Beg!

The insane asylum film genre seems utterly incapable of producing anything that sits firmly in the center of the bell curve; what comes out of it is either brilliant or awful, with the awful being just that and only that and not awful in that wonderful way that some films can be. Out of the first category come things like "House of Fools" and "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and the slightly lesser but still admirable "Quills" among several others. At the other end of the bell emerge films like "Beg!"

There seems to be a toybox of images and affects that filmmakers pick and choose from when piecing together their vision of an insane asylum. It appears that the makers of Beg! raided the toybox in drunken madness, and took everything out and threw it into the big jumble that is this film. But as is often the case with drunken projects, the end result looks just like the mess that it always was. The non-drunken audience will not be fooled; however the drunken audience is just that - a drunken audience; drunk on bad imagery, inaudible dialogue, and their own pretensions.

If you choose to subject yourself to a bad insane asylum movie by purpose (I did not), then I do not think that I am spoiling anything by telling you what you will see. You will see the garish but fuzzily muted colors that unimaginative filmmakers seem to think represents the clouded yet energetic lunatic mind, the fuzzy colors that are supposed to let you know that you are seeing the world through the eyes of one deranged. Of course, with this timeworn modus operandi comes the notion that anybody connected with the lunatic world long enough comes to see everything in the same muted shades; ie., just who is the sane one anyway? Gee - that's a novel proposition. Never thought of that one before. And with this tactic comes the inevitable lack of much else in the way of a story or a reason for being - anything goes, since it's from the looney perspective. Anything can make sense, anything can be explained away. Who needs to understand (or even HEAR) the dialogue? Just look at the face of the tortured singer. That explains it all, right? RIGHT? Now, I'm not saying that a great movie needs to make sense. It certainly does not. Hell, "Yellow Submarine" makes no sense and it's gloriously enjoyable. Fellini made many films that, for many people, fall into the "makes no sense" category. And even those who think that they understand everything that Fellini did probably have most of it wrong, if he ever really "meant" anything with them anyway (I prefer not to look for sense, but that's just me). However, even Fellini's "worst" films were one thing that Beg! could never be - interesting. A poorly executed film that is in no way interesting is a waste of time and space; actually it's even worse than that, it can suck the life right out of a person for an hour or two that that person is never going to get back.

If I had to compare this to one film, one that seems to have the same feeling on the surface of it, it would be the French "Delicatessen." It's not really a fair comparison - Delicatessen is a great movie where Beg!, well, sucks. And although Delicatessen is not about an insane asylum, if any film ever explored that oh-so-fine line between sane and insane then it is Delicatessen, with its images of "normal" people who were quite "normal" before the bomb dropped and now seem to have no qualms about eating dead family members. That one takes quite the trip into the human psyche. I use Delicatessen as a yardstick for Beg! in part because Beg mines the same territory, but mainly because Beg! has the very same look and feel that Delicatessen did. When the first reel of Beg! started rolling I was immediately transported back to the same emotional place that Delicatessen exists in and for a brief few moments thought that I had stumbled onto another great one. But it soon panned out to show that I had not. It's as if Delicatessen was a sort of "PhotoShop filter" and the makers of Beg! applied it liberally to their movie. But anyone who is familiar with PhotoShop knows that no amount of filtering will make a truly bad and boring photo good and interesting. You can get the same fuzzy muted colors but they don't go anywhere. Like Beg!.

Oh man, this was just awful, an hour and forty minute cacophony of twaddle and noise that is virtually impossible to understand for even a moment, it's like whoever made it had no care to make a comprehensible linear motion picture at all, and was just interested in making some manner of hyper-surrealistic nightmare garbage interpretive 'high art' that is occasionally punctuated by baffling scenes of spontaneous erotica. The only bright spot in the picture was the mad-eyed man who it featured a lot, you know who I'm on about if you've seen it. He at least was interesting to watch and livened things up out the pretentious sludge of monotony. To this day it's the only thing the actor has ever done. He wasn't that bad, he seed like a real crazy person! So this is absolutely amongst the worst 'movies' I've ever seen, you'd be very hard pressed indeed to find worse than this, it's rancid garbage, trust me. It's boring, it's aggravating, it's truly a breathtaking experience in terrible filmmaking to behold! It should be wiped from the face of the earth... Punishingly bad.

