| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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I MARRIED A STRANGE PERSON
Rating: 
USA. 1997.
Director/Producer/Animation – Bill Plympton, Screenplay – Bill Plympton & P.C. Vey, Photography – John Donnelly, Songs – Maureen McElheron, Art Supervisor – Signe Baumane & Sophie Hogarth. Production Company – Bill Plympton.
Voices:
Tom Larson (Grant Boyer), Charis Michelsen (Keri Boyer), Chris Cooke (Colonel Ferguson), Richard Spore (Larson P. Giles), Ruth Ray (Mom), J.B. Adams (Dad)
Plot: Shortly after getting married Grant Boyer develops a strange lump on the back of his neck. This causes him to develop strange sexual appetites which send his wife fleeing in horror. He is also able to transform objects and create illusions. The lump is desired by tv network head Larson P. Giles who dispatches the military to get it from Grant.
Sometimes there are films that come and just leave one sitting back with an utterly bewildered sense of wondering what on Earth they have just seen. You can count a handful of those films – Eraserhead (1977), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky. I Married a Strange Person is certainly one of those films – it virtually sits and beats you over the head with its filmmakers’ determination to be strange and bizarre. One searches for easy comparisons – the nearest it comes to easy analogy is to the cartoon work of Gahan Wilson.
It was the first feature film from cartoonist Bill Plympton who has made a number of strange and bizarre animated shorts. Plympton clearly announces his vulgar intentions from the opening with sarcastic comments from Picasso and Goering slamming the notion of good taste. From there the film launches into such mind-boggling images as grass clippings turning on a man mowing the lawn and pursuing him around the property; a woman pursued by fat and wrinkles wanting to attach themselves to her body; the image of tanks fucking. The film is filled with visual puns – when the hero shows his wife his bedroom eyes, someone pops out of his eyeball in a bed and asks for quiet because he is trying to sleep; a woman literally wears fishnet stockings replete with fish. The film is filled with casual OTT surreal violence – at one point the wife tries to lasso someone using a set of intestines. Nothing though is as funny as the film’s surreal sexual images – it opens on two birds fucking and proceeds to an hilarious seduction scene by the wife as the husband is trying to work. During intercourse the hero variously causes his wife to manifest breasts that take over the entire house while she transforms into the Statue of Liberty riding atop him; while swirling tassles attached to nipples become airplane propellors or impale the hero’s eyeballs. Indescribably bizarre.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2000
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