By refusing to distance itself from its targets, Mike Judge’s brand of satire risks being mistaken for what it’s satirizing. The Beavis and Butthead cartoons were erroneously dismissed as a mindless extension (rather than a complicit critique) of misdirected suburban youth, a fate that can similarly befall Idiocracy, Judge’s sophomore live-action comedy—or could have, that is, if the picture had ever been actually released. Brusquely dumped by its studio without even the courtesy of a trailer, this orphaned project has, as a result, acquired such an aura of lacerating subversion—the movie 20th Century Fox was too chickenshit to distribute!—that it is more than slightly disappointing to find, upon actual viewing, not much beyond a solid episode of Futurama. Give it props for nerve, however: A world where Starbucks has become synonymous with handjobs is surely beyond the reach of Fox’s other unceremoniously-axed vision of the future.
Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) is an ordinary Army schmoe picked as guinea pig in a government experiment. Along with mouthy streetwalker Rita (Maya Rudolph), he’s supposed to be cryogenically frozen for one year to test a hibernation program, but it isn’t until 2505 that the two are thawed out and released into a radically mutated world: The sheer proliferation of stupid people has gradually reversed the Darwinian process in the 500 years since, and the planet has become overrun with slack-jawed numbskulls barely able to string together the slangy insults the language has degenerated into. The President (Terry Alan Crews) is an ex-wrestler and former porn star, water has been replaced everywhere by sports drinks, and people are only too happy to accept, consume, and vegetate. Judge’s dystopia is a pop wasteland triggered by rampant ignorance (the very act of thinking is dubbed “faggy”) and then held down by corporate greed, a daring concept visualized in the picture’s most evocative shot, of Costco merchandise piled high toward the skies to suggest gargantuan towers ready to topple over.
As evident in the cubicle zombies of Office Space, Judge recognizes quotidian frustration and the small ways through which people revolt against it; working on a larger, broader scale in Idiocracy, however, his control quickly dissolves into a freefall of ideas and jokes, some hitting the bullseye and others landing on the floor with a thud. Judge is indifferent to anything resembling space or rhythm, yet the low-tech chintz of his approach ultimately enhances the caustic themes by making the futuristic atmosphere absurdly transparent; as with Godard’s Alphaville, we are already living in the future, for how wide a gap really separates Date Movie and Failure to Launch from Ass, the single, unchanging shot of a gassy, naked butt topping box-office charts in 2025? (The hero recalls a past when moviegoers “cared about whose ass it was, and why it was farting.”) Idiocracy is too scattershot and compromised to push the conceptual bleakness beyond the realm of lowbrow comedy, though Judge’s cultural ire remains bracing throughout: For all the characters’ slapsticky imbecility, Judge makes it clear that it’s their docile acceptance (read: political inactivity) that makes them true dumbasses.
“Night is Short, Walk on Girl” (2017) is a surreal romantic comedy anime directed by Masaaki Yuasa and based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Tomihiko Morimi. The plot follows the intertwined adventures of a college senior pursuing a fellow student he’s infatuated by over the course of a wild night and the various characters they help and and are assisted by in the process. Stylistically and philosophically, it’s a cross between Yuasa’s 2004 masterpiece Mind Game and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001). This anime is also notable for being oddly prophetic with its out of left field subplot in the third act involving a flu-like epidemic originating from a selfish and cynical old oligarch.
“Pootie Tang” (2001) is a comedy written and directed by Louis C.K. starring Lance Crouther, Chris Rock, Wanda Sykes, Jennifer Coolidge and Robert Vaughn. It’s a feature film adaptation of a comedy sketch from The Chris Rock Show and also features appearances by Kristen Bell, David Cross, Missy Elliot, Conan O’Brien, and Bob Costas. Louis C.K. has been in cultural exile for legitimate reasons and this early film of his was unanimously panned by film critics upon release. However, like even worse offenders such as Woody Allen, he was able to make people laugh (with collaboration of a talented cast and crew) and since none of the material in the film is related to what C.K. is now infamous for and he doesn’t appear in the film, it’s still possible to watch without constant reminding of the perversion of the director (whose actions aren’t as evil as Allen’s though still terrible). So I’d encourage anyone in the mood for a dumb comedy to check it out, especially those with an appreciation for blaxploitation b-movies and anti-corporate co-optation fables.
Irecently bombed a job interview that seemed a sure thing. It was a job I wanted and, even worse, a job I needed. I got the rejection call, then I missed my bus and had to wait in the rain. Then I lost my wallet. I felt like a real Munson. A born loser. Give me a wide berth.
