The legendary Mickey Rooney gives an incredibly wild, hammy and over-the-top full-tilt insane, inspired and uninhibited performance as B.J. Lang, a deranged and delusional psychotic washed-up Hollywood has-been who thinks he's a great successful big-time film director ala Orson Welles. Lang relentlessly torments and terrorizes hapless lovely aspiring actress Carlotta (the beautiful Luana Anders) on a dingy and decrepit abandoned studio back lot: he rants and raves to himself with rip-snorting gonzo aplomb, spoon feeds her baby food, impersonates an effeminate make-up artist (Rooney sports bright red lipstick and gaudy blue eye shadow!), pretends to have a fatal massive heart attack, and occasionally breaks into these astounding impromptu a cappella renditions of "Chattanooga Choo Choo" which he heartily belts out in this pained hoarse'n'wheezy croak of a voice.
Writer/director Yabo Yablonsky whips up one awesomely aberrant and idiosyncratic marvel of an outré indie avant garde experimental cinematic meditation on dreams, delusions, dementia and the fine line between unattainable fantasy and bitter reality. Yablonsky deftly creates and maintains a clammy, creepy and claustrophobic weirded-out mood that sucks the viewer into the stunningly surreal and suffocating anything-goes nightmarish atmosphere which proves to be both jarring and riveting in comparable measure. Baird Bryant's garishly stylized cinematography uses every fancy artsy trick in the book: crazily tilted camera angles, distorted fish-eye lens, strenuous slow motion, artificially sped up film, wonky zoom-in close-ups and startling freeze frames. Gil Melle's groovy, droning, atonal psychedelic acid jazz score constitutes as another significant asset. Keenan Wynn briefly pops up in an embarrassingly thankless bit part as a mumbling drunken bum who Rooney runs through with a rapier. While Rooney clearly dominates the picture with his bracingly berserk and bravura acting, Anders still nonetheless holds her own quite well and gets to perform a major crack-up scene where she really cranks up the astonishing eye-rolling histrionics to 10 plus. A splendidly screwy and singular one-of-a-kind piece of sheer celluloid lunacy.
Writer/director Yabo Yablonsky whips up one awesomely aberrant and idiosyncratic marvel of an outré indie avant garde experimental cinematic meditation on dreams, delusions, dementia and the fine line between unattainable fantasy and bitter reality. Yablonsky deftly creates and maintains a clammy, creepy and claustrophobic weirded-out mood that sucks the viewer into the stunningly surreal and suffocating anything-goes nightmarish atmosphere which proves to be both jarring and riveting in comparable measure. Baird Bryant's garishly stylized cinematography uses every fancy artsy trick in the book: crazily tilted camera angles, distorted fish-eye lens, strenuous slow motion, artificially sped up film, wonky zoom-in close-ups and startling freeze frames. Gil Melle's groovy, droning, atonal psychedelic acid jazz score constitutes as another significant asset. Keenan Wynn briefly pops up in an embarrassingly thankless bit part as a mumbling drunken bum who Rooney runs through with a rapier. While Rooney clearly dominates the picture with his bracingly berserk and bravura acting, Anders still nonetheless holds her own quite well and gets to perform a major crack-up scene where she really cranks up the astonishing eye-rolling histrionics to 10 plus. A splendidly screwy and singular one-of-a-kind piece of sheer celluloid lunacy.