- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 1 July 2006 00.00 BST
Jan Svankmajer's Food trilogy
Hiding out from the heatwave in front of the monitor, Cybercinema has a yen for the kind of weird and wonderful webfilms that used to abound before the internet became yet another flickering household screen thick with corporate logos and low-cost loan opportunities. This month if it's odd, it gets the nod. First among equals is cult Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer's captivatingly strange and subversive meal-deal in which human vending machines proffer breakfast, hungry lunchers munch the décor, and desperate diners prepare cannibal feasts. Svankmajer's unnerving combination of deadpan live-action and cavity-stretching claymation is accompanied by an equally unsettling, almost unhinged sense of deprivation which powers these bizarre vignettes.
They're Made Out of Meat
"Omigod. You're saying that the only sentient race in this sector is made out of meat." Director Stephen O'Regan's disgusted diner customers are (under their Men in Black fleshly disguises) a pair of fastidious alien researchers who can't quite believe what several human lifespans of abductions and probing have revealed. Yes, we're nothing more than machine-making, gum-flapping, spit-swapping animals, and O'Regan's marvellously dry and detached adaptation of Terry Bisson's comic sci-fi story turns an alien eye on everyday activities like kissing, flirting and eating, to show us up as the revolting planetary pond-scum we really are.
See You On The Flipside
Digital artist Larry Carlson, hailed by Tech TV as the "Salvador Dali of the next century", swirls his funky psychedelic animations the way that DJs mix records, to produce an eye-catching electronic parade that kidnaps your eyes and holds your mind hostage. Sink into his latest effort, in which Indian goddesses morph into zygotic monkeys and fluorescent mash-ups fragment into flocks of mutant sheep. Subliminal messages flash past like kingfishers ("Are automobiles living beings?") to enliven your altered state, but mostly you'll just be happy to wallow in Carlson's pulsing brain-bath of kandy-kolored tangerine flake psychedelia.
Stalk
For anyone who was too darn hot to make it to the Curzon Soho's Short Film Summer School this month, you can still get a taste of it with Leigh Hodgkinson's dark fairytale of warped bunny love, which featured in their packed programme and lives on at the estimable BBC Film Network site. Flat broke and busted, Lonely Bunny is haunted by the salad offerings of a mysterious admirer who is literally eaten up with love. What would be cute in other more conventional hands is rendered shiveringly strange by Hodgkinson's avant-garde soundtrack, which mixes rain-slushy sound effects and broken traces of melody to hair-raising effect.
Desire Management
Noam Tolan's crushingly original film (and sometime RCA art installation), about deviant domestic devices for alienated people, comes trailing clouds of theory about "the object as protagonist"; so we've chosen its jargon-free Tiscali short film incarnation. His detached and elegant five-sequence fiction features people driven to create one-off fetish objects to slake their psychic hungers, some funny (the baseball bed, for a sport-mad lover), some downright disturbing, such as the tear-catching teamaker. As ever with Tiscali, there's an infuriating hunt-the-thimble process to unearthing this short, which we'll short-circuit by shouting, "It's in the FIRST COLUMN OF BLUE TYPE, people!"
The Superman Movie
No, not that one. Not the US$400 million, multiplex-packing new release. This one. In which high-pitched layabout PJ and his pal Bob the Cat are debating whether Superman could survive a poke in the eye ("Ya can't toughen up your eyes. There's no eye machine at the gym") and use Clarence the Fat Boy as a rooftop-tumbling lure to tempt the Man of Steel out of hiding to test their theory. Why is their bait-boy dressed as a woman? "Superman always rescues chicks. With dudes, it's pretty much a crapshoot." Neptune Circle's wacky, copyright-wrecking spoof makes its flat, no-frills animation jump around with the inspired lunacy of its premise.
Uncontrollable Semantics
For a hyper-poet, Jason Nelson's prose sounds uncannily like one of those Googledegook instant translations: "Within your mouse flows all directions." But indeed they do, inside his intriguing interactive art-game, in which a compass of arrows entreats your mouse to check out "Spirus", a lava-lamp trail of balloon bubbles, and then beckons you to brave the shrieking carrots of "Scurvy" or the mysterious stacking blackboard blocks in "Pornopolis". With 50 diverse environments packed with levitating shapes and miscellaneous music, you can undertake a vast number of mesmerising journeys. Just avoid the enticing label "a trap", or you'll be catapulted into a dead-end loop of epilepsy-inducing text lines which cut short Cybercinema's digital Alice-in Wonderland wanderings rather abruptly.