So I went home and (re)watched the Farrelly brothers’ 1996 film Kingpin. I know what you’re thinking, it’s not the most obvious candidate for a feel good film. Actually, it may be one of the scuzziest films ever produced by a major studio. For the uninitiated, it tells the story of former “man-child” bowling prodigy Roy Munson (Woody Harrelson). An alcoholic, and devoid of his bowling hand after an unfortunate incident involving nemesis Ernie “Big Ern” McCraken (Bill Murray), Munson believes he’s found his ticket out of poverty with Ishmael (Randy Quaid), an Amish man hailing from rural Pennsylvania.
Subtlety isn’t this film’s strong point – most of the jokes concern some bodily function or another, or slapstick violence involving someone’s testicles, sometimes at the same time. What really sets it apart from other ’90s gross out comedies is how genuinely nasty the characters are. At the time of its release many critics, even the ones that liked it, described it as tasteless, vulgar and crude. In one of his most underrated performances, Harrelson is simply hilarious as the stupid, lazy and self-serving Munson.
Meanwhile, Bill Murray ad-libs almost every time he is on screen, giving a masterclass in smart arse performance as the womanising sleaze ball Ernie. Farrelly bros’ regular Rob Moran somehow manages to be even more unpleasant as a domestically abusive “bowling enthusiast” and sometime gangster called Stanley. Vanessa Angel’s Claudia is a born grifter and a bowling groupie. Even Ishmael is all too eager to abandon his Amish ways to enjoy the earthly pleasures of coffee and cigarettes. Along with a colourful supporting cast, this is one of the most glorious collections of freaks and weirdoes you’re ever likely to see on screen.
Kingpin also has a refreshing, freewheeling approach to genre. It’s a romantic comedy, a clash of cultures played for laughs, a buddy movie, a road movie and a underdog sports story all rolled into one 113-minute caper. It should also be noted that this is very much a film for adults, with explicitly adult themes. Yet it’s undercut with the universal message that, just maybe, everything will be okay in the end.
Ultimately, this is a story of redemption. A film that says you can always turn things around, that it’s always worth persevering. The 1990s and early 2000s saw a rise in “adult genres”, allowing filmmakers to take greater risks on mid-sized studio films. Kingpin is one of the finest examples of that trend, a film in which nobody involved is particularly interested in focus groups or target markets. It is what it is, warts and all.
After Kingpin, the Farrelly brothers began to scale back the sleaze, retreating to the safer shores of more formulaic rom-coms like There’s Something About Mary and Shallow Hal. But we’ll always have Munson to remind us that you never know when an Amish bowling prodigy might walk into your life and change everything.
As a young man, I felt that most people conceived of memory differently than I did, believing that failures of memory were errors of playback more than of recording. This idea, that memory works like a vinyl record in which everything we experience has its groove, supposes that it’s just a matter of knowing precisely where to put the needle down to replay the experience. In contrast, my younger self operated with the also erroneous belief that our memories are only hazy recordings of what we have somehow deemed worthy of recalling—that memory is like finding old semi-legible notes to ourselves written in an old notebook and trying to figure out what they mean.
It was with this theory of memory in mind that I had begun to consider Split, a movie that I thought I remembered renting from a video store up the street from my childhood home sometime around 1990. For over a decade, my occasional recollections of the film, often spaced years apart, might prompt a web search with no results, which would then introduce a sense of disorientation: I could not experience the instant gratification of finding some online mention that might confirm that what I remembered was real. Was Split (that was the name, right?) just an Easter Egg written into the script of my past—some sort of Berenstain (sic?) Bears thing? After all, and with all due respect to the films’ creators: if my adolescent mind was going to fabricate a memory, this is the sort of thing it would have come up with.
Originally released theatrically in 1989, and subsequently on VHS in 1991 by Futura Home Video, Split was reissued on DVD in 2018 by Verboden Video and is also available through Alamo Drafthouse’s streaming app, which is how I was able to confirm its existence and watch it again. Spoilers of the film follow, but only insofar as my synopsis is veridical to the plot—a nested disclaimer I wouldn’t need to make if the film were less fractured. Whether its cracked mirror nature is a deliberate mindfuck, the result of freshman filmmaking hamfistedness, or both, is not something I can tell you.
The film opens with Starker, our hero, wandering the streets of San Francisco. His ripped jeans show his bare rear end, and he’s wearing the sort of jagged and discolored false teeth that might have been advertised in old comic books alongside fake vomit and squirting flowers. He walks through a parking lot full of city buses, suddenly looking directly at the camera and yelling, “Stop following me. Leave me alone.” At first, we believe he is addressing us, the viewers, and breaking the fourth wall, but the camera cuts to two men dressed in a mid-‘80s Ivy League casual style—like they just walked out of a JC Penny catalog shoot. One sits at a computer; the other, older and mustachioed, is framed over his right shoulder. The younger man was surveilling Starker, and, as the dialogue reveals, the populace more broadly. He rewinds a recording of Starker’s camera-facing monologue and consults with the older agent, who says Starker is just crazy, but capitulates to the younger agent’s desire for further observation.
