1920s (indeed, the world of Brazil‘s looks like it might have been designed by Fritz Lang if he’d survived to 1985 and been handed a fifteen million dollar budget).  The characters’ fedoras, the double-crosses, and the cynical tone of paranoia and distrust evoke 1940s film noir.  Pryce delivers a couple of out-of-place slapstick routines that could have come out of Charlie Chaplin‘s Modern Times (1936): in the most famous, he shares a desk with a man in a neighboring office, and they engage in a tug-of-war through the wall.  Further broadcasting the movie’s intent to merge the cinema of the past 85 years, the rescue scene directly quotes from the classic Soviet propaganda film The Battleship Potemkin (1925).  The theme song comes from 1939, and even Michael Kamen’s brilliantly overwrought, melodramatic incidental music, with its swelling heroic and romantic themes, simulates a symphonic soundtrack from Hollywood’s golden age.

Just as the film’s look and atmosphere is a messy amalgamation of styles from across the decades, the machines and technologies that dominate this world exist outside of time.  Gourmet steak is served in a mushy green lumps (is it Soylent brand?) A few security robots roam the halls of the ministry, but they are just elaborate clattering riggings housing a camera on an eyestalk; they look like they’ve been built from leftover 1950s sci-fi B-movie parts, though they beep like R2D2.  Computers are also everywhere, but they resemble old Smith-Corona typewriters with mounds of gears and tubing attached, except that they’re equipped with transparent crystal monitors that look futuristic even today.  Gilliam materializes the intense mechanization of this world as a series of ductwork and flexible plastic tubings that stick out of every wall; even swanky restaurants have giant pipes running through the dining room floor. The movie begins with an advertisement pitching the ability to spiff up your old-fashioned ducts with Central Service’s new line of multicolored ducts.  Sam is bewildered when he looks behind a panel in his apartment wall and sees its stuffed full of a convoluted maze of hoses, wires and and tubes.  There’s a jury-rigged, junkyard look to the Brazil‘s industrial appliances, as if each new machine was built on top of an older machine, with everything constantly growing more and more complex by a process of accumulation.  And the machines people depend on to live their daily lives are constantly breaking down.  Sam’s alarm system, apparently designed by Rube Goldberg for George Jetson, not only fails to go off, making him late for work, but also pours his morning coffee onto his toast.

The malfunctioning machines of Brazil are little images representing the biggest dysfunctional apparatus of all: the modern State.  The world of Brazil is a horrifying dictatorship, but its citizens are accustomed to it and don’t notice.  When there’s a terrorist bombing in the restaurant, no one reacts with anything but mild annoyance, and management thoughtfully puts up a screen to shield the diners’ eyes and sensibilities from the bloody limbs scattered about the next table.  The embodiment of the State’s otherwise disembodied evil is Michael Palin’s Jack, who disgusts us because he’s so normal and respectable.  He’s invariably polite and proper, he’s a dedicated family man (though he sometimes confuses his triplet daughters’ names), he buys a stack of Christmas gifts for his co-workers, and he looks out for Sam’s upward social mobility, goading him to conform and fit in.  Jack just does his job, and he doesn’t even notice the bloodstains on his smock anymore, nor does it ever cross his mind that there’s anything to hide or be ashamed of about his job in the trenches “retrieving information” and combating terrorism.  Evil has never been more banal than Palin.  In Brazil, there’s no sense of Big Brother, of a cabal pulling strings behind the scenes; society simply seem to have gradually slipped into this horrid condition unnoticed, as a result of everyone doing their job unquestioningly, following proper procedure, playing their role as an insignificant cog in the State’s vast machinery.

It’s bureaucracy and paperwork, the reduction of human beings to slips of paper and signatures on the proper form, that keeps this world going, much in the same way that obsessive documentation kept the Nazi regime running (like the bureaucrats in Brazil, Nazi charged Jews for expenses related to their own deportations and executions).  There has never been a movie in history so contemptuous of paperwork (a character even dies onscreen in a hail of forms), and that’s one of the features that allow viewers to connect with the story.  Brazil is what the entire world would look like if the CIA was under the direction of the IRS.  Every major plot development stems from a slip up in paperwork; a name misprinted on a form will eventually lead to the death of at least two characters, and the permanent insanity of another.  But paperwork is also the source of most of the film’s mirth.  A renegade becomes an enemy of the state because he illegally fixes people’s heating and air conditioning units outside of the state servicing monopoly, without filling out the proper forms; he works like Batman, sneaking in at night to work on the AC and sliding down a zip line to safety when he’s done.  (Gilliam once expressed astonishment that the political right embraced the film—he shouldn’t have been surprised after he made a folk hero out of a freelancer who valiantly defies ridiculous government over-regulation).  When stormtroopers seize Mr. Buttle, they make a terrified Mrs. Buttle sign a receipt for her stolen husband (and are careful to take their own receipt for her receipt).  Sam stymies a couple of meddlesome technicians by asking them if they have a form 27b/6, which sends one of the pair into an apopleptic fit.  A victim facing torture is advised to confess quickly so as not to jeopardize his credit rating.  Anyone who’s ever stood in the wrong line at the Department of Motor Vehicles for a half-hour can relate to the devilishly funny absurdity of Brazil.

Scrapped together from various historical parts, with added twists of both fantasy and science fiction, Brazil is a unique world for the viewer to explore. It’s also one of the most densely detailed movies you’re likely to see.  Because jokes, visual quips, and even important plot points pass by in the blink of an eye, it’s worth a second or third viewing to catch all the minutia (try to read every one of the propaganda posters pasted on every wall).  My favorite blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag occurs when Sam has to pause in his pursuit of his dream girl to pick up some papers he’s dropped on the street at the insistence of a busybody out walking her dog.  She raps loudly on the sign advising “keep your city tidy” with her cane as she browbeats the meek Sam, who’s still accustomed to following the conventions he’s grown up with.  At the end of the scene we briefly see the evidence that this old lady practices what she preaches: she’s placed masking tape over her yapping lapdog’s anus to keep it from pooping on city sidewalks.

Gilliam’s genius in Brazil was to recast George Orwell’s propaganda-ridden nightmare 1984 not as some disaster that might happen in the distant future if humanity is not vigilant, but as something that has already happened, and went unnoticed.  The ugly industrialization, the quiet assimilation of machines into daily life, the crushing bureaucracy, and the dehumanization and insignificance of the individual are all events that actually came to pass in the twentieth century. Brazil‘s dislocation in time isn’t just a random choice decided on because of its cool-looking steampunk aesthetic.  By creating a world that incorporates elements from his grandfather’s generation to his own, Gilliam compresses a bleak century into a little less than two and a half hours, and makes us chuckle at its sorry excesses and horrors.  But while we laugh, the hair on the back of our heads rises a little in fear—because we can still feel the hot breath of modernity stirring on the nape of our own necks.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie is awash in elaborate special effects, sensational sets, apocalyptic scenes of destruction and a general lack of discipline. It’s as if Gilliam sat down and wrote out all of his fantasies, heedless of production difficulties, and then they were filmed – this time, heedless of sense.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…a glimmering hunk of fractured brilliance riddled with Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kakfa and Salvador Dali…”–Wesley Morris, The San Francisco Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“…a willfully absurdist dystopian fable about an impossible future that feels more like an antiquated past, a Romantic pretzel-twisting of Orwell and a nursery-rhyme-inflected sci-fi dream epic that appropriates equal parts Fritz Lang, Hellzapoppin’, Orson Welles, and illustrator Brian Froud.”–Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice (1998 director’s cut re-release)

IMDB LINK: Brazil (1985)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Wide Angle/Closeup: The Terry Gilliam Files – Look for and click on the still from Brazil to reveal links to interviews with Gilliam, Palin, and production designer Norman Garwood, along with production sketches and audio files of script read-throughs by Gilliam, Pryce and McKeown

Terry Gilliam | Dreams: Brazil – The Brazil page at Dreams, the Terry Gilliam fansite, contains a FAQ, production stills, and a vintage collection of promotional material

Shot to Remember: Welcome to Brazil – Gilliam annotates a series of stills from a climactic moment of the film for “DGA Quarterly” (Vol. 2, No. 3 – Fall 2006)

Modernity and Mise-en-Scene: Terry Gilliam and Brazil – Article by Keith James Hamel for “Images” magazine on the film’s relationship to modernity and how Gilliam employs an “optimistic” mise-en-scene for fantasy sequences and a “pessimistic” one for scenes based in reality

Brazil (1985) at AMC Filmsite – a detailed overview of Brazil from critic Tim Dirks as part of the “Greatest Films” series; it includes a complete synopsis of the movie that runs for several pages

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v. Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut – Journalist Jack Matthews recounts the epic battle between Gilliam and Universal over the release of Brazil

DVD INFO: Universal’s 1998 DVD release (buy) is the currently in-print version of Brazil, and the one used to compose this review.  This release restores Gilliam’s original cut of the film, including the 12 minutes cut from the U.S. theatrical release (much of which consisted of a single scene of Jack Vaughn, dressed as Santa Claus, talking to the imprisoned Jonathan Pryce).  This release is unfortunately light on extras, containing only production notes, cast and crew bios, and the original trailer.  Designed before widescreen TVs became commonplace, the image is both letterboxed and pillarboxed to recreate the proper 1.85:1 aspect ratio, resulting in a small ini picture playing in a large black space; this setup initially takes some getting used to.

