Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway

Holy Three Stigmata!

Jesus Shows You
The Way To The Highway
Spain/Estonia/Ethiopia/
Latvia/Romania 2019
Directed by Miguel Llansó
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Yeah... I suppose this has spoilers all through it. In a way.

Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is the second feature film by Miguel Llansó, the director of the equally surreal Crumbs (reviewed by me here). Like that earlier feature, the bombardment of various seemingly conflicting or contradicting elements on the audience seems to be the order of the day but, also like that earlier film, once you start to glean and uncover parts of the underlying roadmap, a fairly linear or, at least, penetrable through line on the narrative starts to slowly emerge.

The film had me from the start when the opening title appears over time as an old 1982 ZX Spectrum loading screen, as it would have loaded up from a cassette. We are then flung into the world of the far future where Daniel Tadesse, the male lead of Crumbs, returns in this one as CIA agent D. T. Gagano, partnered with Agent Palmer (played here by Agustín Mateo). After an agent who has been connected to Psychobook, which is something which somehow controls the majority of the future world, has her eyes demolished by a Russian virus, it’s up to Agents Gagano and Palmer to enter Psychoville with their low tech VR headsets, in a series of missions where they can find and trace the source of the virus... which is being distributed as a slimy substance at one point.

Now Gagano just wants to resign from the CIA and stay with his oversexed girlfriend Malin (played by the sensational Gerda-Annette Allikas... this is, bafflingly, her only movie credit). However, when the two agents go in, entering an environment where their masked avatars (of Robert Redford and Richard Pryor) are filmed in a way that is reminiscent of stop motion animation, they come face to face and get into a fight with an Irish accented version of Stalin. On their second encounter, Gagano goes into a coma and is trapped in this alternate reality. A reality where Batman is a fascist president named Bat-Fro, who sends in his subordinate Mr. Sophisticated’s king fu warriors to bring him the Ark of the Covenant... which is actually the very first laptop to enter psychoville. Bat-fro is costumed exactly as Adam West in the old TV shows and, indeed, an old Batman Equal Pay PSA advert starring West, Burt Ward and Yvonne Craig from 1973 is shown playing on a TV set at one point.

And if this all seems fairly mad to you... there’s lots more pop culture references and all of the actors have been deliberately, badly dubbed in English language to mirror the kind of bootleg and international prints of various exploitation films from the 60s and 70s. With some insect men who shoot laser beams from their eyes thrown in for good measure, of course.

Let me just take an aside here to say that the Arrow video contains a relatively short visual essay on the influences of the film and I actually watched that extra (I rarely have time for the extras these days) because it sounded interesting. Alas, the person putting it together correctly identifies that the basic plot structure (or at least as it’s presented to the audience in the most obvious layer) hails from spy movies but he seems stuck on Eurospy films being the influence when, frankly, lots of spy movies have the kind of stylistic qualities inherent in the movie, expecially from the 1960s. And, frankly, citing Our Man Flint as a Eurospy film (it’s an American movie, people!) and, even more alarmingly, incorrectly identifying Bernard Lee as playing ‘Q’ in the Bond movies (he plays ‘M’ guys!), kind of kills the credibility of the piece. Yeah, we can all see he’s referencing Kung Fu movies but, probably not the ones you specifically cite and while I can see it would be worthwhile mentioning the luchador movies such as those made popular by Santo and Blue Demon, it seems to me they’ve kind of missed the point with the obvious homage to knock off superhero movies when you’re not talking about the Filipino and Turkish (among others) superhero movies of the 60s and 70s. So, yeah, was looking forward to the visual essay but I wasn’t impressed, especially when the narrator completely fails to mention the obvious, all pervading influence on the movie... Philip K. Dick.

Okay, so the terrific and chaotic visuals and story strands knitted together before your eyes should all start to come together when, at one point fairly early on in the movie, you find out the full name of Agent Palmer is Palmer Eldritch. As in the Philip K. Dick novel The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch. Indeed, at one point in the film the viral substance which seems to be opening paths to new realities has been synthesised by the Jesus character into candy, directly referencing one of the two drugs used to gateway into different realities in the novel, Can-D and Chew-Z (with the Z being pronounced in the American way to make sense of the second term). Furthermore, when Jesus first properly appears in the narrative, the story almost nods to the idea of Mercerism, central to Dick’s famous novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? And when you realise that the director is referencing Dick and his way of putting characters into alternate realities they had no knowledge of, such as in A Maze Of Death, Ubik and others of that ilk, then the on screen shenanigans of Agents Gagano and Palmer seem relatively easy to decode. Like you’ve just been handed a primer. At some point from then on you realise that all three layers of reality represented in the movie (as barriers between the two layers break down and create a third netherworld between the two) are all just one single alternative reality to an experiment going on at MIT. Except, there’s a little Easter egg towards the end of the picture, referencing the main viral villain, which suggests that even this final reality may well be a false reading.

