MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Sick and Twisted’: It’s Heavy-Handed Humor

“Festival of Animation: All Extra Sick and Twisted,” a program of international short films that opens today at the Monica in Santa Monica and at the Esquire in Pasadena, certainly strives to live up to its title.

The 18 films feature gags about raised middle fingers, urine, feces, blood, other bodily fluids, sex, sexual organs, cadavers, wheelchairs and violence. Unfortunately, none is funny.

If any of the filmmakers offered a really original cartoon take on sex or violence--or made a statement about the way the other media treat these subjects, the results could be provocative and entertaining. As it is, the heavy-handed attempts at humor recall the dirty jokes that circulate in a junior high school locker room, where the object is to gross out other adolescents. The scenes of thuggish kids hitting an animal with a baseball bat in Mike Judge’s “Frog Baseball” or the dead-baby jokes in Mike Grimshaw’s “Quiet Please” seem juvenile and lame, rather than daring or innovative.

Few of these films stand out as example of the animator’s art: Most were created by students or amateurs who don’t understand how to render a motion or expression believably. The stop-motion antics of the inflatable dolls in “Plastic Sex” by Pierre Ayotte and Danielle Jovanovic are under-lit and often out of focus; the drawn animation looks generally inept.

Most of the films are so crudely executed they manage to make “Pink KomKommer,” another of Marv Newland’s inane get-eight-animators-to-do-a-few-seconds-apiece films, look good. Sara Petty evokes the biomorphic eroticism of Georgia O’Keeffe in her sequence, while the Oscar-nominated team of Alison Snowden and David Fine finds humor in a nudist colony setting.

It’s ironic that most of the high school kids who form the obvious audience for “Extra Sick and Twisted” won’t be able to see it: According to the fliers, no one younger than 17 will be admitted. Older viewers will probably leave the theater wondering why the organizers at Mellow Manor Promotions--who have presented some excellent animated shorts in the past--bothered to assemble this sophomoric mess, and why the Laemmle chain would risk its reputation as purveyors of sophisticated entertainment to screen it.