Decapoda Shock

Would you like to watch a film in which a space-man goes into space and is bitten by a space-crab and returns from space to Earth as a LOBSTER ASTRONAUT? When you were reading that sentence did you get to the end and when it turned into CAPITAL LETTERS did you hear somebody WAILING on a GUITAR? Are you prepared to accept that as soon as you have seen Decapoda Shock your favourite genre of moving picture will become, and forever remain, PAELLA SPACE-REVENGE-WESTERN?

This is the film for you my friend; This is the film for you.

Javier Chillón not only writes and directs but has possibly fallen through a portal from a universe where Luke Skywalker was a Django Jedi Knight and Buck Rogers In The 25th Century spawned several spin-offs including one starring Kate Mulgrew that made it to London's West End as a musical partly written by Ben Elton featuring songs from Goblin.

There is a scene where our hero protagonist, the LOBSTER ASTRONAUT, rides a horse while still in his space-suit. He must have his vengeance!

In a clawful of minutes there is a staggering desert and a spaceship that has its fins set to 'awesome' and a speeding car and a split-level ranch home and a beautiful shot in a reflecting pool and then an animated sequence somewhere between GI Joe and Akira and watching Heavy Metal while under the influence of a shell-full of cerveza. There is a training montage under the avuncular eye of his mentor Eric Gibraltar, but for all that has happened on Earth all that matters is what drives him to vengeance. He does not have time for anger. The LOBSTER ASTRONAUT is dispassionate in his revenge, his impassive crustacean features recalling the implacability of Takeshi Miike or Adam West.

The reason that this film is on the cover of the programme of the 2012 Glasgow Short Film Festival is because once you have seen it you cannot help but measure every film you have ever seen against it. You must ask yourself; why have I not travelled in time or between universes or both to park my Detroit-built automo-carriage at 'The Hop' to have a cheeseburger and fries before transporting myself and the entity with whom I am going steady in my chrome-clad line-streamed white-walled-tyre-fitted veloci-bile to a drive-in movie theater to see a film in which a LOBSTER ASTRONAUT revenges himself against a TECHNOCRATIC CONSPIRACY OF SATELLITE SATANISTS?

The answer is because you are not trying hard enough. You have not dedicated yourself to a single goal as tightly as has Chillón who writes and directs and animates and found Cirilo Fernández on a desert island where he had subsisted for 40 years on a diet of Giorgio Moroder records and shellfish and dehydrated ice-cream and Tang and said to him "Cirilo, I am making a film in which a LOBSTER ASTRONAUT returns from SPACE on a quest for REVENGE, and I need you to make the music for this film".* Ariadna Paniague did the costuming, and it is safe to say that every wavelength those costumes emit is the correct one because she is similarly tuned in to this unadulterated creative vision. The colour-palette is washed and perfect, and the high-drama and STAGGERING ACTION are such that one cannot help but reach for the hyphen and CAPS LOCK keys.

Tony Curtis was once in a film called Lobster Man From Mars, but this is not the movie that was in that movie. This is something purer, something towards which the words 'arch' or 'starring Patrick McNee' cannot be directed. This is, to reiterate, a movie for which the prefix 'space' was created. Call it a perfect slice of Bisque-movie if you must; know that you will forever be able to divide your life between the time you have spent not yet having watched it, and DECAPODA SHOCK.

*This may not be unvarnished truth. The music is, however, genuinely brilliant.