Broke(n) Back Mountain

Film: The Spine of Night
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I loaded up The Spine of Night today, but whatever my expectations were, they weren’t what I got. I don’t know if there’s a clear way to describe this except to suggest that it is as close as possible to a sequel to Heavy Metal as you can get without actually being a sequel. It feels exactly like a much more violent version of the Tarna story at the end of the film. If you’ve seen Heavy Metal, you know exactly how violent the final story is, and it’s not a patch on what happens in The Spine of Night.

There’s a lot here that reminds me of Heavy Metal starting with the rotoscoped animation. Traditional rotoscoping runs at 12 frames/second, so it always looks a little jittery. It also, while it tells a specific story, feels episodic in nature. We start with Tzod (Lucy Lawless), a new swamp priestess climbing up huge mountain to find a man called the Guardian (Richard E. Grant). She confronts the Guardian about a magical plant called the Bloom, one that he is sworn to protect, but she reveals that she has the same flower.

From here, she tells the story of how she got here, which begins the violence that will be the hallmark of this film. Tzod and her people are attacked by a militaristic society led by Lord Pyrantin (Patton Oswalt). Tzod is dragged back to their city at the same time as the arrival of a scholar named Ghal-Sur (Jordan Douglas Smith). Ghal-Sur is tasked with the history of Pyrantin and his people, but he is eventually thrown in prison with Tzod. The two use the power of the Bloom to escape, but Ghal-Sur double-crosses Tzod, steals her shroud of the Bloom and returns to his own city. Eventually, he engages in a ritual that vastly expands his power, and also ends up killing most of the people around him. Ghal-Sur becomes a tyrant. And eventually, a shred of the Bloom winds up on the corpse of Tzod and revives her.

The Guardian tells his story as well, which is essentially that he is the latest in a long line of guardians of the Bloom. Each guardian discovers the Bloom and learns its secrets. Realizing that the world is not ready for the knowledge, the guardian defends the Bloom with their lives until the next guardian arrives to take his place (by murdering him). And, well, this might be where we are now, except that Ghal-Sur is on his way to the mountaintop as well.

I’m not kidding when I say that this is violent in a way that few things are. This is something that would be impossible or close to impossible to do in live action. This isn’t just people getting stabbed and decapitated, but people having limbs chopped off, being cut in half, and otherwise rent asunder. It’s also not shy about who is going to be subjected to this violence. The moment you think you might have a character who is worth hanging onto as someone to carry you through the film, they’re going to be gutted or impaled or otherwise filleted soon enough. Seriously, even one of the main point of view characters, Tzod, dies early in the film and comes back only through the auspices of magic.

There’s also a lot of nudity in this film. This is something it again has in common with Heavy Metal, but in The Spine of Night, none of the nudity is sexual in nature. This is simply nudity because the characters are nude. This starts with Tzod, but hardly ends with her. In fact, at any given time, it’s a mild crapshoot if the character is going to be full frontal nude, swingin’ cod or full tribble and all.

For as much as this was reminiscent of Heavy Metal, the film that I’m actually most reminded of is Mad God. There’s a senselessness to the violence, a constancy of it, and what seems like a promise of it continuing forever that the films have in common. While Mad God is a terrible stop-motion vision of hell, The Spine of Night is a rotoscoped vision of a world run by cruelty and pain.

This is not a bad film. There’s a lot here to look at and a lot that is really interesting, but it’s also not the sort of film I would want to watch again very soon. While there are ideas that are fascinating, this is a bleak vision of the world, and it’s not the sort of vision I want to live with too often.

Why to watch The Spine of Night: Adult animation is an underrated area of film.
Why not to watch: This is violent in a way that few things are.