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The Star Child is at once recognized, the staring stomper with codpiece and bowler hat might be the interstellar cherub in debauched adolescence. Raping and pillaging comprise a regular night for the hoodlum (Malcolm McDowell, exultantly malevolent), "good for laughs and lashings of the old ultra-violence," not much else to do in a tacky Brave New World. His rampage is curtailed by a mutiny in his own gang, rehabilitation marks "the real weepy and tragic part of the story." Curbing of "the criminal reflex" is the experiment, vile footage pumped into the lizard brain until nausea reigns. "You mean like going to the pictures?" A dystopian sideshow, glacial and gloating, the full flowering of Stanley Kubrick's analytical smirk. Garish planes of artifice point up the spectacle of barbarism, the rumble in the gutted proscenium segues into a rear-projection joyride. "A nice, warm vibratey feeling all through your guttiwuts," so deep in the hellion's headspace that a convex lens splays everybody else into Grosz cartoons and throbs of "Ludwig van" make Christ figurines dance. (The hapless Messiah returns for a pseudo-Buñuel gag when the incarcerated protagonist thumbs through the Bible and envisions himself as a whipping centurion.) Purcell through a Moog synthesizer, the salaciousness of the "William Tell Overture" and the sadism of "Singin' in the Rain," "most rewarding associations." Patrick Magee's quivering and Michael Bates' barking and Aubrey Morris' double take at a dentures cocktail, all grist to the leaden caricatural mill. Old horrors forced on young eyes, cf. Fuller's Verboten! "Funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen." Bleeding hearts and wingnuts, a pox on both their houses in a sort of obscene Carry On comedy. Haneke meticulously scraps the demonic allure and magnifies the hectoring fraudulence for Funny Games. Cinematography by John Alcott. With Warren Clarke, Anthony Sharp, Adrienne Corri, Godfrey Quigley, Miriam Karlin, Carl Duering, Sheila Raynor, Philip Stone, Clive Francis, Richard Connaught, Steven Berkoff, Paul Farrell, and David Prowse
--- Fernando F. Croce |