Deaf Crocodile Films continue to posit themselves at the
global forefront of importing Eastern European films throughout the decades,
usually scouring the far reaches of the planet to inherit and exhibit some of
the most striking, unusual and largely all but unavailable films in lovingly
remastered boutique limited editions.
Everything from Russian, Finnish, Estonian, Czechoslovakian, Romanian language
cinema and so forth seems to get picked up and licensed to the United States
for the very first time often stacked with plentiful extras, reversible sleeve
art and a special limited-edition slipcover.
Usually the weirder the better, Deaf Crocodile has had a knack for
introducing science-fiction/fantasy oddities from the other side of the pond
into home theaters across America most people would never think possible.
Their latest venture comes in the form of Academy Award
nominated Croatian animator Dušan Vukotić and his brief foray into live action
filmmaking with his perversely weird and freakish psychedelic science-fiction/fantasy/horror romp Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy, a
film of boundless imagination that somehow sits nicely alongside such surreal
prosthetic driven studies of the literary process as Naked Lunch or Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Much like
those aforementioned unadaptable screen treatments, the film’s main protagonist
concerns a struggling novelist named Robert (Zarko Potocnjak) who desperate for
content imagines a story involving gold-skinned androids named Andra (Ksenia
Prohaska) and two child robots Targo (Rene Bitorajac) and Ulu (Jasminka Alic)
who visit Earth from the fictional planet Arkana. Much to his shock and horror, the creatures
of his imagination come to vivid flesh-and-blood life, causing a number of
jealousies as well as problems with his girlfriend Biba (Lucie Zulová) before a
mysterious Boschian tentacled alien dubbed the Mumu Monster (designed by Czech animator
Jan Svankmajer) appears to wreak utterly bonkers havoc on his seaside Croatian
village.
Somewhat like a live action adaptation of Delta Space Mission
or The Son of the Stars replete with psychedelic visuals exquisitely
rendered in 1.33:1 by Jirí Macák and backlit by a shimmering electronic
keyboard score by Tomislav Simovic, this frightening, bizarre but somehow
sardonically enchanting paean to the woes of a writer struggling to maintain a
balance between his fantasy creations and the real world is peculiar, discomforting,
unnerving but through it all kind of a wild roller coaster ride.
With a central alien (antagonist?) that looks
like the evil robot Maria from Metropolis if she had sex with C-3PO, Visitors
of the Arkana Galaxy is truly unpredictable as it wades through both
stop-motion animated wonderments, blue-screen effects with just enough of its
own brand of funky unreality it almost achieves a musicality. Sporting perhaps the wildest fully rendered
prosthetic alien monster this side of Carlo Rambaldi or H.R. Giger who both put
their heads together for the legendary Alien, amid the inventive sci-fi
fantasy comedy we get a mind-melting scene where said monster randomly appears
at a wedding party which it terrorizes in ways that have to be seen to be
believed including kills that’ll make modern viewers think of The Greasy
Strangler.
Produced by Zagreb Film, Jadran Film and Filmski Studio in a
joint Czech-Yugoslavian coproduction co-written by Vukotić and Milos Macourek, Visitors
of the Arkana Galaxy with its emphasis on prosthetics, fantasy imagination
and the depths of creative genius is a completely untamed beast of a movie that
digs its extraterrestrial claws into your cranium only to pull both haves apart
before pelting them against the wall.
At
once scary and playful, difficult to pin down while ultimately coming back to
the strengths of the creative impulse, the film is anchored by a gifted
performance from Zarko Potocnjak as Robert who as the struggling novelist
trying desperately to come up with tangible literary ideas that’ll stick and
propel his success. Ksenia Prohaska is clearly
channeling Brigitte Helm as the golden clad android who keeps having to reprimand
her child robots for repeatedly causing trouble with the Mumu Monster and so
forth. Lucie Zulová makes Biba into a
basically thankless character though the Mumu Monster created by Jan Svankmajer
posits the legendary Czech animator as the unsung real star of the film.
The last full length feature film of Dušan Vukotić before
his return to short filmmaking and finally passing in 1998, Visitors of the
Arkana Galaxy starts out uncategorizable before coming together in the end
as a tribute to imaginative science fiction fantasy writing lived and dreamt by
its main character Robert. The film’s
most striking image of the Mumu Monster flying in space with Robert and the
androids in tow preparing to light a cigarette off the monster’s tentacled
snout signifies the film’s offbeat yet hip and cool attitude towards conjuring
up things and ideas no one considered previously.
Nominated for the Best Film award and Best Screenplay
at the 1984 Fantasporto festival in Porgual, Visitors of the Arkana Galaxy for
a time languished in Eastern European cinematic obscurity before the folks at
Deaf Crocodile mounted a Kickstarted campaign (myself among the backers)
leading towards its eventual restoration of the only surviving 35mm
interpositive. In the hands of modern
moviegoers, you find another Eastern European science-fiction fantasy/horror
hybrid about how wonderful it is to write fiction quite as far out there as
this. Absolutely on world cinema’s most
endangered species list.
--Andrew Kotwicki