Having one of the more bizarre careers out of any well-known modern actor, Nicolas Cage and insanity go together like peanut butter and jelly. Unless we’re talking about his earliest work or his direct-to-video paycheck gigs, he’s a great talent who makes good movies even better and bad movies compulsively watchable. His latest picture comes from Panos Cosmatos, a filmmaker who gained notoriety a while back thanks to his feature debut being the psychedelic cinematic wonder Beyond The Black Rainbow. It goes under the title Mandy. Take a look for yourself, will you?
...well, that was certainly something, wasn’t it? And, here I was, thinking that Mom And Dad was the only Nicolas Cage movie worth paying attention to this year. So much to unpack for a quick trailer. Lots of hazy, colorful visuals of the cryptic and unsettling variety like Cage hammering together a sleek looking battle axe and the Hellraiser-looking dudes that kidnap his wife. Strange animated cutaways. Cage filled to the core with anger and covered in blood. A tease of a swordfight with chainsaws that’s so utterly bananas, it could’ve been ripped from a certain Tobe Hooper picture. It’s a lot of cool stuff to take in. If this doesn’t end up being the weirdest movie of the year, the rest of 2018 is going to be pretty gnarly.
Having been screened at both Sundance and Cannes months ago, the reception’s been more than intriguing. Jacob Knight from Birth. Movies. Death. (a fellow critic I trust above many others) went as far as to describe it as “Ghost Rider by way of Alejandro Jodorowsky”*. Also, this is going to be something of a posthumous release seeing how the score was done by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson (who unfortunately passed away a little over five months ago). I can’t say that I’m entirely prepared for this craziness; however, that doesn’t mean I’m not hyped out of my skull to see it when gets unleashed on September 14th.
*That bit was paraphrased. You can read his thoughts here: https://boxd.it/nUuaT
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