In 1969, Jim Henson locked a man in a box and let him die. Don’t worry, it was just for a movie. A movie that now gathers dust in the LAPD’s evidence room inside a locked crate marked “Too horrifying to watch”. How does it gather dust inside a locked crate? Good question.

Let’s talk about The Cube, a Henson-directed telefilm from the same year.

A man is trapped in a white room. He doesn’t know how he got there, and can’t leave. People enter the room through mysterious doors (which only they can see and use), and do things to the man that might be pranks, might be torture, or might be attempts to enlighten him. They rave, threaten, lie, confabulate, explain, offer hallucinatory narratives about what’s happening, then leave. The man is still in the cube.

Henson made films about puppets. The Cube depicts a man (played by Richard Schaal) who’s metaphysically a puppet: he lacks free will, and is at the mercy of his unreliable senses. That’s the simplest reading of The Cube: we are locked inside our own minds: trapped in a skull-box, grasping at threads and slivers of light and sound spilling through pinholes and cracks and fissures, seeking meaning in the pale, languid eidolons, trying to infer the world buzzing outside the cube—a world we can never actually visit, because it would mean stepping outside the boundaries of our own awareness. We are prisoners of the sensorium. And it’s lying to us.

The 60s were a decade made for such questions. Marijuana. LSD. MKULTRA. Postmodernism. The edges of reality and perception were being tested and rewritten and overturned. Science accelerated cultural derealization: we could actually examine an eyeball, and see all the kludges and hacks holding our vision together: see the bloody lattice of veins and arteries spread across the retina, see the optical nerve which interrupts our vision (a blind spot that the brain edits out with a patchwork of surrounding data), see how the sensory sausage is made.

In 1967—one year after Henson and Muppets co-writer Jerry Juhl wrote The Cube‘s screenplay—Doreen Kimura conducted her famous dichronic experiments, revealing the mangled patchwork of the human auditory system. Simply put, aural pathways from our ears to our brain “cross over” inside our heads—what the left ear hears goes to the right side of the brain, and vice versa. But the left hemisphere is dominant for language tasks: so when human speech (for example) enters the left ear, the signal must make an additional trip from the right side to the left via the corpus callosum for processing, adding a few-millisecond delay to the sound. To compensate for this, the brain does the same thing a laggy online videogame does: by artificially delaying the signal from the right ear, so that both left and right stereo signals match. Essentially, your ears hear things happening later than they actually did. The brain coheres all this into a singular experience, a singular sound, but it’s an illusion.

The Cube could be viewed as a metaphor about scientific derealization. It also has religious readings. A Christian Scientist turned hippie, Henson likely had at least a remedial understanding of Buddhism, and The Cube kind of works as a dramatization of three “marks of existence”: Impermanence, suffering, and selflessness.

Anicca: all is impermanent. Reality inside the cube is unsettled and ill-defined. A mud that swirls into new shapes every time The Man tries to touch it Objects and people suddenly appear that weren’t there before. The words of his visitors are no more reliable: often they’re palpable lies, or contradictions. He meets a prisoner called Watson, who claims to have spent a very long time in another cube—how long, he cannot say, because when he tried to mark the passage of days on his thumbnail, they tore it out. (This itself is rugpulled: the man is later described as an actor, playing a role…which is true, of course. None of these events are happening. The Cube is a 1969 TV movie directed by Jim Henson.) There’s a layer of metafiction, as the man sees himself on a TV screen, and must process the implications.

Dukkha: all is suffering. The Man is sent reeling through psychological states. Hope, horror, amusement, confusion, sexual desire, anger. All are useless in the cube. His actions aren’t totally meaningless—people react to him, such as two clowns (the first is apparently a parody of Eddie Cantor) who become savagely angry when The Man fails to laugh at them—but he can’t escape the cube. He’s like a ball in a pinball arcade cabinet: it whips around at dizzying speed, racking up points on bumper after bumper, but will fundamentally never escape the cabinet. The cube is a hell twisted into the shape of a Kline bottle. There’s nowhere to escape, except straight back into it.