Robert Golden has only made two films. This film, Beg, is subversive art, sure, but it doesn't mean that it would be considered very "good" art. It's main intention, for a large portion of the running time, is to disorientate the viewer, constantly, scene to scene, with a ferocious, unyielding grasp of cinematographic technique. There's barely a chance, until perhaps midway through the film, when we get a breather for a few scenes of characters trying to connect and talk, but mostly Golden and his DP string together a bunch of incomprehensible mind-f***s. Sometimes inventive, yes, but never more than just a surface of "hey, we can do lots of colorful-but-dark lighting" and surrealism just for its own sake.

The plot itself sounds interesting enough, about Doctor Second and her faulty attempts to control her ward of a mental hospital while also fighting to save the life of her father who is on life support. The actors seem to be left to their own warped devices since the director is too busy making every scene "DIRECTED BY". You might know this kind, like a lessor David Lynch who cares too much about the mood of a scene, and then another and another. It's suffocating to see so much of a flagrancy of technique, of trying to make this story, or stories, more important then they are with flash and whiplash style theatrics with the lens and editing tricks. It's like a magician who keeps throwing plates up in the air with technicolor effects - and then keeps doing it for far long past his welcome.

My advice, if you must watch a crazy European art-house movie on a mental hospital, check out Jan Svankmajer's Lunacy instead. There's a reason Golden didn't get very far after this film hit a few festivals and subsequently (and rightfully so) got picked up by Troma video. It looks fantastic, but it goes absolutely nowhere. You keep watching, but you wont know what's really going on most of the time except for lots of flash and sex and abnormal figures doing s***.

Pitch black horror comedy set in a crumbling, chaotic, near future hospital staffed by grotesque cartoon-like characters. When Dr Penny Seconds lover is murdered, and her father falls into a coma, Detective Stiltskin starts to investigate. The tone of this film is almost unique.There are similarities with Greenaway, and Lindsay Anderson's Britannia Hospital, but this is much stranger and more stylized. The sets sometimes resemble theatre sets. Peta Lily as the "normal" character at the heart of the piece is excellent, as is Phillip Pellew as the repulsive Stiltskin. The rest of the cast vary. Its quite watchable, with some gore (live dogs sewn inside murder victims, plus Stiltskin ripping out his radio control implants), plus a couple of sex scenes. But at the end of the day it all makes little sense. You just have to take this film on its own terms.

I'm hesitant about putting any film straight into pole position on my 'worst ever' list: I've seen a lot of execrable garbage in my time and it's hard to recall all of it. Let's just say that I'm confident that 'Beg!' would comfortably make it into my top three of terrible films, and would be a very strong contender for the title of Ultimate Crapfest.

I rather stupidly bought Beg! knowing nothing about the plot; having watched it over the course of three very painful evenings, I'm none the wiser, the story being an utterly incomprehensible mess. In fact, I'm seriously impressed that others here have even attempted to try and summarise the film, because I was totally lost from unfathomable start to completely confusing finish.

That a movie this bad even exists is hard for me to accept; that it hails from the UK makes me want to weep. Director Robert Golden clearly draws his inspiration from the weird and wonderful world of Jeunet and Caro, the dark horror of Argento, and even the gory absurdity of early Peter Jackson, but fails in every way to replicate their sense of style. Golden's interpretation is a gaudy, grimy concoction of ugly characters, awkward camera angles, art-house pretensions, terrible dialogue, and slapdash editing that is painful to behold.

Usually I try to find something positive to say about even the worst examples of cinema, but on this occasion I cannot; everyone involved should be deeply ashamed of the abomination they have helped to create and Beg! for forgiveness.