The wastelands, some time after the apocalypse: Wheelchair-bound mad
inventor Felix Crabtree (Michael Lake) and his sister Betty (Rhys Davis),
a mad religious fanatic, live on a farm, miles and miles away from
everyone else. One day, a stranger, Smith (Norman Boyd), who soon admits
he's on the run but never discloses from whom, stops by. Betty thinks
he's a demon and wants to throw him out immediately, but Felix seizes the
opportunity to make the healthy young man his assistant in inventing a
flying machine, designs of which he has only seen in old books. Smith
agrees, because
you know, even though he's on the run, he's bound to hit some
unclimbable mountains in a few days blocking his escape route, and a
flying machine would come in pretty handy. Soon enough, Felix and Smith
start their experiments, that at first are total failures since Felix
hasn't got the first idea about aerodynamics and the like, but eventually,
he's even able to build himself a wind canal with the little he has got,
and after much trial and error, Felix and Smith are able to come up with
an actual, pedal-driven flying machine ... and just in time, too, as
Smith's pursuers are slowly gaining on him. Actually, the flying machine
was built for three persons, because Felix wanted for him and Betty to
leave here as well, but on the day of the maiden flight, Betty can't be
talked into getting into the thing with the stranger, whom she still
thinks to be a demon, and ultimately, Felix figures he can't go without
his sister, and so in the end, Smith takes off alone (and successfully,
too), escaping those after him by mere hours ... Judging from
the synopsis alone, Spirits of the Air, Gremlin of the Clouds might
sound like some sugary-sweet human drama about some underdog beating the
odds, but the film is far from it. Stylistically closest to Sergio Leone's
Spaghetti-Westerns, the film is so full of absurd, bizarre, sometimes even
surreal elements it's as far from sugary-sweet human drama and Leone alike
as humanly possible, with Michael Lake as strong-willed eccentric and Rhys
Davis as religious lunatic (who can be seen in a different outfit - from
Marie Antoinette to Japanese geisha - in almost every scene) adding plenty
of colour to the proceedings. That said, the film is by no means
perfect, it does contain some lengths and tends to get a bit repetitive at
times, but it's weird entertainment nevertheless.
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