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"The beautiful harmony of thought" is given its due, stark raving madness however is the art here deliriously celebrated. Scientist (Horace B. Carpenter) and vaudevillian (Bill Woods) are two sides of the same deranged coin, "super-adrenaline" is the invention tried out at the morgue. (Rubbing a corpse's arms brings her back to life while a pair of seamy attendants, frozen somewhere out of the frame, provide running commentary.) An ocular close-up points up Un Chien Andalou unmistakably, Viridiana's pouncing kitties are foreglimpsed as part of a thoroughgoing travesty of Poe, so that The Tell-Tale Heart thumps in a jar amid test tubes. The Rue Morgue ape figures in a most stupefying showstopper, a society husband (Ted Edwards) turning into a whooping troglodyte and running into the wilderness with the comely zombie in his arms, a metamorphosis so ecstatic he can't resist describing it as it happens. "O darts of fire in my brain!" (Cp. Renoir's Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier.) Mismatched vérité inserts, medical title cards, non-sequiturs straight to the camera—about the only lucid thing in Dwain Esper's grand hallucination is the serene philosophy of the uncredited yahoo running a fur farm out of his backyard: "The rats eat the cats, the cats eat the rats, and I get the skins." Gratuitous undies ironing, unholy silent-film superimpositions and dueling syringes are just some of the raw materials in this disjunctive hophead whirl, the lunatic-artiste's resemblance to Eisenstein is absolutely no coincidence. "Primitive tendencies" and "unkind experiments," the feline eyeball has the last laugh, "the gleam is gone." The hilarity and poetry of "our defense against a world which is not of our making or our liking" is in due time appreciated by Russell (Altered States). In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |