“The Anna Cabrini Chronicles” (Polymorph Productions)

Review by Kent Manthie

From the mind of Tawd b. Dorenfeld, comes “The Anna Cabrini Chronicles”, a very outré work. It’s got everything an art-house flick needs: cool editing, fragmented and dissociated camera work, trippy animation and graphic scenes of violence, self-mutilation and suicide.
Writer/director/animator, Dorenfeld weaves together, in 148 minutes, three different
vignettes, all connected by the fact that they committed suicide and before snuffing it, had all been given, months or weeks earlier, a Dictaphone and notebooks with which to record all their thoughts and ideas, hopes, fears, et cetera.
So as Anna is reflecting one day, she picks through some of the recorded microcassettes and then, one by one, we get to peek in on these shattered lives as they reveal themselves and all the demons that invaded their consciousness.
First we meet Brooke, a cheerleader manqué with a bad back and emotional problems who has a rough time adjusting to life and dealing with her mom. She desperately tries to get out of this world, to shuffle off this mortal coil, to coin a phrase…
Next is Jonathan, a very messed-up person; self-loathing homosexual with paranoia and very suicidal and self-mutilating: he likes to cut himself with razor blades and ends up shooting himself in the end.
Lastly we meet 12 year-old Merrick Young, a Cuban-American who is growing up in a terribly dysfunctional household, with a father from hell – a big, dumb meathead who treats everyone in his immediate radius like shit: his son, his wife, his neighbors, his son’s friends, you get the picture: a real jerk; the kind of father who drives his kids to desperate, crazy things.
The whole thing seems like a documentary, albeit a psychically charged headtrip, in that these people, as messed up as they were, are representative of lots of realities – just look around you sometime; really pay attention.
Anyway, there is a great, great score by Trey Spruance, who’s done some freaking out with John Zorn, Mr. Bungle and other “experimental” bands and artists. You know the type. The wild fits and starts nicely punctuate the creepiness, the anger, the desperation – all the things that are portrayed with wrenchingly realism, so hurrah for picking Mr. Spruance to score the film.
There is some interesting animation, but it’s mostly toward the first half of this 2 _ hour epic freak-out. It is the kind of pen and paper drawing animation: the graphic sketches morphing into eerie monsters with bug-eyes and then contorting into a human form, then into someone else, then into maybe some inanimate object, ad nauseum. The animation, done by the director, Tawd b. Dorenfeld, is slightly reminiscent of some of the wicked claymation work in the 1979 Frank Zappa flick, “Baby Snakes”. I think this would be a mind-blower on a big silver screen of a movie theater, but good luck finding a place (except for maybe the Roxie theater in SF) to show or distribute it! America isn’t ready for this kind of highbrow stuff (yet) but just wait a few years…this will seem tame! For more information on the director, the film, the music, or whatever, check out this website: http://www.polymorphproductions.com – KM.

0 thoughts on “issue 33 DVD movie review “The Anna Cabrini Chronicles”

  1. It’s the “What kind of sex am I having” looks

    Lets see
    pic # 1) Your going to put that where?
    pic # 2) Really… your going to put that where?
    pic # 3) Don’t you dare use that wine bottle on me
    pic # 4) You gone and done it now…
    pic # 5 & 6) Ahhh… sure glad that’s over with
    pic # 7 & 8) Now my ass hurts
    pic # 9) What the hell just fell out of my ass?

    God I am bored today…..

Leave a Reply