STUDIO: Olive Films | DIRECTOR: Florian Habicht | CAST: Nicolas Butler, Teresa Peters, Tony Bishop, Matthew Sunderland, Steve Abel, Mardi Potter, Warwick Broadhead
RELEASE DATE: 5/1/2010 | PRICE: DVD$29.95
BONUSES: commentary, documentary, short film, soundtrack CD, more
SPECS: NR | 99 min. | Fantasy | 1.33:1 widescreen | stereoRATINGS (out of 5): Movie
| Audio
New Zealand filmmaker Florian Habicht’s memorably bizarre 2003 movie Woodenhead receives a repromotion from DVD supplier Olive Films, which should please art house lovers looking for something they might have missed when it was first released.
A Grimm’s fairy tale-like deconstruction, Woodenhead’s strange story concerns garbage man Gert (Steve Abel) who takes on the chore of driving his boss’s (Warwick Broadhead) daughter Plum (Teresa Peters) to her wedding in a neighboring town. When their car breaks down while en route, the pair are forced to travel by donkey, which leads to getting lost in a thick forest and stumbling into the kind of romantic, dangerous and sexual adventures that make for great cult cinema.
Applying all sorts of nifty production techniques to get a desired effect — expressionist black-and-white photography, a pre-recorded dialog track that doesn’t quite link up to the images as they progress — Habicht creates an enchanted landscape filled with forests, cottages and magic beans and populated by characters that have a distinctively modern take on events as they occur.
Though the film immediately calls to mind the work of Guy Maddin (Careful), early David Lynch (Eraserhead) and even once-young New Zealander Peter Jackson (Bad Taste), German-born, New Zealand-raised Habicht’s movie is uniquely his own.
The DVD is overflowing with extras, including a bonus soundtrack CD featuring composer Marc Chesterman’s ominously playful score.
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