They run a face recognition program, presented as a musical montage, in which we see Starker’s head rendered as a 3D model as the camera hops around a black and white grid of similar hairless heads looking for a match. The sequence is still enthralling and somewhat hypnotic after 30 years. This isn’t a real 3D scan of a human head; rather it’s a painstakingly created proof of concept showing us what the technology that would soon become ubiquitous might look like. It dances. We hear pitch-shifted human voices of the sort we might associate with Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” and they create a synthetic and escalating harmonic pattern as the facial recognition nears completion.
This is the first of a few similarly rendered and soundtracked scenes that make Split worth more attention than it will ever receive. Analog processes are used to pre-mediate future digital operations, and there is a lo-fi poetry to them. These skies are the color of the ancestors of our flat-screen TVs, their saturations and frequency roll-off the stuff of a time when there really were dead channels, and tuned-in heads bobbed to the tangible yet barely audible click that the phone made just before it rang. Different media have different dispositions, and I explain these in the hope of being descriptive, while mindful of any argument about the veracity of concepts of authenticity.
Jittering a bit and mumbling, Starker heads into a diner and has a seat at a booth. He orders coffee from a waitress we’ll meet again later while speaking in a hybrid of fake European accents. Making a mess while examining a ketchup bottle, then pouring a packet of artificial sweetener onto the table and snorting it up his nose like cocaine, he talks to himself as the surrounding patrons begin to grow nervous. One of them gets up, takes him by the shoulder and leads him outside. At one point the camera lingers for a moment—letting us know that a brightly colored fabric pouch that Starker has left behind means something.
As the film progresses, we watch Starker give the agents surveilling him the slip. After being knocked out and having his jacket tagged with a tracking device, he discovers the device, removes his jacket, and changes clothes to elude his pursuers. To illustrate the process of his being tracked we are treated to a primitive color representation of a 3D vector map of the city. It’s like an isomorphic video game built of an extruded and pastel colored De Stijl painting that says, “Welcome to the control society. Now you’re playing with power.” The whole sequence provides a taste of the ‘90s to come, bringing to mind critiques of the automatic production of space and tactical media projects like the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s iSee and the performances of the Surveillance Camera Players.
Starker retrieves the brightly colored fabric pouch from the trash outside the diner. He dons a new—and more ridiculous—disguise: a stick-on mustache and goatee paired with wire-rimmed glasses, a brown turtleneck, and a beige corduroy sports coat. Setting the scene for an art gallery opening, a lovingly blocked shot of Starker creates the sort of recursion we would associate with a Magritte or Escher through a row of champagne flutes. The camera lingers over a series of paintings reminiscent of Basil Wolverton’s or Erol Otus’s more psychedelic work. Gallery patrons talk trash about the paintings and each other while Starker shoves food in his pockets—John Belushi in Animal House style—as a lovely minimal synth piece by Robert Shaw, the director’s brother and creator of the computer generated effects seen through the film, begins to warble and flutter.
Conversing with the fictional creator of these paintings (in reality those of writer/director Chris Shaw himself), a flat-topped New Waver wearing a mustard yellow dinner jacket over a t-shirt, our ludicrously costumed hero mentions preparing to “wake people up.” As they discuss the artwork hanging on the gallery walls, they stop to look at a storyboard—which we realize is the storyboard of the current scene. As the artist begins to realize the same truth, he becomes enraged. He screams, but none of the patrons seem to notice or care.
The film meanders for a while, if it was not already meandering. We see the junior and senior agents discuss an analysis that reveals no discernible patterns in Starker’s behavior, and they escalate their attempts to find him. Now at the artist’s apartment after the art opening, Starker is coaxed into revealing his plan: “All we have to do is change the program!” he says, later addressing the painter’s skepticism with, “I have the way. The way is here—in my package!” Removing the pouch from an inside coat pocket, Starker then opens it to reveal a white plastic disc approximately the size of his hand. The artist remarks that it resembles a urinal deodorizer.
Starker goes on a tear: “Science is a jealous god.” The mystical “separates us from robots.” “What I am holding is a mutant biological organism.” He almost immediately contradicts himself and says the substance is just a placebo because people require a scientific reason to believe in something and that that is necessary for “the dream” to have power. He explains that he is going to dose the city’s water supply with this substance and then it will spread around the world as people excrete it through their urine. Sort of an Amanita muscaria re-trip meets infrastructural schwerpunkt: The MacGuffin is Elan Vital as urinal cake.
