The Caligari Insane Asylum (CIA, to those in the know) is an unusual place. Built on a festering toxic waste dump, its strangely two-dimensional towers rise darkly against the night sky in an expressionistic wriggle of impossible angles. It's no surprise that the patients are a strange
bunch, but their keepers are little better. There's leering Dr. Avol (Fox Harris), and Dr. and Nurse Lodger (David Parry and Jennifer Balgobin), a peculiar couple who do everything--smoke, speak, move--in tandem. Strangest of all is Dr. Caligari (Madeleine Reynal) herself, a statuesque beauty
whose professional interests have a distinctly lurid cast. Years of research into the function of the hypothalamus have convinced her that she can use the preserved brain juice of her famous grandfather to absorb his intellect. But before she goes sticking long, nasty needles into her own
forehead, she perfects the process through experimentation on her patients. Dr. Avol sanctions her investigations by looking the other way, but the Lodgers disapprove strongly. They're willing to resort to drastic measures to see Caligari stopped, but are no match for the ravishing degenerate and
her unholy obsessions. Justice nevertheless prevails, as Caligari's brain-fluid switching goes awry and leads to a terminal confusion of personalities.
This basic plot summary doesn't begin to convey the mannered style of DR. CALIGARI's goings-on. The film opens with shots of CIA patients in primary-colored hospital gowns, melting out of the shadows in eerily lit compositions. Barely dressed, Mrs. Van Houten (Laura Albert) watches television in
the middle of the barren dump. The television speaks to her, and she escapes through a freestanding door that rises in splendid isolation. Once inside, she is terrorized by a doll-faced man who gets up from a bathtub, straight razor in hand. And so it goes. DR. CALIGARI presents a succession of
sometimes startling, sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque, but always carefully composed images that are undeniably striking. While they don't ultimately constitute a movie in any conventional sense of the word, they are something to behold.
DR. CALIGARI's relationship with THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, a classic of German Expressionist filmmaking, is tenuous. Though the opening credits include a series of stills from that silent film, once DR. CALIGARI gets started the similarity between the two movies is primarily a matter of
attitude. But this is some attitude: DR. CALIGARI is 78 minutes of sinister "voguing" with dialog. Caligari poses with the accessories of her profession: hypodermic needles, an electroshock apparatus that looks more like an electric chair than any therapeutic device, and a hot pink lab dress fit
to raise the comatose if not the dead. Mrs. Van Houten--usually semi-clad--postures and pretends, while the Lodgers take their stylized duet to its outer limits. Holding up the verbal end, John Durbin, as a loquacious cannibal killer, delivers a nonstop monolog loaded with mordant wit.
On the self-conscious hipness meter, DR. CALIGARI is off the dial. But it's ultimately less interesting than director-cowriter-designer Stephen Sayadian's first film, the pornographic CAFE FLESH, directed under the pseudonym "Rinse Dream." CAFE FLESH crosses adult movie conventions with
post-nuclear science-fiction cliches by way of CABARET, and the result is legitimately novel. DR. CALIGARI is an exercise in MTV/performance art/postmodern mannerisms, successful and stylish enough as such things go, but no ground breaker. (Nudity, sexual situations, violence.) leave a comment
