Tag Archives: Fantasy

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CAPSULE: FRECKLED MAX AND THE SPOOKS (1987)

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Pehavý Max a strašidlá

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DIRECTED BY: Juraj Jakubisko

FEATURING: , , Ferdinand Mayne, Gerhardt Karzel, Martin Hrebeň, Barbara De Rossi, Jacques Herlin, Mercedes Sampietro, Flavio Bucci, Milan Lasica, Julius Satinsky

PLOT: Orphan Max ditches the traveling circus and ends up at a castle just as Victor Frankenstein is preparing to animate his new creation, “Albert”; Count Dracula, water and fire spirits, Igor, the White Lady, and the Wolfman also haunt the premises.

Still from Freckled Max and the Spooks (1987)

COMMENTS: At first glance, the clunkily-titled Freckled Max and the Spooks hits all the marks as more-than-decent family entertainment, with a plucky orphan who falls in with a bevy of misfit monsters, leading to wacky adventures. Those of a certain age (OK, 60+) may be reminded of the Saturday morning show “Monster Squad” where the “Love Boat”‘s Fred Grandy solved mysteries with Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolfman. Young Frankenstein and 1972’s The Girl on a Broomstick are also similar in tone. Freckled Max‘s comedy isn’t quite as broad as those, but there is a fair amount of slapstick, mainly involving Martin Hrebeň’s monster Albert, in a performance that’s sort of a proto-Jason Segel. A slight element of European bawdiness intrudes from time to time, but the characters have an underlying sweetness—as well as a bittersweet sadness, notably in the backstories of Igor and The White Lady. As Count Dracula tells Max, “When someone ends up alone, he turns into a ghost.”

Freckled Max is stacked with a cast of stellar actors: Lindfors, Constantine, Mayne (who also played a vampire in The Fearless Vampire Killers), and familiar faces from Italian (De Rossi and Bucci) and Czech cinema (Lasica and Satinsky) cinema. If there’s one criticism about the film, it’s that you wish that you could spend more time with the characters. Freckled Max is a drastically reduced theatrical version of a 7-episode Czech miniseries, “Frankenstein’s Aunt” based on a book by Allan Rune Petterson. That it holds up as a satisfying viewing experience even in its truncated version is a testament to the skill of everyone involved.

Juraj Jakubisko was an acclaimed director (1969’s Birds, Orphans and Fools) who, like most of his contemporaries who remained in the country after the post-Prague Spring crackdown, fell into disfavor. When allowed to make films, their projects skewed towards non-problematic fare: documentaries or family-friendly subjects like fairy tales. Jakubisko did a magical realist miniseries, “The Millennial Bee” (1983, based on a novel by Peter Jaroš), which also got a reduced theatrical version, and the feature The Feather Fairy (1985, based on the Brothers Grimm tale “Mother Hulda” and starring .)

Restored by the Slovak Film Institute, Freckled Max gets its first ever U.S. Blu-ray release via Deaf Crocodile in limited and standard editions. Extras include a commentary by Samm Deighan and a visual essay “Frankenstein’s Faster” by Ryan Verrill and Dr. Will Dobson. Deighan digs into the differences between the mini-series and movie while Verill and Dobson examine the source material. The disc also includes interviews with director of photography Jan Duris, assistant director Petra Galkova, and director of the Slovak Film Institute Rastislav Steranka; a short (5 minutes) behind the scenes featurette; and “Portrait of a Film Director,” a 45 minute documentary about Jakubisko. The limited edition comes in a slipcase with art by Beth Morris and a booklet with essays by writers Walter Chaw and Stephen Peros.

