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Capsules

FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL 2020 CAPSULE: THE OLD MAN MOVIE (2019)

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Vanamehe film; AKA The Old Man: The Movie

Screening online for Canadians at 2020’s online Fantasia Film Festival

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DIRECTED BY: Oskar Lehemaa, Mikk Mägi

FEATURING: Voices of Märt Avandi, Jaagup Kreem, Mart Kukk

PLOT: Three kids are dropped off at grandpa’s to spend the summer in the country, and things go crazy when his prize cow wanders from the barn.

COMMENTS: What better way to wrap up the summer than to visit a dairy farm in the beautiful Estonian countryside? Milky clouds, milk-obsessed townsfolk, and a milk-blooded villain all await in a sleepy unnamed town in the middle of nowhere that faces an impending Lactopalypse. The silliness in The Old Man Movie is off the charts; as I recently remarked to a friend, this is the most ridiculous moo-vie I’ve seen all year.

Mart, Priidik, and Naim are unceremoniously pushed out of their parents’ car in front of a derelict barn that’s emitting strange wailing sounds. They enter, and we are introduced to a trio of darkly chanting sheep, a quietly sinister pig, and the creepiest cockerel ever to grace the screen. Off in the dark corner, surrounded by piles of manure, sits the source of the wailing: an old man, frantically milking a cow. He rises, seems to have a stroke, and collapses face-down onto his milking bucket. There is a funeral, and a local hobo swipes the ceremonial bottle of vodka laid with the old man. A bitter-looking old woman spits on the corpse before kicking its funeral bier into the river—flicking her cigarette on to the kindling. But the man arises, and so begins Mart, Priidik, and Naim’s adventures with grandpa.

After recovering from the creamsplosion at the film’s climax (whoops, spoiler alert), I did a little research and found that this oddity was no weirdo one-off, but the culmination of this guy‘s work over the past decade. Imagine that cross-over between Shaun the Sheep and The Mighty Boosh you’ve been dreaming about, and you’ll know the tone. The Old Man Movie is the kind of film that makes me wish we had a “Ridiculous!” tag at 366, because by the end you’ll have seen a newsreel about a milk-mushroom cloud, a creepy sex tree, the lead singer of an Estonian metal group slashing a power ballad from the (literal) bowels of a bear, and cinema’s one and only “Cowju” monster.

There isn’t much more to say about The Old Man Movie, ’cause you’ll know within minutes whether it’s right for you. The 2020 Fantasia Festival officially opened with some creepy-looking period drama set during plague years, but I’m thrilled to have kicked my remote coverage off right with a deep dive into a creamy bucket of inspired foolishness.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Scenes where one of the children left behind builds a mechanical cow to satisfy the hoard of thirsty customers or where characters must use the power of rock and roll to escape the colon of a giant bear that has just eaten them exemplifies this idea of a silly and bizarre concept coming together with immature and low-brow humor to create a truly hilarious set piece… It’s immature, it’s crass, it’s vulgar, and it’s all the better for it.” -Sean Coates, MovieBabble.com (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: HEARTBEEPS (1981)

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DIRECTED BY: Allan Arkush

FEATURING: Bernadette Peters, Andy Kaufman, Randy Quaid, Kenneth McMillan, and voices of Jack Carter and Ron Gans

PLOT: Two humanoid robots from the “GM” factory get distracted by the view of the outdoors seen from their storage repair bay, and head out to explore the woods.

COMMENTS: There is an insurmountable, glaring problem with the movie Heartbeeps, in the form of an animal designation by “Val” (Andy Kaufman). Ostensibly a stocks/bonds/accountant-bot, he misidentifies a forest predator that any stocks/bonds/account-bot (human or otherwise) would know: a bear. There is a bear, in a bear cave. Stocks/bonds/accountant-bots would know what a bear is: they would be programmed with the knowledge of a “Bear Market,” and as such have an awareness of the underlying animal. But, no: Val identifies the bear as a “camel.”

Were it not for this glaring flaw in the scriptwriting, Heartbeeps would… still be utterly terrible! My word, I cannot express how drawn-out this movie felt at only seventy-eight damn minutes. I have always been suspicious of Bernadette Peters (who played “Aqua”, the lady-bot), so now if anyone waxes eloquent about her in my presence, I’ll finally have some tangible ammo. I’d be hard on Andy Kaufman, too, but considering much of his shtick was pushing the audience to hate him, I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.

Let me see, let me see…something worthwhile in this wreck of robot-isms, family creation/bonding, junkyard nerds, and a psychotic ED-209/Dalek hybrid law-enforcement “Crimebuster” tank-bot… Ah yes, almost something: every time the synth music cranked up for the Crimebuster robot, it almost sounded like it might segue into ELO’s version of “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” But it never quite did, and so I was left disappointed—much like I was during the rest of the movie.

