Food

This film is hyped as being in the same sub-genus of film as Tsukamoto's 'Tetsuo' or Shozin Fukui's '964 Pinocchio.' It is, however not as focussed or crafted as either of those films. Still, it warrants a degree of attention.

The story, as I understand it: Three conspirators steal a secret android. In their warehouse hideout, the android secretes a reality-altering substance, which casts them into a frightening nether-world of interconnected subjectivity.

Meanwhile, in the real world, workers enter the warehouse, only to find that the occupants within have mutated into a huge, protoplasmic organism.

Some aspects of this film are more successful than others. The protoplasm being is great, it reminds me of some kind of Kroft-type Saturday morning special effect creature gone really, really wrong. On the other hand an extended montage of stills to ironically loungy music badly overstays it's welcome.

Still, it all seems in good fun; during one of the hallucination sequences, the scientist who designed the android is revealed in a bizarre music video sequence---as a singer for an 80s hair-band.

This does for corporate research science what 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' does for inbred hillbillies. It is a film about psychic warfare that makes David Cronenberg's 'Scanners' seem ineffectual. Tho I don't like Rubber's Lover as much as Fukui's other feature, '964 Pinocchio,' it is certainly remarkable. What makes this film chilling to the bone is not the strange technology depicted or the spooky black & white cinematography or the creepy narrative ambiguities, tho this all adds. It is the screaming, hysterical, overblown performances by the actors which really gives the impression of terrible violence. Tho there is a decent amount of physical splatter in this film, the real gore is psychological. Try this film. you'll feel like a rhesus monkey in a head trauma experiment, and you'll like it!