The full miniseries got a DVD release in Germany (“Frankenstein’s Tante”), but with no English subtitles. It is not currently on any streaming services. However, the curious, motivated, and bilingual might find a Spanish language version (“La Tia de Frankenstein”) out on the interwebs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a surreal fantasy film that’s reminiscent of Federico Fellini and Terry Gilliam.”–Michael Den Boer, 10K Bullets (Blu-ray)

Freckled Max And The Spooks [Blu-ray]

Freckled Max And The Spooks [Blu-ray]
  • Director Juraj Jakubisko's Gothic horror comedy about an orphan who hides out in Frankenstein's castle with a lovable rogues' gallery of monsters
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FELIX THE CAT: THE MOVIE (1988)

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DIRECTED BY: Tibor Hernádi

FEATURING THE VOICES OF: David Kolin, Chris Phillips, Maureen O’Connell, Peter Newman, Alice Playten

PLOT: When Princess Oriana is kidnapped by the sinister Duke of Zill, only Felix the Cat and his magical bag of tricks can save the day—so long as his arch-frenemy The Professor doesn’t interfere.

COMMENTS: It’s fun to imagine a Sunset Boulevard scenario wherein Felix the Cat hearkens back to better times, angrily reminding anyone who will listen that, back in his heyday, he was bigger than Mickey Mouse. He’d go on about how he moved so much merchandise in the silent era, but faltered when talkies came in. How he got his groove back when television snapped him up, jump-starting his career with a voice, new supporting characters, the introduction of his iconic bag of tricks, and an insidiously infectious theme song. How the lack of a deep-pocketed studio to protect him and dust him off every so often (like that infernal mouse had) left him floundering, and how his chief animator and owner of his copyright, Joe Oriolo (and later Joe’s son Don), struggled to keep Felix in the game with ever-growing levels of desperation, including a bizarre misguided attempt at a live-action series and even a Baby Felix cartoon made exclusively for Japanese television. And here’s where Felix would ball up his fist and pound it on the table, lamenting that if anyone knows him at all today, it’s as a clock.

Maybe that can be the scenario for Felix’s next feature. For now, we’re stuck with this one, probably his thirstiest bid at a revival. Felix is a simple character, a monochromatic feline with a classic stretch-and-squash movement and a seeming immunity to misfortune. But to wring 80 minutes out of him, it’s essential to complicate, complicate, complicate, first with a prologue presenting a proto-CG version of Felix’s disembodied head, then by launching an elaborate plot to save a fairy-tale kingdom from an evil overlord, with a panoply of odd characters including a heavily rotoscoped princess, a gun-toting yokel, a host of psychedelic wildlife, and an army of robot trash cans led by what appears to be an ape with a bubble for a head.

The animation, from Hungary’s Pannonia Studio, is wildly erratic, veering from elaborately detailed landscapes and imaginative creature designs to obvious looped animations and jumpy movement. Case in point: Princess Oriana is sometimes shown in the kind of fine detail one associates with the Disney Renaissance, but then is seen in a herky-jerky, poorly drawn style one associates with direct-to-truck-stop mockbusters. But even at its best, the animators’ work is undercut by a script that spends inordinate amounts of time on exposition and setup, forcing the artists to vamp to fill time. In fact, Felix the Movie is almost allergic to anything that stays focused on the plot. The vile Duke is supposedly seeking to conquer the kingdom as revenge against the Princess, but instead of showing us his schemes, we watch him make her do interpretive dance. Numerous scenes are dedicated solely to watching one cartoon beast or another go about their business, even while we’re aware of an impending danger happening somewhere way offscreen. Even the musical numbers seem completely separate from the proceedings, such as a showcase for a family of foxes who have nothing to do with anything, or an extended dance break for a pair of rat/lizard hybrids. (This latter sequence lasts for more than two minutes, almost 3% of the film’s runtime.)

Adding to the muddle is the decision to include two of Felix’s foes from the TV series, the nefarious Professor and his hyper-nerdy nephew Poindexter. They have the potential to throw another obstacle in Felix’s path, but they spend most of the film trailing behind their quarry and end up helping once they finally catch up. One presumes they represent the movie’s attempt to cater to Felix nostalgists, but they’re meaningless to the young, adventure-hungry kids who are the most likely audience for this kind of thing. The movie aims for everyone and hits no one.

Given how uninterested it is in anything logical and linear, it’s fitting that the movie just sort of stops, with Felix saving the day by throwing a book at a giant robot. (That’s literally the whole solution. Deus ex libro. He doesn’t even use the bag of tricks.) Felix the Cat: The Movie should have been a chance for the once-famous feline to get his groove back, but the film never finds a way to let him be the hero he once was, and it doesn’t have a solid idea of what it wants to do instead. So somebody buy the old guy another drink and let him rant and rave about his cruel fate. He deserves another shot at the big time, and this ain’t it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The original Felix cartoons were always surreal in some way, but not in a studied manner, more of an organic, natural development out of the character’s quirks and goodnatured ingenuity. Here, however, there is an attempt to plonk him down into a world that is already weird, almost a post-apocalyptic version of a fairytale land that suffers too many digressions into strangeness for its own sake without furthering the plot… You can see it entertaining the very young who are not aware of Felix’s history, but as a tribute to him it falls flat when it really could have been any generic character starring here: he doesn’t even take off his tail and use it as a cane.” Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

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

FELIX THE CAT The Movie DVD (USA Format) 2003

FELIX THE CAT The Movie DVD (USA Format) 2003
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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE GOLDEN FERN (1963)

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Zlaté kapradí

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DIRECTED BY: Jiří Weiss

FEATURING: Vít Olmer, Karla Chadimová, Daniela Smutná

PLOT: When a lazy and amorous shepherd steals a golden fern bough from deep in a malevolent forest, a mysterious young woman appears begging him to return it lest dire consequences befall him.

COMMENTS: If fairy tales have taught us anything, it’s that going into the woods at night can be dangerous. The Golden Fern ominously begins in medias res in a dark and moonlit forest. A handsome young man races through the trees; it seems like he’s running from someone, but then he stumbles upon a grove of ferns and triumphantly picks the largest frond. He’s immediately attacked by a flock of angry birds whose screeching fills the air. He fights them off and manages to escape back to his humble peasant’s hut, where he gloats over his trophy. Was this an admirable act of bravery or simply foolish bravado?

There are no easy answers in Weiss’ film, but when a sudden knock sounds at the door, the latter seems more likely. He opens the door and at first only a shadowy figure appears, barely visible in the distance. “Give it back,” a voice urges him. “Give back the fern.”

Our protagonist, Jura (Olmer), hesitates to comply. He wants to know who would command him. Eventually the speaker reveals themselves, and to his surprised delight, the forbidding figure turns out to be a very pretty blonde (Chadimová). This being a fairy tale, he’s not going to give back the fern unless she kisses him first. She continues to insist he must give it back, but he ignores her warnings, and she relents to his clumsy overtures.

What seems like a poor start to a relationship briefly becomes a romantic idyll. The girl, whom Jura calls “Lysanka” because she has no other name, falls in love with him. In her devotion, she steadfastly protects him from the ambiguous influence of the golden fern, which he, of course, fails to return.

Fern was made at the beginning of the , although Weiss represents an older generation than the young film makers who would make names for themselves as part of the innovative and rebellious movement that yielded the Canonically Weird gems The Cremator,  Daisies, and A Report on the Party and Guests. While not quite as anarchic and freewheeling, Weiss displays the absurdist and irreverent black humor that’s a common denominator among Czech directors. This is a pretty dark fairy tale; however, the only truly weird element is the fern itself (unfortunately glimpsed in action in only one scene). Half plant, half beast, and blossoming with mysterious flowers before sprouting a tentacular vine replete with talon-like thorns, this fern looks like a worthy adversary to a monster from one of ‘s cheapo creature features (and I mean that as a complement). In a suspenseful and creepy scene, Lysanka fights the fern in what becomes a battle of wills. She emerges victorious, the possessor of one of its golden seeds.

The clever mix of basic low-budget effects utilized throughout the film enhance the otherworldly atmosphere, and the black and white cinematography fits the ominous tone. Lysanka never explains where she came from or who exactly she is; her pleas on behalf of the fern make her initially appear as its ally, until it reveals itself to be an opposing force. Jura remains oblivious of the magical powers surrounding him, simply losing himself in Lysanka’s love and beauty.