Anattā: lack of self. The Man (for he is indeed all men), is the most Hensonian of objects: a puppet. Kermit might have form and shape, but he is hollow cloth with sawed-in-half eyes. His behaviors are supplied by the ghostly demonic hand twisting inside him. Likewise, the Man has no name, and no memories. The torments he is subjected to are nonsense…but in a sense, they’re all that’s real in The Cube. A coquettish seductress walks into the cube, seems to be trying to seduce him…and then reveals it was all an act. This is cruel…but was it really fake? The lust the man felt was real. So is the anger he feels after the prank is revealed. In a sense, she has provided him with what he lacks: an identity as a lustful, angry man. Without the external world torturing him, he would just be nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

Maybe The Cube is simply a freeform Rorschach blot onto which the audience imprints their own meaning. It certainly has a hippie-esque “it’s so deep, man” vibe. And what’s the hippie term for a prisoner of the system? A square. And what’s a cube made of…?

The problem with a film about meaninglessness is that it can quickly shade into the film itself lacking meaning. The Cube does not quite reach that point, but if it had gone on longer than 60 minutes, it probably would have. The Cube is strange, challenging, but perhaps ultimately a bit shallow. Eventually, you get the idea. It’s all a weird, dark game that he’s better off not playing. Instead, even at the end he’s still basically falling for the idea that there’s some “deep reality” that he can reach beyond these shifting stands. Most of the film consists of arbitrary events, that could probably be rearranged in nearly any order with no loss of meaning.

Many of the tricks played on The Man are also tricks on the viewer. A strange monklike figure gives him a mystic artifact called a Ramadar, which might be key to his salvation. But all the Ramadar seems to do is make an annoying buzzing sound, and he smashes it in frustration. Is this a metaphor for the impossibility of enlightenment, or just another red herring? You decide.

The mind is a dark place where all of us live, yet none of us live. And certainly, it is not a place we can escape. My dad had a running joke (likely stolen from some comedian), that old TVs had dust traps down the bottom, and after you watched an old western, you had to empty out all the dead Indians from the bottom of your TV, before they started to smell. They were probably happy to go. They escaped the cube.

Brave the Carpathian wilds of Hungarian animated cinema, and sooner or later you’ll encounter a film called Cat City. Thanks to a fantastic reissue by Deaf Crocodile, there’s no reason it can’t be “sooner”.

Directed by Béla Ternovszky and released in 1986 as Macskafogó (“Cat Catcher”), it’s different to the other Pannónia Film Stúdió movies gaining popularity in the west. Marcell Jankovics’ Fehérlófia was a rapturous hewn-from-the-flesh-of-gods primordial Urheimat myth; György Kovásznai’s Habfürdö was a radical Warhol-meets-Schiele-meets-Soviet-Central-planning romcom. Cat City finds a different way to surprise: by being familiar.

The movie tips its hand early, when a Star Wars text-crawl tells us “In 80 AMM (After Mickey Mouse) the mice of Planet X were threatened by…” What follows is a broad spoof of James Bond and Dirty Harry, where retired “Intermouse” agent Nick Grabovski must recover plans for a device that will save mousekind from a race of evil felines.

Cat City is essentially a western chase cartoon jacked up on espionage steroids—The Mouse With A Golden Gun. Octopussycat. Tom and Jerry Never Dies—with its spy movie hijinks subtly twisted by the fact that they’re about animals. Nick doesn’t have “Bond gadgets”. He uses rodently attributes to get out of trouble (he gnaws through things with his teeth, and picks locks with his tail). The main cat villain has a prosthetic metal hand, like Dr No. The other main villain (?!) is Ernst Blofeld’s white cat. It’s not subtle.

James Bond is conceptually inseparable from Cold War paranoia, so Cat City feels provocative simply by existing. Eastern European baddies with fake accents are the villains in something like every Bond film ever made. Was there public demand for a “we have Sean Connery at home” Magyar imitation? Apparently so. The film was very successful.

But I’m curious as to how familiar, exactly, the average Hungarian would have been with the things Cat City parodies. Here’s a contemporary review (in Hungarian, but Google translates it readably) by Filmvilág‘s Gabriella Székely, who comments that much of the film is cribbed from media that nobody in Hungary can watch. On the other hand, Budapest had at least one cinema in the 1980s that played western movies. On Quora, Viktor T Toth reminisces…

A friend of mine and I saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail here. We were not familiar with Monty Python at the time, so we were completely unprepared. To this day, I don’t know how I managed to avoid wetting myself, I was laughing so uncontrollably at times. Other movies of the era that I remember include Alien (very popular in Hungary, despite the awkward title, apparently borrowed from the French, which literally translates back as “The Eighth Passenger is Death”)…

Hungary, under János Kádár, was the Eastern Bloc’s most liberal state, and an unofficial state attitude of “gulyáskommunizmus” (“goulash communism”) extended a certain permissiveness to the arts. In 1968, deputy Prime Minister György Aczél issued a statement “accepting any […] artistic expression of genuine value, even if it was produced by Western bourgeois culture.” Cases of censorship still occurred, but there were certainly tougher places in the Soviet Union to watch (and make) a James Bond parody.

