FILM REVIEWS:
HEAVIER TRIP (Finland/Germany/Norway/Lithuania 2024) **
Directed by Jukka Vidgren & Juuso Laatio
The film features a heavy metal band that calls itself Impaled Rectum. What does the name mean? (Don’t even go there.) Apparently HEAVIER TRIP is the sequel to their first 2018 film. Impaled Rectum is a Finnish band and the film plays like and suffers from the same problems as Aki’s Kaurimaki’s Finnish band films LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA and its sequel LENINGRAD COWBOYS MEET MOSES. It is one one joke movie, that outplays its welcome. While Kaurimaki’s LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA was really dead-pan funny and the concept worked the sequel turned out to be a bore. The Leningrad Cowboys are a talented band and can play anything including polka and it is entertaining listening to them while watching their hilarious antics. Unfortunately, HEAVIER TRIP’s heavy metal will have fewer followers. Their punk rock could be entertaining if one likes that sort of thing.
The first film HEAVY TRIP follows Turo who is stuck in a small village and the best thing in his life is being the lead vocalist for the amateur metal band Impaled Rektum. He and his bandmates have practiced for 12 years without playing a single gig. The guys get a surprise visitor from Norway -- the promoter for a huge heavy metal music festival -- and decide it's now or never. They steal a van, a corpse, and even a new drummer to make their dreams a reality. The original had more plot and as stronger narrative.
HEAVIER METAL opens with the band Impaled Rectum in a prison. The reason they got there is not really explained. Shackled by fate and locked up in a Norwegian prison, the band discovers their lead guitarist’s family's reindeer slaughterhouse faces a financial storm. The four members, Turo, Lotvonen, Xytraxm and Oula hatch a daring escape plan to help. Desperate for the money, and the chance to perform at the ultimate battleground for metal warriors, Impaled Rektum takes a journey through northern Europe to the legendary Wacken music festival. But hot on their trail is a vengeful prison guard, a female one who appears to love dressing in uniform and using torture tools, thirsting for revenge, and a sketchy record label executive, weaving lies that could shatter their dreams and worse, compromise the integrity of the band. Amidst the chaos, the band must forge a bond stronger than the darkest riffs - forging alliances with the most unexpected compatriots, including an epic cameo from the Japanese Kawaii-metal band, Baby Metal. Only the raw power of metal can determine their fate!
The film aims at being a relentless odyssey of sound, fury, and the unbreakable spirit of true heavy metal in this sequel to cult classic HEAVY TRIP. But the film is an acquired taste. To others, the film, which is no Aki Kaurimaki’s LEMINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA is a boring one-joke film that fails to impress or entertain, while managing just a few laughs.
HEAVIER TRIP opens in theatres and on VOD on November 29th, 2024.
Trailer:
REINAS (QUEENS) (Peru/Switzerland/Spain 2024) ***½
Directed by Klaudia Reynicke
The film opens with an announcement of the increase in the prices of essential items such as the baguette which would more than double its price the next day. The county faces runaway inflation. Directed by Klaudia Reynicke from a screenplay she co-wrote with Diego Vegas, REINAS is a coming-of-age story among other stories set during Peru’s tumultuous political times of the 1990s.
There are three stories in the script. The first is the coming-of-age story of the elder daughter. The second is the story of the absent father who is trying to make good with his daughters, who he calls queens and thirdly it is the story of the mother who wants a better life for herself and two daughters, regardless of what the daughter wants. She wants to move her daughters away from Peru for a better life. She needs the signature of the father for the travel documents but the elder daughter does not want to leave Peru and her friends.
The film is set during the reign of Alberto Kenya Fujimori Inomoto. A Peruvian politician, professor, and engineer he served as the 54th president of Peru from 1990 to 2000. His government was characterized by its use of propaganda, widespread political corruption, and human rights violations. There are lots of protests shown in the film, which explains the family in the film, a separated mother and her two daughters wishing to leave Peru for good. However, the daughters need a signature from their absent father for the travel visa in order to leave.
The two sisters are about to leave their country when they unexpectedly reconnect with an absent father. This relationship will both amplify and ease their pain of change. The father, Carlos wishes very much for his daughters, who he refers to as ‘reinas’ or queens, to love him. But Carlos is a loser, which explains the reason his wife left him. Carlos is poor, and drives a ramshackle car as a taxi and deals the occasional drugs, which in one scene is shown to be payment for a friend's fish dinner with his two daughters at the beach.
Complications ensue when the elder sister Aurora is late in her period indicating a pregnancy. She tells the younger one the secret. They take a sister's oath. “Better to die than to betray a Peruvian.”
Besides the trouble in Peru, director Klaudia Reynicke shows a fondness for her country. In one scene the girls (Aurora’s friends) discuss how boring it would be to leave Peru. The segment where Carlos brings his two daughters to the beach shows the beauty of the local countryside. A drive follows the segment in a car on the dunes, the largest here in Peru in South America. The dunes look grander than Europe’s largest dunes of Pilar, near Bordeaux in France.
REINAS is a culture rich film with three intermingled stories wonderfully told within the country’s political unrest.
REINAS is the Swiss entry for this year’s Academy Awards for Best International Feature. The film opens at the TIFF Lightbox on November 29th.
Trailer:
