Word: surreality
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...plot is silly-surreal. A white U.S. she wolf named Beclch (Sharon Gans) becomes the vampire queen of an African tribe. She is a voracious, paganly sadistic earth mother; her husband (Jerome Dempsey) is an earthworm. To secure her rise to power, she coaxes him into contracting elephantiasis, which the natives regard as a symbol of regal divinity. He is a king in name and pain only, as she promptly betrays him with a kind of virility totem, a bare-torsoed American from Marlbrando country. Deserted by this lover at play's end, the white queen faces beheading...
After juggling these philosophical nuggets, Director Frankenheimer almost saves the picture by the straightforward expedient of a human sacrifice. He plunges with almost palpable relief into the surreal terrors of organization headquarters and carefully builds toward the film's screaming-meemie climax, sparing nothing but an anesthetic. Seconds has moments, and that's too bad, in a way. But for its soft and flabby midsection, it might have been one of the trimmest shockers of the year...
Against the surreal landscapes of Mozambique, Bechuanaland and Transvaal, Director Wilde unfolds this simple tale with elemental force, and acts it accordingly. His natives are not the usual faceless blacks but human beings whose capacity for violence the hero quickly matches. In the script, sparely written by Clint Johnston and Don Peters, a few scraps of English dialogue and African dialect count for less than the surprise of a snapping twig or the insistent throb of drums, injected into the bloodstream of the film like so many shots of adrenaline. Without insulting modern Africa, Naked Prey writes the wild poetry...
Though the surreal James Bond would probably stand up and jeer at such criticism, he might agree with pundits who reason that, in an anxiety-ridden age, it is more fun to laugh at Spectre, Thrush, and ZOWIE than to ponder the threats posed by Mao Tse-tung. The Bondsmen seem far too giddy a crew to inflict any permanent injury on young or old, male or female. As art, the spy spoofs have little value, and they lack even true satirical purpose, or what Critic G. K. Chesterton in A Defence of Nonsense called "a kind of exuberant capering...
...work is surreal, finicky, and owes much to Dada. Baruchello has even done a portrait, titled Chemical Inducers in Marcel Duchamp's Brain, of that venerable, revamped Dadaist. Painted on three layers of Plexiglas, the portrait is a phrenologist's delight, with arrows depicting the flow of nervous energy and vague images suggesting visual ideas. Like the autobiographical trinkets strewn through Baruchello's work, it is the facsimile of an artist's mind...