It wasn’t always this way. The lot where Pannonia Films once existed is fifteen minutes away from the House of Terror, a museum dedicated to the victims of the Államvédelmi Hatóság, Hungary’s secret police. Many of the killed and tortured were actors, writers, and filmmakers. Hungary’s animation industry was nationalized around 1950 as Magyar Szinkronfilmgyártó Vállalat (the proto-Pannónia). Most of its early output tended to be didactic, safe, and moralistic fare aimed at children, but by the 60s and 70s, a spirit of restless experimentation was emerging, all but encouraged by the state.

Hungary occupies a geographically ambiguous part of Europe—Central Europe by some maps, Eastern Europe by others—and under Kádár it had politics to match, with loyalties cleft between the decrepit Soviet giant to the east and the rising sources of capital in the west. When the USSR collapsed, Hungary was the first domino to fall. The Berlin Wall symbolically marked the end of the Iron Curtain, but the beginning arguably came in April 1989, when Hungary dismantled its border fence to Austria.

Was 1980s Hungary a Goldilocks zone for the arts? Isolated enough to have a national style; yet open enough that foreign ideas like James Bond could trickle through? Rich enough to support a film industry; yet poor enough that it avoided the fate of 1980s Hollywood—economically minmaxed by capital into a depressing prolefeed machine? Oppressive enough to stimulate art; yet free enough that this art was allowed a voice? The idea is striking, but likely reductive.

Likewise, it’s tempting to read (and probably misread) broad Cold War concerns into Cat City. Are the cats meant to symbolize anything in particular? At times they behave like a crime syndicate, robbing mice of their possessions. At other times they’re a KGB-esque spy network, surveilling the mice. Yet they’re also a hostile state power, seeking the genocide of the mouse race. They’re like a vague (and sometimes contradictory) conglomerate of Nazis, Soviets, and mafia. Any political allusions are likely nebulous, and buried beneath ersatz James Bond and goofy jokes. The villainous Mr Teufel’s first name is a Germanic “Fritz”: you can that as a political statement, but a more likely reference is Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat.

That said, there is a striking shot where Mr Teufel is wiping his brow with a handerchief, he throws it over his head, and it lands over one eye, looking like Hitler’s combover.

This is an “adult animation”, but only in the sense that Paul McCartney “rocks hard”. There’s some light PG-rated sexual references. Characters have names like Pissy, Pukie, and Lusta Dick. A few gags have a mordant, subversive edge. The basic scenarios—such as a bank robbery, a heist on a supertanker, and an all-out urban battle—are adapted from adult movies (or at least movies watched by adults) like Dirty Harry, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Death Wish 3 (maybe not the 3rd, which came out pretty close to Cat City’s release.) Otherwise, the movie is pretty kid-friendly. Hungarian animated films tended to muddy the lines between adult and children’s cinema—Feherlofia blended dick jokes with fairytale storytelling—and this is of a piece with that. Children can surely relate to the plight of these small creatures as they try to avoid being eaten by vampire bats. That is the world they live in.

At the center of the movie are “The Four Gangsters”: a quartet of rats who are good at self-promotion but little else. Teufel hires them to kill Grabowsky, a task they fail dismally (and hilariously) at. They get a huge amount of character development, but even though ultimately could be cut with no impact on the plot, they improve leaven the mix with some Keystone Kops-esque absurdity. The Four Gangsters feel like a reference to something that a Hungarian audience would be more familiar with than I am.

As far as comedy goes…well, James Bond has been pretty much spoofed to death for me. Having the villain say “Welcome…Mr Grabowsky” doesn’t even register as a parody. It’s like doing a fake Arnold Schwarzenegger voice—you make that kind of joke when you’re a person who doesn’t really watch many movies.

The trouble with satire is that you now have two ways of failing. Either the thing you’re spoofing will become old and forgotten (leaving the movie shadowboxing at nothing), or the parody will itself fail. In some ways, western audiences are as culturally distinct from Connery-era Bond as we are from gulyáskommunizmus-era Budapest. And while the classic James Bond movies are influential and cast a long shadow, Bond seldom crosses my radar at all, except for random culture war stuff about how to reconstruct him so he’s Relevant(tm) for Today’s Audience(tm) (you know what I mean—arguments about whether Bond should be a black woman who believes #ConsentIsSexy and so on.) The character increasingly seems cut off from the now: more like a work of cultural taxidermy than a living, breathing property.

