Delicatessen (1991)

You could call this film a post apocalyptic dystopian Sci-Fi, a Dark Comedy, or a light hearted Romance and you would be correct on all three counts. From the same French director who became most known for the acclaimed and award winning Amelie (also known for City of Lost Children, and Alien: Resurrection) comes this incredibly unique and delightful film.  The film takes place in future France (date unspecified though the costumes and props give the film a 1940s feel) after the world has been ravaged by nuclear warfare and farmers can no longer grow crops of any kind (or at least fertile soil and seeds are incredibly hard to come by). So people have now resorted to eating meat, but due to no crops, animals are also hard to come by, so a French landlord who also happens to own a butcher shop hacks up his tenants and sells them to his customers. Despite that description sounding incredibly dark and bleak, I kid you not this film is one of the most whimsical and light-hearted movies I've seen in a long time, possibly ever. This is director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's first film and it has won many awards, won much praise from critics, and is featured in many "greatest films of all time" lists. Jeunet has a very distinct style to all his films, and they usually come off as visually rich, but distinctly French, dark fantasies; This film is no exception. The actor Dominique Pinon (who is 

featured in all of Jeunet's films) plays the main character, an ex-circus clown looking for a job and a place to live. His character thinks he has found a great deal at the Butcher's tenement, but he will soon realize what danger awaits him. The film takes turns showing off all the tenants in the building and each one of them is somewhat pathetic (though endearing) and funny in their own way. There are two competitive brothers who make novelty toys that make cow sounds, a woman who constantly tries (and fails) to commit suicide in elaborate ways, a down on his luck salesman who designs condoms and sells "rat-calls," and the Butcher's own shy bookish daughter who takes a fancy to the new tenant. The highlights of this film include its great special effects, its bizarre romance between the ex-clown and the Butcher's daughter (they play a musical duet for cello and "singing" saw), its incredible wit (I found myself laughing out loud to this one several times), and the fact it maintains an inspiring "wide-eyed" innocence in a seemingly bleak world. Make no mistake this is a weird one, and quite often some of the laughs come from the sheer weirdness of the film, but I found it thoroughly unique and enjoyable. Delicatessen was to me  refreshingly uplifting drink of water, in the midst of  a sea of dark and gritty films with bleak outlooks on life. Delicatessen shows that there is hope no matter how bad life seems. I give it a 5/5. You can watch the trailer here. 

 

The Original Sweeney Todd aka The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936)

The story of Sweeney Todd goes all the way back to 1847 when it first appeared as a serial in British penny dreadful's (an early form of campy or melodramatic pulp fiction) but it has arguably never been as famous or popular as it has been in the last 30 years or so. The most well known portrayals of this classic story of "the demon barber" are the tony award winning Stephen Soundheim musical version, and the Tim Burton Johnny Depp (2007) film version of said musical . But before either of those versions there was a film version made in 1936. If you are not familiar with the story, Sweeney Todd is the name of an English Barber in London who murders his customers and gives them to the little lady next door, who butchers them and makes them into her famous meat pies. It's gruesome to be sure, but its the story's ghastliness that has made it stick in pop culture for so long. Back in the 1930s Hollywood's biggest leading men in Horror were the Hungarian Bela Lugosi, and the British Boris Karloff. While Karloff was the most famous English man in Horror at the time, there was another man of the day who was just as big as Karloff in the UK; Tod Slaughter. Slaughter made many horror films in England back in the 30s and 40s, but his fame didn't quite transfer across the Atlantic he remained and remains still, largely unknown. He was famous for playing over the top madmen in Victorian melodramas,

his most famous of which was Sweeney Todd. He did influence many future famous names in horror such as Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, both most famous for the many gothic British melodramatic films they made with Hammer Studios. Overall the film is decent. Slaughter is brilliantly chilling in the title role and reminds me a bit of Mark Hamil's interpretation of The Joker in Batman: the animated series. Unlike the famous musical and film version, Todd is not an empathetic character in the story here and is only the villain, not the kind of antihero portrayed in later versions with a much more complex story-line. The movie never goes into the background of Todd or why he murders these people, and that mystery makes the character all the more chilling. Overall it's a purely entertaining film with nothing too deep to it, but who says it has to be anything more? Obviously the production values of the film are more than a little dated being almost 80 years old, but Slaughter's portrayal of the character is still somewhat frightening even by today's standards. I give the film a 4/5. You can watch entire film on youtube here.