A few meaning-laden but plot-insignificant scenes later, Starker heads back to the diner. After a scuffle in which he startles Susan (the waitress we saw earlier) and she kicks him to the ground, he pressures her to let him hide out at her place. Reasonably viewing him as a crazy and potentially dangerous creep, she declines his offer. But, after following her to her car, he convinces her to relent by claiming that he used to be a veterinarian and that he may be able to explain the lethargy of the cat in a carrier in her back seat. The absurdity of this caged animal suddenly appearing to move the plot along is rendered even more absurd when Susan later explains that she already understood that the cat was lethargic because she had had it sterilized earlier in the day. There is something so metaphorically overt about this detail that I can’t tell if it’s a bad joke or a catastrophic mistake. In any event, Starker seems no less concerned about going home with a woman that left a post-op feline in the back of a car all day than Susan is about bringing home a man who claimed he was being followed and sat in her place of business snorting Sweet and Low through a straw while ranting in a fake French accent.
I will omit a lot of interpersonal awkwardness, strange dialogue, and things that may be significant to alternate interpretations in revealing that Starker crashes at Susan’s place (Pop Tarts and chill). The time they spend together only serves to make her subsequent death at the hands of the Starker’s pursuers insufficiently tragic to motivate his subsequent attempt at revenge. Discovering her murder at the hands of the Izod-clad archons, Starker—now in drag and blackface—follows the agents back to their bosses’ HQ. They enter through a large circular metal door, and Starker, who they don’t realize is following behind, is unable to enter.
Their boss, perhaps too obviously referred to as the “Agency Director” in a film about agency panic, laments his “monstrous” newly installed cybernetic arm. In an abrupt spasm of the plot that seems to indicate that the Director’s body is deteriorating, a lab-coated flunky soothes him by explaining that he has created that ultimate mad-scientist expression of mind-body dualism: a machine that can transfer a mind into another body. The camera cuts to Starker, unseen on the Agency Director’s CCTV, who is loading a pistol. He tries to find a way to open the door while the minions inside hurry to find a body to receive the Agency Director’s mind. The agents open the door and grab Starker, having seemingly no idea that they have apprehended the very person they were relentlessly pursuing earlier. Starker drops his gun in the struggle, and they strap him to a chair and lower a brain transfer apparatus over his head.
“Let me out! It worked!” Starker says, but it’s not clear if the process was successful or if Starker is trying to convince the agents that it was. We’re left to wonder if this Camp Concentration-style mind transfer worked at all. It’s set up as a techgnostic climax that never happens, as if this cyberpunk yacht rock anthem makes it to the guitar solo just as the amp blows. The enraged Agency Director yells and tells his minions to get rid of “her.” They throw Starker out, not seeming to care that this random person just entered their secret bunker, and still not realizing that it was Starker himself.
The final quarter of the film involves agents pursuing Starker while the Agency Director’s body is gradually replaced with a mechanical one. The music is great here and evokes both a sort of period instrumental soft rock call-center hold music and early Chrome. Someone with disposable income should release a proper soundtrack.
Now looking like a lo-fi Robocop or a reject from a Shinya Tsukamoto film, the Agency Director’s cybernetic augmentations (or too on-the-nose self-amputations) have endowed him with new powers. He accesses satellites while issuing abrasively vocoded directives that also appear on a camera-facing screen, perhaps to ensure intelligibility to the audience. Starker’s location is revealed on a map as crescendoing lo-bit sound effects accompany synth pads and drums. “Eradicate!” The Agency Director yells in a Davros-like moment. The camera cuts to Starker hopping over fences and traversing a roadside embankment, while the Agency Director seems to glitch out as he installs one last bionic eye into his head.
Now fully metal-skinned and ambulatory, he walks over to a pool of water inside headquarters. Elsewhere in a meadow, Starker stumbles into a pool himself, grabbing the white disc he revealed earlier. Somehow, both pools have become a sort of fold in space—the Agency Director reaches through and grabs Starker. They struggle, each remaining primarily in their own physical location while their arms bend through each others’ space. Starker breaks free and releases the chemical in the white disc. White dust floats in the air.
The end credits roll (well, melt, actually) and no further explanation is given.
***
Ultimately, outside of the beauty of the graphics and soundtrack, the joy and frustration of Split is that we are confronted with something that we can’t quite classify. Foregrounds and backgrounds of plot and image oscillate and change places, but so do the cues we’d typically use to determine whether or not we approached the material as comic or tragic, accidental or deliberate, high brow or trash stratum.
