Manga Video | Buy at Amazon | Review by Sinferno
I for one loved the Punk rock movement, and to this day Billy Idol is my favorite male vocalist, that's why when the powers that be gave me the chance to select a Punk rock musical from the list offenders I jumped at it, expecting some good Old-school "Skank-or-Die" action. Little did what I know what I was in for, or I might have chosen something else. POPULATION: 1 wasn't what I usually call a bad film. But it is not the kind of thing that you can explain with a review; logical coherent typewritten characters forming a common language strung together to convey sentences of meaning. To put it simply, you wouldn't have to be on acid, struck in the base of the skull with a ball peen hammer and actually mentally, clinically insane to be able to "get" this movie, but it would sure help. But because I can't reach the reader through the screen to throttle him, depriving his brain of oxygen, allowing him to actually appreciate this movie in the manner it was meant to be enjoyed, forgive me if none of this makes any sense, which aside from being a stylistic approach is perhaps the most relevant review approach I could give about this film and still have it say something, anything.
POPULATION: 1 tells the story of the last man on earth, a man who looks and acts like the offspring of Johnny Rotten from the Sex pistols and Fred Schneider from the B-52's. I know what you are thinking. "But those are men, how could they bear a child?" Like many of life's great mysteries this too can all make sense for about $25.00.
Anyway this sole survivor is Tomata Du Plenty, the lead singer of the punk band the Screamers, who lives in a bunker and watches various historical footage and on TV and then comments on the evolution of society over the ears, joining the historical events themselves through beatnik turned punk rock style ramblings, some dance numbers clad in period era costumes and lots and lots of detailed, ongoing postulations by Plenty for the duration of this film about nothing at all. To say it is Punk Pock, is perhaps one interpretation, but the dialogue and music in this film fuse together to become one long conversation, a soliloquy actually, because Tomata is the last man on earth, after all. In reality, I though the slow beat and socially relevant babble about the plight of our times was more similar to eighties rap music than anything in the punk rock sub-genre, but fans of both styles of music would most likely hang me from the highest tree for such blasphemy linking them. The best way to describe it is to say that it reminds one immediately the format of Mystery Science Theater where a guy who is trapped in a (claustrophobic limited budget set) place of isolation explores different places through footage and then interacts with it directly using camera tricks, costumes, jokes, original music and crudely manipulated puppets. Only of course in the case of MST it was actually fun for all ages, where in this piece of antisocial art pop detritus, it simply, shall we say, hurts the head.
This movie came out shortly before MTV became a culture, lifestyle, marketing force, and as such the idea of cinematic accompaniment to a band's music even in a largely conceptual, symbolic (nonsense) videos is years ahead of it's time, but the reality is, those years are roughly around 1.5 as POPULATION: 1 was completed around 1985 where music videos from big budgeted mainstream bands had already started to break, and this cinematic patchwork quilt of punk rock seem dated the day of its debut. Seriously even I have a hard time stomaching the special effects in old Billy Idol videos from 1984, and I was following him through his days with Gen X. A modern viewer with no love of this era or its music will remark constantly that they have seen better production values hundreds of times before, "on you tube". And honestly, I don't know what the whole concept of Population 1 was, (Why should I know something the director didn't either?)
But by the time you are telling a late 80's cautionary tale of impending doomsday technical phobia in the style of a dead genre of music no less, the mere fact you are able to watch it twenty years later on digital technology kind of renders the whole damned thing kind of an unintentional comedy. And as much as I little as I remember about Punk, Subtle, dry, thought provoking humor was not one of it's strong suits.
There is another disk in the set which has information about the screamers, a tribute to Tomata Du Plenty and all sorts of things which defy description yet warrant none. The liner notes are full of pages of material which basically testify to the difficulty of this being released at all dropping the usual hype that this was a film so controversial, so quality laden that it "Couldn't be made/Wouldn't be made". Still no one asked me in 1985 and even at age 15, I could have told them it probably "Shouldn't have been made". Even I had moved on to more modern tastes by then, hair bands such as Motley Crue.
| Yucko/Neato Factor: Horrific by what it failed to do, not by what it did. Unintentionally relevant by it's inflammatory all knowing prose when viewed by a modern day audience many years later, like Reefer Madness. As anything else from the punk movement, the establishment will hate it, but so will most people who want to see art that they somehow understand or appreciate. An extra finger for being true to itself and the very spirit of punk. |
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| Production Values: Strings lifting objects went out with Star Trek reruns of the late sixties and even they stopped that eventually. The worst film you will ever see that was ever shot in a single room (Tomata's apartment) The best? The cube. |
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| Realism: This film was so unrealistic that when it somehow showed footage of well-known, real-life, historical events I started to doubt whether they ever occurred. |
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| Value for Price: $24.95? For one disk of content and one of filler? I think someone in the marketing department at Cult Epics is reading the corrections officer dictionary definition of the word "punk" instead of the cultural one and by that I mean "an unwilling participant in forcible rear pocket rape". |
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| Plot: Suffers from the following four horsemen of bad planning. Numerous directors/script changes. Loss of studio financial backing. Changing cultural and popular tastes. And a musical odyssey that was better told in a three minute movie trailer (or rock video) to begin with. |
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