floatation man

Here is the thing. You have to enjoy cheesy horror movies. To be delighted by the bizarre also helps. Hideous! is a weird movie involving collectable biological oddities preserved (mostly) in formaldehyde, a girl band in a cage rocking out, and a mutant born of noxious waste hell-bent on getting revenge or eating people or something. A quirky movie that entertained me to no end just by it's amusing oddness. The topless bandit didn't hurt either. If you like Full Moon Pictures, you will probably like this one. If the Puppet Master or Subspecies movies didn't do anything for you, then you should probably skip it. But, if you are ready to take a leap of faith and/or have a backup video at the ready, get a copy and set back on the couch for a bizarre evening.

Proving once again that animation is no longer a medium for telling stories just for children, Metropolis covers similar territory as the Fritz Lang classic, but is it's own film. Filled with a 1930's retro/future style but with a distinctly modern sensibility, the combination of both cell shading and computer generated animation techniques gives the movie a very unique ambiance.

The city that is at the core of Metropolis is a sprawling mass of commerce and industry that hides it's unstable politics behind massive construction projects and restricts it's malcontents and dissidents to lawless lower levels connected only tenuously with the light filled word above. This is the setting for our protagonists, who enter the stories as investigators tracking a fugitive, but are soon thrown in with murderers, robots, and revolutionaries.

Metropolis pleases on several levels. The animation is beautiful and the story is a compelling meditation on the nature of self and mankind's inherent propensity for violence. And if all that doesn't sound like that much fun, a WHOLE LOT of stuff gets blown up. Enjoy.