Lycan Colony

Lycan Colony is the ultimate movie miscarriage. Such superlatives, uttered particularly in relation to the broad field of the sewer of world cinema, automatically seem rather dubious. In spite of that, however, I won’t deny myself the right to use them here, especially with the passage of many weeks during which I cleared my head cluttered with the non-stop WTF astonishment from watching this piece of work. The maestro of untrained amateurism Rob Roy mercilessly grinds down viewers with something approaching the absolute bottom of the abyss of incompetence, as well as with the heights of delirious progressivity that proudly treads uncharted territory (where no reasonable person would dare step foot). This leads to the paranoid assumption that Lycan Colony must be a calculated product, because the number of violations of the rules of filmmaking here give the impression that the film is a comprehensive encyclopaedia of how not to make a film. However, every sequence radiates genuine artlessness and sincere naïveté that the calculating mockbusters of The Asylum, for example, can’t even dream of. Of course, what we have here in the masterful auteur who stands before us is not an obstinate Sisyphean genius at the level of Herzog’s Fitzgerald, but merely a fake diamond in the rough in the form of an ordinary small-town fantasist. But what’s even more likable is the deluge of woodenly “acting” neighbours and relatives (and their household pets), crudely framed “compositions”, drastically overexposed shots (many of them shot in broad daylight and subsequently converted into night scenes with a filter, though the shadows remain), idiotically utilised simple CGI effects from the menu of basic editing software, sound effects applied in an endless loop and images clumsily deformed in every possible way. And that’s not to mention the disjointed narrative in which Native American mythology is combined with werewolf lore and where generally functional scenes like those from a family sitcom alternate with crazy twists and fantastical elements. It’s hard to find more convincing proof that in some respects AI will never replace human creativity. At the same time, however, Lycan Colony can also be seen as a portent of a phantasmagorically contorted future of cinema, as Harmony Korine is currently proclaiming in relation to his similarly digitally irrational audio-visual flatulence Aggro Dr1ft. THIS IS CINEMA or Rob Roy is the real killer of the flower moon (that is, if Killers of the Flower Moon had been run through a colour filter in the wrong aspect ratio on a green screen). (29.09.2023)

Rob Roy es un visionario. Lamentablemente para mí, sus visiones son como las peores pesadillas audiovisuales, durante las cuales uno espera cada vez más a medida que pasa el tiempo que finalmente lleguen a su fin. [The Autumn Special of the Shockproof Film Festival 2023] (31.10.2023)