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Ronny Carlsson
Swedish film-maker and underground-film reviewer that runs Film Bizarro. Admires Michael Todd Schneider and Shinya Tsukamoto, and this shows in his movies, using mostly mood and surrealism with some gore and nastiness to explore dark psychological subject matter in visual and atmospheric horror movies of varying lengths. A fearlessly experimental movie-maker finding his style. A half-length movie by Carlsson filmed with low-tech equipment. The cinematography suffers a bit as a result, but this look manages to add something to the atmosphere and the B&W is appropriate for the vibe as well. A girl is haunted by nightmares and decides to revisit a cabin in the woods, drawn to it by her troubled subconscious and vague memories. The movie starts very slowly, with the girl making laborious, puzzling and banal preparations, but it slowly builds up atmosphere for the second half which at first seems to be supernatural darkly-lit elusive horror in the vein of Blair Witch, but then goes all out into the surreal, bizarre, subconscious and symbolic as her repressed memories grow and erupt to take physical form. There is a laudable Tsukamoto vibe, some bizarre images in her nightmares are never explained which is good, and a girl called Alma hovers over her memories in a nod to Bergman. One important flaw is that she acts too calmly and flatly for such a troubled girl, and this doesn't align itself with the explosive ending (I expect Tsukamoto-esque slow-burning intensity when dealing with erupting repression). This one is almost all mystery and no revelation, and although the gripping atmosphere and puzzle sticks in our minds nicely, we need to understand what she is going through just a little bit better for a stronger impact, and I'd like to see this kind of thing with a little more meat to chew on afterwards. Nevertheless, an intriguing movie for people that enjoy compact surreal horror movies like Tsukamoto's Haze. If you're going to go way out on a limb in an uncompromising experiment, then you should be ready for a possible fall. This is a movie that I thought was very dull and pretentious on first viewing, but it's one of those movies that dangles the impenetrable secret of its metaphor right at the end, forcing you to re-evaluate what you saw and try to figure it out. In this 50-minute experiment, we see the sound literally turned down and then silently follow a girl wandering around a desolately empty snowy landscape collecting electrical and communication cords that she finds everywhere. This continues for most of the movie, until the dark, puzzling and surreal ending. Themes of loneliness in the modern world, disconnection from nature, and connectivity versus human connection come to mind, but the emerging metaphor is too pretentious, undeveloped and brief to supply more than tenuous fleeting thoughts. So, although this gets points for being uncompromising in its experiment and making me think for a few minutes, I can't say that I enjoyed watching it. 27-minute short about a wounded girl that wakes up in the forest and repeatedly staggers in a dream-like state to different directions, always encountering a mysterious person in a mask. Their symbolic, surreal encounters either end with longing and love, or lust and gore, as she deals with conflicting emotions and guilt. What happened to her becomes obvious within a few minutes, but the film is about the atmosphere and the crisp, beautiful, B&W high-contrast cinematography of the girl in the forest which starts like a meditative nature documentary and ends with symbolic gore. Unfortunately, the short doesn't develop beyond the initial simple idea and although the music sets the atmosphere well, most of the imagery is too repetitive and simple, and the shock tactics of the gore seem out of place in this case where, instead, I was expecting some dream-logic surrealism to better match the atmosphere and look of the film. 'The clutter in Ronny Carlsson's head' is the best description for this wildly experimental movie. This one can go from random footage of a distracting squirrel, to a bath full of blood, some necrophilia, a hilariously bizarre and splattery Cronenberg-esque short about breast cancer awareness, to Ronny discussing film-making with a friend. Officially the third in a trilogy after Video Geisteskrank and My Monster, dealing with the effect these movies have on a director of extreme movies this time, but it's really just the flushing of a frustrated mind into a camera. Just as we expected, a director of disturbing films really does keep dead bodies around for useful purposes, and violently abuses his actresses, until they fight back that is, naked or not. This is all caught on camera in home-made mockumentary Blair Witch style. Other scenes include some nasty gore involving a video cable, a rape victim talking about her experience which you'll have to watch to figure out the relevance, and the only instance I know of where a black screen is actually funny. The soundtrack is some very abrasive noise. Feels more like a collection of extras than a movie even though the theme is 'a warped and annoyed director's mind', but it's an entertaining one-time watch. I don't usually review obscure shorts but these two combine to create a 50 minute experience. Created by Ronny Carlsson from filmbizarro.com and released on DVD along with some earlier shorts under the name of 'Experimental Films From The Lense of a Shitty Camcorder'. These two shorts dive into the mind of a young man who has seen one too many sick movies and has created a to-do list of sick things to try while wearing a pig mask, like puking on girls and torturing them. He kidnaps a girl, performs various nasty tortures August-Underground style, which alone wouldn't be interesting, but then My Monster dives deeper into his mind using surrealism, exploring his warped feelings for the girl he tortured, his disturbed mind overrun by the TV, leading to a scene where he jams the TV socket into his arm. All of this is filmed using avant-garde, gritty, and experimental cinematography with numerous color filters, grainy footage, hand-held cameras, strange random imagery, etc. all creating a celluloid and grainy TV world of sick, Videodrome-esque mind-reality permanently damaged by movies. This one feels like a short padded out to a full-length feature, or rather like several visual ideas and shorts on a single theme put together awkwardly, focusing much more on experimental imagery and sound rather than on well-developed content. The theme is the obsession of a girl over pregnancy to the point of madness, getting herself worked up over a desire to get pregnant combined with fears of abortion and motherhood, all of which turn her world increasingly surreal with nightmares. Early 'meditative' scenes attempt to set the mood and character, and these gradually turn increasingly surreal or symbolic, often involving a closed mysterious box in the forest, or nightmarish superimposed scenes of birth, fetuses and blood. For some unknown reason there is a reference to the short film 'Récompence'. Many chapters and scenes in this experimental film seem to go on forever, padded without a strong point to make, although there is the occasional scene that is rather effective in its surreal nightmarish quality, with the sound and imagery combining nicely. Overall, however, it's an experiment lacking a strong vision and story to tell. |
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