Fresh and Exciting

Blistering performances.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Fernando Arrabal is an author of books and plays. He was part of the panic movement of theater, which also included Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor. In fact, in the beginning of "Viva La Muerte" we see some morbidly surreal drawings by Topor. The film is semi-autobiographical and takes place during the Franco era in Spain during World War II. Fando witnesses his father seized by soldiers. Fando thinks that his father is dead. Later he finds out his father is still alive and that his mother turned him in to authorities for suspicion of communist activities. The film shows how war affects children. Fando has many grotesque, sadistic, surreal daydreams about his father being tortured by the fascist army. The daydream sequences are done in bright neon filters, with strange music and sound effects, even a children's song. The film makes a strong anti-war statement, and is filled with satirical and blasphemous imagery. Some of the images are extreme, including a real cow slaughter and Fando's mom torturing his dad. She even takes a dump on his head. The extended torture sequences may remind some of what the U.S has been doing to Iraqi prisoners. Although the film is brutal at times, it still is beautiful in its subversive poetry. "Viva la Muerte" is a masterpiece of surrealism and makes an important statement about the evils of war.

A wife's betrayal of her husband, leads to a son's nightmares about his father's disappearance, torture and murder at the hands of a totalitarian state.His visions are made literal with brutal, grotesquely eschatological and scatological imagery. Do not expect linear narrative; the feverish imaginings of the boy are the plot, much like paging though Goya's "The Disasters of War", and "Caprichos", or a long leisurely look at one of Bosch's more apocalyptic paintings, to which there are visual allusions in the film, the narrative is driven by episodes of ever- increasing malaise, which give it its power.A special treat, and little masterpiece of horror all unto itself, are the beginning credits, with a haunting song sung by children over monstrous, but beautiful, drawings by Roland Topor.Invite the whole family over for a screening; you'll forever after feel like a functional family unit.

This film begins with a long credit sequence where a strangely catchy nonsense song sung by French schoolchildren is played over Boschian illustrations (by "Fantastic Planet's" Roland Topor) of torture and sadomasochism. And the film never lets up after that. This is the first film of Fernando Arrabal, a Spanish friend and collaborator of the more famous (and more notorious)Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky. (Arrabal wrote the play on which Jodorowsky's first film "Fando y Lis" was loosely based). Although they would probably both be loath to admit it, both men owe an obvious debt to fellow countryman Luis Bunuel. But while Jodorowsky's films resemble the early, very surrealistic films Bunuel made with Salvador Dali (albeit with a lot of trendy 60's era Eastern mysticism thrown in), this film is more of an uncensored version of the films like "Los Oividados" that Bunuel made in Mexico in the 1950's which combine surrealism with neorealist social commentary.This film is much more autobiographical than anything Bunuel or Jodorowsky ever did. It tells the story of a young boy, Fando (no doubt based on Arrabal himself), whose Republican father has been arrested by the Fascists in the dark days after the Spanish Civil War where people who supported the other side were rounded up and executed even if it meant "killing half the country". Much of the movie is based on the boy's memories of his father and bizarre surrealistic images he imagines of the fate that might have befallen him (including being buried up to his neck in the sand while Arabesque figures on horseback use his head to play polo, or being sewn alive into a cow's carcass). As in "Los Olvidados" the boy has a strange Oedipal love/hate relationship with his treacherous young mother who he finds out betrayed his father to the soldiers. He also has an "aunt" who seems to suffer from a bizarre combination of religious mania and nymphomania (Arrabal gives the Catholic Church all the credit it so richly deserves in the tragedy that befell Spain).This movie is quite political. The title is based on a real quote by a fascist general: "Down with intelligence, long live death!" (a sentiment that by the 1970's was making its way across the Atlantic to Pinochet's Chile and the military government in Argentina). Ironically, this film which is a scathing indictment of human cruelty, has often drawn charges of animal cruelty. One act of "animal cruelty" involves a disgusting bug (good riddance). I would hope a scene where a lizard gets its head bitten of was faked (as much for the sake of the young actor as the lizard). The footage of a bull being butchered and castrated is definitely real, but animal rightists should be glad if anything since this occurs thousands of times a day and this scene shows how truly disgusting it is. Besides this is not an Italian cannibal film with a tacked-on political message to justify its animal slaughter--this scene will really hit home with the kind of people who have no stomach for animal suffering but think nothing of their government creating or permitting massive human suffering for the sake of high-minded political ideals. This is truly a brave, powerful, and memorable film.

Whether you like them or not, the images are haunting. I saw this film 31 years ago and still remember some sequences vividly. You might argue that the anarcho-surrealism is intellectualised, a pose. But you cannot deny that it is effective. The message gets across, even if a sledgehammer approach is required. But it also is very poetic: the poetry of cruelty. I suppose this kind of establishment bashing was considered very chic in those days. Now it looks dated, unfortunately. But at the time, it shook me profoundly.