How to describe the experience of watching SURVIVE STYLE 5+?! The look of the movie alone was enough to blow me away: it features fanciful costumes that look nothing like any clothes I've ever seen before, sets crammed with all manner of curios, and a use of color which is simply outrageous. Imagine WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN's aesthetic mixed with the texture of a Dali painting as filtered through a commercial for bubblegum. Then put it on overdrive and string it with Christmas lights...and you will only have begun to envision the glorious assault of brightness and fashion that is SURVIVE STYLE 5+.
Fortunately, the movie's abundance of style is matched by its substance. The plot concerns 5 different main characters whose stories become intertwined in a variety of improbable, violent, and hilarious ways. We meet a song-and-dance hypnotist, a businessman who thinks he's a bird, a zombie wife who fires her arm off like a cannon, and a British hit-man who shows up periodically to ask "WOT IS YOUR FUNCTION IN LOIF?" before going nuts and stabbing people. All that, and I'm only describing the first half hour or so...
Despite its absurd and surreal tone, SURVIVE STYLE 5+ makes complete logical sense. Never once does it veer into the no man's land of "weirdness for the sake of weirdness." The plot meanders all over the place, but there IS a method to its madness: a POINT to it all, a moral to figure out and mull over. In this regard, SURVIVE STYLE 5+ outclasses just about every movie of its type, by which I mean the recent rash of movies with multiple narratives that come together coincidentally. SURVIVE STYLE 5+ is definitely better than HAPPINESS. It may be better than PULP FICTION. MAGNOLIA shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence with it. Really, there is no movie I can adequately compare with SURVIVE STYLE 5+ because it seems like the first film of an entirely new genre.
It's hilarious, too. Several days after viewing the movie, I still find myself walking down the street, remembering a funny scene or line, and laughing wildly to myself about it.
So do what you can to see it on the big screen, then pray for a decent DVD release. You will NOT be disappointed.