Watching Split (had I really seen it before?) left me with the distinct feeling that I just missed five minutes of it without leaving my seat. Shaw never really makes it clear what we should focus on, and the director’s commentary on the DVD doesn’t provide much help. There Shaw describes the film as “a dream that doesn’t really explain itself.” He does, however, talk a bit about chaos—not just disorder, but the branch of mathematics we might associate with Lorenz, Mandelbrot, the butterfly effect, and fractals. While history might provide examples of minor perturbations in complex systems causing them to collapse or toggle into alternate states, it seems here that chaos is really just used as a sort of “magic” (in the same way that “science” is used in superhero comics) to attempt to explain how Starker has a capacity for action that exceeds that of the archons that surveil him.
Really thinking about agency as contingent and distributed means something quite different and perhaps far more unsettling. I’d like to tell you that Split reveals a negotiation between ideas of cowboy individualism on one end, and on the other an appreciation of the behavior of complex adaptive systems of which human “individuals” are both composed of and parts of. In reality, the film presents 20th century ideas of autonomy and individuality taken to such an extreme that they become a bit goofy. The film presents an inverse relationship between attachment and individuality. Take, for example, this dialogue between the two primary agents who discover and begin tracking Starker, in which the frustrated junior agent asks:
How can he make it? We all have something: our family, our friends, something, but he… he gets by on nothing. How can he be that free? No human needs, no weaknesses, no feelings, nothing.
As they discuss their pending report to the Agency Director, the senior agent explains that they will just have to tell it like it is:
No recurrent behavior, no attachments, no soft spots: superman.
So, the superman, the “free” man, is the man who cares about no one and has no routine. Attachment to others is presented in the same way that an ascetic might present an attachment to material things, but also as a commodity that the system of surveillance capitalism depicted in the film exploits. In the world of Split, one can either be “free” and thus detached from social forces one can’t actually detach from, or part of some sort of winkingly self-aware Matrix.
Many of the characters, including Susan, the painter, some street crazies, and the pursuing agents, seem to have some awareness that by participating in society they are being had. It’s as if they are wearing the glasses from They Live (1988) but realize that if they call attention to their alien overlords they will just be ignored anyway.
Shaw’s broader argument seems to be that as an “individual” who is truly “free,” Starker exists without a data-body; he’s an Übermensch who cannot be profiled or reduced to his so-called statistical self. As such, Starker stands outside of culture—the infrastructure of shared social and material substrates that both the one and the many call upon to act. But he still has the magic urinal cake, the fulcrum and lever by which he is super empowered.
Like a bad haircut, dosing the water supply with mutagenic hallucinogens seems cool in high school, when we are naive enough to dream that control is simply a matter of centralization and that shocking the dupes out of their somnambulism is something they will high five us for afterwards. But while portrayed as some sort of systems-disrupting black swan herald of a “new age,” maybe Starker—and the film itself—just represents a dance around the collapse of any sort of shared systems of meaning. After all, at the climactic moment when Starker releases the mutagen, the end credits roll. Were not shown what comes next—just the end of the now.
Chapiteau-show may be the most untypically Russian film to come out in years. It neither resembles one of those spiritually drenched films about characters in the search for the meaning of life; nor is it close of becoming a naturalistic drama about crooked cops and suburban violence. Chapiteau-show is colorful, and chaotic; there are musical interludes, and dances; characters dress up, or go naked. Chapiteau-show is unorthodox. But despite its almost four-hour length, the film is remarkably straightforward. There are four stories entitled love, friendship, respect, and collaboration. Each of these stories is about a young man trying to find more of the category that gives his story a title, but they end up where they began. What they were looking for was an illusion. Each episode closes in the circus called Chapiteau-show, where the protagonists are invited to give a show, and meet again – in a sort of therapeutic ritual – to acknowledge that the world is made up of theatrical tricks, dreams, and fantasies.
In the first part – love – Aleksei (Aleksei Podolsky), a balded gamer, goes on vacation with the beautiful actress Vera (Vera Strokova). Having only met on the internet, they try to get to know each other, but it quickly turns out that they are too different to match. In the second episode – friendship – a deaf baker leaves his deaf friends behind to join a group of boy-scouts. He wants to prove to himself that he can also hang out with people that are not like him. But his new friends have a different idea of “friendship.” Some of them turn out to be lovers, so when his old friends swear true brotherhood he begs on his knees for them to accept him again. The third episode – respect – is about a son’s relationship with his father. The depressed son, Petr Nikolaevich, tries to impress his father by going on a venturous hiking trip with him. But he doesn’t make it all the way, breaking off the trip during a hunt in the woods. A producer is in the midst of the last episode – collaboration. Sergei wants to make money with so-called “ersatz-stars.” But his idea fails when he hires a carpenter to represent Victor Tsoy. In the end the carpenter is hired by the Chapiteau-show, and the producer left off without ideas, stars, or money.
