Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead

Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Undead had me at the opening credits.

That’s a good thing, because it isn’t a very good movie.  The story’s lame, the acting’s bad, the jokes fall flat, and the makeup sucks.  But hey, it’s a mashup of Shakespeare, Stoker, and Stoppard called Rosencrantz And Guildenstern are Undead.  I’m in anyway.

Here’s the setup: Jake Hoffman is a layabout who answers an ad for a “theater director, easily controlled, human.”  The theater?  It’s a vampire theater, putting on a production of “Horatio,” in which Hamlet is the bad guy.  Many theater-nerd jokes will be told.  Much blood will be sucked.  You will probably check your watch.

But hey, I like theater-nerd jokes, and this film delivers them with gusto.  It also delivers a breezy, “ain’t this fun” attitude that bounces things along for an hour and fifteen minutes.  It looks and feels cheap, but it gets by on silliness and goodwill.  If you like theater-nerd jokes and vampires, you just might like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Undead.

The Mutant Chronicles

Where do you go after a movie like 8 1/2? When you've just had a gourmet meal, what do you eat the next time you get hungry?

You go to a genre picture like THE MUTANT CHRONICLES for the same reason you go to McDonald's after that gourmet meal. When you've had a transcendent experience, you need to reset. Otherwise, you won't give perfectly fine but otherwise average fare its due. You'll be measuring it against that masterpiece, and it'll come up short.

And THE MUTANT CHRONICLES is as greasy a burger as you could want after the feast of 8 1/2. It's poorly written, poorly edited, poorly scored, poorly acted, and poorly conceived. It's an uncomfortable mishmash of WWI, zombies, and apocalyptic science fantasy set in a steampunk world that doesn't understand that automatic weapons create more and worse tissue damage in less time than swords. It has lame prophecies, halfhearted fu, and John Malkovich reading his lines from the back of a prop. It's just plain bad in every way, a nice counterpoint to 8 1/2 and a good way to ensure that the subsequent pictures on my Netflix queue get a fair shake.

So, yeah, I'm recommending it, after a fashion. If you spend all your time in the best restaurants, you need to remind your palette what bad tastes like. THE MUTANT CHRONICLES does the trick.