Skritek

2005 "feature butcherly slapstick"

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A few days in the life of a family of four. The father works in a butchery, where he flirts and eventually cheats on his wife with a co-worker. The wife struggles with boredom at her job as a grocery cashier and at home with keeping her family happy. Their oldest is getting in trouble with drugs, spends entirely too much time trying to impress a girl, and is skateboarding his life away. Their youngest is failing her math class because she's distracted by the titular goblin.

I watched a bit of this before tackling the entire thing and fully expected it to be my new favorite movie, another brilliant bit of fun from Czechoslovakia or whatever they call themselves now that I can add to the pile of other brilliant things from Czechoslovakia. It's not my new favorite film, but I enjoyed it. You won't need subtitles as I don't think there are any actual words spoken. The characters all speak in exclamatory grunts and moans, kind of like in the caveman movie Themroc and the nearly-silent German Tuvalu. Here, the grunts, belches, farts, and other cartoonish sound effects accompany action that is credits-to-credits slapstick, one of those cartoons made with human beings. A flesh cartoon! It's a playful and slightly immature world that is created, characterized by zit-popping gags, characters hit by cars, cow-faced teachers and man-faced hogs. It's a bit schizophrenic, maybe even off-puttingly to some since we've got some genuinely troubling experiences for this family--abuse, delinquency, infidelity, and other things we're supposed to be sad about--but with the slapstick tone that takes all the steam out of them. Director Tomas Vorel Benny-Hill-izes it all to a point where it's beyond absurd. Vegetarians and vegans wouldn't like this at all as there are numerous scenes of butchery and a few, almost more disturbing, scenes where characters eat meat or hit each other with meat. Definitely lots of meat. There's also a scene featuring the exaggerated, bouncy beating of meat with a guy who works (and apparently lives) at the entrance to the meatpacking plant. There are some nifty special effects in a movie that otherwise looks kind of cheap. Those animal/human hybrids I mentioned, one which was a drug-induced hallucination and the other part of one of a pair of cool dream sequences, were neat, and I liked how all the photographs had moving images like they were out of a Harry Potter movie. Of course, no movie named Skritek, a word that means Goblin or Dwarf or Gnome depending on who you ask (I asked fourteen Czechoslovakians, twelve who were offended that I wasn't sure what to call them), without a little fellow. Whoever plays that part is good with this enormous tongue and mustache almost as long as his body. And a funnel for a cap. See, he's on the poster up there. I'm not sure if it was a little person actor or a child though. My biggest gripe would be that most of the music in this was pretty awful. I longed for something simpler and less modern. Of course, I could have probably lived without the flatulence as well. Nah, who am I kidding? I like fart jokes as much as the next guy.