Questione di pelle

This film will make your brain ache--unless you happen to be schizophrenic!! The film is a surreal mess and it's practically impossible to adequately describe it.

The film begins in the fictional paradise of Cicada--a land almost completely isolated from the outside world. A tour guide is taking some foreigners through town. As he describes it glowingly, the people see a wide variety of repellent images--with lots of deliberately gratuitous nudity and violence in this dirty crap-hole. In addition, you get to see a severed cow head that spouts water from its nostrils and it's used like a faucet! Wow...pass the LSD! What follows after the tour group leaves appears to be a parody of the American South--with its strict (at times) segregation, racist attitudes and white folks trying to get in the pants of black women. It's all very coarse as well as stupid. So, instead of actually making a statement about a need for change, it's just an incredibly bizarre and cheaply made crap film. Probably not worth your time unless you've already seen every movie already made and are looking to see the last!

Checkerboard (1959)

** (out of 4)

After a bizarre pre-credit sequence where we get to read a bit, we then hit the town of Cicada and meet some of the rather bizarre people who live there. We learn that a tourist group is being led through the town, which is away from most things and they see how evil white people try to hold the black people down with racism and violence.

CHECKERBOARD is without question one of the strangest films that you're ever going to see and my plot description really can't do the film justice because it's just so bizarre and outrageous on so many different labels. This French-Italian co-production was probably made by people who saw headlines of what it was like in the Southern portion of the United States so they wanted to make a movie on it.

The problem is that the film really isn't all that well made and it's certainly not a good or realistic look at the South. I mean, showing how evil some Southern people were is right on the mark but everything here is so exaggerated as far as the characters go that it's hard to take it too serious. There's a very bizarre and sometimes weird view of the white people from them looking weird or just acting in strange ways. One man has a severed cow's head on his counter that shoots water out of its mouth!

The performances are mostly forgettable and I'd argue that the film goes on a bit too long at 93 minutes. Technically speaking the film really isn't all that impressive but at the same time the story is just so weird and bizarre that it's hard to not keep watching and scratching your head wondering what the hell they were thinking. The frank and brutal look at racism and racist words is something quite rare for this era.