Freeze Framing?
Some way into the film, some of the frames begin to freeze for a split second before cuts. This is a very bizarre detail, and I am very curious to find out if this was intentional or not. I have the "Prism Entertainment" VHS and at first thought that it might be some sort of disturbance in the film print used, or something introduced by the video company; but I have talked to someone else with a video by a different company and they said the freeze framing was in their version as well. I am curious to get the "Trinity Entertainment" NTSC R1 DVD that has been released and see if the freeze framing is in that version as well. Does anybody own the DVD and can let me know? I find the whole thing endlessly fascinating. I love little bizarre, seemingly haphazard details in films, art and life. Is it totally subversive, subtle avant-garde or happenstance? Will I ever know?
The film is some kind of strange, wonderful, grab-bag, crackerjack masterpiece of the rubber suit bog/swamp/lake creature genre. The whole thing feels subtly and happenstance-ly bizarre; in the kind of seemingly organic/unintentional haphazard way that all the uncontrollable variables of realty, interaction and the individual collide and create at random. Moments and elements and sidetracks seem to have been flung up out of a black hole bag of cosmic lottery balls as if we are witnessing stages in the history of something immediate. The acting is mixture of wait-your-turn soggy cardboard line readings, real/faked in-the-moment emotion, and documented naturalism; like they left on the tail ends of film reels after the actors had finished their scripted lines and were now “off-duty”. Marshall Thompson seems to be extending, or re-evolving, the 50’s style of B-movie acting into brand new decades. I haven’t seen anyone sit the one-legged-lean on the front edge of a desk in one of those bare office and-then-there-were-two tail whip ponderance scenes holding a Ward Cleaver sigh and significance since ’63. The subtly bizarre feeling might have been intentional, but more likely it was probably just born from a troubled, sloppy, chaotic, incoherent, confused, obscured, haphazard production. I love it either way. You couldn't recreate this kind of thing if you tried. By the way, does anybody know any thing firsthand about the making of this film?
-michael
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