Don't Believe the Hype

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Toilet humour, Jerzy Stuhr in the same clothes (!?) as in "Deja Vu", unfunny and stupid sexual innuendoes, repetitive running about, shallow dialogues, cheap costumes, etc. It's simply remarkable how low the director of "Deja Vu" (a masterpiece in comedy genre) went here. To use his own imagery of this one, he went down the toilet.It's got a potential (the story, the dialogues and action scenes could have been done so much better), but all we have is a kind of unfunny freaky story for adults (though, without proper adult material as well). What audience was this piece of trash made for? A rhetorical question it is.A bizarre notion was in my mind after watching the immortal "Deja Vu", that Juliusz Machulski was a genius. Now it's clearly seen that he is not. A genius would not have done such a tasteless "parable".It simply does not deserve more than a 2 out of 10 (do not trust the high mark on IMDb). Thanks for attention.

Many people try to see this movie ONLY as satire on "soviet times" in Poland. If you do so you just loose a great opportunity to have great time with one of the best polish comedies. Imagine people who have to drink "Polo Cockta" (polish imitation of Coke and simultaneously a symbol of polish tries to be as good as "the western world" many years ago) just to stay in their actual (human) size. When you stop drinking it you can get into quite different world, where everything is minimized, but with usage of elements of the "big world" (imagine having a bath i a tea-pot...). When you have too little to share, you have to... shrink people. (It's quite funny idea to solve polish problems of the eighties, when we lacked of mostly everything:). This movie is definitely worth watching. Pity not all polish jokes are translatable but... when you "get dwarfed" you will understand.. Oh yes you will..:)

I always wondered what good could be found in this absolute flop of Juliusz Machulski? Well, if you say this film is a satire on the Polish Communist years, then, the question easily arises why more than 50 % of Poles still recollect the Soviet years with a great warmth and nostalgia? Let's put the political problems aside. The movie, then. It is a shame to have made such a shallow and humorless try in the style of Monty Python but with much more cynical (and not funny) sexual innuendos, with less humor and less tact. The top (or, rather, the bottom) of this vapid film is the moment when a dwarfish man get into a female vagina and thus gives her gratification. This borders on with the pornography and leaved you with a deep disgust. I only may ask why such a talented director made such a bad and senseless work?

I don't know what it is about Communism and its impact on Polish minds, but any art influenced by a hatred of it comes out awesome. Kingsajz (King Size) is another one of Machulski's satirical masterpieces. Though this movie is brilliant and slightly eerie without any background info, the insider jokes, mainly made at the expense of, you guessed it, the much hated Communist regime, will make you laugh. The movie takes absurd ideas, like soda that is actual a secret formula for un-shrinking, and little people living in a room stacked with old card catalogs, and puts them together into a philosophical movie with a very cliche yet disturbing ending.