THE opening shot of this sci-fi horror feature from the Spanish
Almodovar stable is icky-grisly stuff; a kidnap gone horribly wrong, a
girl floating on a pool of dark blood on a heart-shaped waterbed. It's
an image typical of Alex de Iglesia's approach. He mixes Almodovar
kitsch with a heavy helping of gore to create a highly individualistic
style destined to shoot him right into the cultdom stratosphere,
alongside Waters, Lynch and the rest of the cooky bunch. Accion Mutante
is a paean to bad taste. We're talking mega gross.
The titles take a swing at the Bond movies and from here on in satire
reigns supreme, with parodies on everything from daytime television to
Star Wars and Mad Max. Accion Mutante (Mutant Action) is a gang of
deformed terrorists, fighting back at the beauty-obsessed world of 2012,
a hellish society we can already glimpse in the pages of Hello. ''We
don't want to lose weight or smell good,'' snarls their leader Ramon
(Antonio Resines), who has spent five gloomy years in jail watching his
gang (faithfully recorded by bizarre fly-on-the-wall television cameras)
botch up every kidnap attempt. Like Delicatessen's sewer bandits they're
big on plans but hopeless in action.
Ramon soon licks them into shape, planning the audacious snatch of
Patricia Oruju, daughter of a powerful industrialist, from her wedding.
Against all odds, i.e., their own staggering ineptitude, they succeed.
Taking off in a tin-pot spaceship to the ransom rendezvous of the Lost
Mine bar of Axturias, some in-fighting en route reduces their numbers.
The craft crashes with Ramon and Patricia as the only apparent
survivors. Head concussed, she duly suffers Stockholm Syndrome, falling
in love with Ramon, a man with a face of steel and a heart of stone (but
sexy as hell for all that).
The rest of the film is awash with blood and hilarity, although some
torture scenes are literally close to the bone. Strong stomach and sense
of irony required but see it if you can so in years to come you can say
you saw it first.
* Tonight, Cameo, 11.45.
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