Review of Lunacy (2005) by John T — 04 Sep 2007

Once upon a time there was a czech filmmaker called Jan Svankmajer who used to make some of the greatest surreal movies and shorts. Who dont remember Conspirators of pleasure, Alice or Little Otik?. His corpus of short films was annoying in quantity and quality.

But years went by and he lose it. He lose all of his talent real bad or hes just putting it in something that has nothing to do with cinema. So he did Lunacy, a movie thats just fine into what it promises but fails real hard delivering it.

This movie is a straight rip off from a movie called The Mansion Of Madness done superbly thirty years before by Juan Lopez Moctezuma; based on a work by Allan Poe and inspired by The Marquis of Sade, the lunatics are less crazy than the asylum authorities, the asylum authorities are fascists, there you have pseudo- surreal images, subconscoius allussions, etc.

The problem I find in this particular movie is that the characters are bad acted, the story is pointless when trying to make a political comment of war. The animation is so out of context here, so pretentious and dumb that I just kept the dvd copy to have proof of what im saying.

I screen Lunacy first and then Mansion of Madness, Then I ask for comments. Theres really condescendant people who has told me that is not SO bad. No its totally bad, boring and pretentiously stupid. If this was a movie made by a film student it would be a good project or whatever, but we are talking here of a veteran filmmaker.

So Dont see this trash I recommend, unless you want to waste time, money and your respect for Svankmajer.