The Crazy Family (Ishii, 1984): Garden Cinema, 8.45pm
The screening for this film on Saturday 31 January will be introduced by Tom Cunliffe (UCL), and will be followed by a post film discussion group in the Atrium Bar. The movie is part of the 1980s: The Lost Decade of Japanese Cinema season at the Garden Cinema.Time Out review:
On the surface, Gakuryu Ishii's 'crazy family' is as normal as you or me:
husband, wife and two pretty, healthy teenage kids, living in the
suburban house of their dreams. But Ishii rips aside this bourgeois
façade to show the horror festering beneath. Dad's mind is a seething
can of paranoid worms, convinced that his 'love' is the only cure for
the 'sickness' he detects in the others, and well before the end he's
trying to trick them into a painless group suicide with a stout dose of
insecticide in the coffee. The problems come to a head when his senile
father (disgusting as only the elderly know how to be) visits and
outstays his welcome, forcing Dad to take a chainsaw to the living-room
floor with the perfectly reasonable intention of digging a
cellar-cum-fallout shelter to accommodate the old misery. But that's
when he strikes the nest of white ants... Seeing Ishii's film is a bit
like rediscovering the thrill of your first encounter with Monty Python
all those years ago: black humour at its most vicious (ie. funniest),
paced like a commuter express and spiked with a dash of science fiction
to keep even the most micro-chipped viewer unsure where he, she or it is
going.
Tony Rayns
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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