Howard - verinen iltapäivä

Splatter comedy in Finland has been the sole and minuscule reserve of amateur filmmakers, but Howard tried for some cross over with professional actors and money from the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation. In what is essentially a thirty-minute amok run, Peltonen's harmless deaf-mute florist Howard Cucumber (!) is branded a serial killer by the police and the media and flees across the city, causing more accidental deaths as he is chased by the real thing, Lietola's gun-toting and grinning psycho sicced on him by the police. Between synthesizer-driven vignettes of people running, falling from high buildings, getting shot to pieces or giving CPR to a squashed cat, we get some dialogue in short parodic sketches, the best of which are the television news flashes serving as info dumps and taking the mickey out of a few contemporaneous celebrities. The mandatory (for the 1990s) Silence of the Lambs parody manages a few hits as well, but director Neil Hardwick's cameo as a jiving gangster is just as unfunny as the Tarantino soliloquies it parodies.

Visually, the film is impressive in creating scene after scene of bloodbath and stunts with breathless pacing. Like Lietola's performance, its splatter ballet exudes a delirious relish of kids loosed from all shackles and given the means to wallow in their wildest fantasies. Nice for them, but the jokes may be lost on the viewer.