The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: Suspiria (1977), directed by Dario Argento

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: 'Suspiria (Main Theme)' by Goblin

       There’s probably a hard limit for how many times Dario Argento will keep showing up on this list. Not that we’re almost out of his films to cover, but despite giallo not being the most diverse subgenre in the world it still feels like a disservice to devote 90 percent of the attention towards only one artist. I’d feel the same way if the only westerns I covered were Sergio Leone or the only animated films I watched were Hayao Miyazaki, a man cannot survive on bread alone you understand. Fate willing we will eventually get through the entirety of his ‘classic’ period, but to use the vernacular of this blog Argento is not a Lynch or a Carpenter level director. And that’s fine, the opinion of this blog means jack shit anyway.

       Released in 1977, Suspiria was directed by Dario Argento, written by Argento and Daria Nicolodi and produced by Claudio Argento through Seda Spettacoli, based on the novel “Suspiria de Profundis” by Thomas De Quincey. Jessica Harper stars as Suzy Bannion, an American girl invited to join the prestigious Tam Academy in German, a ballet dancer’s paradise. Unfortunately she arrived at the peak of plot convenience season, as the night Suzy arrives is also the night when a former student of the school is horrifically murdered. She tries to go about her day in peace, only more and more strange things start to happen. Maggots falling from the ceiling, bizarre noises at night, a slight bleeding from every orifice in the face. What is going on at the Tam Academy and what happened to the murdered girl that passed by Suzy in the night when she arrived? Are the faculty oblivious, or do they know more than they seem? Against her better judgment, Suzy decides to investigate.

       Mysterious though it may seem don’t be fooled, as with the other Argento films we’ve covered on this blog the mystery is simply a smokescreen used to hide the juicy giallo core within. Gruesome, overwrought deaths, malicious, psychotic villains, virginal maidens, the works. Burgeoning cinephiles might be led into thinking that because these are foreign language films that they are more refined or thought-provoking, but that’s not really the case. Giallo scratches the same itch as a Texas Chainsaw Massacre or a Friday the 13th: pretty girls screaming while being murdered or trying to avoid being murdered. In the case of Suspiria it might even scratch harder; Argento sees a scene of a girl being stabbed to death and says ‘what if we had a part where the audience sees her heart beating in her mutilated chest cavity and then we see the killer stabbing the heart?’ It is the penny dreadful and the pulp novel set to motion, base entertainment that was later supplanted by the Jerry Springer Show and twitter drama wrapped up in a blanket of cinematography. Sometimes we want a steak, sometimes we want a burger, and in that case Suspiria is like one of those A-1 steak burgers.

       Suspiria is also the film that firmly established Argento’s reputation as a visual storytelling. The first comparison that came to mind was Corman’s Masque of the Red Death with it’s technicolor rooms (Suspiria was also filmed in technicolor), but if you ran that film through a Stanley Kubrick filter. Good lord does this film look good, the lighting, the use of color and location, it’s rare to find a movie where almost every scene looks like it could be its own painting. Argento has given the Zack Snyder’s Watchmen treatment to a comic book that doesn’t actually exist, and all without blue CGI penises.

       Music for Suspiria is provided by the band Goblin, which to me is a double-edged sword. I like Goblin, and I think at the right time their music combined with Argento’s visuals is a sensory overload akin to a bad acid trip, in a good way. Trouble is there are a lot of moments in this film where it’s not the right time. The soundtrack will make it sound like we’re in the middle of a chase scene, our protagonist only inches away from the killer, and yet on the screen it’s just a character walking slowly down a hallway. Which isn’t the band’s fault, fault lies with the filmmakers, and the filmmakers are very lucky they didn’t completely kill off the atmosphere they were trying to build by having Goblin full bore every five minutes or so.

       Suspiria gets an easy recommendation. While it doesn’t do much to stretch the borders of giallo, it is a master class on shot composition that is worth it to watch for the technique of it as much as for the entertainment aspect. If the endless reboots of Halloween and Hellraiser looked like this then their franchises might have never gone on life support. Burn a witch, toast some marshmallows, and sit down with Suspiria this Halloween.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: The White Buffalo (1977), directed by J. Lee Thompson

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: 'Buffalo Stance' by Neneh Cherry

       Originally this year’s western entry was going to be for The Ox-Bow Incident, but this movie sounded like the title of an album by a jazz-tinged prog rock band, so I went with it instead. I also found out it was directed by J. Lee Thompson, the man behind the underrated Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and the underfunded Battle for the Planet of the Apes, which is a good(?) sign. Let’s see how she goes.

