 |
||||
|
Acción mutante [1993] In its first scenes, this swiftly delineates its appealing premise of a handicapped vigilante group [their stylised logo is a wheelchair-bound stick figure brandishing a rifle], providing its grungy heroes with a coolly anarchic TV-style credits sequence complete with an obnoxious 'Accion Mutante' rap and an evocative snippet of Lalo Schifrin's Mission: IMPOSSIBLE theme. Having targeted body-builders, TV aerobics classes, sperm banks and other epitomes of a beauty-conscious society, the group quite properly move on to a high society wedding bash [which, with its absurd clothes and bubblegum music is the single sequence that suggests the influence of producer Pedro Almodovar] and stage an effectively ridiculous atrocity triggered when the bride prematurely sticks a knife into the cake containing a hunchbacked gunman. However, when the terrorists get into their spaceship and head for
Axturias and Accion Mutante's solidarity breaks down as Yarritu kills
off the supporting loons, the film abandons its ostensible idea and
sticks rather too closely to the plot of No Orchids
for Miss Blandish [especially Robert Aldrich's adaptation of
James Hadley Chase, The Grissom Gang]. As
it straggles across a familiar desert planetscape, Accion Mutante even
starts to look like one of the dozens of Mad Max
imitations churned out in the early '80s by Italy, the Philippines or
Charles Band. Isolated images [the smiling dead Siamese twin strung
up by a lynch mob while his living brother kicks] recapture the sick
humour of the opening, but rather more sequences go beyond black humour
into areas of actual nastiness [a retarded child slicing away at Yarritu
with a razor-blade then pouring salt and vingear into the wounds] that
can in no way be seen as comic. Also highly un-funny is the general
abuse Patricia [who has her lips stapled together for a long stretch
of the film] is required to take, ostensibly because of her class -
which seems actually to express a streak of unattractive mysogyny [there
are notably no female mutants] that co-exists uncomfortably with the
editorialising on behalf of the hideous. First Published In: Sight and Sound September 1993 p.38 Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
|
||||