Dr. Caligari

This is definitely one of the strangest alt-indie-freak films I have seen. The characters are almost caricatures, but their actions are choreographed with their lines as they pose around each other.

Madeline Reynard is electrifying as Dr. Caligari, a descendant of the infamous Caligari. She is working on an insidious plot to transfer personality traits between patients in a mental hospital by swapping brain fluids. Her plans go awry when some staff members catch on and she uses a cannibalistic masochist (Shivver Boy) in her experiments.

I definitely recommend this movie for your collection, if not to scare your "normal" friends but for the giant latex tongue.

This movie is the greatest piece of absurdist cinema ever. Watching is like an intellectual acid trip through the darkest recesses of your brain. The characters are memorable, the dialogue is unforgettable, the scenery is unbelievable, and the whole is greater than even the sum of all these parts. Best line: "Juice me, baby, I'm a shiver junkie." Best character: the cannibalistic pedophile who is addicted to being electrocuted. Best scene: the surrealistic sex scene between the nymphomaniac and the doll-headed man.

Stephen Sayadian's "Dr. Caligari" (1989) is a phantasmagorical fever dream that plunges viewers into a world more disconcerting and distorted than the distorted sets of its silent film inspiration, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari". This film is a testament to the enduring power of German Expressionism, a perverse pastiche of its visual and psychological hallmarks warped through a lens of '80s cult cinema sensibilities.

At the heart of this bizarre spectacle is the asylum of Dr. Caligari's granddaughter, a cold and clinical space saturated with lurid neon colors reminiscent of a warped Dick Tracy comic panel. Here, sexual deviance is not merely a pathology but the very subject of experimentation. The film's psychosexual explorations are brazen and exploitative, channeling a dark, camp energy that borders on the parodic.

Sayadian uses dialogue as a weapon of disorientation. Characters deliver absurdist, stilted lines with unnerving artificiality, their words less meaningful utterances than sonic textures adding to the film's unsettling atmosphere. This mockery of 'arty' pretension contributes to the film's blackly comedic tone, as does the gleeful revelry in its own exploitation.

While some might admire its visual boldness and thematic provocations, "Dr. Caligari" is undeniably a film of extremes. Its blend of jarring style, sexual explicitness, and absurdist humor isn't crafted for a broad audience. Those with stomachs for the bizarre, a taste for the transgressive, and a fondness for the stylistic legacy of German Expressionism will find this film an intoxicating, if deeply flawed, curiosity. It's a warped mirror reflecting both the anxieties and guilty pleasures of its era, a fever dream of psychosexual perversion that remains both repellent and oddly compelling.

This is the visual equivalent of an acid trip. A giant tongue attached to a wall licks a writhing lady. Another woman pops out of nowhere in various scenes saying "Chinchilla! Chinchilla!", then disappears. It is one of the most original movies I have ever seen, you are in for a very different experience if you can get your hands on a copy. You will never ever forget this one....

With all of the insane and colorful zest of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, the similarly unnatural bodily horror dysplazia of VIDEODROME, some incredibly witty, well written and razor-sharp dialogue to rival the likes of FASTER, PUSSYCAT KILL! KILL!! And even HEATHERS, finished off with equal parts ERASERHEAD. FORBIDDEN ZONE and THE CORPSE GRINDERS, the resulting abortion emerges as director Stephen Sayadian's brilliant, long overdue sequel (of sorts... not really, though!) to the 1919 classic German expressionist CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, this more recent incarnation, also titled DR. CALIGARI, reaches such insanely overblown, expressionistic and unlikely comedic heighths, that it is an immensely bizarre and enjoyably welcome, diverting hoot of a bad acid trip that consistently veers off in the opposite direction from the atypical genre fare one might easily anticipate from such efforts, that it really does emerge as a wholly original and consistently first rate breath of fresh abstraction, quite apart, above and far beyond anything one might wish to compare it to... the mere fact that DR. CALIGARI was produced, released and exists at all justifies it as achieving meritorious mention as the unheralded and unsung art/sex/grindhouse classic that it truly is, rightly belonging alongside all those other, better known underground cult classics of the last fifty years, and, to my reasonably well-educated, informed cinematic estimation, is nothing short of a minor masterpiece and truly one of the very finest horror comedies in all of film history.... That being so firmly stated : UNLESS sustained representations of abnormal psychology and psychotic situations, every kind of aberrant sexuality, highly stylized instances of day-glo color schemes, synchronized avant-garde staging beyond any rational, functional or logical reasoning and some of the funniest, most ridiculously realized puns & double entendres ever to appear so intentionally, consistently rhythmic and delivered with such hyper-realized absurdist aplomb as you're ever likely to experience from any other title in the library of contemporary adult genre films... If any of that doesn't exactly sound like your particular cup of angel dust, then I would earnestly suggest that you definitely steer clear of this queer grand guignol melting pot of ideas, genres and psyches! Sure, the film is far from perfect, but hell, even SUNSET BOULEVARD had it's fair share of mis-steps!