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Sebastiano Montresor
Unique Italian director of very bizarre movies that typically mix together many incompatible genres, employing a free imagination, an irreverent sense of humor, exploitation, and a random, weird hodgepodge of ideas and elements for their own sake. He calls it 'Agrestic Cinema', from the word that means 'rural' since people want to return to a rural life of simpler and real images, without the artifice and distortion of cinema, therefore his films avoid the fake narrative and special effects, and embrace the bizarre and the artificial in a cheap, campy and obvious way, thereby exposing it clearly for all to see and enjoy. Or something to that effect. This kind of thinking exactly exemplifies his movies: A mixture of art-house, exploitation, nonsensical pseudo-intellectualism, self-deprecating humor, b-movie awfulness, and anything-goes weirdness. Which result in uniquely bizarre & entertaining, but limited, movies Montresor mixes another genre-salad here of film-noir, comic-book, sci-fi, b-movie and filth. K philosophizes about his smoking habit, survives an assassination attempt, and goes to investigate an Anti-Smoke Center, that uses 'accounts' (robots) to monitor their clients' smoking impulses. This organization sells clients' footage as TV entertainment, and seems to have ties with a serial killer and other criminal elements, including a Russian Czar. Did you get that? The accounts are anatomically correct humans that use sex to help rid of smoking addictions. The killer sews up his ex-girlfriend's intestines while K tracks her down, leading to some nasty Human Centipede-esque consequences. Add some random gun-fights, a boss-lady with a dress that fills the room, a mysterious cigarette pack, and other random elements, and you have another bizarre & entertaining Montresor creation. It's like someone spliced an Alain Resnais movie about memory with a random sexploitation movie after watching Existenz, all while under the influence, and with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Q is lost in alternate realities, one where she is under the influence of a substance that creates her reality, or working as an agent for the people that make the substance, or as an actress in an S&M movie, or living a normal life somewhere else. The movie throws around a lot of half-baked statements about memory, such as about substances that evoke memories that are actually images that existed in advance, or the merging of realities and memories, or specific rules about actions that cause a shift in reality sounding like leftovers from Inception, various random symptoms of the all-knowing and omnipotent substance, and a line from a screenplay repeated in the various realities under very different circumstances, including one where she is watching it take place in another movie. All of which is nonsense and random gobbledygook obviously just to have fun with this sub-genre. There are silly gun-fights where people can't die, a new way to rewind and play video cassettes using the female body, scattered nudity, and various other bizarre odds and ends, all in B&W with overlays of comic-book exclamations like 'OOOmmmphhh!'. A somewhat entertaining, but empty-headed, jarring mish-mash of genres. A very Maddin-esque, and entertainingly bizarre film with a logic of its own. It's this surreal logic as well as the humor and sex-oriented developments that make this Maddin-esque, as well as the fact that it is filmed in partial B&W or muted colors with intertitles and slapped-on sound effects. Try to follow this: Space-eggs, a sorceress with huge nails named Lena, and a mummy, all threaten humanity with a Soft Machine, some kind of virus that feeds on fear and imagination until the person is lost. Agent Danger is the hero, except he is plagued by a curvy, naked woman with a Dixan washing-powder box on her head who fulfills his every desire, and who turns out to be part of the virus. The mummy goes after Eva, Danger's partner, and Eva goes after a Sacred Chainsaw, but has to grapple with a riddle posed by a naked lady, while Dr. Munoz with his pig mask prepares his placebos, and has to deal with the Dixan woman who cheats at cards, and eggs coming out of people's bodies. And throw in an alien holding a hoe and a television over his head who doesn't seem to do anything. Entertaining, but it doesn't quite achieve something more than that. Ranks up there with an above-average Maddin movie. Unfortunately, this sequel forgoes what made its previous entry good, and focuses only on the weaker aspect: Adding tons of cheesy bizarre elements for their own sake without creating a surreal atmosphere. It's also in full color and contains lots of nonsensical dialog. A girl with scotch-tape on her nipples is given a leadership role over invisible, indestructible, nihilistic bikers by Death (who saved her life), except that she grows a moustache. A scientist is trying to save the Earth overcome with deserts, by connecting with a parallel earth and breeding members of both planets as well as with aliens to create super-beings. His assistant has a sexual thing with the moustached bike-leader and they discuss pubic hair extensively, a naked male alien appears with a TV on his head to give him the lottery numbers for financing his project, except that he has serious issues with pubic hair. There's also random S&M gear, insemination by bow and arrow, an invisible massacre with CGI blood, computer-game fights, and more bizarre silliness. Silly, practically x-rated strangeness that is mostly about the exploitation, rather than the more interesting surrealism of the previous movie. |
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