MindFlesh

Wow! Mindflesh threw me for a loop and really knocked me back in my seat! Discovering a prize like this in a media slurry of mainstream mediocrity is like running across the fabled Star of India in a trash heap.

Slick, fresh, Mindflesh is a bizarre horror yarn about sexual obsession, body disassociation, and morbid metamorphoses. Independent writer/director Robert Patten outdoes himself, making an extreme departure from his first feature length effort, London Voodoo (reviewed below.) Mindflesh is a surreal shocker. It's sexy, grotesque, and provocative. It's a crazy, jarring ride through alternative consciousness, through the chilling, the macabre, the uncanny, and the wantonly perverse. Patten has accomplished the nearly impossible task of visually translating to the screen in a sensible manner, William Scheinman's quirky, metaphysical novel, White Light, replete with all of its dreamlike nuances, grim foreboding atmosphere, and otherworldly Ick! factor.

What transpires in Mindflesh isn't presented via corny, over-simplified exposition, yet we manage to achieve an intuitive grasp of the phenomena that unfolds. The result is a movie that challenges us with its imaginative concepts, yet is not hard to understand.

Chris (Peter Bramhill) lives after dark, quiet, solitary, driving a mini-cab through the swirling night fog along the damp asphalt traverses of darkened London. Dimmed neon signs, empty boulevards, abandoned parking lots, the lonely, sleeping city is his domain. Issuing from the receivers in his cab is the distracted soundtrack to his nocturnal patrolling, a mottled, perpetual backdrop of scratchy radio traffic -dispatch messages, police reports, weather bulletins, and static. It's a world alien to that which most of us are accustomed.

Chris finds out just how alien it can be.

He may have some special sensitivity. Chris is haunted by murky half-memories of something awful from years ago. Increasingly, he suffers from terrifying dreams and hallucinations. From a book, he encounters the hypothesis that trauma warps our plane of existence, creating holes in the fabric of space time through which various phenomena cross between parallel worlds.

Chris's suppressed angst, unmet inner need, wistfulness, and loneliness radiate from him like an aura. By chance, it catches the notice of an enigmatic stranger with a similar perceptive gift.

During his travels through the urban twilight, in shadows, out of the corner of his eye, in his rear-view mirrors -is it a trick of the light? - Chris gets mysterious glimpses of an apparition, a woman (Carole Derrien ), solitary, resolute, watching him.

Her appearance is accompanied by electromagnetic disturbances. His automobile compass spins wildly. Radio transmissions warp and undulate, becoming unintelligible. When Chris approaches the mystery woman, she vanishes into a smoke trail, shimmering out of sight in a spiral of mist.

Chris desires her absolutely. An inter-planar transcendence takes place. The woman achieves a physical manifestation, acquiring form out of thin air. Has Chris willed her into this world, or has she willed herself here, entwining with our plane of existence in order to entwine with Chris? She flickers in and out of earthly reality, until In an example of utter Pygmalionism gone awry she materializes from the skeleton up. Organs fill in the gaps, skin follows. Slick with lymph and blood, basking in the presence of Chris's humanity, she finalizes like a caterpillar transforming in the chrysalis.

She is a quantum Goddess; sex incarnate, saturated, oozing, seething with desire. She and Chris engage in a ghastly, slimy, ethereal coupling, an obscene union of heaving, illicit, inter-species sex. In her amorous frenzy, the Goddess trashes Chris's apartment, seducing him tirelessly, repeatedly, transforming him into a quivering lump of catatonia. She pulls him into her alien universe and he undergoes a bodily transformation into her peculiar native anatomy.

Problematically, some very frightful aliens make the scene. They have heavy grievances about Goddess leaving her plane for the earthly realm. They're willing to do some very nasty things to get her back.! Chris is burdened with the job of returning her, and sheer hell awaits him if he falters. To achieve his salvation, Chris must discover how the Goddess is linked to a sinister episode in his deliberately obfuscated past.

But how? Mindflesh is colorful and wonderfully twisted. Arban Ornelas's score effectively reinforces its vivid imagery and seamlessly blends the film's segue-ways. Patten's striking cinematic technique is captivating and compelling. His transitions between scenes, the way he melds flashbacks, dreams, and hallucinatory experiences artfully conveys their meaning in a manner that's concise and logically accessible to the audience.

