Movie Independence Day Presents: ***!!South of Heaven!!***

South of Heaven is the best movie ever.

Make Your Own Monument Valley: $4.99 at Bastardmart.

Like Streets of Fire, South of Heaven smushes genres together to create something fresh and different. It’s a little bit like Tarantino (but better), the Coen Brothers, early Lynch (Eraserhead to Elephant Man), Raimi, Peckinpah, and Happy Tree Friends.

It's not a party until everybody dies.

There are two brothers who are meant to be collaborating on a novel, but one of them’s run off with a psycho, played by Shea Wigham in the best performance ever: “Mad Dog”. So the other brother gets visited by these two vaudeville goons who think he’s the other brother so they kick the shit out of him. This lady from a film noir keeps hanging around. Shit gets real. “Mad Dog” sings a Depeche Mode song. Then they all meet up in a little house and there’s a showdown, but not quite the one you might expect.

This is the expression of a serious individual.

Anyway, the plot isn't really that important. What’s important is the movie’s style: all the exteriors are like sets with backdrops, the characters are designed after Tex Avery cartoons, George “The Animal” Steel makes a cameo where he just sits there, and “Mad Dog” has a speech about a chicken which is better than everything. Most indie-type filmmakers try to hedge their bets by making their movies all ironical, so if they suck they can say they did it on purpose. South of Heaven is a little bit different than that: the content is funny, but the characters are serious, so you might find you actually give a shit about what happens to them. It’s a dark-comic tone of a different flavour than your typical dark-comedy.

The shirt that heralds the end times.

The other reason to see it is because the DVD by Synapse Pictures is really sweet. I don’t normally care that much about DVD packages, but this one is textbook so you should all buy it twice and give a copy to your grandma (if she likes really violent film noir cartoon westerns). It’s got three feature commentaries and three short films that are actually really long (but really inventive as well). The short films are definitely up themselves, but still really good anyway. I want to marry this DVD and have human-DVD-hybrid babies with it. I think they’d look like this guy:

Anyway, see South of Heaven.