       Released in 1977, The White Buffalo was directed by J. Lee Thompson, written by Richard Sale and produced by Pancho Kohner, based on the novel of the same name by Richard Sale. Charles Bronson stars as the legendary gunfighter Wild Bill Hickock, traveling under the pseudonym James Otis, as he heads West looking to make his fortune. Willie Sampson Jr. plays Crazy Horse, famous warrior and chief of the Lakota, is already West because he lives there. These two men have the same problem: a white buffalo, or rather the white buffalo given the settler’s itchy trigger fingers. Wild Bill has been bedeviled by nightmares of a white buffalo, and a white buffalo ran roughshod over Horse’s tribe, killing children and getting him exiled from his tribe. Both of these men want this thing dead, so their paths will inevitably cross. Will they kill the white buffalo, or will the buffalo kill them instead?

       Another reason that I decided to go for this movie was that wikipedia listed this film as a fantasy western, and that piqued my interest. I mean westerns have been crossed with other genres before, spy fiction, science fiction, horror, martial arts, but not often enough that I’d consider it common. Especially so after the 70s and the end of the spaghetti western boom, when the genre’s commercial relevancy almost completely dried up. Studios have tried to get things going, but since the results were shit like Cowboys vs. Aliens, Jonah Hex and The Lone Ranger, clearly they weren’t trying that hard. 1977 is closer to the Golden Age though, so I had some hope.

       The White Buffalo isn’t fantasy though, as it turns out. The titular white buffalo is certainly treated by the filmmakers as a supernatural presence, bringing to mind the infamous subway scene in American Werewolf in London, but aside from being very strong and aggressive it doesn’t really behave out of the ordinary. I mean it’s basically the bovine version of Moby Dick, and while the white whale was a symbol of obsesion or divine retribution or what have you it was still just a whale at the end of the day. The only real fantastical element was Hickock’s dreams of the thing, but given how common visions and such are in stories relating to Native Americans I barely gave it a second thought. Pulp western might be a better term, as that tiny bit of weirdness fits right in with the Conan and Doc Savage books.

       Speaking of Wild Bill Hickock, why was he in the movie again? Of course I know why Hickock would be in a western story given his status, and I know why Charles Bronson would be in this movie given his filmography, but he seems kind of superfluous? I mean Crazy Horse is the one with a reason for revenge, he’s the natural fit for the protagonist, both in the story and in real life, and instead we have Wild Bill having bad dreams and grimacing for 90 minutes. You’d think that at the very least he’d get an arc where he’d learn not be such a racist asshole, and he kind of does, but also not really? I don’t think not being racist towards one guy counts as not being racist, and he doesn’t ever seem to show remorse for anything he did. That could be because Charles Bronson has a face that looks like it was carved out of shoe leather though.

       So yeah, not exactly the most progressive film to come out of ‘77. Lot of casual racism from the white side, justified with ‘well you attacked us too so same thing both sides’, and a lot of broken English from the native side that sounds a half step above Tonto speak. On the one hand I can respect that we’re not pretending relations between settlers and indigineous peoples were peachy keen, but on the other hand I’m not interested in hearing that shit for 5 minutes, much less 90. Can this story be done properly? Obviously, cinema is loaded with stories of two people with radically different backgrounds, but there needs to be a sense of reciprocity, of mutual understanding. Riggs and Murtaugh learn about each other, their problems, their quirks, and so grow to respect one another. They try to do the respect between warriors thing but it doesn’t ring true. Hickok doesn’t give a shit about the plight of the Natives and any talk from Crazy Horse about the two being brothers rings hollow because they have no chemistry together nor enough screen time to build that chemistry. Way too much time spent on Hickok fucking around frontier towns and not fucking Kim Novak.

