Review of Cool World

I finally got around to seeing this film. I went in with low expecations. On the surface it's got terrible acting (which I think is deliberate--more below) and looks like a lower budget version of WKRR. To my surprise I was seeing psychotic imagery: cityscapes with faces buried in the twisting architecture and hypersexual sadistic toons frantically jumping across the screen almost nonstop, manifesting the main character's (the male cartoonist's) fantasies. Example: there's a scene where a toon character gets sucked into a pen by a toon woman as a kind of "toon murder". After she leaves the screen, it fills up with death-like toon charaters, and a single disembodied voice continually shouts "Oh, that's gotta hurt. Pen me too! Hurt me! Hurt me!" Contrasting this, Brad Pitt is the film's cock block--an older character in a position of authority. At this point it was obvious: This isn't WKRR. it's a Freudian surrealist horror comedy. I looked it up after viewing and sure enough, a screenwriter (Larry Gross, who worked on the film without credit) interviewed in the LA Times called it "an elaborate Freudian castration-anxiety dream." The movie made a lot more sense to me once this clicked. Because it's trying to fit in some difficult themes in jarring ways, I don't really know how to rate this one, so I'm giving it a slight above average score for the attempt. For those of you who worry about how women are presented, you might feel disturbed by the fantasy imagery at points, though to note, the fatale character does disrupt some of those tropes (without going into spoilers). If you keep that in mind, you might figure out whether or not this is a film you want to watch.