Chapiteau-show shows how people are unable to significantly change the specific environment they live in. The irony of the film is that while in each of the four episode someone sets out to go on a road-trip to find a meaning in life, the only meaning presented to him at end of the trip is right where he left off. The film’s four variations have a clear message. It doesn’t matter who one wants to be. It is who you are that matters. The encounter with the young men’s desires and dreams shows them who they really are. The deaf baker is only forced to think about friendship when he sees how other people behave that also define themselves as friends. But instead of holding on to his dream or destroying the dream of others, he simply appreciates his own reality. It is this notion, that makes Loban’s film so unique. It may have parallel realities as a plot subject, but not as as moral suggestion.
I recently wrote an article on how birch trees, in Russian cinema, represents spiritual longing, the search for truth, peace and harmony. There is one scene that takes place in a birch tree forest in Loban’s film, too. It is when Petr, in the respect episode, decides to abandon his father and his wish to impress him. One could say that the choice of the birch tree forest for this particular scene is ironic. Whereas in most Russian films, like in Zvyagintsev’s The Return, or Federochenko’s Silent Souls, the trees underline the spiritual force of the characters dreams, Loban turns the signification around and makes his character’s dream die in the same setting. But the point is, in my opinion, not to provide an anti-metaphor, or to deconstruct the symbols of Loban’s cultural forefathers. Loban acknowledges the artistic meaning of the trees. He doesn’t deny that dreams for peace and harmony exist. Indeed, the motivation for Petr to impress his father is similar to the narrative of Zvygintsev’s The Return. This film is also about the relationship between two boys and their father, and a voyage the three make into wilderness. Even though Zvyagintsev’s film is far from reconciling, the film lacks Loban’s realism. It has a deep nostalgic feel to it. The distance between father and sons is like a lament, like a a betrayal. Unlike Chapiteau-show, The Return hangs onto the dreams of reconciliation. Even if it there is no space for real harmony in his film, there are the birch trees, and the equilibrium of nature to tell us that harmony is possible and that violence, hatred, and angst are opposed to it.
Dreams are part of reality, they may even shape reality, but the naked, commonplace, boring reality is different. Where one may think that Loban’s characters celebrate their dreams in the performances of the Chapiteau-show circus, they really celebrate their dream’s farewell. Loban follows this plea aesthetically. His film is full of pop-cultural and sophisticated references from Marylin Monroe to the Pirates of the Caribbean; from Levi-Strauss, and Goethe to Kubrik and Lynch. But these citations don’t have a chaotic postmodern feel. They simply show, on an artistic level, what the characters already told us. It is impossible to escape imitation; to be more beautiful, fancy, glorious, and glamorous is part of life. But there is no need to be nostalgic when life still turns out to be the boring, commonplace reality one tried to escape.
It’s not often that you find a movie that is completely batshit crazy, all the way extra, yet entirely wholesome all in one package. Yet, this is what we have in PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN. Coated with ounces of blood, campy humor, and adolescent sassafras, audiences will be taken through a wackadoo journey that will have their heads spinning. While not quite the type of family film one would put on family night, there is enough family-fun goodness to add this to the list once all members are grown and prepared to have their eyeballs explode. By film’s end, you’ll find yourself unexpectedly wanting the best for everyone, even if it means pure, utter destruction is the end result.
Siblings Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) and Luke (Owen Myre) accidentally awaken an ancient alien overlord with no name from a millennia-long prison sentence. Why was this overlord imprisoned you ask? Well, he attempted to destroy the universe after working under an oppressive system that exploited his labor. While the creature has no chill, Mimi is undaunted, especially when it’s discovered that she is in possession of a magical amulet that enables her to force the creature to obey every single command she makes. Every. Single. Command. If you know children well, you know this is an absolutely awful idea.
They decide to give the evil creature the name Psycho Goreman (Matthew Ninaber), which they shorten to PG to keep things easier. PG’s re-appearance, though, triggers attention across the galaxy. There are those who want to destroy him, remembering the destruction he caused eons ago. And there are others who wish to help him, for a price that is. As the galaxy’s creatures start to zero in on this small Earth town, the fate of the galaxy may be up to Mimi and Luke. But first, we get a heavy dose of sitcom-style shenanigans, which sow the seeds of heartwarming payoff that we experience at the film’s end.
Where should anyone really begin when discussing this film? First off, PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN is a practical effects wet-dream. From slowly crawling brain-boys to a suicidal melty zombie police officer to every alien character having their own specific costume that almost reminds of classic Power Rangers episodes mixed with Doctor Who flair, there is so much craft-based love in this film that it made this reviewer positively giddy to see what we’d see next. Knowing the amount of work that went into the effects onscreen, it’s an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking in this day and age. But, in all honesty, it is so worth it to see it come to life onscreen. Forever pro-practical all the way!