       Also can I say that I don’t get the appeal of Charles Bronson? Yeah, yeah, stoic badass and all that, but he’s never seemed all that badass to me. More like a wax statue of a cro magnon that’s been sitting in the sun too long, or everyone’s shitty uncle that won’t shut up about Ayn Rand. I could forgive it in Once Upon a Time in the West because that’s a fun film, but I find him to be a very dull actor. For all his faults, Clint Eastwood at his peak exuded charisma and danger in equal measure, a guy who could legitimately beat your ass if you were on his side of the screen. Bronson looks like he would kick your ass, but he has to hurry and get to the early bird special at the Cracker Barrel. The idea that Kim Novak’s character would want to jump the bones of this basset hound looking bastard is one of the great illusions of Hollywood.

       Unfortunately I’m leaning towards a no on the recommendation for The White Buffalo. It’s got a decent number of gunfights, visually there’s some great ideas (the scene where Hickok’s view of town is obscured by enormous piles of buffalo bones looks amazing), and I think the design of the white buffalo and the shots of him moving are very well done, but I just couldn’t get invested. Even without all the redskin shit I don’t think my opinion would improve all that much, although it does prove that J. Lee Thompson can pull off a genre when you give a budget that’s not comprised entirely of the change found between the couch cushions. There’s the framework of a fun movie in there, enough that some people might get some enjoyment out of it, but of all the weird western films in the world, all two dozen of them, this probably won’t be hitting the top of the queue anytime soon. 

Annie Hall (1977), directed by Woody Allen

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "It Seems Like Old Times" by Diane Keaton

       This is a blog dedicated to genre films. Sci-fi, horror, westerns, animation, if it barely made back its budget and has never been within spitting distance of any Oscar that doesn’t have the word Special Effects engraved on it, then in its in my wheelhouse. Still there comes a time in any Z-list movie blogger's life when they need a shakeup. A change of pace to avoid falling into a rut and suffering that most dreaded of all conditions: burnout. It’s something I’ve been all too familiar with over the years, and it’s why the Marathon has taken on so many quirks and gimmicks. Keep yourself engaged and your readers will follow, or they would if I had any readers.

       So if you’re looking for a change of pace from genre films, which by their nature are a niche field, then you go for the most mainstream of all styles of cinema: the romantic comedy. And if you’re going to do a romantic comedy, you can’t just start trawling through the Hallmark Channel like a barbarian, you gotta go for the primo shit. Which is exactly what we’re doing today, as I cross another film off the old bucket list. At this rate I might even cover a Christmas movie this year, the sky's the limit.

       Released in 1977, Annie Hall was written and directed by Woody Allen, and produced by Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe as A Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe Production. Allen plays Alvy Singer, a neurotic comedian (naturally) whose major passions, or rather obsessions in life are death and misery. It comes as no surprise that such a guy hasn’t had the best luck in romance; Married twice, divorced twice, and a sex life that reads like a Bergman film plays. Alvy’s last relationship with a woman named Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) didn’t end up much better, but over the course of the film we see the relationship play out. We see the initial meeting and the awkward first steps, the ups and downs, and ultimately the dissolution. Throw in a couple of jokes here and there and you’ve got yourself a movie, or at least a very long commercial for therapy.

       The 70’s were a period of experimentation and maturation for Woody Allen as a filmmaker. His singular attempt at the science fiction genre, Sleeper, came out during this time, as well as films built around the works of Shakespeare and Tolstoy. From my description it all seems rather straightforward, but in practice Annie Hall is a lot more metatextual. The opening of the film is Alvy breaking the 4th wall to address the audience, and throughout the film he acts as both character and chorus, existing within and outside the story being told. Rather than just tell other characters about his childhood he just brings them into the flashback to see it, and when a noisy guy behind him at the theater starts going on about being an expert on a writer’s work, Alvy literally pulls the writer from offscreen to tell the guy how wrong he was. Allen is no stranger to zany comedy, he built his career on it, and it’s interesting to see this sorts of crossroads between that and this more grounded, realist depiction of relationships. Alvy namedrops Groucho Marx at the film’s opening, and it does feel a bit as if the mustachioed Mar brother somehow wandered into a Fellini film.

