I'm not using this phrase all that often, so: What the hell did I just watch? It's the only film by a certain Alan Gadney, artfully photographed, lit and cut, but very confounding.
A young painter (Mark Travis, looking as puzzled as I must have), arrives at a mission that now is used as the strangest hotel not located in Twin Peaks or Japan. There he meets a bunch of strange people (including a fat and priestly Victor Buono and John "The Walker" Carradine). It seems he is caught in an endless cycle of repeating the same basic acts leading to his death over and over, since the time of the inquisition. That much of the plot is clearly discernible, but underlying it, every single character and every single act here is also highly symbolic of something having to do with the search for perfection in a mystical sense.
As far as I could discern, the symbolism is based on some part of the Western magic(k)al tradition, but not being Alan Moore, I barely understood half of it.
Still, it is a fascinating film: The acting is not bad, but so purposefully artificial and absurdly earnest even in the most ridiculous moments that it defies most concepts of good acting and arrives at a place only the most ruthlessly strange ever visit. The technically very proficient (if you ignore one boom mike smack in the middle of the picture), but highly weird (and of course symbolically overloaded) visuals do their best to make this one of the truthfully most trippy films I have ever seen.
Now, I can understand if someone finds the movie overwhelming and kind of irritating, but one thing it certainly isn't: boring.
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