I understand this is something of a cult film but I don't know why. By 1970, the year of this release, the psychedelic cycle had been peddled to near pattern exhaustion. There wasn't much left after the reckless abandon of Richard Lester's stuff, especially "A Hard Day's Night" in the early sixties. And parodist nonsense must have reached the stage of ejaculatory inevitability with "Casino Royale" in 1967. Yet here is Tinto Brass, picking the gleanings a couple of years later, and apparently doing it with exuberance, as if it were his very own discovery.
The pop images pop in and out, there are nonsensical inserts, actors speak lines of gibberish (three actors at a time), the performers are either beautiful or grotesque. (I think here we see the influence of Federico Fellini. If you're going to ape, ape the best.) Brass seems to believe that any crazy thing he puts on the screen will sell. Random bits of newsprint. A man masturbating. A duck having its head chopped off. A surrealistic poster. If a shot last longer than a few seconds, he simply inverts the image. Voila! Invention! I won't describe the plot because there is so little of it to describe. A rapist escapes from prison. He's picked up by strangers and they all register at a motel that is itself psychotic. I mean the architecture. The man behind the counter weighs several hundred pounds, speaks in a falsetto, and does nothing but burp and fart and kill mice.
"Finnegans Wake" makes more sense. Dennis Hopper's "The Last Movie" is a logical tract by comparison, and Hopper at least had the excuse of being thoroughly stoned all during the shoot.
I was able to endure about forty-five minutes of this bloated attempt at modernism. The alternative was to start chewing on the rug.
Good luck.
The pop images pop in and out, there are nonsensical inserts, actors speak lines of gibberish (three actors at a time), the performers are either beautiful or grotesque. (I think here we see the influence of Federico Fellini. If you're going to ape, ape the best.) Brass seems to believe that any crazy thing he puts on the screen will sell. Random bits of newsprint. A man masturbating. A duck having its head chopped off. A surrealistic poster. If a shot last longer than a few seconds, he simply inverts the image. Voila! Invention! I won't describe the plot because there is so little of it to describe. A rapist escapes from prison. He's picked up by strangers and they all register at a motel that is itself psychotic. I mean the architecture. The man behind the counter weighs several hundred pounds, speaks in a falsetto, and does nothing but burp and fart and kill mice.
"Finnegans Wake" makes more sense. Dennis Hopper's "The Last Movie" is a logical tract by comparison, and Hopper at least had the excuse of being thoroughly stoned all during the shoot.
I was able to endure about forty-five minutes of this bloated attempt at modernism. The alternative was to start chewing on the rug.
Good luck.
