I was at Scarecrow the other day, looking for a real gem, when I remembered this one. I looked it up, and they had a copy! You see, earlier, they didn't have a copy, as this film had never been released to video before. I thought perhaps that Grindhouse Releasing had finally put it out (the people who put up the trailer on Youtube). However, the copy that Scarecrow had was not from Grindhouse. In fact, the box had a warning on it, something like "WARNING: This copy was mastered very badly, or was mastered very badly in the first place. However, it's the only NTSC copy available right now". Well, that wasn't gong to stop me! I have watched many poorly mastered films in my day.
However, this turned out to be an especially bad mastering. I will review the film and the mastering separately.
First, the film. Well, if you watch the trailer, you get pretty much all of the choice scenes, and there's really not much reason to rent the movie beyond that. It's pretty darn hilarious, with some radically awesome dialogue. My favourite line? "BIIIIIIIIIIG SHIT!" Nothing ever makes sense, even though we were pretty sure the directors intended it to be symbolic of society's ills. We learn a few choice things, though: 1) all you need to survive away from society is 1 goat, 1 boat, a bottle of wine, and a barren rocky island in the dead sea, 2) sharks, once they have spotted you, will never leave you alone and will watch you from the shore for days in a row, and 3) people will go crazy and turn into wild-animal-beast-people if they are thirsty and haven't eaten in 12 hours.
Pictures to prove it:
The mastering was unbelievably strange, and intensified our weird experience by a factor of 10 or so. The film was divided up into segments, and between the segments there was a blank black screen, with no sound, that could last anywhere from 5-25 seconds. I was pretty sure that we were missing segments of the movie at times, as the story line would advance very quickly, or a goat would suddenly appear in the car when there was no goat in the car before. However, it was hard to be certain, since the movie didn't make a whole lot of sense anyway. But then near the end, there was definitely a missing segment - they went from chatting about how gross it was to eat limpets with the girls clothed in bikini tops to suddenly throwing rocks at each other with the girls bare-breasted. They then showed the scene that was supposed to have happened before that scene. So, two scenes were out of order. And, then, at the very end of the movie, when the words "The End" were displayed on the screen, it suddenly jumped to the missing scenes from the rest of the movie! These were then all played in order for us. So, the film was structured like this:
A-B-C--E-F-G--J-K--M--O-P-Q-R-S--U-V-x-w-Y-Z-d-h-i-l-n-t
With caps letters denoting scenes in standard ordinal positions, and lower caps scenes denoting out of order scenes.
So, this was some kind of bootleg copy, probably made from someone filming the movie in a theatre somewhere in Israel (where it apparently has regular showings for people to come make fun of it). But why on earth would they mess up the scenes like that? What gives? A bizzaro movie arranged by a totally bizzaro bootlegger.
Anyway, a truly unique experience, to say the least. April, I hope your happy!
Holy crap, another winner!
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