       That idea also comes into play in regards to the nonlinear way that Allen depicts the relationship. We start the film with Alvy stating he and Annie have already broken up, then jumping to a point when their relationship was dissolving, then to their early days and so on and on. If we consider the 4th wall breaks as Alvy the storyteller injecting himself into the story to go off on tangents, the way the story is structured is similar to how we as people remember past relationships. The bad times might resurface sooner, especially if you’re someone like Alvy who revels in misery, but as you delve deeper the good times start to shine through as well. We get to see things as Alvy likes to remember them and the way things really were, which can and are two separate things when dealing with romance.

        Annie Hall has a couple of faces you might recognize, Paul Simon, Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum, but of course the most important are its main actors, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Alvy Singer is exactly how most people imagine every Woody Allen character is like; A man permanently locked inside his own head. Someone supremely confident in his own intelligence, that he’s the smartest guy in the room, but completely unable to confront his own problems. Completely incapable of enjoying life, but addicted with letting people know how much he doesn’t enjoy it. It’s a type of character that can be both exhausting and irritating, and I would be inclined to agree except that we know that this about a relationship failing. This is not a Adam Sandler movie where the main character acts like a screaming toddler for 90 minutes and still ends up with the girl in the end, Alvy’s behavior leads him to taking certain actions and those actions have real consequences. And it’s those real consequences that lead to real growth.  While I wouldn’t say Allen is stepping out of his comfort zone, cue him making a joke about how comfort zones have always made him feel uncomfortable, he obviously knows what he’s trying to get out of the material.

       Then we have Diane Keaton as the titular Annie Hall, and where Allen feels very calculated, very controlled, Keaton instead feels completely natural, as if she had thrown away the script and was just being herself. Annie undergoes the most amount of growth over the course of the film, makes sense, and yet it’s not a radical departure either. Annie is still Annie, just with the confidence to be herself, which is the most engaging part to the audience, while Alvy is stuck largely on the physical and sexual. I believe this was the breakout role for Diane Keaton, and it was a success well earned.

       The moral of Annie Hall then is that things change. People change, feelings change, and therefore relationships change, or in this case end. A relationship doesn’t have to end in hate, or spite, or recriminations, or lying in a dark room listening to Morrissey albums (perish the thought), it can simply be the recognition of change. That you are the same people that you were before, that your feelings aren’t the same as before, that what you need from a relationship is something the other person can’t or won’t provide. So rather than trying to force feelings you don’t have, or clam up and let things fester, it’s okay to just end things as they are. Remember the good times, try to learn from the bad times, and see where the future takes us. Which all seems like a healthy way of looking at it to me, and if it means you’re listening to less Morissey than I’m all for it.

       Annie Hall gets an easy recommendation. While Allen had been a successful filmmaker for a decade at this point, it was the release of Annie Hall that kickstarted a particularly fruitful period of his career. Manhattan, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Radio Days and so on and on, the kind of output to success ratio that other creative types dream of having. So if you are looking for a way into his filmography, this is the film to watch. Of if you’re not looking for an excuse to watch a dozen or so movies and just feel like watching one interesting movie that works too, I mean I won’t judge. Someone asked me to judge a cutest baby contest and by the time I was ready to decide instead of ribbons they asked to pass out social security checks, so believe me when I tell you about judging.

The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), directed by John Landis

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Clinch Mountain Back-Step", by The Kentucky Colonels

       If you ever needed proof of how pop culture’s tastes shift and change with the tides, look no further then the Zuckers. During the 1980s, what some nerds might call the renaissance period of American comedy films, David and Jerry Zucker (and Jim Abrahams) were responsible for what are often regarded as some of the most hilarious films of the decade, maybe even of all time. Airplane!, The Naked Gun series, these movies were like living cartoons, combining slapstick, wordplay, gallows humor, raunchiness and absurdism into madcap adventures where a joke could strike from anywhere and everywhere, and take any numbers of different forms. Films whose scripts were practically built wholesale out of quotable lines, which transformed Leslie Nielsen from an underappreciated dramatic actor into a beloved comic legend without so much as a lateral move, that are so funny that you are always thrown off guard when O.J. Simpson walks on screen. Where Mel Brooks appeared to be slowing down in the 80s it seemed like the Zuckers were gonna be the guys who could pick up the slack into a new era.

