One Word Movie

Pan's Labyrinth

Proper fairy tales are good because they tend to be full of horrible things - people are cut into a thousand pieces, devoured by wild animals, sent into a coma by nasty bastard thorns, boiled alive, preyed on by child molesters, imprisoned for a laugh, and generally shat on for no good reason. Unfortunately some people don't like that sort of thing and they tend to concentrate on the nice things in fairy tales - talking animals, candied fruits, and fauns. And that fucks it up, because fauns are the biggest wankers going. When a faun appears in Pan's Labyrinth I was ready to leave the cinema and treat my brain to a couple of nice pints of strong continental lager.

That would have been a mistake, because this film is really good. It is definitely nasty enough, because it is about civil war, fascism, and features an excellent wicked step-father as well as a faun, but the faun is OK because you are wondering if he's going to turn into a nasty paedo bastard. There were enough scenes to make Janine shield her eyes until they had finished cutting the man's leg off, too. The fantasy bits are not at all twee, because the set-up is right out of a spam-in-a-cabin flick - and most importantly, it obeys the first rule of spam in a cabin pictures, namely that anyone can die at any time.

It's a superior reworking of Del Toro's earlier The Devil's Backbone, which had a better ghost in it, but otherwise comes up a bit short. In summary, after the disappointment of L'appartement, Spain is the new France, although I am worried that Switzerland could be the new Germany.

posted by Chairman Peyote @ 5:56 AM