True fans of the film may want to track down the out-of-print but readily available 3-disc Criterion Collection edition (buy), which was the first release to restore the film to the director’s original vision and includes commentary by Gilliam, the usual Criterion booklet, the featurettes “The Battle of Brazil” (detailing the spat between Gilliam and Universal) and “What is Brazil” (a “making of” mini-doc), and production notes.  A curiosity takes up the third disc: “Love Conquers All,” the infamous bowdlerized 94 minute studio cut of the film that was only shown on American television, with commentary by critic David Morgan explaining the edits.  Criterion also issued a single disc edition of Brazil (buy) containing only the complete film and Gilliam’s commentary.

Universal is released a Blu-ray edition of Brazil on July 12, 2011, sans extras (buy).

(This movie was first nominated for review by “Kass,” who added, “not seeing Brazil on the list struck me as a terrible injustice to weirdness and Terry Gilliam.”  Consider this injustice rectified.  We would have fixed the oversight earlier, but we lost the paperwork.   Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Alejandro Jodorowsky

FEATURING: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas

PLOT: A thief, who looks like Jesus Christ, silently wanders through a bizarre and depraved city with an armless and legless midget companion, participating in a lizard circus where toads are dressed like conquistadors, bearing a crucifix through the streets and eating from Jesus’ body, and meeting a prostitute with a chimp.  He comes to a giant tower in the middle of a busy highway and rides up a hook to the top, where a mystic with a menagerie introduces him to seven companions and purifies him by burning his feces and turning it into gold, among other rituals.  After preparation the assembled nine set off the find the Holy Mountain where the immortals are said to live, so they can displace them and become like gods themselves.

BACKGROUND:

• In preparation for making the film Jodorowsky studied with two a Zen master and with a disciple of Gurdijeff.  Part of his training involved sleep deprivation (he claims he went a week without sleep) and taking LSD for the first time.
• During filming, the Catholic church in Mexico was not happy with The Holy Mountain because of its apparent blasphemy, and the President Luis Echeverría’s regime was also angry with Jodorowsky because soldiers in Mexican uniforms were depicted massacring civilians.  There were public marches protesting the filming.  Per Jodorowsky’s DVD commentary, he left Mexico with the footage he had already shot to finish the movie in New York after receiving threats from government officials and paramilitary groups.
• John Lennon partly financed the film.  The budget was $750,000, a fairly extravagant sum for a film largely made in Mexico in 1973.
• According to Jodoworowsky’s DVD commentary, George Harrison wanted to play the role of the thief, but balked at playing a nude scene where the character has his anus scrubbed.  Sources at the time reported that it was Lennon who wanted the role and that he could not follow through due to scheduling conflicts.
• Jodorowsky dubbed the voice of the thief.
• Various “masters” the characters meet as they prepare for their ascent of the Holy Mountain were played by actual Mexican shamans and witch doctors.
• Due to disagreements between Jodorowsky and producer Allen Klein, The Holy Mountain did not receive any sort of legitimate home video release until 2007.  The same issues plagued Jodorowsky’s previous film, El Topo.  According to Jodorowsky, Klein became angry and vindictive when, thinking it was too commercial, the director abandoned a project to adapt the erotic classic The Story of O with the producer and instead pursued an opportunity to make George Hebert’s cult science fiction novel Dune (a project Jodorowsky never completed—David Lynch was hired instead to film Dune, which ended up as a flop and an embarrassment).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are so many candidates—the apocalyptic toad and chameleon circus with amphibians dressed as conquistadors and missionaries, the giant mechanical vagina art installation stimulated by a nude woman with a probe, the hermaphrodite with leopard head breasts that squirt milk onto a proselyte—that choosing a single representative image seems like an almost arbitrary exercise.  Still, there is one trick so stunningly beautiful and effective that Jodorowsky essentially uses it twice: the live birds that fly from out of the gaping wounds of corpses mowed down by fascist soldiers.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Holy Mountain plays like a cut-up version of the world’s sacred

Short clip from the “Neptune” sequence of The Holy Mountain

texts.   If you tore out pages from the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, The Golden Bough, and a dozen other esoteric works from the Kabbalah to Gurdijeff—throwing in a couple of sleazy pulp novels for good measure—and put them together in a giant cauldron, stirred them up and pulled out sheaves at random and asked a troupe of performance artists, carnival freaks, and hippies tripping on peyote to act them out, you might come up with a narrative something like The Holy Mountain. Here, the cauldron is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s skull, and the stirrer was LSD, and an ex-Beatle gave the director and master visual stylist a small fortune to bring any elaborate and depraved fantasy he could dream up to shocking life.  The singularly bizarre results—the pure, undiluted essence of mad Jodorowsky—are unlike any film that has ever existed before, or ever shall be, world without end.

COMMENTS: The first thirty or forty minutes of The Holy Mountain are as astounding, intense and hallucinatory an experience as anything any weird movie alchemist has ever conjured.  It contains imagery so sacrilegious it would make Buñuel spontaneously give the sign of the cross, and so confusing it would make David Lynch throw up his hands in frustration.  This extended opening segment may be as fine a work of surrealism as has ever been filmed; for pure passion, audacity and agonizing irrationality, the thief with Christ’s face’s journey through a depraved, nightmarish Mexican city is hard to beat.

Though many find The Holy Mountain‘s narrative weak (if not frustratingly obscure), the story does easily break into three acts: the Thief’s adventures in the city, his apprenticeship to the Alchemist inside the tower, and the trip to and ascent of the Holy Mountain itself.  Each segment has its own aesthetic sensibility, while retaining their essentially demented Jodorowskyness, and together they form a loose allegory about the soul’s quest for enlightenment: from living in a corrupt world to the first stirrings of a spiritual sense to the actual climb towards enlightenment.

The film begins with a prologue featuring the Alchemist (played by Jodorowsky), his downturned face hidden by a ludicrously broad-brimmed sombrero, as he shaves the heads of two nude women.  The episode has nothing to do with the main narrative but imparts a ritualistic air to what follows.  The credits then roll, over a series of reverse zooms revealing flamboyant dioramas decked out with cryptic symbols—a blue eyeball surrounded by azure peacock feathers and shiny turquoise beetle shells—before the view shifts and the camera alights on the face of a bearded man covered in flies.  A dwarf with stumps for arms and legs drags himself to the sleeping body and wakes him; after some adventures involving a mock crucifixion and stoning by a group of boys with green genitalia, the pair wander from the desert into a city.  The metropolis is a riot of perversion and decadence: brown-skinned soldiers parade in the streets carrying crucified, gutted goat carcasses, and execute dozens of civilians in the city square while white faces laugh and take pictures from inside the air conditioned comfort of a tour bus.  The Thief gets a job working in the “Great Toad and Chameleon Circus,” where costumed reptiles re-enact the conquest of Mexico in a bloody spectacle, and then serves as the model for a wax Christ made by four obese entrepreneurs, three of whom dress as Roman centurions and the fourth as the Virgin Mary (in drag).  Angered by his experience, the Thief first eats the face off his likeness, which is filled with dough underneath the wax visage, then ties balloons to the statute’s legs and releases it to fly to the heavens.  Uniformed prostitutes (including a child) prowl the streets and cathedrals; they follow the Thief, and the one who carries a pet chimpanzee with her is particularly attracted to him.  He comes to a large red tower in the middle of a highway, before which peasants are holding a banquet; a large fishhhook descends from the tower. On the end of the hook is a bag full of gold, and the peasants place food on the hook.  The Thief, spying the gold, throws the food off and climbs on the hook itself as it rises to a hole at the top of the tower.  And those are just the main highlights of the tour; there are two or three stunning, never-before imagined scenes per minute during this astounding first half hour, whose never-ending stream of images assault the viewer like a swarm of surrealist bees.

