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DIRECTED BY: Aleksandr Rou
FEATURING: Olga Yukina, Tatyana Yukina, Andrey Fayt, Lidiya Vertinskaya, Arkadi Tsinman, Andrei Stapran
PLOT: A spoiled young girl enters the Land of Mirrors, where she goes on a quest with her mirror twin to rescue a boy imprisoned by the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors and his devious daughter and Toad courtier.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: A colorful explosion of baroque and fantastic conceits that’s a set designer’s dream project, the lavish fantasy Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors never fails to astound with its visual invention (not to mention odd details like the piano-playing monkey). To be properly considered for the Apocrypha, however, we’d like to see an actual restored version rather than the cheapo dubbed Something Weird print currently available. But by all means, keep the English language version as a supplement.
COMMENTS: In the 1950s and 60s, American producers, desperate for B-inventory to fill the teeming drive-ins, increasingly turned to foreign productions to stock their larders. This was especially true of children’s films: kids are less discriminating moviegoers, just throw some spectacle and slapstick on screen and you can keep them busy for 90 minutes while moms and dads do whatever it is moms and dads do when the kids aren’t paying attention. To meet this market, K. Gordon Murray plundered Mexico for dime store fairy tales. Roger Corman made inroads into the Soviet Union, re-editing halfway decent movies like the planetary exploration saga Planeta Bur (1962) with newly shot footage into ridiculous cut-n-paste monstrosities such as Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968). More to the point for today’s topic, AIP Pictures acquired 3 respectable folklore-based films from talented Soviet director Aleksandr Ptushko and desecrated them with shoddy editing and bad dubbing (in the case of Sadko, they turned the eponymous Russian hero into “Sinbad,” trying to fool viewers into thinking they were seeing a Ray Harryhausen epic.) These AIP knockoffs were so cheap and weird that they became popular entries in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 canon.
Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors falls loosely into this genre, with one difference: although a dubbed version of this Soviet variation on “Through the Looking Glass” was prepared, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence it screened in the USA. The American version was copyrighted by Walter Manley Enterprises, a company whose only other known contribution to cinema history are a series of compilations of the Japanese superhero series “Starman” that they edited together into semi-coherent feature films for the television market. Kingdom may have seen a few televised screenings after midnight or in a Sunday morning matinee spot on desperate independent TV stations, but somehow Something Weird Video came into possession of the Walter Manley catalog in the 1990s and issued Kingdom on VHS as a curiosity. This obscurity and poor print quality are a shame, because Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors is colorful and imaginative and much better made than its provenance might suggest—every bit as good as the Ptsushko films, which are now regarded as minor classics. The Walter Manley dub job is not terrible: they even rewrote the movie’s few songs in English versions.
The plot (from a popular Soviet children’s novel) is fairy tale standard. Spoiled, petulant, gluttonous child Ellen is whisked through a magic mirror into a fantastic kingdom. In a loosely-applied motif, everything in that world is backwards. She meets her “reflection” Nelle (played by Olga Yukina’s real-life twin Tatyana), who’s as responsible as Ellen is careless. Inside the mirror is a kingdom where all the mirrors reflect lies: old men see themselves as young and handsome, etc. One slave boy refuses to create “crooked” mirrors and is beaten and imprisoned for this impertinence; the twins take it upon themselves to free him. This leads them to encounter the Kingdom’s oddball characters: clownish courtiers, the stupid figurehead King, and most importantly the three evil powers behind the throne, the wicked Prime Minister, his conniving daughter, and the amphibious green-skinned noble Daot (every character has a name that is a backwards representation of their real character: the king is Torrap, and so on). Major spoiler incoming: the twins right all the Kingdom’s wrongs, and Ellen reflects on some important lessons along the way.
The simplistic story, of course, is not the appeal. It’s the production design that’s striking. Elaborate costuming and makeup is an economical way to provide spectacle. The most memorable case is Daot in his lime green skin with warts and a ruff made of scales, but even the everyday populace sport silken duds in every color of the rainbow, adorned with lace and frills, and are decked out in hosiery, wigs of orange, purple or green, and thick makeup with fake putty noses. The sets are elaborate, a combination of stages and rocky countrysides, with Expressionist waves in the kingdom’s royal architecture, like it’s being seen in a funhouse mirror. The rocky walls of castle interiors all seem to be draped in glittering tapestries. A drawbridge over a yawning chasm that leads directly into a stone falcon entrance is particularly grand, but everything in the kingdom is decorated in extravagant medieval proto-psychedelia.
Of course, the irony of the revolutionary children correcting the distorted visions of the crooked capitalist mirrors is rich, coming out of one of the most heavily propagandized societies of all time. But the allegorical interpretation of the Kingdom as the decadent West is so implicit that it never becomes intrusive, as proven by the fact that this indictment of capitalist societies could so easily be repackaged and sold to American children, with no one apparently the wiser.
Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors is currently available on the Something Weird/AGFA collaboration “Krazee Kidz Video Party.” The print is dingy, but the colors shine even through the VHS haze. Unfortunately, the image is permanently marred by the “SWV” bug affixed to the corner of the frame. We’re hopeful someone will someday re-release a proper restored version of the original for the North American market (such a restoration does exist in Russia).
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “TheRealBpilgrim” [obviously not the crooked mirror version of Bpilgrim]. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
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