Wave Twisters

Why did I give this a 6? It is above average but certainly not the best thing since sliced bread.

The whole thing about the movie "fitting the songs" is really not that big of a deal. It is not impossible to make beats and sound clips fit a mediocre plot..

If you are a DJ, a techno|hiphop head, or on acid - this deserves a 10.

If you are into animation and like the heavy beats of the DJ world - this film probably deserves an 8 or so...

But if none of the above fit your persona, you'll be bored within 20 minutes - after you realize that "hey, it has no creative story..."

I give this flick a 10 for the tight DJ mixing skills from DJ god Qbert and his crew. As for the film I gave it an 8 because however it is visually awesome except everything is exploding wildly on the screen and it's totally crazy to watch. I like how the animation goes perfectly with the songs so that's another plus. However I only viewed this DVD a few times and gave up because I only like it for the beats. Again, too much stuff exploding in your face, it's like watching fireworks all day long and it'll make your eyes go haywire. Watching it is just hypnotic, like looking at a nonstop spinning swirl, and it'll make your eyes go crazy!

I have never really liked dj music, or dance music either for that matter. But a friend of mine put this in, and I was hooked. DJ Qbert has a very unique style of using records that you normally wouldn't normally exspect to hear used by by a DJ. Think old space cereals on vinyl. Also, unlike other DJ's, He uses the bare minimum. A sampler playing a beat with a few sounds, and a record player. And with that minimalistic aproach, he creates the entire sound track of this movie, the dialouge, the back ground music, the sound fx, everything! The movie itself is a combinations of sci fi cliche's and obvious plays on classics such as star trek and star wars. But there is also that layer of the street mid 80's. The constant presents of things like Atari's, old arcade style games, grafiti, toys, and old school rap essentials give the movie a very unique almost indescribable feel. If you are in to really different and exsperimental movies, you should really check it out. But, I must worn you, you might end up with a few new cd's when its all over, because the music is very addictive...

Watch drunk or stoned. There is no other way you will appreciate this deliberately weird little film.

One star for its existence.

One star for the clearly difficult editing.

And one star for not completely grossing me out.

A group of space dentists get drawn into an intergalactic war over the power of old school hip-hop as represented by the Wave Twister device, which they have in their possession but a villain known as the Red Worm wishes to seize before it is used to defeat him. No, really.

This film opens with graphically animated dental work being carried out on a variety of weirdly twisted creatures in a space ship by a blue dentist, and visually it gets weirder from that point onwards. This is the film version of the album from DJ Q-Bert which is all electronic beats and scratching – lots and lots of scratching to mix together all sorts of sounds and clips. I stress this because this is a film that will either appeal to you or not, I really don't see how there is a middle-ground here for someone to say "yeah, twas OK I guess". The key appeal here will be to older hip-hop fans who love the b-boy side of the genre, with scratching, graffiti art and so on; I won't pretend to be able to do any of that (and I would look daft if I tried) but I do enjoy it as a culture and audibly is where this film worked for me. The music is quite brilliant from start to finish and it just makes it more impressive that we have the artists themselves scratching within the film – those who think there is no skill to this should really watch them in actual while hearing the results.

The music is sort of folded into the main story which is weird just describing it, but really transcends weirdness when you actually see how it is delivered. As a fan of some Adult Swim shows, I am not unaccustomed to odd animation but this really is something else; indeed this film is probably what Adult Swim animators watch when it is their turn to get high and watch cartoons. It is very odd indeed and it did take me a minute not to hate it for the visuals (especially the dentistry) but quickly the strength of the music and how well the two fold into one another makes it work surprisingly well, albeit in spite of itself. The mention of Adult Swim is relevant though because it is worth noting that this film was released in 2001 – over a decade ago, but yet this style of animation (and its weird excesses) is something that feels much more modern and new and as such Wave Twisters can be considered to be ahead of its time in terms of what it did. It is no less weird for being influential, but for sure it deserves to be discussed in those terms.

For me, this was a great film despite being one that visually incredibly weird and often uncomfortable to watch. Those that hate hip-hop (or who think hip-hop is what plays on commercial top 40 radio) will struggle with it for sure, but for those into scratching and others b-boy aspects of the genre, this is a brilliant animation that you need to see.