Pop Skull - 2007

Incredibly Strange Film Festival
Pop Skull - 2007

One line review: Drugged up low budget mind melter. An original vision. Content may disturb.

I have left at the end of a fair few movies asking "What the hell drugs was the director on?!".

For 'Pop Skull' I can definitively tell you the director/editor and his lead actor/muse were robotriping balls out on robotussin for a chunk of the production and post production, and it shows.

I mean that in a nice way. The end result is a disturbing, unsettled look at a young man coping with his first heart break, his ever growing drugged out haze, and then there is the slight matter of the ghosts he is seeing around the house...

This has a distinctive low fi look, sound, and abrasive editing that comes with an epilepsy warning. Seriously, there are strobing sequences designed to set off viewers with altered mind states. Even with eyes closed it was still intense. There should also be an opening credit warning "content may disturb some people" because it is bleak and involving and unhinged all at the same time which would not be a good thing for a viewer already in a downer mood.

It is not really a horror, although it has some very effective J-horror creep out moments, it is not really a pretentious art wank, it is not really a true story even there there is a lot of truth to the story it tells, it is not really a psych out movie although it gets very trippy. It is very much its own thing.

I cannot say you would enjoy, or be enlightened or uplifted by this movie but you will see something challenging, interesting and different. If there were awards for 'least likely to be remade by Hollywood' or 'least likely to star Steve Carell' this is it.

www.popskullthemovie.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYYOsU5W6XQ