Fast forward to 2019, however, and no one really talks about those screwball, madcap style movies anymore. Oh sure, there have been many of them made, like the Scary Movie franchise and what have you (some of which were even directed by David Zucker), but they’re not treated with the same love and affection that those films in the 80s. Far from it in fact, the general opinion of these newer movies tends towards them being hackneyed, unfunny tripe, suitable more for mockery than for any possible enjoyment of their content. What changed? Was there some great cultural shift that turned movie audiences away from the Airplane! type of film, or were the Zuckers so amazing at what they did that other filmmakers felt like there was no point in trying to top them? I can’t say for certain, but while I pondered that question, I decided to take a look at the genesis of this formula that would see so much success in the future.

Released in 1977 and directed by a young John Landis, someone who would also see his greatest critical and commercial success in the 80s, The Kentucky Fried Movie was the debut film of the The Kentucky Fried Theater, the original name for the writing team of David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams. Centered mainly around the framework of television & the cinema, including commercials, previews and even a short film, The Kentucky Fried Movie presents a skewed and satirical take on pop culture of the day. Whether it’s the titillating farce of “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble”, or a morning news show that’s interrupted by a gorilla with erectile dysfunction, nothing and nobody is safe when the camera is rolling. Starring Bill Bixby, Donald Sutherland, and everyone’s favorite block of wood, George Lazenby

So The Kentucky Fried Movie isn’t an anthology film, or a collection of vignettes, rather it could be more accurately described as a ‘skit movie’. The closest example I can think of at the moment is the original Monty Python film And Now For Something Completely Different, which was just a collection of sketches from Flying Circus that were remade for the cinema, but even that doesn’t quite describe what you’re getting here. The Kentucky Fried Movie is all about motion, constantly moving towards the next joke as if they were being charged a dollar a minute. There are proper sketches, sure, but there are just as many moments that exist for a single joke and then it’s off to something else. It can be bit a bit overwhelming at first, by the time you’ve finished processing one joke you could already be two or three jokes behind, but at the very least it insures that there’s always something to potentially laugh at.

Of course as a movie, it’s perhaps appropriate that the most memorable parts are those that spoof the popular cinema of the day. There’s the aforementioned “Catholic High School Girls In Trouble”, a sendup of the sleazy exploitation flicks of the day, and a spoof of the Irwin Allen era disaster films like The Towering Inferno called “That’s Armageddon”, but the most ‘developed and arguably best part of the film is its feature attraction, “A Fistful of Yen”. A parody of the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon and to some degree the Bond series, Evan Kim plays the martial artist ‘Loo’, who is tasked by British intelligence to infiltrate the compound of ‘Dr. Klahn’ in order to rescue a Chinese nuclear physicist and save the world from potential destruction. While it unfortunately suffers from some lame racist humor, characters having names like ‘Chow Mein’ for instance, what’s surprising is that in many respects ‘A Fistful of Yen’ has captured the essence of Lee’s films pretty well. Kim has a great physical presence on screen and many of the fight scenes are filmed in long takes with minimal cuts, which end up looking way more impressive than you would expect from a short parody. It is, no offense to John Landis, really the only point in the film where to me the directing really shined, as opposed to the writing.

“A Fistful of Yen” is also the segment that feels the most like what we would see the Zuckers do in the future, and I think therein lies the major issue with the film in hindsight; The Kentucky Fried Movie is the prototype of the formula that would be perfected in later films, so there’s not really much of an incentive to go back to it. Besides gratuitous tits I guess, in case you’re one of those people who don’t know the internet contains porn. I mean there’s still jokes, what would become known as the Zucker formula is there, but the engine just won’t turn over for some reason. I can watch The Kentucky Fried Movie and be amused for example, but I watch a single episode of Police Squad and get more than a couple laughs out of it. Maybe it’s the actors involved, maybe the fact there’s a story structure in later films allows for more concentrated jokes rather than the almost stream-of-consciousness style thing that we’ve got here, maybe it’s because this was made for a 1977 audience in mind and not for someone almost half a century in the future. I dunno, but whatever buttons it pushes for other people it doesn’t push them for me.

