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SPIKE & MIKE’S SICK & TWISTED FESTIVAL OF ANIMATION

Maybe pop culture has finally inured us to the debased, the destructive, and the debauched — whatever, the 28 shorts of this year’s Sick & Twisted seem more style than noxious substance. Jason Baskin’s pristinely computer-generated " Cubism, " about a Dilbertesque drone who flatulates in his cubicle, is quaint, not queasy. In " Coco the Junkie Pimp 3, " Michael Comas and Pete Metzger up the ante with trash-talkin’ herky-jerky marionettes doing very bad things to a disrobed Britney clone. Darren Way’s execrable stop-motion " A Father Son Chat, " in which a woman’s post-coital genitalia are likened to " an old dirty bulldog eating a bowl fulla mayonnaise, " is genuinely stomach-churning. But " The Inbreds, " before which Cosgrove Hall Films warns of " mutual vomiting, bestiality, vegetable penetration . . . [and] copious body discharge, " is merely gross, with a crisp visual sense that’s at odds with its odious ambitions. The best entries (Spumco’s Fantasia-on-Viagra video for Tenacious D’s " Fuck Her Gently " notwithstanding) are six simple Flash-animation vignettes from veteran Bill Plympton. Spotlighting the sanguinary perils of frosting licking and computerized Japanese toilets, they succeed by not trying too hard to appall.

BY MIKE MILIARD

Issue Date: April 3 - 10, 2003
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