I’m reminded of Elvis’s 1968 hit “A Little Less Conversation”, which was remixed by Junkie XL in 2003, and then hit number one in nine countries. Some took it as a sign of The King’s enduring cultural legacy. Yet Elvis was so buried in the mix, so out-of-place in the modern production and big-beat trappings, that it had the opposite effect for me. He felt irrelevant. It was as if we, as a civilization, were saying “yes, Elvis is important. But let’s be real, nobody actually wants to hear him, unless we dress him up in modern drag.”

I’ve wandered a bit from the point, but the question of how much you enjoy Cat City’s largely rests on how much you enjoy other, fairly old movies. In 2024, I’m now convinced that the Bond parody stuff is the least interesting side of Cat City. It’s far less sharp than even something like Austin Powers, and its barbs are further blunted by time and culture. Mostly, I’m surprised by how distant James Bond himself feels. Too far to even take potshots at anymore. If you’d asked a person in 1970 whether James Bond would last longer in culture than Sherlock Holmes, I don’t think many moviegoers would have put money on Doyle’s detective.

Cat City definitely nails the racial and gender politics of a classic Bond film. The vampire bats are cartoonish Mexican stereotypes who wear sombreros and play mariachi music. There’s a Japanese cat who attempts to trap Grabowski while the “Chinaman riff” plays. There’s a sexy mouse geisha, who is effortlessly seduced by Grabowski at the end, despite having no chemistry established. It’s all played for fun; a slightly naff recreation of Hollywood stereotypes.

So what do I think of Cat City?

Well, it has a lot of charm. It’s also a bit baggy, feeling every minute of its 1:33:00 runtime. A number of gags just don’t work because they’re dragged out, and lack rhythm and timing. The scenes of Teufel terrorizing and maiming his put-upon assistant, Mr Safranek, should have been funny, but they just go on and on, and become uncomfortable.

The story also needed a haircut. It has numerous plot digressions that don’t really go anywhere and are dropped by the end—Safranek’s daughter has a pet mouse, and their relationship is played up for its taboo potential, but this ultimately gets forgotten about. Animated films are normally very “tight”—one of the blessings of a 3-year production cycle is that it gives you ample time to work out what film you’re actually making—so it’s odd to see one second guess itself and go down blind paths.

The adventures are suitably Bond-esque, with setpieces involving mountain roads, submarines, high-tech cars, etc. Grabowsky is so competent and capable (and his opponents so moronic) that he never feels in much danger. Incredibly, the Four Gangsters rank among his tougher adversaries!

The animation is good, but static. Shots are locked-down and stiff. Characters exist on flat planes of action, like comic book panels. There’s little of the camera movement or layered multiplane action of a Disney movie.

But its flaws make it interesting, in a rough-hewn, shaggy way. It’s reactive, in a sense, and can’t be watched on its own like Feherlofia can. There’s a still a lot of creative juice inside it. I kept pausing to admire certain shots, such as how Mr Teufel’s smoke floats across the room and weaves a noose around his put-upon subordinate Safranek’s head. It certainly has the Pannonia energy. It’s not altogether successful, but it is memorable: a weird island of convention inside the bubbling goulash of Magyar animation.

Have you ever read a fanfic where author clearly 1) likes the characters and 2) hates literally everything else about the world and setting and tone? Star Trek, but it’s a dystopia and everyone’s angsty and gay? Harry Potter, but there’s no magic and everyone has up-to-date political views?*

The Devil’s Rejects was and is Rob Zombie doing revisionist fanfic of his own work. It preserves the characters of 2003’s House of 1,000 Corpses but otherwise reinvents their entire world, tabula rasa. The first movie was trippy and phantasmagoric, more inspired by Rocky Horror Picture Show than, say, Tobe Hooper (also “influenced” by the budget running out by the end, as Rob admits). This one’s a different beast: as visceral and ugly as pyloric stenosis surgery performed on a taxidermized fetus stuffed with wriggling hairless baby mice. It’s a raw, bracing film, and you want to take a hot shower after it’s done. You feel its foulness baked into your skin.

I watched it 18 years ago through a cloud of resentment: Rob Zombie was my favorite musician at the time, and his filmmaking gig took him away from that. When he returned to music, I no longer liked him as much. You have to move on. Unconditional love does not exist. However, he still is family.