All right, there was one actually worthwhile element: Randy Quaid was pretty good, despite being limited to the secondary pursuit-of-wandering-robot-family story line. So, maybe eight salvageable minutes. But being 10% bearable is too low a bar; or as Val might say, “camelable”.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Heartbeeps… is a three-minute television sketch stretched to last nearly 90 unbearable minutes and fitted out with enough futuristic hardware to stock a short trailer for a science-fiction film.” -Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “John,” who, perhaps facetiously, called it “strongly recommended.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: TIME WARP: THE GREATEST CULT FILMS OF ALL TIME, VOL 3: COMEDY & CAMP (2020)

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DIRECTED BY: Danny Wolf

FEATURING: Joe Dante, John Waters, Illeana Douglas, Kevin Pollak

PLOT: The final installment of a three-part survey of cult films, focusing on comedies and films with a camp sensibility. (Volume 1 is reviewed here, Volume 2 here.)

Still from Time Warp Greatest Cult Movies of All Time Vol. 3: Comedy and Camp

COMMENTS: This omnibus collection of mini-documentaries confronts its most challenging subject matter here in the third act. In the case of comedy, the ability to make audiences laugh is subjective, underappreciated, and difficult to discuss without destroying the very qualities of humor. When it comes to discussing camp, the concept itself carries with it issues of gender, sexuality, race, and power. How would the producers of the Time Warp series address these important, sometimes even incendiary topics?

The answer is: pretty much not at all. Time Warp just wants to have fun and share some rabidly adored films. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But the fact that the filmmakers don’t even want to engage with some of these interesting topics means that the whole enterprise carries about as much weight as “VH-1’s 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders.”

There’s a pretty straightforward recipe for Time Warp’s method: play some clips from a film that took time to find its audience, get some of the movie’s participants to recount tales from the production, throw in some well-chosen clips and a little commentary from talking heads to explain why the film has a devoted following, and let simmer for 10 minutes. Then queue up another movie and do it all again. The panel of hosts clocks in barely 5 minutes of screen time, and offers virtually nothing in the way of analysis, context, or debate. So you just kind of have to trust that the producers have done their best in picking the comedies and camp-fests that best exemplify the label of “greatest cult films of all time.” Clerks? Yeah, I can see that. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls? Yes, I am totally convinced. Super Troopers? Um… sure, I guess.

That said, the list assembled here is pretty entertaining. These actors and directors are genuinely and justifiably proud of their work, and thrilled that it has managed to endure and thrive over the years. Diedrich Bader and Jim Gaffigan tell stories of having their famous lines quoted back to them. B-movie legends Erica Gavin and Mary Woronov offer gleefully unrestrained accounts of the conditions in which their movies were made. Jon Gries (whose name is misspelled in his chyron) is interviewed while holding a noisy parrot, and why not. And it’s a bittersweet surprise to see the late Fred Willard show up. Interspersed with well-chosen clips and some thoughtful commentary from critics and other professionals (gold medal to Amy Nicholson for her explanation as to why John Lazar should have become a legend), Vol. 3 makes a pretty strong case that any one of these films could easily merit its own feature-length documentary.

But it’s hard to be sure what distinguishes this from a video version of a Buzzfeed listicle. As my colleague Terri McSorley noted in reviewing Vol. 2, these selections are pretty anodyne. These 18 films are almost wholly American (only Monty Python and the Holy Grail can legitimately call itself a non-US film), largely recent (more than half are less than 30 years old), and predominantly white (actresses Shondrella Avery and Marcia McBroom and actor/director Jay Chandrasekhar help vary the palette). This roster feels like a good place to start the conversation about cult movies, but hardly the end-all be-all of the form.

Maybe I’m just jaded by the extensive efforts of this website to justify the films we crown. After all, consider the fact that Danny Peary needed three volumes to chronicle 200 films in his “Cult Movies” series, or that Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon accumulated 130 entries over the course of five years. To spend a decent amount of time with 47 films in less than six hours is really a solid achievement. But it still feels like the format makes it impossible to do much more than pay lip service to a handful of films that have earned passionate devotion, without examining the phenomenon or delving into why these films are such good ambassadors.

I’m including the complete list of films discussed in this volume, with links to our reviews. And it’s possibly instructive to compare our attention to campy vs. funny flicks. Guess a comedy’s got to work really hard to land on our radar.

* Part of the 366 Weird Movies Canon

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Wolf has a more interview-packed chapter to finish with, securing sunnier features to study, closing on a bright note of classic endeavors that provided a sense of danger, delirium, and human insight, brought to life by talented filmmakers. Any chance to spend time with these titles is most welcome.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com (contemporaneous)