A diluvian and albeit hectic comedy hits its stride well save for the last part where it strays and runs out of gas.
Hectic Knife, a seemingly.. oh hell there's no seemingly to it.. a very weird vigilante who slices and dices, and juliennes too, bad guys, and others, meets his match in an evil doctor (I know this because he says he's an evil doctor) named Piggly Doctor, and is truly a ham. This brings about a crisis of confidence in Hectic as he searches for himself, and if he would take a moment to search for the plot of this film too it would be truly appreciated.A movie almost fully in black & white save for color in a scene or two, Hectic Knife answers the question "what if David Lynch and Robert Crumb had a love child that was then raised by Andy Warhol". Of course it is a question nobody asked, and I don't even know if anybody wanted an answer to it, but here we have it.
From the very start Hectic Knife proceeds to break every rule of good cinema with bad acting, over-acting, recognizing the camera, recognizing the script, and lots of the overly obvious and overly oblivious. In near the first hour of the film it succeeds in being quite funny with many laugh out loud moments; especially with things that should not be funny but garner a laugh anyway, if for no other reason than its pure silliness.
Hectic Knife is a mix of surrealist and nonsense cinema; and whether or not there is a script in the mix is beyond me. It feels many times like a throwback to early Troma, except this moves at a better pace and is funnier, up to a point.
About two-thirds into the movie it loses its energy and what was a funny albeit super-silly ride runs out of gas and has to walk the rest of the way, and the bagel scene alone has it on its hands and knees. At least the film has the self-awareness to make fun of itself in pointing out how bad it is at this point. But that's not enough to bring it back to life as what remains is mostly padding the time.
If Hectic Knife had maintained its level of energy it would have been at a 3 Plus rating from me. That's where I was for a good bit of the film. Overall it has more entertainment than not. I can imagine this would be even better to watch with friends, and especially for those who like their movies on the silly side and their humor on the WTF! side.
My Rating: 3 Fingers; that's a 6/10 for IMDbers. I struggled with this as the first two-thirds is better than 3 Fingers and the last is by far not, so I went midway between what I would have rated each part, 3 Plus and 2 respectively, and rounded up. Obviously movie reviewing on my part is not an exact science.
*I will add screencaps to this review later.
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