After defeating the golden fern, Lysanka sews the golden seed into a seam in Jura’s shirt. When he gets drunk at a tavern and ends up shanghaied into the army, it spells the end of their affair. She begs him to never exchange the shirt for another. He promises he won’t, but it’s Jura’s inability to follow good advice that landed him in this dire situation in the first place.

The setting then shifts to the frontier of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, where the Empress’ forces are at war with the Turkish military. This second half of the film has prompted comparisons to  The Saragossa Manuscript , but Golden Fern never reaches levels of surrealism. After a somewhat minor act of courage (literally capturing a flag from the enemy), the general promotes Jura to officer.

While the upper ranks continue to ridicule him for his slow-witted peasant ways, Jura unwisely begins a flirtation with the general’s gorgeous and aloof daughter (Smutná). First inspired by the possibility that she’ll convince her father to release him from his military service so he can return to Lysanka, she predictably beguiles Jura into attempting a series of increasingly dangerous tasks.

Learning from a fortune teller how to capture the general’s daughter’s heart, Jura risks his life to infiltrate the enemy camp. When he’s caught half-dead and disguised as a Turk after completing his mission, his commanders immediately assume Jura has turned traitor. The general’s daughter coldly abandons to him his fate as the gears of military justice grind into action; laws which seem as cruel and arbitrary as the mysterious rules of the forest. Even in a world of magic ferns and fae spirits, people still kill each other, mock each other, and fall in love—human nature is both triumph and tragedy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Czech writer-director Jiří Weiss’s The Golden Fern is a dark and haunting fairy tale, albeit one that’s grounded in an earthy naturalism. Rather than lean heavily into the surreal, as these films often do, Weiss subtly weaves elements of the magical or miraculous into an otherwise straightforward narrative, thereby cannily introducing aspects of the uncanny.”–Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine (Blu-ray)

The Golden Fern [Blu-ray]

The Golden Fern [Blu-ray]
  • Czech director Jiří Weiss's breathtaking B&W fantasy about a stunning young forest fairy who falls in love with a handsome but selfish shepherd
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LILAC BALL (1987)

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Лиловый шар

Liloviy shar, AKA Purple Ball

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DIRECTED BY: Pavel Arsenov

FEATURING: Natalya Guseva, Vyacheslav Nevinnyy, Vyacheslav Baranov, Boris Shcherbakov

PLOT: In the year 2087, a research spacecraft discovers the wreck of “The Dark Wanderer,” a legendary doomed ship containing mysterious purple spheres.

COMMENTS: Enmity is nasty business, and were it not for one plucky little girl, the future of mankind would fall to self-destruction. So we learn in Arsenov’s science-fiction/fantasy outing, Lilac Ball. It covers a span in time from a century into mankind’s future—when computerized intelligence facilitates deep-space exploration—to the ancient past, the time of Legends, wherein man and myth coexisted (if not in harmony, then at least side by side). In those days, myriad dangers arose for the common peasant by way of the dark sorcery of Baba Yaga and her three sons.

Events kick off in grand future style. Captain Green, the commander of the Pegasus who speaks nearly as mechanically as the ship’s computer, is tasked with escorting Professor Seleznyov and his daughter Alice to a research vacation. All of a sudden, the ship’s sensors detect an anomaly: a craft too large and too strange to be found in the database. Behold, it is The Dark Wanderer, and its floating ruins contain dispiriting records of the crew’s fate, a fair number of vitreous spheres, and the lovable four-armed archaeologist, Gromozeka. The spheres contain a horrible doom, but little Alice knows just where on Earth to find the purple ball secreted—thousands of years in the past—by the Dark Wanderer’s crew to destroy humankind at just the right time.