There is an inconsequential amount of dialogue during this amazing, lysergic sequence, which makes the proceedings all the stranger.  The soundtrack (by Jodorowsky and free-jazz legend Don Cherry) consists of Hindi drones and percussion, Tuvan throat singing, pan flutes, gongs, buzzing insects, classical dirges, a bit of melodious cornet improvisation by Cherry, a German march for the conquest of the chameleons, and a waltz with muted trumpet and xylophone to which the soldiers slow dance with each other.  The vast, eclectic, exotic instrumentation changes form almost as often as Jodorowsky changes visions—we find ourselves bathing in a new and unique musical environment every minute or so—and the orchestration is always in perfect harmony with what’s going on onscreen.  Like the imagery, this musical invention can’t quite sustain itself for the picture’s entire running time, but it’s a masterful achievement while it lasts and adds immensely to the sensory saturation.

The magic continues as the Thief enters the Alchemist’s abode: first, in a magnificent rainbow room where the master waits on his throne of goats with a camel and a naked Nubian woman tattooed with Hebrew characters and astrological symbols.  The remaining sets in the sanctuary are equally opulent.  The Alchemist’s marble pool comes complete with a bathing hippo.  He has a hall of mirrors with an obelisk.  Rooms are decorated with occult symbols on the floor, and they spin; everything is painted in vivid primary colors.  One circular room is lined with Jodorowosky’s surreal interpretations of Tarot cards.  In this section’s centerpiece scene, the Thief is encased in a glass bowl on top of a brick apparatus with braziers and copper tubing; the Alchemist burns his excrement, tuning it into gold while the fecal smoke flows into the bulb and chokes the thief.  Meanwhile, the nude woman plays a cello and a pelican strolls around the machine.  More rituals ensue, as the Thief is further purified and absorbs obscure Zen lessons at the feet of the Master.

The tone abruptly changes from mystical to satirical/absurdist when the script introduces seven new characters, fellow seekers like the thief, each associated with a planet.   The previous segment featured some incisive, blackly comic moments—as when a soldier begins to rape a tourist’s wife, and the enthralled man tries to capture the amusing native antics with his camera—but these were tiny pointed shards of ridicule poking out from an illogical, nightmare mass.  The segments here are blades, forged for cutting.  In voiceover, each of the initiates describes their backstory on their home planet: they are Important People. Mars is an arms dealer, Jupiter a millionaire, Neptune an enforcer, and so on.  Jodorowsky uses these segments to take scattershot aim targets including militarism, consumerism, modern art, political propaganda, fascism, and even the modern art and architecture scenes.  There are many memorable images in these mini-movies.  Mars designs a line of munitions targeted at the various religions (Judaism gets a multi-barelled gun shaped like a menorah).  Saturn is a toy designer who develops her product line with future wars in mind; her computers predict a conflict with Peru in the coming generation, so she designs a series of anti-Peruvian amusements for kiddies.  The castrating chief of police for the autocratic Neptunian despotism gets perhaps the film’s best line: “Your sacrifice has completed my sanctuary of 1,000 testicles.”  Weirdness continues to permeate these sequences, and the planetary excursions allow Jodorowsky to broaden his already wild palette.  But the comic tone is a jarring change from the formerly mystical atmosphere and themes, and the constant narration is a significant stylistic departure from the near wordless silence that came before.  Perhaps Jodorowsky meant these digressive excursions to provide a lighthearted breather from the intense surrealism that came before; it feels like, halfway through the film, he’s drifting off point.

One of the minor issues with The Holy Mountain is that each successive sequence becomes slightly less surreal and less intense than the one that came before it; which is not to say that the final act isn’t astoundingly weird, by ordinary cinematic standards, but just that what came before is so dreamlike that Jodorowsky faces an impossible task trying to top himself.  After some more purification rituals, the group, under the direction of the Alchemist, leaves the tower and ventures out toward the Holy Mountain, where they intend to displace the Immortals.  This journey is shot entirely out of doors, with the cast, now with shaved heads, dressed in dull brown robes or Olympic jogging suits (when they aren’t nude, that is).  This new naturalistic style (Jodorowsky calls this portion a “documentary” of the group’s spiritual quest) robs the film of two of its greatest strengths: set design and costuming.  Previously, whether we were in a depraved urban dystopia, an arcane alchemists lair, or an art exhibit on Jupiter, there was always some amazing detail to draw the eye, some Hermetic symbol or freak or weirdo wandering around the frame.  Now, things are relatively restrained; Jodorowsky spends more time tossing out aphoristic bonbons drawn from Buddhism or rabbinical literature than he does conjuring menacing visions.  There are only two sections that truly liven up the weirdness here.  The first is the Pantheon Bar sequence, where the questers meet a drunken carnival of fellow seekers who began following the path of enlightenment but were distracted by a weakness of their own ego and stopped at the base of the mountain, abandoning their ascent.  The most notable of the caricatures is a gentleman in a feathered hat with a stoned expression who informs them that “the cross was a mushroom–and the mushroom was also the tree of Good and Evil.”  (Jodorowsky mocking acidheads seems to be the definition of biting the hand that feeds you).  The second manic sequence occurs when each of the members of the team has a dream just before reaching the summit.  The director goes all-out grotesque here: the visions include animal sex, hermaphrodism, castration, ejaculation, and lactation.

Jodorowsky’s finale is notoriously controversial, but ending this movie was an impossible task.  If the Thief’s journey is an allegory for the soul’s journey towards Ultimate Reality, then how could the director film God?  What could he do that would exceed the fractured visions that started the movie?  Jodorowsky doesn’t even try; what he does, instead, is basically to topple his entire house of cards with a wave of his hand.  The Thief discovers that he could have ended his quest an hour ago, when he met a nice girl.  Everyone goes home.  With this ending, Jodorowsky seems to be saying that the character’s search for metaphorical enlightenment was itself an illusion.  Of course, all the blood, sweat and cerebral juices the cast and crew spent bringing this bewildering and extravagant spectacle to life belie that conclusion.  But, unable to drop an enlightenment bombshell at the film’s climax, this was the best the director could do.

Is Jodorowsky a Surrealist?  The tableaux he creates are shocking and appear irrational, but to him each image has a particular, specific symbolic meaning.  The key part of that sentence, perhaps, is “to him,” because he rarely provides his audience the necessary clues to divine the meaning he’s propounding.  Viewers pick up bits and pieces of his intended message; it’s easy to see, for example, that the transvestite Virgin Mary selling crosses to tourists represents the Catholic Church distorting the true meaning of Christ’s message.  When the Thief goes on a rampage and wrecks the crucifixes, most will catch the reference to Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple.  But in a film where the director references nearly every mystical or occult tradition the world has ever produced, scrawling Taoist symbols on the hide of a passing elephant, how could he expect anyone to catch all the details and follow his overall argument—if, indeed, he has one?  Listening to his commentary on the DVD helps explain what he had on his mind on a scene-by-scene basis, but his exegesis only confirms that he isn’t consistent with his symbolism.  At one point he tells us that the Thief’s legless and armless friend represents his divine spark within (when he first awakens his body from its drunken coma).  Later, we are informed that the very same character represents the monstrosities of the ego (when the Alchemist demands the Thief throw the freak over the side of a boat to cleanse his soul).  How are we supposed to follow along if the author won’t even keep his own symbolism constant?  A thirtieth degree Mason couldn’t decipher a third of the symbolism of The Holy Mountain.  Jodorowsky’s method is to flit about from concept to concept as the mood strikes him, like a schizophrenic doctor of comparative religion, and he never paints a consistent portrait of the soul’s progress to enlightenment.  The result is that, although it he intends each image to have a precise symbolic meaning, the key to unlocking their meaning is locked inside the author’s mind.  The Holy Mountain is meant as a Symbolist work, not as unconscious nonsense; but the end user, unable to decipher the film, experiences it as Surrealism.

