Errors of the Human Body

What would you have if you had a movie made by recent graduates of an Eastern European art/film school that were named Gunther, Dagmar, Fritz, and Schotzie? Not their real names AFAIK. (Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. Void where prohibited. Some assembly required.) Why, you’d have something like Errors of the Human Body. Something Netflix kept throwing up at me as a recommendation. (Oh, Netflix!  You crazy kid, you.) After watching it (while doing chores so I might have missed a vital bit of dialog that adds sense to this mess), I imagine the development of the film went something like this:

Gunther: I vill direct! It vill be set in a university in Dresden. American doctor whose babby son died from a rare juhnetick disease vill come to Dresden und help zee university’s juhnetick program. We vill show his American happy life in zee soft-focus flashbacks wiss zee happy pregunant vife. Zen zee babby tumors und no no more of zee happy.

Dagmar: I vill assistant direct! Oh he must have zee lover interest und she must have freckles und no one vill wear makeup so we can see her freckles. Und zee pony tail! Und she needz zee pony tail!

Fritz: I vill be best boy! Zee bad guy must not be too obvious. But he must be bald und looken like zee albino und have zee buggy eyes. Und zee freckle girl will have had sex wis him but she vill lie about it.

Schotzie: I vill make zound effects wiss my armpits!  Farfergnuggen! You all have forgotten zee important tings. We need a scene wiss zee Yooropian siren sound und vee must show zee modern underground rail station!

Gunther: Yah! We can throw zem in at zee end. We must not forget a decadent party scene wiss peoples in costumes of creepiness. Vun of dem vill be zee bad guy’s assistant und he vill be a trahnsvestite at zee party und he must look at zee American und suck seductively on a straw. Und, zen, in zee ironical tweest zee American will get zee diseeze of his babby but he vill be also the cure which will be like arthouse movie sad because no more babby. Und a mouse virus. Mouse virus very popoolar now.

Dagmar: Oh yah und zee trahnsvestite should look like zat Frankenfurter guy from zee Rocky Horror so Americans vill know heez trahnsvestite!

That’s pretty much the only way my brain can parse getting all of those frantasically glorious details shoved into 101 never-ending minutes of cinematography.

The best thing about this movie: it ends (although I spent the last 20 minutes thinking “would you die already, jeesh”).

The worst thing about this movie:  there’s something to dislike for everyone!

The Intruder (1999)

The Intruder (the one with Charlotte Gainsbourg) is such an awful pack of crap. How it got made is beyond understanding.  But probably more understandable than the movie itself.

A woman (Charlotte) marries a guy whose first wife died. Maybe. Is she trying to kill Charlotte? Is Charlotte trying to kill her? Who cares (yes, you already don’t care when stuff actually starts to happen)? Is she crazy? Could it be wormholes something something time folds in on itself or something as proposed by some half-rate physicist or math teacher or something?  (The explanation may have caused me minor brain damage.  Apologies to you.) Time passages make no sense. How are they living in such swank digs in a part of some city that doesn’t even get snow plow service? WTF with the door/maintenance man? Did all these people have sex with each other? Why don’t they want her to leave? What the hell is going on with his chest hair? Does he even have a job? Is there going to be a lukewarm lesbian moment? Thankfully, you care so little that you don’t care if you find out. Yes, this movie makes you care less! It achieves the impossible! You could care less, but you can’t even be bothered to care to begin with. Too bad they couldn’t convert that to perpetual motion.

The oddest part of this movie is what they use for a segue. Some white guy in some craptacularly ugly hat playing the fucking saxophone. Him, saxophones, music, the places at which he’s located, etc. have fuckall to do with the movie. It’s like a third-grader’s version of “let’s add some artistic vision”.

You know that sax piece Lisa Simpson plays at the beginning of each episode of The Simpsons? It’s like that. Except, instead of having a week between hearing that earwax-blasting cacophony, you get maybe 15-20 minutes before you’re faced with more failed attempts at aural pleasure. And the segues aren’t even really segues. It defies explanation, comprehension, or even reality. Hell, it doesn’t even represent the time folding thingy thing. At least not in any comprehensible way.