Mindflesh is almost a 10 Pints Of Blood horror film. It just misses the bullseye. Chris's Achilles heel is right out of a famous Greek tragedy. The effect is melodramatic. More surprisingly, in the otherwise sound screenplay, there are a couple of easily avoidable logical flaws which occur later in the story, We try to overlook these incongruities because they pale in comparison to the movie's sensationally striking visual and imaginative elements. For a horror movie, Mindflesh is in the top tier, sporting visual effects and horror styling reminiscent of Altered States, Videodrome, Hellraiser, Possession (1981), Species, and Splice.

An increasingly disturbed Taxi-driver's (Peter Bramhill) erotic obsession over an otherworldly Amazonian goddess (Carole Derrien) becomes fatally corporeal in tweaked terrorscape Mindflesh. As the mutable matter separating reality and surreal sexual fantasy are eerily conjoined, those closest to him are inexorably drawn into this sinister sexual vortex of disturbingly alien, pan-dimensional deviation. Hopelessly unbalanced, utterly beguiled, unable to resist the lustful allure of this flesh-tripping seductress proves fatal! Explicit, grimly humourless, and wildly inventive, unorthodox British body horror Mindflesh delivers some righteously tweaked WTFuckery!!!! An exhilaratingly unhinged experience, Robert Pratten's skewed shocker is a vertiginous descent into the boundless grotesques of human consciousness. Enticingly engorged with the polymorphous perversity of Clive Barker, a hallucinatory exploration of a malign multiverse's weirdest vortexes, Mindflesh is macabre movie manna from a hatefully hedonistic heaven! Should a multiplicity of universes be empirical fact, it might be a reasonable hypothesis to suggest that any evil therein will manifest itself in ways far more dreadful than our darkest imaginings.

Taxi driver is having "sightings" of a mysterious woman. Seems it has been going on for quite some time since at the point we, the viewer, enter his story he has an extensive logbook (appropriately labeled "sightings") and a map on a wall covered with pins and stickers to document all the locations of these sightings. Additionally, the movie begins where he's single again after his obsessive sightings cost him his girlfriend. Nobody around him takes these sightings seriously, of course, no matter how adamant he his that they are real.

What our hapless taxi driver doesn't know is that his sightings are the result of heightened awareness or ESP; an ability likely triggered by a childhood trauma involving his mother. His particular ESP is not simply the ability to sense things that most people cannot but it is also the ability to manufacture or create reality. Things begin to come to a head for our taxi driver when after a nightmare curious bruises appear on his abdomen. Then shortly after that, while having a sighting in his car, the experience turns nightmarish as some kind of monster appears. He's so frightened he goes home and frantically tears down his map. Some things, less bruise-like this time, appear on his stomach; lumps of some kind. Reminiscent --to me anyway-- of a sows teats.

Let me take this time to introduce the central acquaintances of our taxi driver (this is important because his condition impacts them). Lyn: boss. Tessa: ex-girlfriend. Tate: friend and fellow cab driver. Slade: friend and deviant cop. About a third of the way into the movie the taxi driver's obsession makes a "tangible" appearance (to him, anyway). He acts like a man in love; more than that, like a humble servant to a queen he worships. The guy is on his knees rolling out gifts he bought for her. "Look, your Highness".."And this as well, my queen".."But I'm not finished o regal one, this as well." He never actually said anything but his demeanor suggested those words. Are you mocking the poor fellow, Boloxxxi? --Yes I am. But also you need to have a glimpse of this man's state of mind at this point in the film.

Our taxi driver's boss, Lyn, gives him a book written by a professor Frank Verdain which explains (in her words) how the trauma of some people who are going thru a difficult period "warps our plane of existence, creating holes for things to cross between our parallel worlds". This scene precedes the materialization of the mystery woman, by the way. At some point, after his indulgences with her (Wink! Wink!), he writes the professor to request a meeting. The request is denied. Desperate, he stakes out the professor and catches him on the street. The professor is none to happy to see him; he's brisk, tells him again his request is denied, and walks away quickly. Well we both know that the taxi driver wasn't going to let it go so easily. He goes chasing after the Prof who's growing increasingly irritable.