Is Jodorowsky a mystic?  He tosses every esoteric reference he can think of into The Holy Mountain, and the breadth of his knowledge of cabalistic traditions of the world is truly impressive.  But you can’t make a lush, sensual, psychedelic film and promote authentic mysticism at the same time.  True mysticism, what Aldous Huxley called “the perennial philosophy,” involves asceticism, the denial of the body and even the imagination, an absolute abnegation of the ego and the senses.  It seeks and longs for what appears to be nothingness.  Along the journey Jodorowsky pays lip service to the necessity of dissolving the ego, but it would be hard for a novelist to conjure up a more narcissistic character than this director.  After all, here he casts himself in the role of an ascended master and spiritual teacher (admittedly a step down from his role as a messiah and demigod in El Topo).  The contemporary Jodorowsky reveals that his earlier self was convinced that this film would change cinema and change the world, hardly the position of an ego-less master who has transcended pride.  Most of all, Jodorowosky is obviously intoxicated by his own superlative creativity and imagination—and rightfully so.  But a true mystic views imagination as a relic of the ego and an enemy to enlightenment; imagination can only work on things brought to it through the senses, which obscure the Divine.  Consider the words of another mystic who wrote about a spiritual journey up a metaphorical mountain, St. John of the Cross in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, who asserted that those who wished to ascend must rid themselves of imagination and visions:

All these imaginings must be cast out from the soul… Whether beginners or more advanced, all must learn to abide attentively and wait lovingly on God in a state of quiet, and to devote no attention either to imagination or its working…  the soul must take care not to lean on visions that take place in the mind… they perturb it, and for this reason the soul must renounce them and strive not to have them… If the spiritual director has an inclination towards revelations of such a kind that they mean something to him, or satisfy a delight in his soul, it is impossible for him not to impress that delight and that aim on the spirit of his disciple… From his inclination toward such visions and the pleasure he takes in them, he develops a certain kind of esteem for them… In this lies a great delusion.  Ascent of Mount Carmel, BOOK TWO, Chapters 9-13.

This warning from a certified mystic that imagination is a false path to enlightenment could have been specifically addressed to Jodorowsky, the great magician and alchemist of cinema who hopes to change the world through the elaborate symbolic visions he constructs for the masses.  St. John of the Cross would likely see Jodorowsky as one of those stuck in the Pantheon Bar at the foot of the Holy Mountain, believing he has already reached the peak and found the answer when he has not even begun to ascend the slope yet.  Perhaps it was his knowledge of texts like this that explain Jodorowsky’s apparent, sudden rejection of mysticism at the end of the film.  If the mystics say that imagination can only take you so far, well, then, the creative soul can play the same game and turn it around; mysticism can only take the imagination so far, and then it must abandon it and follow creativity’s own path.

Jodorowsky uses the techniques of the Surrealists and the symbolism of the mystics, but he himself is neither a Surrealist nor a mystic.  He’s more of a madman and a Fool, trusting and delighting in his own deranged visions.  And cinema is enriched by his injection of his own singular brand of madness.  No one else could have made the astounding, narcissistic, and utterly beautiful The Holy Mountain.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“All the classic surrealist techniques are called into play, like when a young woman is shot down by police, and doves fly out of the wound. But finally, ‘Holy Mountain’ is all surface and very little meaning.”–M. Goodwin, Take One (contemporaneous)

“…an extraordinary visual concoction, loaded with stunning primary colors, anti-religious caricatures drawn from Diego Rivera and a succession of dreamlike, grotesque vistas worthy of Dalí at his most deranged.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon (2007 rerelease)

“…suggests what might have resulted if Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, and George Romero had all dropped acid and made a movie together.”–Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

OFFICIAL SITE:

ABKCO Music & Records, Inc. – Films – The Holy Mountain – the closest thing to an official site, this is the homepage for producer/distributor ABKCO.  It contains a long synopsis of the film and a couple of stills, but there is also a five minute documentary featurette mixing scenes from Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain with an interview with Jodorowsky

IMDB LINK: The Holy Mountain (1973)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Holy Mountain – The Holy Mountain page at “The Symbol Grows,” a Jodorowsky fan site, contains little specific to this film, but search the site for images of vintage posters and a relatively extensive Jodorowsky bibliography

The Holy Mountain (1973) at Mubi – the trailer, synopses, and links to forum discussions involving the movie

DVD INFO: The Anchor Bay DVD (buy) features a typically fascinating (Spanish language, so be sure to turn on the subtitles) commentary by Jodorowsky, who at times seems affectionately bemused by the passion of his younger self.  Other extras include deleted scenes, also with commentary, and a five minute feature where Jodorowsky explains the philosophy and symbolism of the Tarot, and the original trailer.  Joe Byrne, who worked on restoring the film, gives a technical but nonetheless very interesting explanation of the restoration process; segments of the film are shown in split screen, with the original print shown on one side and the restored version on the other to dramatize the improvement.  One final extra shows photographs of the working script, which is itself almost nonlinear; it’s full of markups, notes, crossouts, scrawled amendments and doodled alchemical symbols.

The Holy Mountain is also available (with all special features listed above) as a key component of Anchor Bay’s The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky (buy).  Also included in this collection are Fando y Lis, El Topo, and the documentary The Jodorowsky Constellation.  Soundtrack CDs for El Topo and The Holy Mountain round out this very cool collection.

Anchor Bay plans blu-ray releases of both The Holy Mountain (pre-order) and El Topo on April 26, 2011.

(This movie was nominated for review by too many readers to list individually. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Bruce Robinson

FEATURING: Richard E. Grant, Rachel Ward, Richard Wilson

PLOT: A young hotshot ad exec begins to crack from stress when he has difficulty coming up

with a campaign for pimple cream; compounding his problems, he grows a boil on his neck that gradually develops a face, and a nasty personality.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  The talking boil, the cracked Bagley tossing thawed chickens into the toilet wearing only an apron, and a few other weird surprises.  What works against Advertising‘s weirdness is that the film’s bizarro bits are all part of a perfectly clear and rational satirical plan.

COMMENTS:  Ad exec Dennis Bagley develops the mother of all zits in this blackheaded black comedy: does he need a dermatologist, or a psychologist?  He’s up against a deadline to design an ad campaign for a pimple cream account, and he’s obstructed.  “I can’t get a handle on boils,” he explains.  “Compared to this, piles were a birthday present… so was dandruff!”  Brilliantly portrayed by an acerbic and unhinged Richard E. Grant, Bagley is a man on the edge from the moment we meet him. He delivers an authoritative, amoral address to junior execs delighting in the dieting-reward-guilt dynamic that keeps women buying unwholesome food and stressing the importance of marketing to “she who fills her basket;” but in private, his advertiser’s block is driving him to knock back highballs in his office and nearly break down into quivering mass at lunch with his beautiful wife Julia (Ward).  On a fateful train ride home for a weekend of fretting over the acne campaign, frazzled Bagley has an epiphany about the pervasiveness of the advertising/propaganda mentality while listening to strangers discuss a sensational newspaper account of a drug orgy, and launches into the first of many entertainingly deranged rants.  By the next morning Bagley has gone completely off his rocker: he’s running around the house nude except for an apron, thawing frozen chickens in the bathtub and trying to rid the homestead of everything connected to advertising.  But, to his distress, he’s also developed a rather nasty and surprisingly painful pimple on his neck, one that keeps growing and getting worse.  And after a dream where a pair of pink and blue birds fresh off the set of Song of the South flit about his room devising a plan to sell burglar alarms, he wakes to discover that that the boil has grown and developed a voice, and—worse—an embryonic face.

