Review of Severed

Severed (2002 Video)
Required viewing
17 September 2003
If you wish to produce your own feature, please pause a moment to take in the intoxicating brilliance of 'Severed'. I am glad I own a copy of this DVD for my own personal collection, so I may review it at my leisure when I feel particularly low in my fine-culture fuel tank.

As a film about Coup de Etat attempts in Eastern Europe, I find 'Severed' to be both insightful and magically realistic. Certainly it's producers have in depth knowledge of behind-the-scenes political machinations and bring them to bear metaphorically in the form of a deranged mass decapitator loose in society. It is refreshing to see such high-brow culturally hedgmonic ideas come to bear in low-budget fare. As a result I carry my copy of 'Severed' with me while lecturing in the former Eastern Bloc "Schools Du Cinema" and have shown excerpts on my Austrian talk show "Cinemachten es Machinen du Changen Regimen!!!"

The picture bears witness to the director's mistrust of the instability often caused by the political vaccum left following a Coup. As an uber-marxist multicultural talisman of the zeitgeist present in collective schemas, 'Severed' performs admirably supplanting the role of neo-camp metadata with a post-modern serial killer/police procedural Brechtian signpost with Plathian undertones. Of course, none of this is particularly profound as it should be obvious to the most casual of viewers.

To be fair, the film has it's downpoints. The acting is a notch below that of your low-budget local cable commercial, and to say the film is directed as unevenly as a 3-legged table is insulting to 3-legged tables everywhere. However you can not completely fault a film as nakedly ambitious and political as this.

As such, I highly recommend 'Severed' between sips of triple-chai-mocha-goat's milk-latte and as a break from a steady diet of Nietzche.

Severed from my copy of 'Severed'? Ye Gods, don't let this come to pass!!
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