The Devil’s Rejects‘s small, bloody plot begins on a small bloody plot: the local sheriff raids a farmstead where 75 homicides and disappearances have taken place. After a rousing shootout, the surviving members of the (Manson-inspired) Firefly family go on the run, while the sheriff chases them, becoming increasingly unhinged in his own methods.

If you want gore, this has it. It also has a fun, lively script, peppered with one-liners. “Boy, the next word that comes out of your mouth better be some brilliant fuckin’ Mark Twain shit, ’cause it’s definitely gettin’ chiseled on your tombstone.”

Rob’s a “Quentin Tarantino” filmmaker. He doesn’t make movies about reality. He makes movies about movies. In this case, it’s Sam Peckinpah, blaxploitation, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and sundry other things, filmed through the distorted Monstervision lens of Rob’s imagination. Everything has a bleary carnival vibe where it’s trying to conjure or evoke or remind you of something you saw before, but in a cracked, broken-down form. This movie recognizes that carnivals are never more compelling than when they’re old, rusty, and breaking down. When the paint chips, and the muzak distorts, and the rides might suddenly kill you. There’s a real dry, arid air of death and dying about this film. You’re seeing American culture being tanned out to leather under the blazing sun.

But it’s incredibly referential. I often wonder if there’s much to the movie, once you wash away the dried blood of its influences. The “Freebird” shot at the end is all about redeeming the idea that “Freebird” can be a serious song, which, of course, relies on the audience knowing that it’s a stand up comedy punchline.

Then comes a scene mid-movie a woman (Kate Norby, I believe) runs out onto a highway wearing her husband’s face as a mask (long story). She seemingly cannot hear approaching cars and trucks until they literally are in frame. I believe that this is a reference to Sergio Leone’s patented “things outside the frame don’t ontologically exist” approach…fuck it, here’s Ebert.

A vast empty Western landscape. The camera pans across it. Then the shot slides onto a sunburned, desperate face. The long shot has become a closeup without a cut, revealing that the landscape was not empty but occupied by a desperado very close to us. In these opening frames, Sergio Leone established a rule that he follows throughout “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” The rule is that the ability to see is limited by the sides of the frame. At important moments in the film, what the camera cannot see, the characters cannot see, and that gives Leone the freedom to surprise us with entrances that cannot be explained by the practical geography of his shots.

Review of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

…but if you don’t know about that fourth-wall-bending technique, the character’s behavior just seems bizarre. Like she’s spontaneously become deaf. It’d be fun to try this movie out on a person who’s never seen a movie before. An Andaman Islander or something.

Sid Haig is despicably great. Rob Zombie’s wife punches the clock and does her usual job. Bill Moseley is suitably depraved and desperate. And speaking of dearly departed Rog, there’s a film critic character who seems like a merger of Ebert and Siskel—the movie gets a few mean laughs at his expense, then throws him out on his ass. Rob doesn’t like critics much.

As with House of 1,000 Corpses and his later films, it’s weird and confusing around the edges. One of those jigsaw puzzles where the sides aren’t straight lines, but fit still more puzzle pieces. Some of the actors don’t quite seem to get what movie they’re in. And there’s a lot of faffing around in the middle involving bounty hunters and carnie owners that feels like “unnecessary complications”. The film seems to have barely any story—it’s driven by vicious, limbic-system horror gore and comedic gags that sometimes work and other times don’t. (The scene involving the chicken-fucking appears to be an attempt at a “do you think I’m funny?” classic-movie scene, but it falters because there’s little at stake and the characters don’t matter.) Genuinely clever writing exists alongside the kind of dumb shit you normally get from Eli Roth. So there’s a lot of texture and unevenness to the film.

But there’s one unreservedly great scene. “Tutti fucking fruity”.

It’s a canonical example of how a scene can add literally nothing to the plot, yet carry the movie’s soul on its shoulders. The Fireflys stop to get ice cream. That’s the scene. They don’t murder the ice cream vendor, or do anything weird. They just get ice cream. This scene makes me extremely uncomfortable: why do these depraved serial killers suddenly seem sympathetic, relatable, and human, just because they stopped for ice cream?

Well, that’s the movie. These people aren’t space aliens or monsters: they’re people. A family. A neuroscientist would compare my brain with Otis B Driftwood’s and find them basically identical. The best of men and the worst of men are about 1% apart.

(*I don’t say that as criticism of fanfiction. As Lev Grossman said: “I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, but manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool.”)