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Friday 22 July 2016

Men & Chicken (2015)

Denmark is a relatively small country with a subsequently limited number of A-list actors, all the more recognizable nowadays through the popularity of 'Scandi-noir' television series. However even the most dedicated viewer might have trouble recognising the leads in this very black and very peculiar film from prolific screenwriter but only occasional director Anders Thomas Jensen. Jensen is responsible for the screenplays for such recent international hits as "In a Better World", "Love is all you Need", "Salvation" and many more thoughtful and prestige features. However when he dons his director's hat -- and this is his first movie for ten years -- he favours offbeat comic, absurdist scenarios.

I've seen his 2003 feature "The Green Butchers" which celebrates small-town cannibalism, but not his second film, 2005's "Adams Apples" which pits neo-Nazis against the established church. However in the above film he pushes the boundaries of 'good taste' even further by creating a film that can best be described as a slapstick "Island of Dr Moreau". Estranged brothers Elias (superstar Mads Mikkelson) and Gabriel (David Dencik) learn from their father on his deathbed that they are not only adopted but the children of different mothers. Their real father is apparently an ancient and mad geneticist, the wonderfully named Evelio Thanatos, living in an abandoned sanatorium on a remote island. Gabriel, the more rational of the two -- although both come across as societal misfits and both bear the scars of surgery to correct birth defects --is determined to find their birth father and to discover the fates of their respective mothers. Reluctantly he allows Elias to join him on this road trip, despite the latter's need for frequent pit-stops to deal with his rampant masturbatory urges. Mikkelsen has a ball playing against type. 

When they eventually reach the derelict building which is over-run inside and out with sheep, goats, pigs, and hundreds of chickens, they discover that they have three hare-lipped half-brothers, played by TV stalwarts (The Killing, Borgen, 1864, Dicte...) fat, cheese-loving Nicolas Bro's Josef, childish Nikolaj Lie Kaas' Gregor, and nearly unrecognizable in his physical deformity disciplinarian Soren Malling's Franz. However rather than greeting Elias and Gabriel with open arms, their new siblings attack them savagely with stuffed animals, planks of wood, and any other makeshift weapons which come to hand and force their retreat. They suspect that they have been sent by the hospital authorities to cart the trio away.

When they return and manage to join the dysfunctional household -- greasy, asocial, and disgusting Elias fits in the more readily -- they find a world of madness with the patriarch long dead upstairs on the ancestral bed and a locked and forbidden cellar laboratory below. They live on the proceeds of a prize bull's sperm which is collected twice a year and Gregor explains the ubiquitous chickens. They are for 'practice' until they get to meet 'real girls' and are eminently suitable for the purpose since they regularly produce large eggs! The original Danish title of the movie translates as 'Men & Hens', which is perhaps rather more apt in its sexual connotation. Nosy Gabriel manages to break into the cellar and finds the evidence of his father's nightmare experimentation and the mummified remains of the five mothers. All the brothers are the products of spliced human and animal DNA and like all hybrids they are naturally sterile. One is part owl, one part bull, and so on with Franz being the most part-animal of them all: part chicken! Chickens apparently made the best test subjects and some of them now strut about on cow hooves. (Wait to discover what became of the island's resident stork who disappeared years before). 

Rather than the plot spinning completely out of control as one might assume when Gabriel briefly accepts that his 'brothers' can only continue to exist under custodial care, he begins to understand that they can all live together and enjoy a relatively 'normal' life (complete with numerous offspring), thanks to their Dad's warped experiments. For these mental and physical misfits there can be a happy and joyful future.

A cross between a comic horror flick and a backwoods nightmare, this film is certainly not for everyone. However it's a wondrous and grimly imaginative creation from a writer whose next project is the script for a mainstream Stephen King movie.   

1 comment:

mgp1449 said...

Despite the distasteful basis of the plot, this was a thoroughly enjoyable film. What could have been an
over-the-top horror movie turned out to be a rather strange bucolic comedy.