2551.01 – THE KID
dir. Norbert Pfaffenbichler, 2021
Austria. 65 min.
No spoken dialogue.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 10 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 14 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 18 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 22 – 10 PM
One-hundred years lie between Chaplin’s first feature-length film and Pfaffenbichler’s very loose interpretation of it. The Kid, filmed in 1920, is a story from the realm of the “lumpenproletariat”, a tragi-comic moral tale of an abandoned child and police brutality. 2551.01 is all of that, too—and is, after all, at a distance of 100 years and all kinds of breaks in cinematic history and countless wars from Chaplin’s bittersweet patchwork comedy. The director calls his toxic genre blend a “dystopic slapstick film.” Pfaffenbichler has already shaped two of his short films from Chaplin material, and the “daemonic screen” is his passion. He devoted a film to the silent film quick-change artist Lon Chaney, and he called his 2013 Boris Karloff tribute A Masque of Madness. Now, in 2551.01, a lot more than one mask of madness can be seen. The false clown, sod, and nightmare visages, which the amateur ensemble wears, define this low-budget grotesque, which is set in the passageways of a sewer system, bunkers, and dark cellars, without windows, without daylight, without escape. Chaplin’s tramp turns into a man in a monkey mask, who takes in an abandoned child and hesitantly looks for a place for his charge in the violent and zombie world he inhabits.
A series of genuinely obscene images makes the pulse quicken: nauseating meals are served at a decadent candlelight dinner in the wreckage, disturbing rituals are carried out in a nursery school of horrors, and on the hero’s path through the underground hell, we witness Abu-Ghraib-like torture. Along with the complex textures of silent films, Pfaffenbichler also uses elements of splatter and exploitation films and sitcoms—and an extremely eclectic soundtrack of music. In this way, this episodic drama leads us to the peripheries of punk and shock comedy, to territories that are practically non-existent in Austrian cinema. For that reason, with all luck, the Orgy of the Damned, which is announced at the end as Episode 2 of this wicked tale, will soon become a reality. (Stefan Grissemann)
2551.02 – THE ORGY OF THE DAMNED
dir. Norbert Pfaffenbichler, 2023
Austria. 82 min.
No spoken dialogue.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 10 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 15 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 18 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23 – 10 PM
The mad saga about the man in a monkey mask wandering through the torture garden of deviant delights continues. The second part of an intended trilogy, Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s 2551.02 – Orgy of the Damned picks up exactly where 2551.01 left the stunned viewer craving continuation, and as with all great sequels you needn’t have seen the previous film to be thrilled by this one. Especially if you like slapstick violence, sick sex and pitch-black humour. The opening image of a faceless sitting nude whose penis surprisingly retracts into a vagina announces that you’re entering a fantastic world where conventional constraints have no meaning: There are no taboos in the grotesque underground realm of Pfaffenbichler’s 2551 movies, which cross all borders, especially those of good taste.
Reviving the original punk spirit of true independent filmmaking, Pfaffenbichler and his ingenious collaborators have concocted another marvel of no-budget ingenuity, in which all characters wear crazy masks and society has regressed into subterranean caverns filled with resplendently obscene details. No words are needed to express the pain felt by the unnamed protagonist as he traverses this wacky wasteland, hunted by a police corps headed by a plague doctor and repeatedly crossing paths with a seductive mystery woman, while he is looking for an abandoned child (their relationship a loose perversion of Chaplin’s silent classic The Kid), which is literally trapped in a school of hard knocks. Awesome music and enthusiastically exaggerated performances propel the hapless (anti-)hero forward, as he drunkenly stumbles on, only to be knocked out repeatedly, especially by the lady of his dreams.
The lovingly staged set pieces include an “ultimate fighting contest” with wrestlers from hell (staged as a slap dance to electro beats), a brawl in a barroom that serves cut-off fingers as snacks, and a tour de force of the universal meat market to which no act of sexual transgression is alien. When a dreamy interlude (scored to Henry Purcell’s “Cold Song”) finally allows a vision of sexual healing you can bet that it ends with a money shot of the limp ejaculation of maggots. This Orgy of the Damned finally delivers on the age-old promise that you will witness things no man has ever seen before. Even your own vomit may stare back at you. Probably because it also can’t wait for 2551.03. (Christoph Huber)
Special thanks to Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer, Jonida Laçi, and sixpackfilm.