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Lunacy

4.4 out of 5 stars 42 ratings
IMDb7.1/10.0

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February 20, 2007
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Lunacy
Genre Drama
Format Multiple Formats, Color, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Contributor Katerina Ruzickov, Jan Triska, Jir Krytinr, Iva Littmanov, Pavel Nov, Stano Danciak, Jaroslav Dusek, Pavel Liska, Martin Huba, Ctirad Gtz, Jan Svankmajer, Edgar Allan Poe, Marquis de Sade, Anna Geislerov See more
Language Czech
Runtime 1 hour and 58 minutes

Product Description

The latest provocation from surrealist master Jan Svankmajer deliriously combines live action, stop-motion animation, kinky sex, Euro-trash violence and horror, black comedy, and lots of frisky meat puppets. In nineteenth-century rural France, a young man named Jean Berlot becomes caught up in the nigthmarish world of a mysterious, decadent Marqius: orgiastic black masses, "therapeutic" funerals, and an asylum with a smoirgasbord of macabre "treatments" and tarred-and-feathered doctors.

Product details

  • Aspect Ratio ‏ : ‎ 1.85:1
  • MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ Unrated (Not Rated)
  • Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.88 ounces
  • Item model number ‏ : ‎ ZEIT1084DVD
  • Director ‏ : ‎ Jan Svankmajer
  • Media Format ‏ : ‎ Multiple Formats, Color, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
  • Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 58 minutes
  • Release date ‏ : ‎ February 20, 2007
  • Actors ‏ : ‎ Pavel Liska, Jan Triska, Anna Geislerov, Jaroslav Dusek, Martin Huba
  • Subtitles: ‏ : ‎ English
  • Language ‏ : ‎ Czech
  • Studio ‏ : ‎ Zeitgeist Films
  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000KJTG7Y
  • Writers ‏ : ‎ Edgar Allan Poe, Jan Svankmajer, Marquis de Sade
  • Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars 42 ratings

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
42 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2007
    I was introduced to Jan Svankmajer's work with a feature film called "Conspirators of Pleasure" which was a movie with no dialogue and dealt with masturbation. That said, I fell in love with the czech surrealists work and animation.

    "Lunacy" is another gem (this time with dialogue!) and is based loosely on the works of Poe and the Marquis de Sade (but you can tell that from reading the dvd jacket, you silly monkey!)

    and I know that there is dialogue in his other films such as "Faust" and "Alice", but this film seems to rely more on the words then the visuals.

    From all of his films I've seen, this could very well be my favorite.

    I know this is just my opinion and everything, but you owe it to yourself to purchase this film. Watch it, Love it, and let your friends borrow it and enjoy it's awesomeness!
    6 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2015
    An exceptionally well made, warm hearted comedy drama for the whole family. Not many family films touch on this level of compassion.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2011
    Jan Svanksmajer strikes again with this relentless and provocative film. A wonderful tapestry in which demons emerge. And what other place in the world is the most appropriate but a madhouse to show the decline in all its dreadful human cruelty and thirst for hidden perversions inimiginable?

    With inspiration coming from Poe and the Marquis de Sade, the film revolves around Jean Berlot, who is unwittingly recruited by a stranger who leads him to the antechamber of hell. An asylum where black masses, perversions, and punishments therapeutic fuerales numbered according to the degree of cruelty are put into practice. Jean meets Charlotte, an attractive woman who falls for revealing some of the secrets behind the door.

    An amazing trip to the antipodes of the unfathomable horror universe without restrictions. Svnakmajer pays well-deserved tribute to the legendary movie Marat Sade by Peter Brooks, 1967.

    Do not miss it.
  • Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2017
    VERY GOOD!
  • Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2016
    great
  • Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2017
    Faust was much better. Lunacy seemed ridiculous.
  • Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2015
    lunacy
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2006
    In his introduction to the film inside the own film Jan Svankmajer compares modern societies with a lunatics assylum. The subject of " Lunacy " is essentially an ideological debate about how to rule an institution. " Basically there are two ways of managing an institution, and each equally extreme ": one looks at the absolute freedom; the other, the old-fashioned based on absolute rules and punishment. And there is also - he concludes - another one that combines the worst things of both " and this is the mad-house in we're living today ". As the protagonist of the film, as artists nowadays, modern democracies seem to move between two chairs, to walk behind the fog.

    Placed in the ninenteenth century rural France, " Lunacy " is freely inspired by a not very popular tale by E. A. Poe titled " The system of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether ", about a mental hospital ruled by their patients ( this is by lunatics ), and also by the decadentist and anticlerical criticism of the Marquis the Sade. We find too some references to the spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel ( for instance, in the scene in which the aeseptic and sadistic lead doctor of the asylum shows to her lover the content of a bizarre box and that the spectator never get to known ) so as another tribute to Poe in the scene of the therapeutic burial. The result is a satirical and thought-provoking surreal horror tale where Svankmajer conjugates grotesque, cool stop-motion animation, kinky sex, gothic horror imaginary, disturbing analogies, circular nigthmares, lunatics and meat puppets to built up a pessimistic political parable about mankind alienation and indecisiveness in industrializied societies.

    I've heard some commentaries by Svankamajer fans dissapointed about " Lunacy " because it has not many animation sequences, as frequently many of their followers wait to find in his movies. It's true: the animated scenes, inserted in the film as macabre vignettes of surrealist imagination or sarcastic and philosophical graphic commentaries, hardly reach to be twenty minutes in all the whole film, but this doesn't avoid to place Svankmajer's last feature-length film as one of his finest and most subversive works.