That’s just the first act.  The remainder of Advertising focuses on Bagley’s contentious relationship with the obstinate zit, setting up a string of sly set pieces and pedantic anti-consumerism speeches.  An effective running joke has the boil constantly interjecting advertising slogans or crude insults (“shut up, you cynical old anus!”) into Bagley’s conversations; it sounds like a sitcom level gag, but the script integrates the gag with wit. There’s an extended sequence where the boil only speaks when Julia’s back is turned or Bagley’s head is under the table; the husband and wife argue about whether the boil is deliberately taking advantage of these opportunities to pipe up, or whether it’s the delusional ad-man who is.  (The script never directly reveals whether the chatty carbuncle truly has a separate existence; for symbolic and satirical purposes, it doesn’t matter).  Just as the dramatic possibilities of a man arguing with his own pimple seem about ready to play themselves out, the script throws in a wicked twist that rearranges the power balance.  A droll sequence near the end capitalizes on the movie’s switch of fortunes by synchronizing a new conversation on top of an older one.  The script is riddled with clever touches like this, which, together with the biting black humor and the extra appendage make it play like a smarter, more focused, and less weird and tasteless precursor to 1991′s The Dark Backward.

Critics’ main objection to the film was that it’s too talky and unsubtle (to the point of being preachy). It substitutes speechifying for action.  Some of the dialogue seems to stem from the author’s private obsessions (he repeats a metaphor equating trains with good, communal socialism and cars with bad, selfish capitalism, even though it clunked the first time round).  In his idealistic incarnation, Bagley often seems paranoid and cranky rather than incisive: he suggests newspapers demonize marijuana because they see it as a threat to cigarette ad revenue, and in a long rant (delivered with his head encased in a cardboard box) he frets that corporations plot to cut down forests so they can charge for oxygen.  The fact that the film climaxes with another long monologue—Bagley riding through the verdant English countryside on a horse, discussing the “wonderful” products that would disappear if not for automobiles (including “tinned spaghetti and baked beans with six frankfurters”)—only reinforces that impression.  It’s true that Robinson repeatedly violates the “show, don’t tell” axiom (as did Shakespeare), but in his defense, on Advertising he was in the zone when it came to dialogue.  The film is packed with quotable quips: “that suppurating, fat squirting little heart attack traditionally known as the British sausage,” “I’ve had an octopus squatting on my brain for a fortnight,” “my grandfather was caught molesting a wallaby in a private zoo in 1919.”  When the psychiatrist asks him if he’s been masturbating much, he replies “Constantly! I’ve got a talking boil on my neck, what would you do?”  The boil is alternatively referred to as “a shanker yacking on [my] neck” or a “smutty Marxist carbunkle.”

Most of these lines are given acid deliveries by an inspired Grant.  As Bagley, he gets to play a character who at various times is bitingly self-assured, idealistic, coldly cynical, or coming apart at the seams, and relishes the opportunity.  Grant races about the set and delivering a variety of rants ranging from incisive to wittily cruel to delusional, and he finds the proper tone of comic exaggeration whether the script requires him to be withering or pathetic.  Grant’s performance, combined with the rapid fire Brit wit that trips from his lashing tongue and the absorbing tidbits of weirdness, sweep away all the objections about Advertising‘s sententious socialist moralizing.

Writer/director Bruce Robinson began his movie career as an actor, but achieved greater success when he switched to screenwriting, notching an Oscar nomination for his adaptation of The Killing Fields (1984). In 1987 he produced the black comedy Withnail & I, starring Richard E. Grant in a title role, about an alcoholic out-of-work actor. The movie was a critical and cult success. Like Withnail, Advertising was produced and distributed by George Harrison’s Handmade Films (sometime patrons of the weird ever since funding Time Bandits); unfortunately, this film received mixed reviews and made little impact on its theatrical release. Advertising retained enough partisans to be briefly released by the Criterion Collection in 2001; that edition quickly fell out of print, however. MGM snapped up the rights in 2003, but again the movie sold poorly and rights lapsed. The latest, bare-bones DVD release came courtesy of Image Entertainment in January 2011; hopefully, the film will stay in print the third time around. It deserves a larger audience than it has found.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Bruce Robinson… goes off on a new lunatic tangent in his latest comedy, ‘How to Get Ahead in Advertising,’ an engaging if slightly overstretched combination of satire, science-fiction, Freud and domestic farce.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

GLAUCON: You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

SOCRATES: Like ourselves…”–Plato, The Republic, Book VII

DIRECTED BY: Giorgos Lanthimos

FEATURING: Christos Stergioglou, Aggeliki Papoulia, Hristos Passalis, Mary Tsoni, Michele Valley, Anna Kalaitzidou

PLOT: A Father and Mother raise their three children—two girls and a boy, aged somewhere between their late teens to twenties—in an isolated country estate with no knowledge of the outside world.  The children spend their days playing odd games, engaging in strange family rituals, or learning new words with incorrect definitions; they are taught that “sea” means an armchair, a “motorway” is a strong wind, and so on.  The one outsider they know of is Christina, who Father brings in weekly to satisfy Son’s sexual urges; inevitably, she discloses facts about the outside world that disrupt the family’s artificial harmony.

BACKGROUND:

• Winner of the “Un Certain Regard” prize (which recognizes works that are either “innovative or different”) at Cannes in 2009.
• Nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2011 (only the fifth Greek film so honored).
• According to writer/director Lanthimos, the three actors who played the children got into character by inventing games (like the “endurance” game the kids in the film play) to pass the time.
• Mary Tsoni, who plays the younger daughter, was not an actress prior to this role; she was a singer in a band.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Dogtooth is a movie made more from concepts than from imagery.  Most likely, the scene that makes the biggest impression is the one that best encapsulates the family’s strange rituals.  To celebrate their parent’s wedding anniversary, the two girls perform an awkward, shuffling dance, as invented by two children who have no knowledge of choreography, while their brother accompanies them on guitar.  After the younger girl bows out, the rebellious older one begins throwing her body around with bizarre, manic abandon, until her parents object to this display of individuality.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Beginning with the conceit that the meanings of ordinary words have

Original trailer for Dogtooth [Kynodontas]

been changed, Dogtooth presents us with an unsettling vision of an “ordinary” family where the basic rules of social behavior have all been unpredictably altered, for reasons that are never fully explained.

COMMENTS: “Dogs are like clay, and our job here is to mold them,” the dog trainer explains to the Father when he tries to retrieve an animal and bring it home before its training is complete.  “Every dog is waiting for us to show it how it should behave.  Do you understand?”

“Sure,” answers Father, with the same blankly severe expression he always wears.  He is, in fact, the last person the dog trainer should be lecturing on the importance of strict adherence to a behavioral modification regimen.  We’ve already seen that he and Motherteach their children that the word “sea” means an armchair, regularly bring in a prostitute for Son’s scheduled bout of sex training, give out stickers to the kid that performs best in tasks like holding their breath the longest or finding Mother first while blindfolded, and punish Son for lying by making him hold Listerine in his mouth until the alcohol burns his gums.  Every aspect of the children’s existence is tightly circumscribed.

Although there is an overarching narrative, Dogtooth is mainly built from such examples of the children’s training; the story is wider than it is deep.   Lanthimos expands his kernel of an idea about two parents who build an isolated reality for their cloistered offspring by exploring every aspect of daily life in the enclosure.  The kids’ entire world is limited to the house, a garden surrounded by a tall wall behind which they are told exist horrible creatures who will kill them, and a swimming pool; as far as they know, a missing brother and the prostitute Christina are the only other people who exist in the world.  There is, of course, no television allowed (they family only watches home videos of themselves); they are told, and believe, that airplanes flying overhead are toys.  They have records, but they are informed that Frank Sinatra’s voice is the voice of their grandfather, and Father translates “Fly Me to the Moon” as a message from beyond the grave about the importance of family togetherness.  And they have been living this way for a long time; although their age is not given, the kids are all sexually mature and could be anywhere from their late teens to mid-twenties.  With no stimulus or purpose to their lives beyond following their parents’ absurd rules, the children’s emotional growth has been stunted; they still play with toys and invent games—like who can keep their finger under a stream of hot water the longest—to pass the long days.

