Search - Zoetrope on DVD

I have seen the future of horror...

yorgos dalman | Holland, Europe | 05/14/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Can you imagine a movie that combines the `human body manipulation' of Rammstein's video clip "Mein Teil", Judas Priest's strobocopic lightning in their video "Painkiller", the black and white approach of "Pi", together with the weirdness of "Eraserhead" and "Begotten", the hellish production design of Brad Andersson's "The machinist" and the cinematic fetishism of the twin brothers Quay ("Street of Crocodiles" and "Institute Benjamenta")?

Probably not. But, believe me, there is such a movie.
It's Charlie Deaux' 18 minute tour-the-force "Zoetrope", a deranged, mindblowing, futuristic adaptation of Franz Kafka's "In the penal colony".
After a surreal opening in which we are, seemingly trapped in a void, approached by an unidentified flying object, we witness the final wanderings of a trapped, naked man, who crawls around his cell, waiting for his death sentence to be carried out. Above him, in the `upper world' there is the man, in the uniform, expressionistically gesturing, articulating his words of doom, and operating all kinds of seemingly purposeless tools and machinery.

Meanwhile, the clock, of which we often see its inner structures, is ticking. Time collapses. Mindgames alter, but still sore. It's a nightmarish existence of which there is no escape, the claustrophobia of the machine-filled upper world being as immens and exhausting as the claustrophobia in the large, empty prison cell.

And, to make it even worse, all this is set to the music of Brian Williams' terrifying one-man-act Lustmord, who brought us such dark ambient albums as "Heresy", "The place where the black stars hang" and the Robert Rich-collaboration "Stalker".

The CD "Zoetrope" contains considerably more music, and in the hands of Lustmord, we can be thankful for that, allthough, just like the film, it isn't a journey one would care to make out of choise- more out of some deeply rooted necessity.


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