Review: A Town Called Panic
Posted February 18, 2010 12:53 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Sitting through A Town Called Panic is like watching someone on LSD play with a bucket of toys for 75 minutes. Based on a Belgian television show, it’s a crazy and hilarious film that is so far out there you’re left thinking, “What the hell am I watching?,” more often than not.
The story, if one can call it that, follows Horse (voiced by co-writer and co-director Vincent Patar), Cowboy (voiced by co-writer and co-director Stéphane Aubier), and Indian (voiced by Bruce Ellison) — three friends made of plastic. It’s Horse’s birthday and as a last minute gift idea Cowboy and Indian decide to build him a brick barbecue. Instead of ordering 50 bricks they accidentally type in a few extra zeros and order 50 million bricks. Left in panic mode when the bricks arrive by the truckload they hide them on the roof of their house before Horse finds out. Their plan works until the house collapses under the weight of the bricks leaving them homeless and in deep trouble with Horse. They attempt to rebuild the house but after one day of construction they only have two walls up and when they wake up the next day those walls are gone — someone stole them. This leads Horse, Cowboy, and Indian on a bizarre adventure to find out who is behind the wall theft and where they’re hiding them.
Some people might scoff at the very raw stop-motion animation or the voices (in French) which come across as if everyone is constantly yelling. I find that those elements are what make A Town Called Panic work so well though and watching it I laughed harder than I have in a long time. I also found something unique about the animation style. It could be because we’re so used to seeing clean, computer-generated, 3-D films these days that it really grabbed me. Or maybe it’s because my imagination wandered back to when I was a child playing with toys pretending I was making my own movie.
Needless to say, A Town Called Panic is not for everyone. It definitely has “cult film” written all over it but it’s worth checking out if you want to see something different.
A Town Called Panic opens on Friday, February 19 at the AMC Yonge-Dundas.
*** out of 5 stars
Not Rated
Voices: Bruce Ellison, Benoît Poelvoorde, Jeanne Balibar
Directed by: Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier
Official Site IMDb
brian.mckechnie@citynews.rogers.com
ALSO OPENING THIS WEEK: Shutter Island, Defendor, Fish Tank, Soundtrack for a Revolution, Reel Injun
Top image: A scene from A Town Called Panic. Courtesy filmswelike.