Whatever the underlying reality, though, Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is a chaotic, maelstrom of surrealistic, alternative worlds with lots of fun and bizarre imagery, quite unlike any other film I’ve seen to date, including the director’s previous movie Crumbs, which is an entirely different brand of ‘What the heck?’ than is on show here. It’s one of those films I could easily revisit over and over again and certainly one I’ll be introducing to various film buddies at some point. Why this didn’t get a huge cinema campaign and a shot at the box office over here other than a single, one off screening at Glasgow Film Festival, is a complete mystery to me. People need to be exposed to more films like this, especially in a country where we have quite a diverse range of people living here who would be in more of a position to recognise and understand the visual influences and tropes on display here than some other international audiences, I suspect (and probably more so, for sure, than the expert commentator on the visual essay was able). Anyway, if you love film and want to see something you may well not have seen before then, Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is the one to watch. But watch out for those 8-bit music saturated end credits... if you have any leanings toward epilepsy then you might want to give those end titles a miss.

Crumbs

Trail At The
End Of The World

Crumbs
Spain/Ethiopia/Finland 2015
Directed by Miguel Llansó
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B
Second disc in Arrow’s Blu Ray set
of Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway

Warning: Very mild spoilers, of a sort, kind of...

Well this is a strange movie, I’m glad to say. I realised that Crumbs, the first feature by Miguel Llansó, was included on the second disc in Arrow’s presentation of Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway (the same director’s second movie). Being as I suspect that any reissue they do of this one will probably not include the Crumbs disc, I decided to watch the trailers for both movies to see if they were my kind of thing. Those two trailers were ticking all the right boxes and so I bought this limited edition version of the release while I still could. So glad I did.

The film starts off with the information that we are in a post-apocalyptic, future version of our world. A devastating war has left the remaining humans interested in surviving only for any kind of future generations. The population has dwindled to almost nothing and a few people are scattered in this landscape, trying to just enjoy their days and maybe find some meaning.

Not that meaning is in any way forthcoming in this surrealist melange of broken people and the lionisation of ancient artefacts. The back story, which is in itself a quote from something else, seems to be a frame to hang together some almost logical story beats into something which, in all honesty, defines categorisation and takes you to a point, perhaps, where the attempt to find something more clearly defined in the story content might leave you clutching at straws... or at the very least clutching at various pop culture objects in an attempt to make sense of it all.

We have two main protagonists in this movie, which is almost a surrealist road movie in some ways, although the quest which seems somewhat central to the future of the two is cross cut with the incidents which make up the days of one of the two who is left behind, waiting for her man to return. These two are Candy, a hunchbacked person of small stature played by Daniel Tadesse and Birdy, played by Selam Tesfayie. Candy spends his days scavenging the wasteland for artefacts which Birdy can use in her found sculptural art works.

However, the spaceship left over, apparently, from the war... which hovers in the skies all day and night and has a large arm with a giant hand coming out of the top of it... has started to show signs of activity. Candy notices that a version of Santa Claus is living in the underside of the machine in the bowling alley (which keeps activating by itself) so he goes on a journey to track down Santa so he can get his wish for him and Birdy, reserving a seat on the spaceship before it takes off. On his way he encounters a mouse masked Nazi, a horse backed bandit, a train driver and various other people and objects such as the local witch, played by Shitaye Abraha, who gives him a clue as to where to find Santa. Of course, when he finds Santa and confronts him in his deserted, lion decorated theme park, Candy has to peel off his clothes and reveal that he is really Superman... but this doesn’t prevent Santa Claus from hitting him with a bicycle. Of course, this encounter is watched by Birdy as she looks through the mechanism of the bowling alley.

And it’s an interesting and certainly entertaining movie. The pacing is very slow and the ponderous establishing shots of the colourful landscapes and locations in deep focus are absolutely beautiful. There are some amazing little sequences too. For instance, a local ‘fence’ character buys the ancient artefacts found by various scavengers, as they have become valuable currency in this dwindling world. Artefacts such as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle amulet, a plastic Max Steel sword (which Birdy gives to Candy to protect him) or a vinyl copy of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album. A little while after such artefacts are found or lost, there is a beautiful sequence of each artefact spinning in slow motion in space, as the fence mis-identifies and mis-explains the history of the object in question.

If you do want to impose some meaning on the film then a sequence of ‘mistaken identity’ when Candy goes into a deserted cinema which has been showing the same movie non-stop for the last 40 years (it’s the so terrible it's good Turkish Superman, which I have seen and own and, yeah, perhaps one day I’ll review it for this blog). In a scene a little later, he is seen throwing away his Superman suit and it gives you pause for thought on the true history of the character, who has been telling everyone he is an alien trying to get back to the spaceship with his lover.

And that’s that. Crumbs is a wonderful surrealist movie with a certain level of emotional atmosphere to it, in spite of the way the ideas and scenes are threaded together in an almost throw away but mesmerising fashion. Recommended for anyone who is interested in the art of cinema, for sure. Oh... and if you want to find out the final fate of the spaceship, stick around until about half way through the end credits.