Greedy Guts (2000)

This movie does seem to drag a little toward the end, but any reasonable person should be hanging on to see what ELSE will happen, because things do happen in this movie. It is full of funny characters and weird situations, so it is quite amusing, in a "Twilite Zone" sort of way. Did you like "Erasurehead", "Dead Alive", and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"?

This movie illustrates, in fairy-tail fashion, what sort of AWFUL things can happen if you tamper with the natural order of things.

Fmovies: Perhaps Jan Svankmajer is sick of the medium of stop-motion animation which first made him famous. Perhaps he's trying to move into pure filmmaking. And perhaps I shouldn't criticize him for that. He's actually an excellent live-action director as well, which Little Otik (in Czech "Otesanek," "Greedy Guts," the name of an Eastern European fairy tale from which the script is adapted) demonstrates. But I'm not sure he wants to leave stop-motion animation behind. It seems to me more like he wants to use it more often in the film, but he didn't have the money. If you're interested in Svankmajer's work, start with his short stop-motion films, then move to Alice, his version of Alice in Wonderland, and then move to this film and then Faust.

As for the film itself, it's imperfect. Its biggest problem is that it's overlong. There's really not enough meat in it (well, there's enough meat literally). It can move slowly, especially nearer the beginning. Also, the ending is a bit abrupt. Still, there're a lot of great scenes and set pieces. It can also be very funny. It's certainly the most humorous side of Jan Svankmajer that I've seen. 8/10.

I liked this film very much. As with most comedy/horror films, the plot is fairly absurd. An infertile couple is desperate for a child. When the husband digs up a tree root vaguely resembling a child the woman loves it so much that it comes to life, and life begins to imitate a frightening fairly tale. It gets pretty slow towards the end, and would have been an even better film had it been about 25 minutes shorter. But, the film is great fun to watch, especially the performance of the woman playing Little Otik's mother, who is just insanely funny in the protection of her "son".

It's certainly not the best of it's kind, but it is a hilarious, twisted nightmare of a tale that fans of the genre will likely enjoy.

Greedy Guts fmovies. Amusing, disturbing, consistently entertaining film. "Otesánek" is funny, most of all – part ironic fantasy and part low-key farce, even if there are genuine moments of pathos and horror. It's ultimately a satire in the vein of "Little Shop of Horrors" – more abstract, of course, and with babies and baby fever, rather than the American Dream, as the target of its love/hate approach. The movie appears to have been made very cheaply, but Svankmajer exercises tremendous visual skill, and not just with the sad/funny/horrifying manifestation of Otik himself, but also with more mundane images such as an old pervert putting on his glasses or a hand planting a single cabbage seed. And the visuals are witty as well as beautiful – cinematic food has probably looked more disgusting than it does here, but not much more, and it's a perfect fit with this story about appetite and overeating. In the end, the film is undeniably overlong, and worse, begins to repeat itself by the end – it suffers a bit from the "Little Shop" similarities, too. But overall, it's an extremely watchable film, with good performances by the three principals, and a delightful black comic energy. Highly recommended to oddity fans especially. 8 out of 10.

A fairy tale, that name, and my upbringing, always made me imagine not so dramatically the savage that really means to be eaten by an wolf, or a gigantic baby live stump, after all everybody would be leaving happily ever after the Wolf belly was cut by some savior, so the tragic end was not so tragic after all, the spell would always be cast off. One of the matter is, Folk tales although morally intended, could somehow as well ending up have an inconsequential value to whatever force, or miss- action that drove the main characters down that road for whatever that it is was trying to say, therefore loosing their original intention and it's poetical and moral intentions to a happily ever after ending.

Folk tales is a better name for what it is intended, to have our imagination protected like that, or for the children you could say, looses an important aspect of beauty, of actually dealing with the real world in ways that are much more intriguing than the ones that we have been classically presented for the last century and so on, and that it was just blown into my face, how much has infected my own imagination, in realizing I can only imagine the characters being eaten up in a cartoon kind of way, where they are not on the ordeal of the tragic to be experienced. I remember receiving this book when I was kid about this giant, I confess that I don't remember the exact plot of what happened, there are gardens, roses, and he dies, the sadness of that story is not exactly because he dies, but the poetry contained in there, it was something that moved me, that made my whole day ethereal, Things were different that day and tasted different, that experience made my life bigger. Of course, there are measures for what and how it can be shown, I am not here advocating to spook children out of their pajamas and cookies, they are so very sensitive to what it is given to them, but their imagination are much more than princesses and princes fairy tales, and that it is my point about that.

The other point it is to become friends with the monster. "Oh, please don't go—we'll eat you up—we love you so!" Where the Wild Things Are

So the plot of the book it is simple, and if you read the synopses you will know, what the movie is all about. A contemporary folk tale. "When a childless couple learn that they cannot have children, it causes great distress. To ease his wife's pain, the man finds a stump in the backyard and chops it and varnishes it into the shape of a child. However the woman takes the root as her baby and starts to pretend that it is real. When the root takes life they seem to have gained a child; but its appetite is much greater than that of a normal child." (it is funny how whoever writes plots always want it to make very intriguing, so you can be drawn by the riddle of the mystery that it is left upon the lines).

In this case is kind of ludicrous.

The synopses is also the plot of the movie. You could say that all the plots can be done one Thousand times, and what it is actually inside the sandwich that counts. But it is not exactly how many films are made, so many rely so much on the plot, and those mechanisms really give the whole energy for things to happen. But for this movie, things are driven in a different manner, what happens in this flow, inside the story and how it is told that really matter, what it is added inside the sandwich, the journey, the world created, the actual experience of watching it, can only be told in the end, as of while it

This movie was very, very disturbing. I can't help but noting that I would never voluntarily see this movie again, and even that I wish I hadn't seen it the first time.

On the other hand, I am forced to admit that it was a very good movie. The fertility imagery was a little TOO heavy-handed for my liking; I felt like shrieking "OKAY, I GET IT ALREADY!!!" about twenty minutes into the movie. But I suppose it all related to the theme, so it was okay.

The Otik-creature is also very disturbing, but the food scenes are probably the worst. I remember the food from my stay in St. Petersburg, and this movie was fairly accurate. Don't see it if you've recently eaten, or plan to eat at any time in the future. Ugh!

I think the movie would be classified as a dark comedy if it were American. As such it was extremely funny; the dialogue is quite witty and the acting is good. But the whole thing was just... disturbing.

Beware of violence; there are a few very bloody, graphic scenes. The nudity is nonsexual, so it's really not a problem even for prudish Americans like me.