the dead man 2: return of the dead man
We see two queers in faecal dirty grainy black and white, one giving the other a blow job. Their clothes are covered with an indescrible substance; it’s probably good that we don’t have TV you can smell. While jerking a certain body part back and forth with his right arm, one repeatedly begs the other: ‘Give me your fucking puke, man!”, and the other immediately sticks his finger down his throat. Apparently the one who’s asking is very thirsty, and he is indeed satisfied….If, upon seeing this scene, the proverbial morsel does not drop out of your mouth back onto your plate, I suppose nothing in the world can shock you anymore. Everyone else clasps his remote control with glassy eyes and prays the rest of the film will be different. And it is. Not like you might expect from a short film, for The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man shatters every conventional film framework.
After the opening scene we find ourselves in a strange bar: an old man who, judging by his hands, should have been in his grave a long time ago, walks in slowly with a totally blank, unseeing expression on his face. This man is looking for something. And he finally finds it, in the form of a fat lady who, at the end of the film, treats him to a forceful ‘golden shower’ he seems to enjoy intensely. In between is a long sequence which is almost entirely gray black, showing only outlines and shapes. The soundtrack is the industrial music of the Japanese composer Merzbow, sounding as if you were standing in the middle of a swarm of one million locusts. The endurance of our vision and hearing are tested ad absurdum; this is either the work of genius or of a madman, in the case of this film there’s nothing in between.
So what is the director trying to tell us here? I don’t know, there has been no international film critic who has been able to reveal the meaning of this film, it remains inaccessible, closed, bizarre, shocking, towering monolithically out of what we normally call film. Is it the poetry of death that we should not wish to return? Or is this an after death bar, where drinks are served wordlessly, soundlessly, while the images of the burning Waco stronghold are still glowing on the viewer’s retina? Is there sex after death?
You really have to see this piece of experimental cinema to believe it! By the way, this is the film with which Ian Kerkhof graduated from the Netherlands Film Academy! Enter at your own risk - here there be tygers.
Alexander Fortsch
DOOM nr 1, sep 1995
“the dead man 2: return of the dead man” has finally been released commercially as part of the l’etrange festival’s first anthology of 13 extraordinary short films.
click here to order your dvd.
September 3rd, 2006 at 2:59 pm
If you want to read the french translation of this text, you can find it in my personnal site. dionysos
June 3rd, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Sound like somthing I should post in my blog lolol