Further note on the retro style of The Lure

An additional note on the extremely odd Polish film The Lure, probably (certainly) the only mermaid-zombie musical: Having watched a brief documentary on the making of the film, I'm glad to note that it is in fact a period piece, set in the mid 1980s, so the retro feeling of the film does not reflect contemporary styles and trends in Polish culture. The filmmakers started off with the goal of making a film about the mermaid myth, but updated with a horror/zombie touch and with the mermaids made to look grotesque rather than alluring; when they found that a well-known Warsaw nightclub, now defunct, was available as a location they built the look of the film around that club: very disco, with revolving lights and glitter all around, and then the musical score seemed to follow that style lead, with a not of #s in the style of 80s music videos as well as a few big staged traditional musical #s, for which the director credited the influence of Fosse. I'm not sure if the film rose to the level of fulfilling its vast ambitions or whether the filmmakers even recognize that many people will find the film comic, even ludicrous, but my guess is that they're open to all reactions: It's a copious film and one of a kind.

The best ever Polish zombie-mermaid musical film: The Lure

There can't be any other film like this one: a Polish musical about zombie mermaids. Sounds like a joke, right? And in some ways it is; The Lure (2015), by Agnieszka Smoczynska (I had to look that one up!) is so over the top and beyond the pale that you have to completely give yourself over to the world of this movie or not even bother to watch it. It's beyond criticism, in a sense, as it AS and her team deliberately break all the rules of credibility - combining into a surprisingly successful mashup of several movie genres. Though nobody would or should go to this movie for its plot, here, as best as I can understand it, is what happens: Two attractive young mermaids (Golden and Silver are their names; oddly, the blonde is "Silver") surface in present-day (I think) Warsaw (I assume) and get a job as part of a rock group (The Lure) performing in a sleazy nightclub. Silver falls in love w/ the guitarist, which is fine, except that she can't have sex because she has no human sexual  organs below her waist. She arranges for a "transplant," her lower half replaced by a standard female lower-half complete w/, as she says, "pussy," but there's another catch: If a mermaid has sex with a human male she much bite his throat out and gorge on his heart and other organs. This sometimes gruesome narrative is told via several musical #s, reminiscent a little of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, including a few #s performed in the nightclub and others in the street, such as romping with a vice officer through the streets and tunnels of the city. The nightclub, the music, and the city itself all look and sound as if they're about 1975, and I can't tell if that's meant to be the period setting, if that's the way contemporary Poland actually looks and sounds, or if that's just another weird facet of this mash-up. With better distribution, this film has the potential to be a midnight-screen cult classic, a la Rocky Horror, but failing that, though it's by no means a film for all viewers, it's worth a look if you're seeking something completely different and you're willing to suspect all disbelief.