Summary: Your guess is as good as mine. There are vampires involved.
This movie is all about style. That is how it is advertised and on that front it certainly delivers. This is probably the most stylish movie I have seen in a long time and that is both its strongest point and biggest flaw. What makes it strong is that it is really fucking cool. It flashes back and forth between surreal flashbacks (maybe?) and hallucinations (definitely). I guess almost the entire movie is a flashback, but within that there are other flashbacks that may or may not be real. Some of the transitions between scenes are done comic book style, with the picture switching to a hand drawn look and narration written in text blocks (this is actually just kind of a rip-off of the Max Payne video games). Unfortunately, these transitions are not consistent and so it usually is kind of jarring and pulled me out of the movie even as I was thinking “that is fucking cool”. And that is pretty much the story of the movie. Some movies are style over substance, and I can respect that, as long as there is still some substance and the style doesn’t interfere with the it. With Sodium Babies there is just so much style that I could not even tell if there was substance to interfere with. My feelings at the end of the movie can best be summed up as “Guh?”.
There is not much in the way of a story to talk about, or at least I don’t think there is, so I won’t even really try. Probably the coolest and most original thing in the movie is the idea of ghouls – people who are not quite vampires but are no longer human and can serve as slaves to the vampires. In this movie when you are fed (or injected) with the blood of a vampire you cease aging and become exceptionally strong but can still walk in the daylight, so ghouls are used to bring food to the vampires. There are really only two vampires in this vampire movie and they seem to be mortal enemies. The main character, Dead Dog, is a servant of The Prince, but really we only see his immediate superior, another ghoul named Max. Max is easily the most entertaining character in the movie and is just insane and has some sweet disco moves. I think my favourite scene is a hallucination where Dead Dog is on a game show hosted by Max… don’t even ask. So anyway, The Prince’s mortal enemy is The Duke, whom he has expelled from their little vampire clique. All of this leads to a climax that doesn’t really make sense and is mostly lacking in gore.
All in all, I was kind of disappointed in this movie. Lately the French have been making a good show of cinematic insanity that gives the Japanese a run for their crazy money and I was really hoping for something along the lines of Man Bites Dog or Baise Moi (maybe not that far, it is the only movie to date that I have turned off because it was just too much, and I sat through Tokyo Gore Police). And while this movie delivered on the visual insanity it did not deliver on the uberviolence I had prepared myself for. This is not always a bad thing, as evidenced by Inglourious Basterds, but that movie at least turned out to be a compelling story, not just a sloppy mélange of weird pictures and allusions to drug abuse.
There is not much in the way of a story to talk about, or at least I don’t think there is, so I won’t even really try. Probably the coolest and most original thing in the movie is the idea of ghouls – people who are not quite vampires but are no longer human and can serve as slaves to the vampires. In this movie when you are fed (or injected) with the blood of a vampire you cease aging and become exceptionally strong but can still walk in the daylight, so ghouls are used to bring food to the vampires. There are really only two vampires in this vampire movie and they seem to be mortal enemies. The main character, Dead Dog, is a servant of The Prince, but really we only see his immediate superior, another ghoul named Max. Max is easily the most entertaining character in the movie and is just insane and has some sweet disco moves. I think my favourite scene is a hallucination where Dead Dog is on a game show hosted by Max… don’t even ask. So anyway, The Prince’s mortal enemy is The Duke, whom he has expelled from their little vampire clique. All of this leads to a climax that doesn’t really make sense and is mostly lacking in gore.
All in all, I was kind of disappointed in this movie. Lately the French have been making a good show of cinematic insanity that gives the Japanese a run for their crazy money and I was really hoping for something along the lines of Man Bites Dog or Baise Moi (maybe not that far, it is the only movie to date that I have turned off because it was just too much, and I sat through Tokyo Gore Police). And while this movie delivered on the visual insanity it did not deliver on the uberviolence I had prepared myself for. This is not always a bad thing, as evidenced by Inglourious Basterds, but that movie at least turned out to be a compelling story, not just a sloppy mélange of weird pictures and allusions to drug abuse.
C-
originally posted Oct. 6, 2009
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