With the practical effects aiming to seduce our hearts, we have to keep in mind that this is not all that writer-director Steven Kostanski is bringing to the table for us to consume in PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN. The writing and the delivery of performances from the actors really help to sell the chaos that is taking place onscreen. Matthew Ninaber’s PG’s sinister, almost deadpan delivery contrasts nicely against Nita-Josee Hanna’s manic over-the-top energy she delivers for Mimi. While this reviewer would have loved more levels in Hanna’s performance, the direction and delivery of her character performance still worked well for the over-the-top nature of the film. Adam Brooks is also a notable standout, with his comedic timing and everyman performance providing a much-needed contrast to the adventures of the children onscreen.
The script itself is hilarious and heartwarming, with lines about hunky boys coming out of PG’s mouth that would seem out of place in any other film. Yet, this is a heartwarming, tongue-in-cheek type of film that lends itself to these subtleties, where each character undergoes their own spiritual journey. Just, with wallops of blood, gore, and viscera. These little moments are subtly interwoven in, which maximizes their impact upon arrival due to the black comedy that Kostanski leans into. And, if that isn’t enough for you, the various homages paid to family-style shows in the script really help remind the viewer of the lengths this film will go to remind of what PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN is really about – love and finding your own family. Even if that family consists of a psychotic girl, a mom-turned-administrator of misguided justice, or – even – a bloodthirsty alien warlord.
Overall, PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN is a film that would make an epic Midnighter event at any film festival. It would have been a crowd-pleaser pre-COVID and it certainly will after. This reviewer would argue that it’s the alien warlord version of the little girl paired with bodyguard/former military turned babysitter trope. It’s heartwarming, bloody, incredibly fucked up, and extra as all get out. And, while at times the performances can be more one-note than not, the film just really works. It’s a family film gone wrong, which seems perfectly fitting for the age we’re in now.
Absurdity can take many different forms, particularly when it comes to artistic expression, with many individuals over the past century making their living from subverting the central tenets of reality. One such artist was Karen Shakhnazarov, whose ambition film Zerograd (Russian: Gorod Zero) holds the distinction of being one of the most bizarre works of cinema produced in the last few decades. A strange, hypnotic voyage into a darker version of the world, this film feels like the perverted offspring of David Lynch and Andrei Tarkovsky (especially if they collaborated on a twisted version of Alice in Wonderland), and I don’t think there is a single moment in this film that I was in complete awe of. Cinema is supposed to be challenging, and it doesn’t get more impenetrable than this, where Shakhnazarov takes us on a voyage that is somehow both hilarious and utterly terrifying, showing us a side of society that isn’t familiar to anything the best of us have experienced ourselves, but still manages to be as captivating as anything else. A deliriously work of experimental dark comedy, Zerograd is quite an achievement – and kudos has to go to Shakhnazarov for managing to construct something so bewildering, yet so deeply brilliant in both how it provokes certain ideas while remaining quite stable and consistent in its message (at least after we actually figure out what this film is attempting to convey), which creates a sensational piece of filmmaking that tests the boundaries of reality and presents the viewer with something so singularly unique, one would be forgiven for believing that Zerograd isn’t actually a film, but a fever-induced bout of delusions – and for all these reasons and more, we can easily proclaim this film as something of a hidden masterpiece, an outrageous, disconcerting surrealist odyssey that is as entertaining as it is wholly disruptive, both to the art form in which it was made and in terms of the broader socio-cultural implications embedded within it.
The film centres on Alexey Varakin (Leonid Filatov), a regular civil engineer who is sent to a small town in the middle of nowhere to meet with the owner of a factory to discuss some of the products they have been supplying. What was supposed to be a brief day-trip turns into what appears to be an eternity, especially when it becomes clear that everything isn’t what it seems in this mysterious countryside hamlet. His visit takes a horrifying turn when Alexey witnesses the suicide of a chef, which not only traumatizes him, but also places him at the centre of a conspiracy that points to him as the chief suspect, especially when the perspective of the event changes from suicide to a murder. What Alexey doesn’t realize is that he is stuck here – it is physically impossible for him to move beyond the borders of the town, since there are certain metaphysical forces keeping him there. This is made clear when he visits a museum, where the crotchety curator (Yevgeny Yevstigneyev) gives him a tour, taking him to subterranean levels and relaying the history of the town, which stretches all the way back to the formative years of the USSR and the rise of communism across the Soviet Union. Despite being a mild-mannered working-class man, Alexey is seen as something of an anomaly in this town, a stranger sent there by some celestial being to disrupt the lives of the residents – but it soon becomes clear that he’s not the one to fear, since a looming sense of foreboding lingers over the town, and causes the protagonist to reevaluate not only his own life, but the entire concept of reality in general, as everything around him is starting to point to the fact that everything Alexey knew to be true is quite possibly false information, and he himself is at risk of losing his identity as a whole if he doesn’t solve the problem before its too late.
