Tales from the Gimli Hospital The Devil-Doll

"Irresistible stuff...audacious filmmaking."--Film Comment on Guy Maddin's Tales from the Gimli Hospital

Over-the-top doses of surrealism, gore, and the bizarre from kindred spirits Guy Maddin and Tod Browning.

"Rich and startling!...rightly compared to everything from David Lynch's Eraserhead to the films of Jean Cocteau"--The Globe and Mail

Maddin's first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, was an immediate underground sensation, inviting comparison to the early David Lynch in its troubling yet oddly funny imagery. Set in a plague-stricken hospital in the backwaters of Manitoba, it focuses on the conversations of (and growing antagonism between) two hallucinating patients, Einar and Gunnar, anti-paragons of the virtuous Icelanders that settled the area.

A descendent of those Icelandic Canadians, Maddin was attracted to the project by the opportunity to mock this "much beleagured and largely unnoticed race of people." "The banner beneath which I worked on that picture was 'Annoy My Family,'" Maddin explains. "It's a simple one, and I think a good one to make your first feature with." (1988; 72 mins.)

"Dracula is great, but it must have been some sort of assignment, because the usual starting point for a Tod Browning picture involves, at the very least, a guy in drag and a cigar-chomping midget wearing a diaper."--Guy Maddin

One of Maddin's spirtual predecessors, Tod Browning is known for his unsual scenarios. In The Devil-Doll, a resourceful Lionel Barrymore escapes from Devil's Island and produces malevolent miniature "living dolls" to torture the bankers responsible for his imprisonment. With Erich von Stroheim and Maureen O'Sullivan. (1936; 78 mins.)