If we’re talking historically, as the movie that not only launched the Zucker’s career in film but that of John Landis as well (the success of this film is what landed him the Animal House gig), then I could see why this movie might be of interest. Otherwise, since most folks will probably already be familiar with Airplane! and The Naked Gun, there’s not much here that’s going to be radically different from what you’ve already seen. Aside from “A Fistful of Yen”, which I’d say is worth a watch even if you do it separated from the rest of the film. Play it by ear folks, and you’ll be fine.

Jabberwocky (1977), directed by Terry Gilliam

those of you who have't seen the Police Squad television show should get on that. Only 6 episodes, which is a shame, but so damn good.

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Jabberwocky", by Branford Marsalis Quartet

     Terry Gilliam might one of my favorite director when it comes down to it. Up until I started writing this blog I never really put much consideration into the idea of favorite directors, a misguided attempt to avoid bias when it came to recommendations I suppose. He’s got a fantastic track record though: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Brazil, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, all of them great films (in my opinion of course), all of them interesting films, and ones that I would heartily recommend when asked. Okay, The Brothers Grimm was a particularly fetid turd in the ‘make stories and people who aren’t that cool into super cool badasses’ action subgenre, (which I believe began with the ungodly awful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie yet still clings to to its wretched life like a half-drowned rat) and I don’t know what all could have been done to keep it from being Van Helsing-but-with-fairy-tales (fire, possibly). Certainly a misstep, but it hasn’t ruined my appreciation for Terry Gilliam films, and I haven’t been discouraged from eventually completing his filmography.

     Only a few more movies left to go.

     The movie takes place in a realistically filthy medieval kingdom (It’s always the Welsh who end up filthy) currently being besieged by a man-eating creature known as the Jabberwock. It’s a horrible looking beast, despite the fact that no one knows what it looks like, which consumes every part of a human, except for his bones and face for some reason. Gilliam seems to be implying that this creature is the same jabberwocky from the Lewis Carroll poem, not only with the name but even placing voice-overs of the poem throughout the film, occasionally acted out by a Punch & Judy show. I’m not entirely sure the reason, maybe because of the recognizable name, because there seems to be little relation to the events of the movie and what happens in the poem. Unless, as I now wonder, Mr. Gilliam’s purpose was to subvert the story in much the same way as he helped to subvert classic British literature in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which wouldn’t surprise me at all if that was true. There is a distinct lack of momeraths, in any case.

     Enter Dennis Cooper (Michael Palin), apprentice/son to the village barrel maker and consistent fuckup. Although Dennis has philanthropic ambitions, his constant mistakes have cause almost everyone he knows to viciously hate him, especially his father. When his father suddenly passes away (after telling his son on his deathbed that he hated his guts), Dennis decides to move to the city in order to make his fortune. Armed with only a half-eaten rotten potato and the ambivalence of his rotund lady love Griselda Fishfinger, Dennis Cooper is thrown a series of events that are as numerous as they are coincidental. Will Dennis win the heart of Griselda? Who will slay the fearsome jabberwock? You’ll have to watch to find out.

     Jabberwocky is a movie of reaction and coincidence. Nothing that happens to Dennis throughout the story is due to his own actions, and everything he tries to do ends up being a colossal failure. Stumbling through an adventure is not an uncommon thing in comedy; Arthur Dent helped save the galaxy several times by just existing, after all. When you make a character completely subject to circumstance you can’t go far into the extremes: If the only things that happen to them are good, then they are viewed as unrealistic and boring. In the same vein, a character who is beset again and again by misfortune is also considered unrealistic (or perhaps too realistic) and eventually boring. I feel that Gilliam finds the right balance, having Dennis achieve success without meaning to but having him suffer for it as well. Because he’s a nice guy, and we want to see him have something after being like dirt by the rest of the world, but we need to see that dirt being thrown to keep us interested.

     There are way more scenes of Dennis getting urinated on than I expected. I was expecting none at all.

     If you can imagine Monty Python and the Holy Grail with less emphasis on breaking the suspension of disbelief, or perhaps The Princess Bride with Stan Laurel, and you might get an idea of what Jabberwocky is like. It’s not really a movie that generates a large amount of post-movie discussion like 12 Monkeys or Brazil can, but it has that mix of the real and the fantastical that I can’t help but identify with Terry Gilliam’s work. For those interested in some British-style comedy, or are otherwise looking to branch off from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, I direct you here.

Result: Recommended