Johnny Mad Dog
The film, shot in the literal Hell-On-Earth the United Nations recognizes as Liberia, will push your eyes through the back of your head. A cast of actual former child-soldiers portrays an army of child-soldiers; in spite of their lack of prior experience with cameras, they are more than experienced with blowing the brains out of naked, starving adults. Their staccato dialect seems composed nearly entirely of the words ”fuck” and ”kill,” and the explosive nature of the voiceless velar stops in these words synthesizes with the syncopated rhythm of gutpunchingly low-frequency explosions and gunshots to form a sort of doom-laden percussive music; in the cutting of the images, there’s a kind of hyper-paced tympanic harmonization with the soundtrack that will not only overwhelm you to the point that the sounds are subconsciously absorbed, but which is so disorienting that you’ll walk out of the theatre with a loping and dragging gait, as if punch-drunk.
– JARROD WHALEY, OAKSTREETFILMSDuration: 93 min
Dialogue: English
Subtitles: Swedish