Understandably, kept in a state of enforced childhood, they grow into immature, bored, and unfulfilled adults.  Son tells of a dream he had; there’s nothing to it, because his restricted world doesn’t contain enough elements to build a fantasy from.  Obvious to everyone except their parents, the children miss something in their lives, and it’s not just sex.  They fight over toys or imagined slights, and like kids, they lash out at each other, though with adult force.  Like little children, they lie to their parents to escape trouble; but because they’re recycling fables that their masters originally told to them, they’re easy to catch in a fib.  At least once, this leads to a humorously unjust result, when Father is forced to go along with the youngest girl’s ridiculous lie to keep the illusion of unseen enemies prowling the grounds at night alive.

On occasion the children learn a new word or concept by accident, by reading a label the parents have left lying around, or through something Christina lets slip.  The parents then step in to redefine that word or concept, but even the most careful parents cannot completely control what their children are exposed to.  The plot, as opposed to the leisurely exploration of the setting and concept, begins when contraband from the outside world finds its way into the compound.  Exposure to the simplest of ideas undermines the intricately tailored web of lies and omissions the parents have created; the eldest daughter starts to wonder, for example, what it might be like to have a name.  (Father, who has surrendered his own name for the sake of stressing his familial role rather than his individuality, does do one thing for the dog that he doesn’t for his children—he gives it a name.  The kids are simply referred to as the eldest, the youngest, the boy).  Once new concepts and horizons are opened to the daughter, it is impossible to keep her under daddy’s control.  Even the slightest glimpse of a world outside the four walls of the compound stirs a kid’s curiosity and rouses her out of her domesticated torpor—but Father has a steely resolve, backed by a quick fist, and he’s dedicated to holding the family together.  The parents have given the children hope for a potential way out of the house eventually, although they assume it’s a vain one.  According to family legend, a child is old enough to leave the home and face the dangers of the outside world when his or her dogtooth falls out.  Of course, even then its unsafe to venture outside except in the confines of the car—even Father stays safely inside his vehicle to drive a few feet to fetch a toy that’s been thrown over the fence.  If the eldest daughter can negotiate these two hurdles, though, she may be able to leave the home and see what lies outside the walls.

Many people find Dogtooth disturbing and shocking, but their reactions are slightly out of tune with the actual content of the film.  There are five incidents of violence, and perhaps two or three sex scenes that are disturbing, in context.  Arguably, every single one of the “disturbing” scenes is necessary to the plot, although it is debatable whether they had to be delivered with this level of explicitness to have the same impact.  (The one gambit that is clearly gratuitous is the brief clip of hardcore porn, which I suspect was inserted out of misplaced love of audacity and in an attempt to cop some of the bad-boy cred of obvious influence Lars von Trier).

It’s not actually the shock scenes that disturb people, however.  Though Dogtooth is clearly a film for adults, there is less violence and bloodletting than in a typical R-rated horror movie, or even an average action flick.  What people find unsettling are the underlying concepts—that parents would treat their children as lab rats, and that someone might lie so convincingly and arbitrarily about absolutely everything, no matter how trivial—and the matter-of-fact unease with which these ideas are delivered.  The children are innocent victims, but they are also horrifying to watch, inhuman.  They don’t react like real people (because they haven’t been allowed to become real people).  Their facial expressions are off, their behavior patterns are unpredictable and unfamiliar, they even dance awkwardly.  Their parents’ coldness is chilling, and the lack of explanations for their plans and schemes is frightening.  It all strikes at hidden fears, suspicions and resentments of parental deception we still carry deep within us.  Dogtooth could have been made under the Hays Code, and it would still disturb people because of its ideas—and because it’s weird.

Dogtooth is a parable about control.  When Father delivers the worst curse he can think of, it is “I hope your kids have bad influences and develop bad personalities.”  For him, the greatest horror is not for his offspring to be unhappy or fall short of their potential, but to be influenced by forces outside of his control.  Ominously, he and Mother appear more upset when a child is disobedient than when one is presumed dead.  The specific form of control exercised here is parental control, which most of us can relate to.  We’ve all been disillusioned by finding out that our parents aren’t perfect and have lied to us; we’ve all discovered there is no Santa Claus.  But it’s impossible not to extend the metaphor of total control over thought exhibited here to the political arena.  When the dog trainer tries to convince Father not to take his mutt back early, he asks him, “Do we want a guard who will respect us as his masters and do unhesitatingly whatever we ask of him?”  Father wants exactly that of his children; he wants them docile and compliant.  The concept that the parents deliberately teach their children the wrong meanings of words recalls the newspeak of Orwell’s 1984, and the imaginary enemies supposedly prowling around outside the compound walls are reminiscent of the imaginary wars fought in that dystopian world to enforce a sense of desperation and camaraderie in the populace.  The film reminds us of propaganda machines in Nazi Germany that drove an entire nation insane, and of Communist dictatorships that rewrote history books to try to keep people ignorant for decades.  The idea even plays on our deep epistemological misgivings that we ourselves could be brainwashed.  Everything we’ve ever been told, by our parents, our institutions, our governments, even by ourselves could be a lie; like the children, we’d be living a nightmare, but we wouldn’t even know it.

Dogtooth starts by redefining common nouns in an absurd way.  Since we know only a tiny slice of the family’s private vocabulary, this immediately puts us on edge.  We realize that we might decode the dialogues that follow differently than the characters do, a suspicion that’s soon confirmed when the youngest daughter asks her mother to pass her the “phone” when what she really wants is the salt shaker.  But Dogtooth isn’t concerned with abstruse linguistic philosophy or with meaningless insights about the arbitrariness of signifiers; it’s concerned with reality.  Not with the mechanics of how we come to know and understand reality, but with the deep emotional and moral impulse to break through lies and deceit.  We immediately sense and feel that what the parents do to the children is wrong; even if the kids are well-fed, protected, and perfectly happy in their walled estate, we know that they have been abused and degraded by being kept apart from reality.  We hate the Mother and Father for imprisoning them, and root for the offspring to break through the walls that surround them.

Lanthimos’ scenario here reminds me of the one invented by his ancient Greek ancestor, Plato, with his Allegory of the Cave.  In Dogtooth, the children are kept in an isolated villa and systematically lied to, so much so that they see images of real things (airplanes) and through the trick of perspective believe that they are mere toys no bigger than their hands.  Plato’s allegorical prisoners were kept chained from birth, their fields of vision restricted so that they could only see shadows passing on the walls of the cave, never seeing things as they really are.  For Plato, if one of those slaves ever escaped his chains and saw the world as it really was, the sudden light would hurt his eyes and he could hardly believe or understand what he saw; but it seemed to the philosopher the greatest form of good and the highest human duty to break free from the bonds of ignorance.  Dogtooth exhibits the same faith that genuine knowledge of reality, however painful it may be to obtain, is worth fighting for—whether we live chained in a Cave, or on a country estate.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of the darkest, most unsettling, weirdest films of the year.”–The London Times (contemporaneous)

“..a conversation piece. Though the conversation may not proceed quite into the depths of psychosexual analysis that ‘Dogtooth’ seems to invite. Your post-viewing discourse may be more along the lines of: ‘What was that?’ ‘I don’t know. Weird.’ ‘Yeah.’ [shudder]. ‘Weird.’”–A.O. Scott, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“…nothing in this weird, watchable, blasé black comedy from Greece stays innocent for long.”–Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITES:

DOGTOOTH – the original Greek site (translated into English), with cast bios, stills, review excerpts, etc.

DOGTOOTH the movie – this site from American distributor Kino contains the same information as the Greek site, along with a director’s statement and an alternate pressbook

IMDB LINK: Dogtooth (2009)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Festival de Cannes – The Dogtooth page at the Cannes film festival site, including the trailer, a link to download the press kit, and links to articles on the film

Dogtooth: Interview with Yorgos Lanthimos – Revealing interview with director Lanthimos by Pamela Jahn of Electric Sheep magazine

The surprising Greek film winning fans abroad – A briefer interview with the director from CNN’s “Screening Room”

Guest Review: Dogtooth [Kynodontas] (2009) – Kevyn Knox’s September 2010 capsule review, written during the film’s festival run.  Also available in a slightly different version at The Cinematheque.

DVD INFO: The Kino DVD (buy) contains a few extras. The print is anamorphic widescreen, and looks radiant: the Mediterranean sunlight glows on film. There is the trailer and a photo gallery. Of more substance is the 12 minute interview with director Giorgos Lanthimos and three deleted scenes, the coolest of which features the three siblings singing along to grandpa Sinatra’s rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon” in painfully broken English. No commentary is included; since there’s no real obstacle to such a feature, it may be being reserved for a future special edition.

