LITTLE BIG BOY - THE RISE AND FALL OF JIMMY DUNCAN
DVD. Worldwide Multimedia.

Kim Sonderholm’s film seems unsure as to what it wants to be. At times, it’s a comedy horror with Lloyd Kaufman gurning away in his usual manner; at other points, it’s straight-faced. It flirts with the idea of mockumentary, crams in enough gratuitous nudity to pass as a softcore film and tries to pretend that it’s an American movie rather than the Danish production that the accents of most of the cast give it away to be. The end result is a film that is trying hard, but never quite comes together.

Sonderholm plays the title character, am egotistical hack horror film director who could easily be based on the likes of Uwe Boll. Cracking up while making his fourth feature film - a process that seems to consist mostly of auditioning actresses who have to take their tops off – Duncan kills a girlfriend trying out a ‘donkey punch’, and then sets out on a killing spree. The story is mostly told in flashbacks with Duncan’s colleagues, friends and detractors filling in the story.

There’s the potential for an interesting Hollywood satire here, but the film is so stylistically scattershot that it doesn’t really come together. The ‘talking head’ interviews don’t really fit in with the footage of Duncan reaching breaking point – the latter scenes breaking away from the documentary feel that had been built up so far, and we never really get inside the director’s head. It's only during the final moments that the film tries for any real explanation of Duncan's obsession, and it turns out to be the cliched childhood sexual trauma that was a little old hat when played out in Nightmares in a Damaged Brain.

It's a technically weird movie too. Lots of it is shot green-screen, resulting in an unreality that may or may not have been intended. certainly, the efforts to pass the movie off as a US production - it's notable that the American shot scenes look rather different from the rest of the movie - are disconcerting. One or two Scandinavian accents you can accept - but after a while, you either have to accept that either lots of Danish girls have travelled to the US in order to show Duncan their tits, or there is something more going on here than we know. The closing credits rather give the game away...

That’s not to say that more undemanding genre fans won’t get a certain amount of fun from the film. The cast includes enough names from the fringes of the genre – Kaufman, April Monique Burril, Monique Dupreee – and the aforementioned gratuitous nudity, genre-referential moments and touches of weirdness to ensure that it doesn’t become dull. But it’s a messy affair that I can only assume made more sense in Sonderholm’s head than it does on screen, and is ultimately rather forgettable stuff.

DAVID FLINT

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