    Another disturbing and exquisite work by this genial and dark alchemist of the surreal.
    25 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • amotoki
    5.0 out of 5 stars 一般受けはしないが自分にとっては満点
    Reviewed in Japan on February 5, 2024
    シュワンクマイエルの名前はかなり前から聞いていましたが、
    昨年「オテサーネク」を観て以来、ファンになりました。
    「アリス」、「ファウスト」に続いてこの作品を観ました。
    一般的な映画とはまったく違うので、ごく少数の人にしか受けないと思います。
    L. V. トリアー、D. リンチの作品に少し通じるものがあるかも。
    文章を書くのが苦手なので、ここまでにしておきます。
    Report
  • Emily Max
    5.0 out of 5 stars Super film
    Reviewed in Germany on April 9, 2022
    Ein intelligenter, kreativer und auch sehr schwarz humoriger Film.
    Wer sich an Kunst Filmen versuchen will oder schon ein richtiger Svankmajer Fan ist sollte unbedingt zuschlagen.
    Ein wirkliches Meisterwerk welches das Horror genre komplett auf den Kopf stellt.
  • Rossettian
    5.0 out of 5 stars Poe + De Sade + Svankmajer = Lunacy
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 29, 2012
    It's a joy that two of Svankmajer's past feature films - this and 'Conspirators of Pleasure' - have finally got official UK releases. 'Lunacy' was, to my knowledge, only previously available in region 1, yet here it is at long last.

    The film can be divided into two halves. The first half takes place in the shabby grandeur of a marquis' house (who presumably, going by Svankmajer's acknowledged inspirations for the film, is modelled after the Marquis De Sade). Jean, a young man on the way to his mother's funeral, is invited on his journey to spend the night in the Marquis' home - there he witnesses a blasphemous orgy (with plenty of chocolate cake) and an equally mysterious burial. The second half unfolds in a chicken-filled mental asylum where Jean goes to stay voluntarily, hoping to cure his frightening nightmares of being forcibly straitjacketed. Ideas of the conflict between order and reason and liberty and imagination (the latter clearly favoured) are here played out with the asylum as a backdrop - the patients are given free reign of the place, sledding down the stairways in showers of feathers and staging a tableau vivant of Delacroix's 'Liberty Leading the People'. The film is also curiously anachronistic: the extras in the opening scenes are dressed in modern clothing, and pile onto a bus, yet the Marquis is decked out as an eighteenth-century libertine and the main sets are weathered and Baroque; a computer keyboard is placed amid the clutter of an old-fashioned doctor's office.

    Svankmajer's trademark stop-motion animation is much more absent in 'Lunacy', when compared to its prominence in his other features such as 'Alice' and 'Little Otik'. Every now and then, at random intervals, short vignettes pop up of chunks of meat cavorting and frolicking to repetitive, carnivalesque music, possibly acting as mirrors of their live-action counterparts. This, of course, only adds to the film's overall oddness, and it is by no means rooted entirely in reality. Hallucinations are mingled with the everyday, and madness is superimposed with presumed sanity. The humour is always morbid, the imagery Gothic and wild, and characters sway ambiguously between being reliable and untrustworthy. Yet this, as always, is part of Svankmajer's charm.

    The DVD itself is perfect, in my opinion. I'm no expert on such matters, but I thought the picture and sound quality was flawless, and there's even a short behind-the-scenes documentary showing various aspects of the production. It's fascinating to see Svankmajer at work on-set, interacting with the actors.

    Overall, a much-welcomed release. I would urge any fan of Svankmajer's work to get it before it goes out of print, as this generally seems to be the fate of his feature film releases!
  • Salvador Fortuny Miró
    5.0 out of 5 stars A philosophical horror tale
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 5, 2007
    In his introduction to the film inside the own film Jan Svankmajer compares modern societies with a lunatics assylum: the subject of " Lunacy " is essentially an ideological debate about how to rule an institution. " Basically there are two ways of managing an institution, and both equally extrem: one looks at the absolute freedom; the other, an old-fashioned based on absolute rules and punishment". But we can find another -he concludes- that combines both of them and " this is the mad- house in we're living today ". As the ptotagonist of the film, as artists nowadays, modern democracies seem to move between two chairs, to walk behind the fog.

    Placed in the nineteenth century rural France " Lunacy " is vaguely inspired by a not very popular tale by E. A. Poe titled " The system of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether " about a mad-house ruled by their patients and also by the decadentist and anticlerical criticism of Marquis de Sade. The result is a satirical and thought-provoking horror tale where Svankmajer conjugates cool stop-motion animation, kinky sex, black humour, gothic horror imaginery, disturbing analogies, circular nightmares, therapeutic burials, lunatics and meat puppets to built up a pessimistic political fable about mankind alienation and indecisiviness in industrializied societies.

    Another masterpiece of this dark alchemist of the surreal .
  • 小口栞
    5.0 out of 5 stars 生肉が動き回る
    Reviewed in Japan on December 29, 2007
    どんなに細かいところを見逃さないように、三日間くらいかけて見終わりました。そんな気を起こさせる映像です。しかしかなりエログロで、哲学的ホラーと言われてますが、確かに気持ち悪くなります。場面場面を繋ぐ、間接的にエロティックで暴力的な生肉のアニメーションが、直接的にならずに想像力を刺激するので、上手いと思いました。
    ストーリーは精神病院内での自由や愛や暴力についてですが、何が自由で何が真実なのかわかりません。救いのないストーリーは哲学的に問いかけてきます。
    映像だけでも不条理な世界をたっぷり満喫できると思います。
    メイキング画像などついていて、ヤン・シュバンクマイエルに興味のある方には、是非見ておきたい作品だと思いました。