Dogtooth is also available on Blu-ray (buy) with the same features.
(This movie was nominated for review by multiple readers. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY:  Kinji Fukasaku

FEATURING:  Takeshi “Beat” Kitano, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Chiaki Kuriyama

PLOT:  Intergenerational relations in Japan have broken down to such an extent that

youngsters are rebelling by committing acts of violence and mass truancy.  The situation has deteriorated so badly that the government reacts by passing the “Battle Royale Act”: each year a randomly selected high school class is sent to an isolated, uninhabited island, fitted with remotely detonated explosive collars, given meager supplies and told to fight to the death.  One must emerge a victor or three days later everyone will die.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Although I consider Battle Royale to be a “must see” film, it really can’t go on the list.  It’s just not weird.  It’s funny, violent, overblown, disturbing, both operatic and banal, but not weird.

COMMENTS:  My first review of the film was a little flippant and then, quite randomly, I overheard a man say it was the “sickest” film he had ever seen.  He appeared to be quite sincere and I was driven to go back and watch it again, and again, to try and see what he had seen, what had disturbed him so much.

I don’t think that there’s anything in Battle Royale which will upset “366-ers.”  Yes, it is a film filled with images of youngsters killing each other and it would not be unnatural to find that disturbing.  The violence is so over the top, however, that it’s difficult not to be amused at times.  Who would have thought that a saucepan lid could prove to be such an effective weapon in the right hands?  It’s not even a very good saucepan lid.

The controversy surrounding Battle Royale on its release centered on the graphic violence and the age of the participants, but there is no connection between the violence in the film and real life violence involving teenagers.  The high school class that we follow are being forced against their will to participate in a life or death game, and they have been forced to do so by adults: adults who have stooped so far as to rig the game.  Despite having their backs against the wall, some of teenagers behave quite nobly; pleading for peace, setting up co-operative groups despite knowing only one can survive, committing suicide rather than participate in the game.

With every viewing of the film more and more contradictions appear.  The results of the battle appear to be televised during the opening scenes but the class chosen show astonishment that such a thing exists.  I would expect teenagers to talk about the Battle Royale Act incessantly.  The existence of such a grim piece of legislation would surely provoke further anger and violence amongst the younger generation, and hero worship of the victors.  There are indications throughout that the Act is counter-productive, that underground rebellion is growing.  A moment’s consideration would surely tell the adults that not only is this going to happen, but that there’s every chance the survivors of previous Battles are going to be eager rebels.  There’s nothing like training the best of the best to fight against you in the future, after all.

The more I think about this aspect of Battle Royale, the more impressed I am by how relevant it still is.  In the UK, at least, I can’t remember a time when the adult population was more terrified of their children, but who raised these children?  This generation of teenagers will go on to raise the next generation.  Will they in turn grow to fear their own children?

There’s certainly a deep and troubling message at the heart of Battle Royale.  You do have to dig through a wild and crazy cartoon ride of glorious, gory violence and hilarious teenage angst to get there, but it’s really worth it.  If you have a teenager, or can remember being one, then it is possible to laugh at the dialogue, all delivered in an appropriately earnest fashion.  In real life teenagers tend to flounce upstairs to their room, announcing that no-one understands them and they hate everyone, before terminating their soliloquy by slamming the bedroom door as hard as is humanly possible.  In Battle Royale they do the same thing, except they cap their tantrum by stabbing someone in the head.

I didn’t have the chance to ask the man I overheard just what it was that so upset him about this film.  I tend to think it was the depiction of youngsters stabbing, shooting and decapitating each other.  I could be wrong though.  The underlying message is one of fear and lack of communication between adults and their children, and this is far more disturbing than any number of bouncing heads with grenades in their mouths.

Is it possible to be disturbed and amused at the same time?  I find it is; in fact, real life does it to me all the time.  Battle Royale is both amusing and disturbing, and better than real life in that it has a fantastic, deadpan performance from the wonderful “Beat” Takeshi; watch with joy his possessiveness over the bag of cookies.  The only thing that puzzles me is why there isn’t a computer game version of BR yet.

366weirdmovies adds:  Battle Royale is just weird enough to deserve mention here, but not strange enough to vie for a spot on the List.  The “Battle Royale Act” itself is the weirdest thing about the film: randomly selected teenagers slaughtering each other in an un-televised death match mitigates the social problem of juvenile violence… how?  The Japanese people overwhelmingly vote to send their own children, innocent and guilty alike, off to be massacred… why?  The premise is absurd, and just in case we couldn’t see that on our own, the instructional video with the perky female commando describing to the students how their collars they’re wearing will blow their heads off if they disobey the games rules makes it crystal clear.  Something funny happens after this surrealistically satirical set up, though; the movie plays it straight the rest of the way, turning into a highly effective actioner with unexpected depth of characterization.  The fun is in watching the student’s varied and generally believable reactions to the bizarre situation, and in watching the field get winnowed down to the finalists in some very grim ways. The film’s midsection is invigorating—packed with juicy, bloody surprises—and the thrills you get block out the horror of the “Lord of the Flies” scenario.  Despite the perversity of the premise, the movie basically shows a good heart: it’s firmly on the side of the misunderstood kids, who aren’t just blood squibs waiting to be exploded for their splat value.  “Beat” Kitano unexpectedly makes for one of the slimiest, yet most haunted sadists since Norman Bates took out his mommy issues on random vacationers.   And although the movie does indeed prey on adult fears about the coming generation, it equally addresses teenage anxieties about cutthroat academic competition: the whole thing can be seen as a metaphor for the Japanese education system, where the pressure on kids to get into a prestigious junior high school can be overwhelming and feel like a life and death struggle.  Overall, Battle Royale is a very well-made film that’s unlikely to seriously disturb or offend anyone but the most squeamish; it’s not very weird, but it’s definitely in the ballpark, and worthy of a strong recommendation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a stunningly proficient piece of action film-making, plunging us into a world of delirium and fear… this is a film put together with remarkable confidence and flair. Its steely candour, and weird, passionate urgency make it compelling.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Takashi Miike

FEATURING: Shungiku Uchida, Ken’ichi Endô, Kazushi Watanabe, Jun Mutô, Fujiko

PLOT: Father is a television reporter who was publicly humiliated when he was sodomized on camera by a gang of punks, Mother turns tricks to pay for her heroin habit, teenage Daughter is a runaway prostitute, and Son beats his mom with a riding crop when he’s not being bullied by his schoolmates.  One day, a strange man conks Father on the head with a rock and moves in to stay with the family.  Thanks to his influence Mother and Father gain confidence in themselves, and the family is drawn together, as corpses pile up in their home.

BACKGROUND:

• Visitor Q was made as part of the “Love Cinema” project, where six independent Japanese filmmakers made direct-to-video movies to explore the possibilities of the ne digital video format.
• According to Miike the film was shot for a mere seven million yen (about $70,000) and completed in one week.
• There are several times in the film where boom mics are visible.
• Miike’s  plot owes much to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), in which a mysterious, nameless visitor serially seduces members of a wealthy Italian family.
• Besides acting, the multi-talented Shungicu Uchida (“Mother”) is also a manga artist, singer, and writer.
• Visitor Q was one of two winners of the 2010 “reader’s choice” poll asking 366 Weird Movies’ readership to select one film that had been reviewed but passed over for inclusion on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a movie full of shock after shock, it’s the very last image, a scene of perverse family unity, that turns out to be the most affecting and haunting.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Visitor Q is a baffling parable of perversity.  What starts out as a

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)
Short clip from Visitor Q

depraved but unhappy family ends up as a homicidal and unified clan, thanks to the intervention of a mysterious, omnipotent stranger who cracks the father on the skull with a rock and teaches the mother to lactate. Along the way, Miike films the family graphically indulging in every act of sexual deviance he can think of, and even makes up some new ones.

