MartinHafer The films of Jan Svankmajer are NOT for everyone, that's for sure. His stop-motion films are ultra-bizarre and have a strange sensibility that set them apart. Calling them extremely disturbing is not at all an understatement--and "Lunacy" is often very disturbing and really weird.The film is based on the Poe story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" and is unusual because most of the film is NOT stop-motion. The plot is essentially about a mental hospital in the 19th century where the patients have taken over and locked their tormentors in the basement. However, it takes a VERY long time to get to this plot and has a lot of strange stuff that Poe never intended--such as an overabundance of animated meat...yes, MEAT. Throughout the film, tongues and hunks of meat appear and move about using stop-motion for no discernible reason other than to make the film weird. Additionally, there is a lot of nudity and adult content that clearly make this a film you might not want to show your children, your mother or dead old Father O'Malley (especially because of the very blasphemous scene that takes place in a church-- it would give the old guy a heart attack).I do not recommend this film unless you like Svankmajer and know what you're getting into by selecting it. Instead, try seeing the recent version "Stonehearst Asylum"--a very intelligently made and satisfying incarnation of the Poe tale.

Martin Bradley "Lunacy" is Jan Svankmajer's homage to Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis De Sade, (it's full of allusions to "Marat/Sade"), and as he tells us himself, is a horror film and not a work of art. It is certainly the first and I would argue it is also a work of art of quite a high order. It combines live-action with Svankmajer's trade-mark animation in giving us a study of what we might call 'the banality of evil' unlike almost anything else in cinema. It is a film that moves from a barely recognizable present to some kind of past as easily as it does from live-action to animation existing in a kind of no-man's-land between the real and surreal in a manner almost guaranteed to give you the very literal creeps; this is the real thing. Yet there is also something tongue-in-cheek about the horrors Svankmajer inflicts on us. There is a giddy perversity to the picture that to a degree dissipates the director's attack on the institutions he appears to condemn. This is as much a very bizarre celebration of hedonism as it is an attack on the communist regime. There's also an asylum in the film that makes the one at Charenton look like a Wendy House. Perverse, yes but also utterly extraordinary and undoubtedly one of Svankmajer's masterpieces.

schism101 Jan Svankmajer is one director to imaginatively combine real life images with the inventive use of stop motion animation that produces grotesque and nightmarish images that unnerve the viewer. LUNACY is further proof of this and its influence of Edgar Allen Poe and Marquis De Sade is perfect for the vision of Svankmajer. Its story concerns an innocent young man, travelling home from his mothers funeral who spends some time with a wealthy man, known only as the Marquis (possibly the Marquis De Sade). The young man bears witness to the Marquis' debauched and blasphemous rituals and after some philosophical discussion over the rights and wrongs of man and religion, the young man under the request of the Marquis goes undercover into an insane asylum and falls under the spell of a women who insists that he helps her release the actual warders and doctors who are locked away, as the inmates are running the asylum. The film is a bizarre yet brilliant look at a world gone insane, where fear, punishment and madness is ruling and no one is in charge and whoever is in charge is corrupted by there own absolute power and twisted morality. The stop motion animation interludes add to the grotesque and surreal nature of the film and even offers it to comparisons with the body horror films of David Cronenberg. Overall its an art house horror that provides the viewer an uneasy yet unforgettable journey into insanity.

Polaris_DiB Edgar Allen Poe. The Marquis de Sade. Jan Svankmajer. If you're familiar with any of those people, and enjoy their work (or even if you don't enjoy it but you still understand what they do), then you are pretty much obligated to see this movie. If you like all those artists, then you've probably already seen it and this review is redundant.Jan Svankmajer's job in this movie is to take the theme of the lunatics running the asylum to a new extreme--hopefully to the limit, as I wouldn't want to watch what anybody would try to do further. A young man named Jean Berlot has recurring dreams of being stuck in an insane asylum, and unfortunately for him these dreams attract the attention of a mysterious Marquis who's out to help "cure" a new friend. The Marquis, however, has his own, let's call 'em, "extreme philosophies." If the storyline isn't enough, the transitions between scenes are animated with pounds of animal meat.Jan Svankmajer calls this his horror movie, and once again he shows a large amount of craftiness behind his impressions. The first two acts of the movie are so absurd they're mostly comedic, but the third act is surprisingly disturbing. You'd be surprised which characters you end up caring about and which characters you end up hating. In the end it becomes a question of how to choose your own insanity... because in a world where insanity exists sanity seems to take fifth pier.One of the more revealing parts of this movie involves its anachronism. The wooden sets are filled with timeless pieces, the gray weather can be representative or give off a feeling of a period piece, and the Marquis and Jean's journey in the coach crosses Bubonic plague-style imagery with freeways. What's more terrifying about this scene when one thinks about it later on is how even outside of the insane asylum there doesn't seem to be any sense of normalcy.Which is one of the things that is hard about this movie. Jean's delusions and his light obsessiveness makes him an untrustworthy narrator in a world where it seems like every single character harbors some maladjustment. Structurally speaking, it's unproductive to make insane characters populate an insane world without any norm for the audience to build on. For this foundation, Svankmajer seems to rely entirely on the audience, which works amazingly well. Watching this movie, for me, was even more enjoyable while hearing the laughs and moans of the people in the theatre around me. However the real drama in this film seemed to come from my own sense of values and reality desperately trying to find a handhold within the philosophies projected within the narrative. In the end the subjectivity of reality becomes more an issue of choosing one's own insanity.--PolarisDiB