The Prankishly Post-Modern Audio Commentary-Based 2022 Austrian Horror Comedy Razzenest is a Demented Delight
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
During the seeming eternity that I was researching The Fractured Mirror, my mammoth upcoming book about American films about moviemaking, people would sometime suggest non-American movies to me.
They were being nice, and I was flattered that they were thinking about my book at all. Yet I also cringed a little inside because the main problem with writing a book about every American narrative film and a generous cross-section of documentaries about filmmaking released over a hundred year span is that entails an almost impossibly large amount of work.
The field of movies about filmmaking is anything but barren. It is rich and plentiful, and continually replenished by new movies about the subject, some very good, some very bad, most in between.
So while I appreciated the interest, I was not about to make an already almost prohibitively difficult, if not impossible, project even more time and labor intensive by adding more to my plate.
That said, I very much appreciate it when patrons choose movies for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 that would definitely be in The Fractured Mirror if they were American.
I’m talking about movies like the clever 2017 cult Japanese zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead and the 2022 Austrian horror comedy Razzenest.
One of the things that I love about this column is that you sometimes choose movies that you know that I will like and appeal very directly to my sensibility that I might otherwise not know about, let alone see and write about.
That now includes multiple movies that take the form of an audio commentary. A few years back, I wrote about 2016’s Director’s Cut, a crowd-funded satire from director Adam Rifkin and writer-star Penn Jillette where Jillette played a lunatic obsessed with actress Missi Pyle, who kidnaps her and forces her to be in what can very generously be deemed a movie opposite him.
The movie is a feature-length audio commentary of Jillette’s character. That might sound like a conceit that would be difficult to maintain for an entire feature film, but Director’s Cut is satisfying as a movie and not just an audacious stunt.
2022’s Razzenest makes an already formidable challenge even more difficult by positing itself as the director’s commentary on a Terence Malick-like folk horror movie with no people or dialogue, just images of nature relating, on a very abstract level, to the bloodshed and horrors of the Thirty Years War.
There is similarly an abstract to non-existent relationship between what we see and hear. Sometimes, the pastoral tableaus seem to correspond directly to the sonic action. Other times, the connection is thinner or non-existent.
It reminded me of my student film from college, which was a parody of the French New Wave (how terribly original!) that was post-dubbed so that the narration sometimes deviated from what was onscreen.
A similar dynamic is at play in Razzenest. It begins with Babette Cruickshank (Sophie Kathleen Kozeluh), a Los Angeles film critic whose stumbling earnestness as an interviewer I could relate to on a painful level, conducting an audio commentary for the titular film-within-a-film cranky South African auteur Manus Oosthuizen (Michael Smulik).
Manus is an excitable parody of the deeply imitable and often satirized Werner Herzog. He’s an Enfant terrible type who takes unseemly pleasure in shouting indignantly at the intimidated interviewer and taking great offense at everything she says.
Herzog is a big target that Razzenest nails. As with Herzog, there’s cracked poetry to Manus’ pessimism and sense of the world as a bleak nightmare hurtling over an endless abyss. And those are on the good days.
The flustered critic treats the tempestuous director with a reverence that he most assuredly does not return. It reminds me a bit of John Ford's and Peter Bogdanovich's dynamic in Directed By John Ford.
Bogdanovich treats Ford like a wise sage with much wisdom to impart. Ford looks at Bogdanovich like a bug he’d like to stomp with his boot.
Manus’ collaborators try to rein him in, but he thunders instead with outrage and active contempt. Razzenest has a lot of fun with the pretentiousness of art film and indie film culture and the outsized personalities that it attracts in both the critical and filmmaking worlds.
Another critic describes Manus' film as “Blair Witch without the witch.” Razzenest has a similarly minimalist aesthetic. At times, it suggests The Blair Witch Project re-imagined as a radio comedy.
Someone in the recording gets sick and then things take a turn. The audio commentators stop talking about the pretentious art horror film that brought them together and find themselves confronting real horror of the supernatural variety.
Manus’ crew members and the genial sound guy helping Babette with the recording become possessed by the evil spirits by people who perished in the Thirty Years War and find themselves behaving in an uncharacteristically brutal fashion.
They begin speaking Old German and murdering babies and behaving in other uncharacteristic ways. Pretentious banter about art and film and war soon gives way to an all-out struggle for survival against an ancient and voracious horror.
The tone of the commentary, and the film, changes accordingly. Babette stops taking Manus abuse and condescension, while he reveals himself to be something other than a pure artist concerned only with unearthing provocative truths.
Razzenest turns into a proper horror movie, as Babette and Manus must put aside their differences and work together in order to achieve their goal of not being murdered by collaborators who morphed from everyday people to murderous, cannibalistic ghouls over a period of minutes.
Babette and Manus find themselves in an all out struggle for survival that forces them to be resourceful and resilient.
Razzenes begins as a loving goof on arthouse movie pretension, insufferable filmmakers and indulgent film historians before taking a sharp but effective turn into audio horror
There are moments throughout Razzenest that reflected my sensibility on such a pure level that it felt like the movie was made specifically for me. For example, the filmmakers don’t just reference Nicolas Cage, my favorite actor, and his regrettable enthusiasm for purchasing castles that he must pay for by appearing in direct-to-streaming movies of varying quality. No, they specifically reference Willy’s Wonderland, which I have a special affection for because it’s about evil animatronics at a family fun spot, and my son is absolutely obsessed with Five Nights at Freddy’s.
I felt the same way about the running joke involving the director’s friendship with Gremlins 2: The New Batch director Joe Dante (who is referenced, gloriously enough, specifically as the director of Gremlins 2: The New Batch) that culminates in an audio cameo from the cult auteur.
There’s even an oblique nod to the origins of Dante’s beloved co-directorial debut, Hollywood Boulevard. Razzenest puts an arthouse international spin on Dante’s prankishly postmodern style of pop-culture-crazed meta-comedy.
Like Director’s Cut, Razzenest benefits from brevity. I wouldn’t want a movie like this to be 100 minutes long. Thankfully, Razzenest wraps things up satisfyingly—and spookifyingly—in under 85 minutes.
I quite enjoyed Razzenest. It appealed very directly to my sensibility, and if you’re reading this, it means you enjoy weird, random, semi-obscure pop detritus, so I very much suspect that you will also dig it.
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