This movie is recommended for anyone who has been on a three-day bender featuring copious amounts of meth, peyote, cocaine, PCP, Jagermeister, multiple cases of Colt 45, several shemale prostitutes, Charlie Sheen, David Spade, and a colon cleansing AND you still think “Man. I am just not fucked up enough.”

The Possession

You’ve enjoyed a nice dinner of split-pea and matzoh ball soup, along with a nice chilled glass (or two?) of Mogen David Blackberry wine, you tuck yourself into bed and, around about three in the morning, you sit bolt upright with the brilliant idea “My god! If you combined Yentl and The Exorcist, you’d have a hit movie!”

Well, actually, you’d have The Possession.  Kyra Sedgwick co-stars.  For some reason, she gets third billing after the guy who plays her ex-husband and the girl who plays their daughter.  This is inexplicable.  Although, overall, the acting is fairly flat and it seems like everyone just called it in.

It starts with a woman trying to destroy a wooden box and something happens to her.  (I’m not sure what, as I watched this movie over several weeks because it is just that engaging.)  The primary players though are your typical broken nuclear family – husband/wife split and two daughters and the wife has a new boyfriend.

Dad and the girls are at a yard sale and the youngest takes a liking to the wooden box the woman was trying to destroy (who may be the woman in the full body cast in the house next door that freaks out – which isn’t easy when you’re in a full body cast).  Things start to get creepy with bugs and the little girl just pigging out when she eats and no one noticing the stupid, big, ugly ring she’s now wearing because she <peers around fearfully> figured out how to open the box.  (Nah, no Pinhead inside.  That would have made it too interesting.)

Then things get weird.  Things like the little girl suddenly wearing some drab dress when she’s “teh debil <spooky music>” and people almost getting killed (some people do get killed, some people she just smacks around).  And some maybe getting killed or not (looking at you mom’s boyfriend).  And a rapping Hasidic Jew (technically, he’s not rapping but just singing along) who, later, does a fairly good job at an interpretation of a straight white guy dancing at a disco in the 70s (aka “an exorcism”).  Yes, suddenly this has become something related to the Jewish faith and possession by a dybbuk – the dybbuk that had been locked in the wooden box! Dun dun duh!

Then the girl’s not possessed and the dad is and the Jewish guy keeps on dancing exorcising and then dad’s not possessed and everything is happy happy.  See, the boyfriend is gone.  (Dead? Smarter than everyone else? Got a better gig as a waiter at Chuck E. Cheese?  We don’t know.) So dad is back cooking in the kitchen and everyone’s happy and the Jewish man who exorcised the demon calls from dad’s car (because he needed it to get back to New York City which is 220 miles away) and everything’s OK because he has the wooden box containing the dybbuk and everyone liv… BAM!… hit by a tanker truck.  But not hard enough to cause the burnt out former-car they show.  Or so it seemed to me.  But, you know, had to have some way for the wooden box to get into someone else’s hands for The Possession II – This Time We’re Line Dancing.

The audio on this movie sucked.  Hey, audio engineers:  WTF is up with your jobs?  Can’t hear the dialog, so I crank up the sound, and then BLAM LET’S BURST THEIR EARDRUMS AND BREAK SOME WINDOWS WITH LOUD MUSIC AND/OR SOUND EFFECTS.  Whomever is making that decision just needs to be locked in a room with Yoko Ono for a week.

Continuity or editing kind of falls apart at the end with a couple of “wut…wait…huh?” scenes.  Are we at a hospital?  Are we at a school?  Physical therapy room!  Run, no one will see us!  Oh, a morgue.  Must be the hospital.  Obligatory “dad hit me” and “you can’t take away my girls” scenes that really don’t fit.  At all.

One creepy scene involving the little girl.  If you’re the kind of person who’s ever spent long nights wondering “I wonder what it would look like if someone were trying to crawl out of my mouth”, this movie will answer that question.  But it will leave you with many other questions: “What the hell are those damned bugs anyway?  What the hell did he/she say?  Why the hell am I still watching this?  Christ, why didn’t I buy two gallons of vodka at the store?  If I could go back in time and show this movie to Hitler, would I?”  And, possibly, many others that will leave you in a cold sweat.

There is one positive note here for children of divorce:  getting possessed by a dybbuk will bring your family together.  (Not really. Do not try this at home or anywhere, including the mall.)