Word: ferally
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...workman Sparrow (Mikhail Zhigalov) include a legacy of family violence, a stretch in a work camp, virtual gangsterism in the cemetery where he works as a gravedigger, and a dangerous weakness for vodka. There are performances of enchanting sweetness from Anton Tabakov as a young co-worker and of feral malignity from Valeri Shalnykh as a mock-friendly gang enforcer. But the most memorable scenes show Sparrow alone with his cacophony of fears, climbing arduously up to a bell tower where he can hear the euphony of wind and birds and a distantly remembered lullaby, until a screeching train cuts...
...thunk it? A horror movie with brains and guts. That is, as it happens, the theme of George A. Romero's Monkey Shines: a battle of intellect vs. instinct, the moral vs. the feral, Allan man vs. Ella monkey. Ella learns to know Allan, through a kind of transspecies ESP, and to love him, with a frightening intensity. He is seized with visions, from Ella's point of view, of the creature's nocturnal rambles as she acts out his jealousy and frustration in the most violent form; and Romero films the images as if through a late-night monkey...
...underscore his high-minded intentions, he calls his book a fable. This is somewhat misleading, since there are no animals that talk like people but plenty of human characters who sound feral. A Mafia bill collector: "You either got $220 for me or I take your f------ ear home with me." An unwed teenage mother: "I waited to have a baby until I was 15. That's a long time. From eleven to 15 waitin' to have a baby." A slumlord: "The original reason I went to Dobermans was that I fell in love with their teeth. I thought they...
...back home, he says, is more of the same -- the beginning of the same. Everyone in Hope and Glory may be English middle class, but Boorman sees to it that war soon turns the instincts feral. In the rubble of a blitzkrieg, children forage for ghastly souvenirs, and adults renounce a lifetime of propriety for some guilty, convulsive sex. But this is not a horror story, though there are horrors for the Rohans to endure. And though their ordeal was unusual, Boorman makes it close to universal. Every family lives in a war zone of its own circumstances and compromises...
Working from the principle that too much is never enough, Russell unloads his inventory of weird imagery. Candied corpses and puddles of rancid goo. A woman's nipples that open to reveal eyes. Claire, filthy and feral, a dead rat in her mouth. Stuff like that. In such films as The Devils and Altered States, Russell found a conjurer's balance between sense and surrealism. But with this catalog of chic atrocities he cannot shock, he can only embarrass. For an artist as canny as Russell, that's crazy...