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Sex, Lögner och Videovald
Sex, Lies and Videoviolence
Sweden 2000
produced by Mike Beck, Anders Ek, Johan Holm, Richard Holm, Henrik Wadling, for Tech Noir Film
directed by Richard Holm
starring Mike Beck, Johan Holm, Camilla Henemark, Magnus Uggla, Zara Zetterqvist, Kaj Steveman, Anders Ek, Joachim Lindman, Micke Dubois, Anders Tegner, Tony Johansson, Jan Larsson, Christina Lindberg, Mel Brooks, Jörgen Holmstedt, Brandon Lee, Elinor Persson, Johanna Westman, Staffan Nordén, Ylva Maria Thompson, Melina Wikman, Anderz Petersson, Sven-Erik Olsson
written by Richard Holm, Henrik Wadling, music by Christer Planborg, visual effects by Per Sjöberg, Johannes Runeborg, Adam Horvath, Anders Franzén, special makeup effects by Kaj Steveman, Joakim Lindman, Göran Lundström, alien monster effects by Jan Larsson, fight choreography by Mike Beck
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Micke (Mike Beck) is a man in love with violent movies, and he loves to
watch action movies from the 1970's and 80's back-to-back as his form of
weekend entertainment. Then one day though, while wtching Die Hard,
one of the German terrorists, Franz (Johan Holm), jumps out of the TV, and
now wants to kill Micke - and who knows how Micke gets away. Then Micke's
sister (Zara Zetterqvist) shows up to give stomach-bursting birth to an
alien before his very eyes. Now Micke knows all of this is just a
hallucination, he has been through all of this before and has recieved
treatment - but how come then the next day he reads in the newspaper that
his hallucination, the German terrorist, has shot someone? Micke knows
noone will believe him, so he buys a gun on the street (which eventually
turns out to be a toygun) and goes terrorist hunting - to disastrous
results, because soon enough, he gets his girlfriend (Camilla Henemark)
killed and suddenly finds himself on the run from the droogs from A
Clockwork Orange - when he happens to come across the spirit of Arnold
Schwarzenegger, who provides him with weapons and a Terminator-like
outfit, and this way, Micke turns the tables on the droogs - but somehow
Franz, who has temporarily been one of the droogs, gets away. Micke
manages to track Franz down to a movie theatre, where Franz turns into
RoboCop (Tony Johansson), and now the two battle it out to the fullest,
until Terminator Micke destroys RoboCop - but Franz emerges from RoboCop's
shell unfazed, and it's only now that Micke realizes to end all of this he
has to get Franz back into the TV - forcefully ... which is when the
scenery changes, and we find Micke in the loonie bin, destroying the TV -
turns out everything was just an elaborate daydream of his ... but why
then is Franz still around? You might have guessed it from my
synopsis: Sex, Lögner och Videovald is a loving hommage to as well
as over-the-top parody of action cinema from the 1970's and 80's, anmely
films like Die Hard, Terminator, RoboCop, Alien,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, A Clockwork Orange, Thriller
- En Grym Film (with Christina Lindberg in a cameo repeating her
role from that movie) as well as any number of Chuck Norris-, Jean-Claude
Van Damme- and John Woo-movies. What makes this film somewhat special is
that it never shies away from identifying its sources on one hand, while
never reducing movie-quotes to mere dress-up routines - no, while watching
Sex, Lögner och Videovald one gets the feeling that the people
behind the film intimately understood their source material and
consciously wanted to improve upon it, take all these elements from other
films to make a movie that can very much hold its own on both a narrative
and a directorial level. All that said though, Sex, Lögner och
Videovald certainly is no masterpiece, some of its humour is way too
blunt or misses its target altogether, but it should be the perfect sort
of entertainment to watch with a couple of mates and a couple of beers.
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