COMMENTS:  Visitor Q is a confounding, bewildering movie, and not just because of the unexplained presence of the diabolical angel who leads the broken family to salvation in homicide and necrophilia.  It’s non-stop, taboo-shattering shock filmmaking, made in less than a week’s time, but it’s no pink movie or punk provocation; the artistry behind it is undeniable.  It’s filmed on video in a reality-television style, but the events it documents are anything but everyday, approaching the mystical.  The movie’s a titillating and pornographic black comedy, but an air of seriousness (and, at times, of serious disgust) deflates the eroticism.  It’s only real aim is to outrage and get a rise out of the audience, and get a rise it does: but the lift comes as much from its loyalty to its own inverted morality and aesthetics as from its vulgar displays.  As a work of disturbing, arty fetish porn, it’s a classic.

My initial reaction to Visitor Q was that it was an empty and shameless gimmick of a movie, though brilliantly made considering its low aspirations.  But even though I dismissed it, the movie kept nagging at me, largely due to the power of its final shot.  Despite the parade of perversions Miike has oh-so-jokingly subjected us to, he saves the most powerful scene for the finale.  The scene, sold by Shungicu Uchida’s seductively maternal smile, plays like Miike is lifting a veil of sick jocularity for a moment to take a peek at a reunion that would represent ultimate redemption—in an alternate universe.  In our universe, the shot conjures up sentiments simultaneously sweet and revolting.  To cap the climax, Miike (a master at selecting evocative end credits music) accompanies the visual with a melancholy ballad, with wispy vocals about the undulating sea delivered to acoustic accompaniment and distant percussion and gradually rising waves of feedback.  The effect is, to say the least, emotionally complex; and the way Miike unnerves us by showing us and making us feel things previously unseen and unfelt is unparalleled.

Despite the bizarre premise and hasty, improvised production, Visitor Q emerges one of Miike’s best constructed movies.  The digital videography is acceptable and appropriate to the subject matter; the camera is particularly good at picking up the gaudy, artificial pinks and yellows of the fireworks attacks, which might have come out muted and distant on film.  The performance—particularly by a frequently nude, leaking, middle-aged Uchida—are brave and committed.  The characters are well-crafted, with precisely drawn relationships between Father and Mother, Mother and Son, Father and Son, Mother and Visitor, and so on, which all develop and bear fruit as the story gestates.  There are moments of transcendently dark invention.  Miike knows how to build a scene; the black humor rises to a crescendo as the father becomes aroused preparing to cut up his dead girlfriend’s corpse, and then discovers that he has overcome his premature ejaculation problem just before things get really sticky.  Miike sometimes allows the scripts he directs to wander off in their weirdness (see Gozu).  That looseness can be effective, but Visitor Q (written by Full Metal Yakuza‘s Itaru Era) is remarkable and satisfying in its tight construction.  Everything is connected, nothing is wasted, and there’s a consistency to the film’s (a)moral vision; family unity is the sole value, individual isolation the only evil.  Everything in the tale is about bringing the divided family back together, and social mores are gleefully smashed by both the forces of “good” and evil.

Visitor Q doesn’t lack for weirdness—the family enjoying a quiet dinner while they are under assault from a gang of roman-candle wielding toughs, the enigmatic Visitor sitting with a plastic umbrella to protect himself from Mother’s enthusiastic “squirting”—but the weird effect is almost totally submerged by the in-your-face sexual transgressions.  Writing this review, I encountered more evidence of that fact.  When selecting quotes for the “what the critics say” portion of these entries, if possible I pick ones emphasizing adjectives like “weird,” “surreal,” “bizarre,” and so on; that proved a tougher task than usual with Visitor Q, where, despite the movie’s overweening strangeness, reviewers were much more likely to focus on words like “scandalous,” “harrowing,” and “ewwwww!”  In a 2001 interview, Miike concedes his intention was to shock: “I really feel like Audition didn’t go over the top,” he told reporters.  “The envelope remains to be pushed.”  The hidden premise is that envelope-pushing is a worthwhile endeavor.  But Audition was a great movie that pushed the envelope; it wasn’t a great movie because it pushed the envelope.  That’s why, in my initial review, I wrote that Visitor Q was “more a shock movie that’s incidentally weird than a weird movie that happens to be shocking… it seems to fit more comfortably into the shock genre than the weird genre.”

Its narrative mystery, constant surprises and—obviously—titillation factor makes Visitor Q a surprisingly enjoyable film, if you can get past the powerful “ick factor.”  The movie’s prime showpieces are father-daughter for-pay incest, sodomy by microphone, insanely copious lactation, rape, and necrophilia, all shown with as pornographic a level of explicitness as Miike could get away with (there is genital fogging, though unfortunately in a key scene there is no anal fogging).  Those critics willing to publicly embrace the film as something more than artistic pornography needed a peg to hang their praise on, and for their sake the movie provides tiny bumps of satire and social commentary.  There is the background of the moral breakdown of Japanese youth, the suggestion that the family is essentially an abusive institution, and references to the corrupting influence of television and media.  Read literally, the message is that Japanese families are dysfunctional because each member keeps his perversion private; if everyone would take an interest in the others’ activities—like raping corpses, shooting heroin, or suckling on Mom’s breasts as a family—everything would work out.  The family unit actualizes and comes together by being antisocial as a unit rather than individually.  Of course, it’s impossible to accept this literal reading, but Miike hardly suggests what his attitude toward sexual upheaval and the breakdown of the family really is.  Critics have argued both that the movie is a savage frontal attack on the concept of the nuclear tribe, and that it’s a fundamentally conservative defense of the traditional family.  I think it’s neither; it’s not a thesis on Japanese society, but a dream of unbridled id, and those thin straps of social relevance are the only thing that keeps the film from flying off into a void of diseased libido.  It’s hard to imagine Miike didn’t sport the same sort of guilty erection dreaming up certain scenes as the male audience does watching them.  Up until the very end of the movie, the film’s ironic attitude—distancing itself from the horrifying material with hip, callous comedy—is off-putting, far more disturbing than the rapes and beatings themselves.  Transgressive themes play better when their horror is honored, rather than chuckled at; we don’t get that sickening suspicion that a movie is secretly celebrating and perpetuating the perversion and immorality it pretends to condemn.  Whether the cleverness of this project overcomes that sickness is up to the individual viewer to decide, but there is enough talent and artistry in Visitor Q to make it a worthwhile encounter for those who are well-prepared for what they’re about to see, or for the hopelessly jaded.

Visitor Q isn’t merely a work of epic sensationalism, although it is sensational, in spades.  Its careful craftsmanship, eerie ending and twisted logic present much more of a challenge to the thoughtful viewer’s sensibilities than the typical exploitation shockfest.  Compared to the plotless, pointless, peripatetic nihilism of avant-garde provocations like Nekromantik or Trash Humpers, Visitor Q emerges as a masterpiece of its kind, simultaneously managing to be both outrageously pornographic and slyly nuanced. If you’re rooting about in cinema’s transgressive muck looking for a gem, Visitor Q‘s weird gleam should catch your eye.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…meta-weird… Perhaps to understand this family is to go mad with them … but what are movies if not vehicles for exploration into the beyond and the beneath, into what can’t be spoken but can, with such rough poignancy, be shown? “–Richard Corliss, Time (contemporaneous)

“…a baffling and muddled mess intended solely to shock… that said, Visitor Q is a bizarre oddity that’s hard to turn away from…”–Christopher Null, filmcritic.com (DVD)

“…a surreal dramatisation of the social problems which beset the traditional Japanese family…  beneath all Miike’s over-the-top absurdities lurk real feelings (inadequacy, alienation, repressed sexuality) that simmer away in most ‘normal’ families. All Miike has done is grossly exaggerate – and this is what gives the film its darkly satirical edge.”–Anton Bitel, Movie Gazette (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Visitor Q (Video 2001)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Borderline Weird: Visitor Q [Bijitâ Q] (2001) – Our original, less charitable review of Visitor Q

DVD INFO: Tokyo Shock’s Visitor Q DVD is a fairly bare-bones affair, containing only a few brief paragraphs of biographical info on Miike and a few additional paragraphs of gushing criticism. There’s also the astounding, and rather explicit, original animated trailer, along with trailers fro three other Tokyo Shock titles. A two disc offering titled Visitor Q+ (buy) was released in 2009; it contains a second disc of trailers titled “8 Flavors of Fever Dreams,” and is actually being offered at a lower price point at the time of this writing.