The Lunatics I attended the Slovak premiere (February 22nd) of Jan Svankmajer's latest cinematic work, the movie called Lunatics (ílení). Jan Svankmajer, the famed surrealist artist/animator/filmmaker is back in full force with a generic horror film with "all the deficiencies the genre entails". Though the movie is mainly live actors it contains the trademark surreal animations you would come to expect from Svankmajer. These animations (crawling flesh, rolling eyeballs, bovine tongues dancing in beer glasses, you name it, it's there) cut in between scenes fulfill the role of visual music and help illustrate the progress of madness on screen.
Svankmajer's intro really says it all; this philosophical horror movie is "an infantile homage to the writings of Edgar Alan Poe" with "a few subversive ideas borrowed from Marquis de Sade". The movie's basic premise concerns the great ideological dispute of how best to run a lunatic asylum on the one hand you have the concept of total freedom and on the other the conservative ideal of discipline and punishment. According to Svankmajer there is a third way that manages to combine all the negative aspects of these two approaches and it is the reality we live in...
The movie starts a bit slowly, the pacing is really uneven and could have used a bit of editing, but then Svankmajer wouldn't have been able to let the Marquis (the impeccable Jan Triska) recite director's favourite "blasphemous" passages from de Sade. Anyway the young hero Berlot suffers from live nightmares (in which lunatic asylum workers try to put him in a straight jacket) that end in destruction of all furniture around him; he befriends the Marquis who pays for the damage in the inn where Berlot spend the night on his way from his mother's funeral. After Berlot witnesses Marquise's libertine ways, sadomasochistic orgies, blasphemies, cataleptic shock and a live burial he is nonplussed enough to be convinced by Marquis that the best way to face his own fears of lunatic asylum is to submit himself to one, run by Marquise's friend Dr. Murlloppe. In the asylum run according to the principles of absolute freedom (patients running around with scissors, bobsledding down the stairs etc) he meets the girl who involuntary took part in Marquise's sex orgies and she tells him that Marquise and Dr. Murlloppe were patients in the asylum as well but led a revolt against the reign of the psychiatrist Dr. Coulmiere (great Slovak actor Martin Huba), who remains trapped in the asylum's basement along with his staff... At this point the movie has griped you and doesn't let go until the predictable but great end. All in all, this is a great horror movie, if by horror you mean a bizarre and surreal grotesque... you will laugh and marvel and think, because this is the type of a movie that allows you to do just that.
9/10.
Svankmajer's intro really says it all; this philosophical horror movie is "an infantile homage to the writings of Edgar Alan Poe" with "a few subversive ideas borrowed from Marquis de Sade". The movie's basic premise concerns the great ideological dispute of how best to run a lunatic asylum on the one hand you have the concept of total freedom and on the other the conservative ideal of discipline and punishment. According to Svankmajer there is a third way that manages to combine all the negative aspects of these two approaches and it is the reality we live in...
The movie starts a bit slowly, the pacing is really uneven and could have used a bit of editing, but then Svankmajer wouldn't have been able to let the Marquis (the impeccable Jan Triska) recite director's favourite "blasphemous" passages from de Sade. Anyway the young hero Berlot suffers from live nightmares (in which lunatic asylum workers try to put him in a straight jacket) that end in destruction of all furniture around him; he befriends the Marquis who pays for the damage in the inn where Berlot spend the night on his way from his mother's funeral. After Berlot witnesses Marquise's libertine ways, sadomasochistic orgies, blasphemies, cataleptic shock and a live burial he is nonplussed enough to be convinced by Marquis that the best way to face his own fears of lunatic asylum is to submit himself to one, run by Marquise's friend Dr. Murlloppe. In the asylum run according to the principles of absolute freedom (patients running around with scissors, bobsledding down the stairs etc) he meets the girl who involuntary took part in Marquise's sex orgies and she tells him that Marquise and Dr. Murlloppe were patients in the asylum as well but led a revolt against the reign of the psychiatrist Dr. Coulmiere (great Slovak actor Martin Huba), who remains trapped in the asylum's basement along with his staff... At this point the movie has griped you and doesn't let go until the predictable but great end. All in all, this is a great horror movie, if by horror you mean a bizarre and surreal grotesque... you will laugh and marvel and think, because this is the type of a movie that allows you to do just that.
9/10.