Maldoror

Fearlessly disregarding cinema's hapless history of portmanteau films, this genuinely no-budget collaboration between members of Exploding Cinema and Filmgruppe Chaos - 'the no-torious no-bility of Underground Cinema' - takes a cleaver to the Comte de Lautréamont's 1868 pre-surrealist anti-novel Maldoror. Fifteen film-makers were dispatched into the night with but a chapter of the book (a vile, nightmarish poetic paean to the author's Satanic alter ego) and a Super-8 camera to their name; 12 have returned, and from the cauldron of their labours, delivered forth this wild and bewildering affront to common civilised cinema. Dissonant and depraved, it's a motley stew. The individual shorts are variously indigestible, inconsequential, inventive, evocative, comic, pornographic, illicit and ridiculous, linked only by an overload of narration from the book. Cumulatively, the effect's akin to both a good night at a film club, and a disorienting trip into the head of a stark raving misanthrope.