Ooh, this one is SPECIAL. A *huge* personal favorite. A horror movie that plays like a comedy, this movie occupies the strange spot in my cinematic pantheon where I think most people put “The Big Lebowski” in theirs, and not just because both movies involve bowling alleys.
Schizophrenic guy (played by a youngish Ryan Reynolds, who I didn’t know at the time, and happily was still an actual actor and had not yet gone full-tilt into ironic Manic Pixie Dream Guy persona) hallucinates and goes off the deep end. The twist is, most of the movie is shown from his point of view, to the extent that we see his filth-strewn apartment as clean and tidy, the pink forklifts at his factory job perform ballet, his animals talk to him as a matter of course, and as his victims pile up, their severed heads remain lifelike, cheery, and friendly to him throughout, which adds to the horror when you briefly see the grim reality. (Following a single day of being on medication and unable to deal with the reality, once he’s back into hallucination, one of the heads cheerily says to him, “Did you see what those pills did to me? They made me look like a jack-o-lantern!”)
Twisted, effective, & truly dark fun… and notable for being one of the only horror movies to end with the whole cast doing an upbeat song & dance number. Bleak comedy in the manner of “Otis”. (Update: by Joe Dante. Should have known.) (Update 2: NOT by Joe Dante, I was mistaken. By Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian woman who did “Persepolis”. Apparently, for a long time this script was set to star Ben Stiller, and much as I like Ben Stiller for what he is, that would have cost the cinematic world a true gem.)