Taxidermia

Taxidermia  Directed By George Paulson (or Gyorgy Pailfi) starring Gergely Trocsanyl (2006).

This entry is a special request from someone who works at my favorite cheese shop, they know about good movies and awesome dairy products.

   There are many scenes in this film of Hungarian symbolism drawn from their own society and history that make no sense to us Westerners. However, we can easily overlook them and still understand what's happening. This is one of the first Hungarian horror films that we've ever reviewed and like Serbia, there is a political slant to the violence and disgusting imagery, which gives it a lot more depth then usual. The whole political context about Taxidermia is referenced in European Nightmares: Horror Cinema In Europe since 1945 by Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick and David Huxley. I never heard of director Gyorgy Pailifi before this film and he's very talented, not unlike a combination of Cronenberg and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.  

spicy hot link, get' em while they're flamin!

   It begins with Morosgovanyi (Csaba Czene), a man with a hairlip, who miraculously achieves a flaming orgasm (or perhaps just the tip is ignited, at any rate this guy would make buckets of cash as a street performer)! He is a soldier stationed on a farm run by a cruel lieutenant who philosophies about the word "cunt" (which in his language sounds like he's saying peanut).

   The cinematography is masterful and the landscape and revolving shot of a bathtub is inspired! People on the IMBD message board are bickering about what really went on in this film, ignoring the symbolism and worrying if the vomiting will make them throw-up, their comments remind me of that Kids In The Hall sketch, where people in an office almost puke over talking about someone licking a stamp!

  

That IMDB message board darn near made me puke!

Morosgovanyi sleeps in a barn and has all kinds of sexual hangups (his dick gets pecked by a rooster, while trying to masturbate over two girls in an innocent snowfight). He envisions himself in a pop-up book of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl, like a pervy Gumby, and he ejaculates into the stratosphere (as it whirls up into the stars)! 
Directly after, we are hurled into a genuine slaughter of a large pig, as its stomach is stabbed open and face is chopped into bits. He fantasizes about two women as he humps an enormous mound of pig entrails and is shot in the brain by his commanding officer.

Porkins Playboy centerfold

   Next we meet Kalman (Gergo Trocsani), a shrieking baby born with a tail, that gets immediately snipped off by his papa, possibly to erase any notion that it was spawned by the previous character's unsavory methods. They used a real pig's tail to achieve the ghastly effect that looks uncomfortably real. The tail symbolizes that he is the offspring of Morosgovanyi (unconsciously of course, because last I heard no babies were ever born out of a sexual encounter with a bath full of pig guts)! He grows up to be an obese bastard with a pompadour not unlike Huey from the Lemon Popsicle series, haunched over a trough slopping soup into his pudgy maw in an eating contest. The gruesome contest is an allegory for socialism in Hungarian history called "Goulash communism". All the tremendous gentlemen vomit in a line after the winner is selected, but I guess we all lose in this case.

But Crank, you forgot to mention what a glorious lounge singer I am!

   The nightmarish inhuman contest continues as men gorge on blocks of horse sausage meat. After a spoon swallowing accident Kalman gets the advantage, because an attractive chubby girl named Gizi (Adel Stanczel) comes to his aide and visits him at the hospital. The symbol of their blossoming romance is illustrated by a single drop of her armpit sweat landing under his eyelid.

This corn is delicious

   Nothing goes as planned (this film has a grim existential slant to it). According to Taxidermia there are factories where children are trained as champion eaters conditioned to become lifers in the eating then puking profession that's an Olympic sized sport. Gizi and Kalman's romance is very sweet and endearing, possibly the least revolting section of the film. 

No I'm not related to Dobby the house elf

   And now for the final vignette, which is actually about the Taxidermist, a creepy blonde fellow named Lajos (Marc Bischoff) who's features look like a cross between Dobby the house elf and the singer of Radiohead. 

   He's the caretaker of his father Kalman, now a gelatinous fat man who looks like Benjamin Franklin and Jabba the Hutt, he eats chocolate bars with the silver wrapper still on them.

BenjamifranklinHutt

 Gizi has abandoned her family and is seen on T.V. as a judge in the continued eating contests as her ex husband miserably laments on his former glory, this long running sport reminds me of how American Idol is horrendously still on the air. 
 Lajos, the taxidermist, buys food for his father and his ginormous cats, he has a crush on a cashier that never notices him. His father is gut punctured by one of the hungry cats and his son finds him dead, after coming home from the market. According to Steve Shaviro's essay on the film, " Lajo's profession of preserving dead bodies seems like a reducto ad absurdum of the commodity fetishism that drives a capitalist economy". During the grisly climax he stuffs his father and decapitates himself in a nifty suicide machine, which lops off his own head, turning their deaths into works of art to be preserved in a museum. I like the notion that two inhumanly beast-ish fellows can be preserved as works of performance art for the masses to enjoy, in a cryptic way, its kind of nice (and I'm sure it means something insidious that flew over my head in a metaphor, wait let me consult my Taxidermia cliff notes)!

Hey you got guts on my chocolate bars!

 According to Shaviro's essay on Taxidermia, "Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema", each character can be broken down into the messages they represent Morosgovanyi is Fascism/ War; Kalman is Socialism/ Sports and Lajos is Capitalism/Art. Like I said though, you don't need to stop what you're doing and read the cliff notes to enjoy the film, which I did immensely and its hard to believe a film this bizarre escaped me for that long. 
Highly Recommended!  

If there's hell below we're all gonna be showcased at a Eurotrash fashion museum

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