This movie is not without its charm, and its seventy-odd-minutes breeze by on the winds of adventure and whimsy. The first act, very much typical science fiction, is well executed; the filmmakers push their skills and budget to the limit. The Pegasus’ interior design is refreshingly dissimilar from most outings of the genre, with an open-plan cockpit/convening area (tea is served often) featuring computer consoles, greenery, short staircases, and a central table for four. Zipping back thousands of years into the past—I had had no inkling of a time machine until Alice mentions it for the purposes of returning to the “Era of Legends”—is rather less satisfying, albeit involving some endearing puppetry. (The baby roc is cute—and wholly undeserving of its fate at the hands of the Wanderer’s evil crew.)

Arsenov appears to aim for an all-the-young-adult-adventure-tropes experience, but his reach, alas, exceeds his grasp. Still, it is impossible to feel hostile toward such winsome narrative meanderings of future and past.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Curious mash-up of fantasy and science-fiction from the Soviet Union…  a strange mixture of mythologies, to be sure; part Sinbad, part fairytale, part Wizard of Oz. All in a film whose first act was straight science-fiction! There’s nothing wrong with blending genres, of course, but it’s a tricky business, and the disconnect between the two aspects of the story here is a little jarring, to say the least.” — Mark David Welsh

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan after seeing some clips and remarking that they “resemble something that AI watched in its early stages and picked up on.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

The Purple Ball / Lilac Ball / Liloviy shar (English Subtitles)

The Purple Ball / Lilac Ball / Liloviy shar (English Subtitles)
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List Candidates

SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UNIVERSE 25 (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Richard Melkonian

FEATURING: Giacomo Gex, Jacob Meadows

PLOT: Mott is directed to find a saint and a sacrificial lamb before the world ends this coming Sunday; Jacob, a postman who discovers Mott’s chronicle in the dead-letter office, is uncertain of what to make of the revelation.

Still from Universe 25 (2025)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Melkonian draws deeply from the creative veins tapped by , , and —and so has devised an appropriately odd-and-arty outing.

COMMENTS: Richard Melkonian tells his story his way. If this means using an epistolary structure, with post office banter interrupting the flow, so be it. If this means slapping in a esque dream sequence, so be it. And if this means a West End-style musical duet between an angel and a tragic actress, so be it. While his inspirations are apparent throughout Universe 25, the film is his own, and features a singular sound and visual design. Presuming Melkonian—who serves as writer, director, and composer here—further develops his style, he has the advantage that his last name already reads as an adjective.

Beginning with some gritty back alleys in a gritty style, Universe 25 appears to concern a young postman by the name of Jacob. After a hard morning’s deliveries, his supervisor tasks him with sifting through some undeliverables. Find out if a letter or parcel might, perhaps, have its destination determined despite the “lost post” designation, and if not, affix the “Bump It” sticker after two weeks, and… bump it. Jacob is in no mood for this drudgery, and he slides the dead letters onto the floor. One oddly-addressed item catches his eye, however, and he finds himself reading the handwritten observations of a future super intelligence (a “Level Three” one), who has recently appeared in our time—emerging in a neon green glow upon a canal bridge—to await instructions from his creator. These turned out to be: find the saint; find the lamb; and compose a scroll to account for his efforts.

Mott, the super intelligence, manifests as a quietly genial human. He hears people’s prayers, and offers guidance to those who accept his divine origins. His powers work on a traumatized mother unable to acknowledge her son has gone (grown up or passed away in infancy, it is unclear). They do not work in the case of the man he identifies as the saint. This angel—or future intelligence—follows the saint, from his choreography studio, to the saint’s home in Romania, before returning home after a cryptic sequence involving Mott’s master, a lamb, and a dilapidated church.

This is all the stuff of high-religious meditation, depicted in unsightly earth form. Universe 25‘s sound alternately disorients and grounds the listener, while the nigh-ubiquitous shadows tend to black out the eyes of the performers. But we’re never locked into a trying, portentous ordeal: at the drop of a hat, we zip back to Jacob as he’s interrupted by co-workers. In the end, Mott’s fate is as unexplained as his actual origins: is he an angel? an intelligence? a wing-nut? Would all this be explained if Jacob just answered the desk phone? And while we’re asking questions, just who are this pair of Euro-hipsters who keep popping up?

Like Heaven, the future, and the lives of others: we will never know.