Zerograd is a very different kind of film in every conceivable way. It positions itself as something of a mystery film, but one that dares to ask what happens when someone is investigating something and searching for the truth when every clue not only distances him further from the answer, but proves the incredulity of reality as a whole. This is a mystery film that struggles to even ask a coherent question – if anything, the answers are there, if only we knew where to start looking for them. Shakhnazarov masterfully constructs one of the most fascinating films of its era, a hauntingly dark comedy that eviscerates the very idea of plausibility, going beyond the confines of surrealism and becoming something else entirely, a kind of cold-blooded psychological horror that is more terrifying the more we realize how the sense of danger isn’t just constructed for dramatic purposes, but rather a fundamental aspect of the story. Modern audiences tend to equate the concept of surrealism with the idea of weird works that are artistically transgressive and show a lack of logic – and while this is often very true, its a baseline assessment that can’t apply particularly well to a work like Zerograd, which thrives on its ability to deconstruct nearly every sacrosanct truth while still retaining a coherent, concise narrative that goes to some bizarre narrative territory, but only for the sake of supporting its own ambitious ideas. There are many aspects of Zerograd that positively yearn to be discussed – and I’d expect some background knowledge of Soviet-era politics, while not essential in any way, would only enrich the experience, and help add context to a work of unhinged socio-cultural satire that masters the fine art of amusing the audience while gradually dismantling their deep-seated beliefs, to the point where we too get lost in this world, and begin to question our own individual realities.
We never quite know where this film is heading, and like any work of great surrealism, a clear sense of direction is entirely inconsequential. A brief roadmap of ideas is presented at the outset of Zerograd, but for the most part, it functions as a stream-of-consciousness odyssey that launches us into an uncanny world that feels familiar, but where the smallest inconsistencies prevent us from ever being at ease. The character of Alexey is our surrogate, an ordinary man thrown into these strange circumstances, and forced to navigate a side of the world he isn’t only unfamiliar with, but struggles to understand in any meaningful way. There is certainly some strange occurrences that take place throughout this film, with these events ranging from mildly amusing in how offbeat they are, to fully terrifying, especially when they hint at something far more sinister lurking beneath the surface. There’s quite a bit to digest when it comes to this film, where each individual idea can be unpacked – but as should be familiar to any devotee to the school of surrealism, the more you provoke a theme, the less effective it is. Zerograd works most effectively when each individual concept is taken as part of some larger whole, and while the details make for a fascinating film, the brilliance comes in the cumulative power, the gradually-compounding unearthliness that indicates that the eccentricities embedded within this story are not there merely for the sake of perplexing the audience, but rather to manipulate the entire concept of reality and everything it stands for, which is precisely what makes this such a remarkable film. It only makes the actual filmmaking more effective – Shakhnazarov constructs such a magnificent odyssey, where each frame is stunningly detailed, detached from reality in a way that doesn’t confuse us, but still points towards a more haunting alternative. There are some unforgettable images in this film, such as when the main character is served a cake that is modelled after his own head, or the striking final shot where he is finally able to makes his escape – and when taken alongside the brilliant story, we have a truly memorable work of speculative fiction.
Zerograd is a film in which the plot doesn’t revolve around the fact that nothing seems real – this is a film where we know for a fact that absolutely nothing we are seeing makes sense, but yet it is so grounded in some fundamentally realistic ideas, it never feels too far-fetched. There is an eerie sense of foreboding that intermingles with the darkly comic underpinnings to create quite a memorable piece that delves deeply into looking at the themes of identity and freedom, two concepts that are often explored in Soviet-era literature, albeit not in quite as bizarre a way as here. Shakhnazarov is a masterful filmmaker who produced something truly incredible with Zerograd, crafting a surreal odyssey that feels so compelling, even when it is clear that it is not afraid to venture beyond the confines of all known logic. This is the kind of film that people should be referring to when they’re describing the concept of a Kafka-esque story, since everything about Zerograd feels like something the esteemed but troubled author would write – a mysterious setting, a protagonist thrown into a world he doesn’t understand, eccentric characters that are so familiar yet so deeply unsettling, and a general sense of danger that never quite abates, constantly following the protagonist (and by extension, the audience) the further we journey through this strange world. This is a film that should be seen and discussed, even if the most insightful academics would have trouble coming to terms with the ideas Shakhnazarov uses throughout the film. In short, Zerograd is an astounding achievement, a bewildering but truly worthwhile absurdist masterpiece of Russian cinema that traverses reality and comes out of it stranger and more profoundly fascinating than ever before.
After the Crash 