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Damon Packard
A strange underground film-maker famous for distributing thousands of free copies of his Reflections of Evil to various outlets and celebrities. A bitter man who frequently attacks celebrity film-makers like Spielberg and Lucas for their undeserved success, loves the fantasy and science fiction genre, and makes extremely whimsical, silly but atmospheric and incoherent movies, like a very undisciplined manic-depressive man-child on drugs. One preoccupation seems to be to use/steal/borrow footage and music from other movies and trailers, splicing them together with his own footage to create something different, or releasing 'reduxed' personal versions of movies that he felt needed improvement. Some of his movies merely contain random incoherent snippets of 80s and 90s tropes, like a montage of sketches, impressions or rants on popular culture rather than building a coherent plot. Reviewed until 2016. An '18 minute trailer for an 18-hour epic' involving demons, sorcerers, aliens, action, car-chases and whatnot, with a unique approach of combining silly slapstick and sound effects with chaotic demonic splatter, action, fantasy and psychedelic sound and atmosphere. It teases with low-budget epic horror, snippets of an evil apocalypse and demonic atmosphere, but Packard is just having his usual fun with a typically slapdash collage of whims and fantasies, all acted to comical effect. Included as part of the Experiments in Terror DVD. An underground cinematic experience that is in a class of its own. At first reminiscent of Julien Donkey-Boy, it intimately explores the mind of a very fat street wacko who sells cheap watches for a living (or tries to), has violent or verbally abusive encounters with other street bums and dogs, can't stop eating, sneaks sandwiches in his mouth while distracting his mother, visits Universal studios, etc. The indescribable hypnotic effect this bizarre film has is created by camera warps, disjointed editing, loud, exaggerated and silly sound effects and voice-overs, repetitive insanity, lots of random angry people dreamy sequences of his dead sister roaming a strange deserted city and other random scenes of 60s hippy-culture satire, TV shows and Spielberg bashing. Meanders aimlessly from one vignette to another and it goes on forever, but the overall effect is a mind-twisting depressing, satirical meditation on human existence. Well, if you can describe this one better you're welcome to try. Packard creates an incoherent, whimsical but beautiful looking short fantasy movie with his obvious love for the genre, borrowing characters and some elements from Miyazaki's Nausicaa, and stealing beautiful music from various other movies. The Japanese performers/actors are pretty good, with elegant fight scenes involving sword vs. fans in natural settings, and some extremely cheap special effects and stuffed toys or animated puppets as various creatures. The story is incoherent, mixing Miyazaki's Zen philosophies with heroes, nature, sorcery, fight scenes, and bonding with a 'wild' pet dog. Another incoherent fantasy outing by Packard. It's like a schizophrenic just finished a 100 fantasy and sci-fi movie-watching marathon, took the resulting various images, scenes and ideas in his head, and strung them all together in a movie without regard to what they have to do with each other. Plot lines are started but replaced with another idea 2 minutes later, until the end, and then it all just ends abruptly. Even continuity is blatantly disregarded here, with many different actresses in the same role, the time of the day or seasons changing in between scenes, except Packard 'incorporates' all these inconsistencies into the movie by having the characters remark about the insane changes. The only single thread throughout the movie is that there is a character called Foxfur. That's it. She makes rap videos with 'quantum software', lighting goes crazy in her reality, and strange bubbles and black ink appear, some people go missing, people rant about dolphins being evil, there's a comedy sketch about braindead store employees repeating the phrase 'we don't have that', zombies appear on the street with cellphones, some lunatics talk about alternate realities and UFOs, there's a completely gratuitous suicide and murder, a conspiracy book store, magical woodland creatures with a bow an arrow, elves and made-up languages, alternate realities, and throughout the movie people appear at random with huge ballooned bellies and body parts. The end. And then he wonders what Spielberg has that he doesn't. 40 minute mess by Packard that starts as a mockumentary in the vein of his silly Star Wars Mockumentary, featuring Packard as a film-maker collaborating in a failed art film. At first it seems like this will be a funny satire on behind-the-scenes documentaries as well as the pretentiousness behind making art films, but then Packard just seems to get tired of it all and does his usual shtick (which is boring by now) of splicing together stolen footage from various Hollywood films (Zardoz, Superman, etc) with footage of him and his friends mixed with random and silly acting out of whims and miscellanea. Add to this some strange footage of a mother and baby who plays old video games involved in some kind of alien intrusion, and gratuitous she-male porn as the art-film makers discuss pretentious nonsense in a banned she-male art exhibit. A useless mess. A half-length movie from the strange and messy mind behind Reflections of Evil. Random allusions to sci-fi movies, Atari games, people that claim to be related to characters from sci-fi movies, and colorful lighting effects layered over people with plastic laser guns in inter-dimensional skating rinks, all tell us we're in the future. Or are we? Now throw in random controversial references like Big Brother, 9/11, pedophilia, mind-control, a violent society, commercialism, etc, then show some people that resemble celebrities and what do you get? Maybe a statement about modern society which has become some kind of unreal sci-fi dystopia. Then again, this may just be a rambling mess with no fully-baked, thoughtful point to make. |
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