Tiki Tiki is a mess—an utter, unmitigated mess of a film. It’s the kindest thing that could be said about a film that took clips from another film and intercut them into an animation. Terrible, simply terrible.
Legendary studio KK Films has a lot of money riding on renegade filmmaker Dennis McShane, and movie mogul JJ wants good news on the production. The two movie-industry monkeys face off in JJ’s office. Mcshane’s initial pitch puts the anxious executive at ease—a film about love and freedom, he promises, with pirates, clowns, and a talking dog. It’ll be the first picture ever produced with an all-human cast. What later comes to light is that McShane will shoot his bizarre, highly improvised epic on location using a multimillion-dollar contraption called the FMM 70, the world’s first all-purpose, rocket-propelled, flying movie machine.
Please note this review is of the unrestored version of Tiki Tiki.
I will be honest: I didn’t know what to expect from Tiki Tiki, and after watching it twice, I am still in touch. A mixture of animation and live-action (the live-action being what our filmmaking monkeys are shooting for their film) never meshes well enough to work. The fact that the live-action is actually clips from the Russian movie Aybolit-66 intercut into some animation is all the more perplexing. Its overly, almost purposefully disjointed nature becomes a headache after a while.
Scenes in Tiki Tiki unfold at a pace that’s both excessive and incomprehensible, leaving you questioning your own sanity and the reason for its release. The sad truth is that some films, like Tiki Tiki, are best left forgotten. It’s not the entertaining kind of nonsense; it’s a drag that lasts for an hour and a tiny bit more.
The only positive from Tiki Tiki is that it will make you want to see what Aybolit-66 is about on Earth. Thank goodness Gerald Potterton used his talents for something more; this was just a waste of time. As if it was an experiment to see if you could take a relatively unknown film like Aybolit-66 and chop it to pieces while adding in your own animation to funk it up and change the story to your liking. If it was a film school project, you would understand its existence. But this was a genuine release. This is not What’s Up, Tiger Lily? It’s not even Whose Line is it Anyway? Where Colin Mochrie, Ryan Stiles and co would take old film clips and put their own dialogue over it.
While it has a little twist as to who KK is, this remains a disappointment to say the least, but Tiki Tiki falls short of any expectations you could have had. Despite the potential, it’s a film that’s nearly unwatchable.
★ 1/2
For more of our coverage of Fantasia Festival 2024 please check out our reviews below:
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