Rating: D-/ Flowers is a very strange film, and not in a good, Eraserhead way as much as a ‘why-the-fuck-am-I-watching-this’ way. Although it is almost entirely devoid of redeeming qualities, I enjoyed watching it, the reason being that I got three of my best friends over to watch it and we kept up a running commentary of it’s pointlessly self-indulgent ridiculousness. I’m thankful for my friends and their crazy senses of humor for making this even watchable.
Some people, like me, will read this film’s deliriously weird description and go out and buy it, looking for a subversive good time; trust me, don’t. I will be the first to admit that Flowers has some interesting set pieces and tantalizingly weird moments. But it has nothing else. Nothing. No characters to root for, no story whatsoever, not even any dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, I love weird shit. I’m the first to come running to Netflix when something weird becomes available. Flowers is a befuddling experiment that seems almost like a fetish film at times, a long slog that will make you feel like you share the character’s purgatory; not because it is deep and immersive, it’s just that bad.
The ‘plot’ consists of this- a number of hookers are killed by a necrophiliac serial killer and their bodies are dumped in and under his house. The spirits of these prostitutes awaken and slog through heaps of human guts, experiencing a series of bizarre events before hopefully passing on to the afterlife and off our screen. That means that 90% of this movie is just women wandering through a house that is chock full of body parts and dead pigs and shit. Most of these women look mildly perturbed, as if they didn’t just wake up next to their own fucked, sliced-open, used-up bodies in a veritable house of horrors.
We don’t feel anything for these women. How can we? We don’t know anything about them; except for a few hints scattered throughout to their past lives. As a result, the film elicits no emotional reaction whatsoever. And if you think this movie is packed with deep meaning, you’re kidding yourself. It’s simply 79 minutes of half-naked women slogging through heaps of man meat and wandering through a house pointlessly. ‘Pointlessly’ is the operative word here. Thank God Flowers is short, otherwise just sitting through the awfulness of it would be likely to drive you to homicide. Although the creepy atmosphere the filmmaker creates is mildly intriguing, the total lack anything else positive makes it quite a miserable experience.
As for the ‘actresses,’ they vary. Some are better than others. But they don’t illicit any sympathy, due to the director’s disinterest in developing them or letting them exhibit any human traits. Flowers is completely style over substance, but without character development, acting, dialogue, and plot, what do we have left? It doesn’t help that the ending is as annoyingly vague and pointless as the rest of the movie. Why would anyone enjoy watching this pretentious, disgusting, unredeeming movie? Moreover, whose dicks did the director have to suck to garner the positive reviews he did?
Originality is good, but a movie shouldn’t be a chore to sit through, especially not one that’s under 80 minutes. This might seem like an interesting movie to watch if you like experimental stuff, but I can assure you that it is a total waste of time and money. You’d be better off watching cat videos on youtube, or looking up memes. Not to mention doing those things would probably be more enlightening than watching scantily clad whores crawl through slushy body parts and insert strange things into their bodies. Even the most die-hard weird movie buff would be better off avoiding this like the plague.
The Cinematic Emporium 