Review: 4 Films
Director: Jan Kounen
And now, for something completely different…
The titles says it all – this dvd contains four short films by Jan Kounen. Four very diverse pieces of phantasm and in one case orgasm.
The first film is ‘Capitaine X’ (1989) which is, in humble opinion, not the best of the four presented here. Running over 5 min, this strange little contraption tells an over-the-top story of a group of trigger finger happy soldiers who want to execute a prisoner. This is a mixture of black humour, sadism and of course allot of action.
The second film, ‘Gisèle Kerozène’(1989) is an equally short but hilarious bit about three ‘turbo witches’ that chase each other in a hyper kinetic sequence of gibberish, violence and slapstick fun. I dare you to try not to laugh while watching this !
The third film is ‘Vibro Boy’ (1993) , a super psychedelic short film that seems to burs out of any genre label but at the same time exceeds and combines art-house, cult, thriller, SF, thriller and fantasy. A transvestite steals a Mexican artefact and gives it to his best friend as a gift. After some of the weirdest anger-love bursts, a dead rabbit, a talking fridge and a couple of more confusing sequences mayhem is about to be unleashed. But what look like it would end up as a climatic rabbit’s- head- to- the belly (seriously) turns into the transformation of … Vibroboy !
The super anti-hero with a vibrator gun as his ultimate weapon ! This is funny and scary at he shame time. This look like a bad trip on film! In all it’s strangeness and childish outrage this is really a unique short-film that stick in your head due to it’s emotional roller coater effect and it’s sheer rejection of reason and logic. – Superb !
The final film is a Read Hood Horror Ballet entitled ‘ Le Dernier Chaperon Rouge’(1996).
If you suspected drug inspiration for the previous film, than don’t even think when you (literally) seen mushroom dancing in this one. This really is a great Tim Burtonesque film. It actually has very little to do with the actual Red Hood fairytale. It’s about a monster that kills young girls (by dissecting them and performing other operation on them). The monster looks like what you might get if you but the fat coenobite and Edward Scissorhands in a blender. It turns out red hoods isn’t such a dumb sweetheart after all… I’m’ noting to spoil it all but it look really nice. The ‘ballet’ isn’t as mushy as you might expect it to be and it contain some nice bloody operation scenes. Also, the living forest is captured in a very fluent way. –This make the whole think look like you are having a dream.
This whole dvd is basically surrealism on a disc. Everything looks very ‘different’ and well that’s what I look for in a movie.
All four films are in French but are subtitled in Dutch (talk about scaling down target audience) so that might be a problem for some. The first two films are very short but the second two are 30 min each.
Still the photography and concepts still stand out after more than ten years.
If you can get your hands on this, I highly recommend your rent it !
Reviewed by: LordLeviathan, added August 22 2005
Comments: 4 Films
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