DIRECTED BY: John R. Hand
FEATURING: April Hand, Jeff Hartley, Beverley Promersberger, Mike Engle, Megan Peterson, Esaw Parker Jr., Britney Land
PLOT: A young woman (April Hand) filled with anxiety and paranoia escapes into herself and creates a fantasy world involving ancient aliens who control the human race through the”Synthetic Man,” a figure shrouded in mystery who may hold the key to the woman’s tangled past.
COMMENTS: Imagine watching a really low-budget and serious (non-comedy) version of Gentlemen Broncos and you’ll have a clear idea of what it’s like to sit through The Synthetic Man. This is the third feature from John R. Hand, whose previous work I haven’t encountered yet—and I think I’ll keep it that way, judging from this latest effort. There are some interesting ideas here, but they’re undone by questionable execution.
Essentially the film is an extended look inside the mind of Iris, who is already obviously disturbed—we are introduced to her in the midst of her dream of being groped by a gloved figure. She appears to live an isolated existence; she has no friends or family or boyfriend and she never appears to have any interaction with any other person. Her only outlet is writing a novel, a science-fiction novel she calls ‘The Synthetic Man,” a title taken from one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books she finds in the library. It’s also the name she gives to her dream groper, and via watching really bad science fiction television programs combined with her own fevered imagination, she creates an oft-told tale of aliens controlling humanity through the titular character. Most of the movie is a dramatization of this novel, which gets increasingly violent and culminates with The Synthetic Man raping and impregnating random human females.
Someone once remarked that there’s nothing more boring than watching junkies onscreen for over an hour; that can be amended to there’s nothing more boring than watching sexually frustrated paranoid schizophrenics create fourth-rate pulp science-fiction/sexual-fantasy for over an hour. Perhaps the Europeans can actually pull off something like this and have it be an artistic triumph, but it seems to be just a bit beyond Mr. Hand’s grasp. However, there are moments of unintentional comedy that provide some entertainment, most of which are provided by April Hand’s performance, which consists of her making expressions like the one pictured above. The other moment of unintentional hilarity is the film’s climax, when The Synthetic Man’s purpose is graphically demonstrated in what I assume to be an homage to a sequence in Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed, just lower-rent in budget and execution.
“The Synthetic Man” on Facebook
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
The film begins with a myriad of colors across the screen, and a voice inviting the audience to join in on an exploration—a dream—through which the voice informs the audience, “we can go anywhere, see anything”. The colors coalesce into two faces, Gretchen and Margarita, and from here on they function as guides/proxies for the audience, as they move forward into adventure: an adventure of form and format, rather than any sort of plot or story that has to be followed in the service of ‘business’ or whatever. That is the only ‘savagery’ exhibited by these pair of “savage witches”: the refusal to conform to the typical structure of what we expect when we sit down to watch a film. It is perhaps for this reason that the “savage witches” are burned at the end (besides the fact it provides an exciting ending), and our last glimpse of them is of them resting in state, but even then, they continue to flout our expectations… in contrast to the heroines of Daisies, who are definitely punished at the end for their bad behavior. Of course the attack that the protagonists of the Czech film lead against their society is far more pointed and nastier than Savage Witches. Also, the girls of Witches are not as sexualized as the women in Daisies, who use their erotic appeal as a battle tactic.
