As an adjunct to my Maddinathon, I investigated the work of Guy Maddin’s old mucker in the Winnipeg Film Group, John Paizs. Paizs directed, among other films, Top Of The Food Chain (1999), a highly amusing homage to 1950s alien invasion movies.
I mention it here because it is a film that can be watched with real pleasure by those of us bored to tears by those endless examples of what one critic has dubbed “the cinema of Pointy Town”. Indeed, one could get no further from Pointy Town than the setting of a key scene, where the atomic scientist Dr Karel Lamonte (who works at the Atomic Academy) reports: “We found the remains of a dead human corpse, deceased, in the hilly, lumpy, bumpy part of town outside of town.”
As if to drive home the anti-Pointy Town point, the “lumpy, bumpy part of town outside of town” is pointedly mentioned several times.
Hooting Yard Rating : dozens upon dozens of bright pointy stars.
A mere two nights ago, in an effort to fill some idle night shift hours, I played the time-honoured game of trying to find the minimum set of words required to elicit a particular search result from Google. And yes, the result I was after was the very movie you mentioned above! I even had a fleeting thought along the lines of “This Key person probably would like that one”, or words to that effect. Tsk.
A mere two nights ago… just when I was watching the film (the existence of which I was unaware at the start of the day). What mystic interbrain fol-de-rol is afoot?