"Why me?"..."Why me?" he whines. At some point the professor asks him him if he's f!!cked anyone special lately. The look of embarrassment on our taxi driver's face told the snarling professor all he needed to know. "Congratulations!" he says, "You've been f!!cking your own mind!" and quickly walks away. Red with shame, but still desperate, our taxi driver continues to hound the old man. "How can you know that?"..."Why did she come to me?" By this time the professor is like a pit bull. "Why me?!!"..."Why me?!!"...."Why me?!!" he yells mockingly at our taxi driver. And then answers his own question this way: "God plays dice; it's called evolution!" He advises our taxi driver to give the "goddess" back. Our taxi driver says he doesn't know how. He's warned that he'd better find a way or his friends are going to die. He's told to get rid of his "super nature" or ESP then uses some colorful language and stalks off (That old guy is not shy of his four-letter words, I'll tell you that).

Will our taxi driver do as the professor instructs? --Or will the mystery pu$$y of his mind prove too much? Somehow I think you all know the answer. This is a British made film shot to or as a video. So they say "cab" and I say "taxi". No big deal. This is obviously not a big budget production; but they made excellent use of their resources, I thought. I was a bit pessimistic when it started but Mindflesh turns out to be a good paranormal, supernatural, otherworldly-type film. There are some scenes in it though that are not for the squeamish and yours truly does have his instances. And so, yeah, I looked away like a little girl. Love, Boloxxxi.

I saw director Robert Pratten's 1st movie, London Voodoo some time ago. I remember thinking it was an entertaining, tight, well acted, well scripted, highly competent debut. So competent was it that lacked the edginess associated with 1st time directors of self financed productions.

So, when I saw a Mindflesh at the weekend, I was expecting more of the same. Same director, same DOP, set in London, even the same composer I think.

Wrong!

Mindflesh marks an Alan Parkeresque departure for Pratten. Mindflesh and London Voodoo are as different as Angel Heart is from Bugsy Malone. This time that edgy feel is there, and it's there in spades.

The story follows a London mini-cab driver's obsession with a mysterious woman and the dire consequences it has for his friends, and ultimately himself. If that sounds straight forward, trust me, it isn't. Think strange stomach growths, kinky sex and grotesque vengeful gods and you're part way there.

I can't really categorise MF as I haven't seen anything like it before. I suppose it would fit into the trippy-horror-sex-Buddhist genre, if there were such a thing. This isn't one of those "it was pretty good" movies, everyone that sees this will have a strong opinion of it, but love it or hate it, you should see it.

Personally, I thought it was fantastic.

Somehow I came across the trailer of this British flick. And somehow I was attracted to it. Now that I watched it I was glad I did. The trailer wasn't just a rip-off like so many out on you tube. Admit it, this trailer was even banned from you tube so many would fall for that reason only. But it was banned for nudity. And nudity is what you will have a lot of. Luckily it wasn't gratuitous like in so many blockbusters today. What you see are natural breasts, not those US blown up fake tits. So that was already a relief. I don't know Richard Pratten's first flick London Voodoo so I couldn't compare. But he's a nice guy, as you can see on the 2-disc edition. And I had contact via emails and he replied in manners. But that doesn't influence me about reviewing flicks. I had already teared down a Fred Vogel flick and he was mad at me and tried to ban my reviewing. And there are others that had send ugly words towards me about reviewing and even tearing down flicks by reviews. But let's stay on track and review this independent flick. Due the reason that there aren't subs on it for foreigners it could be sometimes difficult to understand the English dialect. But I love the British language and surely the Cockney accent. But let me say that this is some weird piece. It isn't a slasher or a torture porn, it's something that you will keep watching. You want to know what is going on with the mind of Chris. The only thing that I can spoil is that he had some bad experiences in his youth and due that he's seeing things in his dreams. Those dreams are for him really happening so for his surrounding he's some weird guy. But it got worser when some kind of monster is telling him what he has to do. On his body he's getting some kind of nipples and the naked goddess in his home is banging him and freaking him out. So it's a kind of supernatural horror. And I know that those kind of flicks aren't really made for everybody because you really have to watch closely what's going on, what's a dream what's a flash back and what's for real. All acting was believable. It was nicely shot and edited with simple effects to hide the low budget but it works. It's a relief to see that Britain still can deliver good independents because there's not that much coming out in the last years that was worth mentioning. This I really enjoyed and I should recommend it to people who love for example Altered States, Jacob's Ladder or Videodrome.