Judith Roney

Three-stars for being weird-enough to hold my fascination by presenting one-bizarre scene after another. If you like campy films, this may become a cult-classic in a distant future. The cast is small: Airline-pilot husband and Lola, his wife who is often seen mending clothes, the nun who runs the orphanage where the couple come across fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, both with albinism, and as the film's antagonists, Tin and Tina, the twins with hokey haircuts, and eventually a baby. Lola is cast as a one-legged woman with a prosthetic, which she points out makes her "weird" like the children's lack of pigment. There are plot holes aplenty: A same-day adoption of children, the bug killer powder kept in the same cabinet as the sugar-shaker, amongst others. It **is** horror in the sense horrible events occur. But the film's focus is on religion, and the apparent need for it in this world, otherwise husbands may be hit by lightening, infants might drown, and children could cut open the family pet to "cleanse" its sinful heart. I teach creative writing at a university, stressing "what will you do to set your writing apart?" thus I appreciated the "fresh" freakishness of the cast amidst beautiful settings and scenery, along with bizzaro dialogue and a hard-to-believe story. Quirky (the Chinese spinning plate song!), unsettling (the "baptism" of the infant in the pool), and trippy enough to push this past the threshold to mesmerizing for its uber weird-factorness, I'll call it a must-see for those who appreciate genuine funk.