Burl reviews East of Euclid! (2003)

Ha ha and holubtsi, it’s Burl! I’m here to review another low-budget, high-style swirling-snow picture from days gone by! It’s called East of Euclid, and I’ll wager you’ve not seen it, ha ha, because it’s a fairly obscure movie! But it’s worth a look for those who can find it!

East of Euclid is set in what appears to be a medium-sized North American city (cleverly built cardboard-box miniatures represent the city’s warehouse district), but almost all of its characters are Russian or Ukrainian, or in one case, Finnish, in origin! Their fake accents are not the only thing that mark them as Eastern Europeans: their monstrous appetite for pyrohy tells the tale as well!

Ha ha, our story concerns the murderous killer and gambler Vilosh, played by Michael O’Sullivan from Careful, and his eventual clash with Valeri, a dashing, lank-haired news photographer played by Brent Neale from The Editor! The whole thing is framed as a piece of journalism typed out by intrepid lady newshound Natalia, who loves Valeri: this is a role essayed by Daina Leitold with an accent borrowed from Natasha Fatale! Now, Vilosh, an alternately melancholy and malevolent figure, is in hiding from a his vengeful former employers, the KGB, and longs to start a new life in Atlantic City! But he’s also compelled to kidnap a Finnish hockey player, and also to jealously react when Valeri falls in love with Viloch’s mistress Alexandria!

After a long beginning, matters amp up when Valeri takes a photo of Vilosh, and, ha ha, the fugitive gambler doesn’t want that! So he and his thugs - including Mark Yuill from Crime Wave - invade the darkroom and beat poor Valeri to within an inch of Bokesville! Next thing you know, Valeri gets a false eye that’s also a camera, and he runs around the district maniacally taking eyeball pictures of everyone he sees! Then it’s vengeance time, and numerous attempts to rescue the kidnaped hockey player, who is kept roped up in the closet, having gained several suit sizes by being force-fed pyrohy; and a gang of East Side-style kids figures in somehow; and when the police finally start finding the corpses of Vilosh’s victims, which have been buried in snow, the chase is on! And Viloch is doing the chasing, ha ha, thundering after Valeri across rooftops until he reaches a ledge he dare not jump! 

Vilosh is caught and sent to prison, and his remaining henchmen are either locked in the briner or commit suicide by lying down on the pyrohy machine conveyer belt and being violently reformed into enormous pyrohy! Ha ha! But the 88 minute picture is not finished yet! Years later, Valeri and Natalia are a happy couple, the hockey player has become an ice-cracking butterball from his all-pyrohy diet, and Vilosh, released from prison, resolves to try jumping from the ledge he had chickened out on before, and crashes to earth four stories below!

All of this story unfolds at its own weird pace, and is photographed in a chonky black and white, surely 16mm! Ha ha, I quite liked the look, and was impressed, too, with many of the sets and props! As Action U.S.A. is clearly a movie made by stuntmen, East of Euclid is equally clearly a picture made by an art director!

The storytelling is not smooth, and the acting quality is variable, but these are not serious problems! It’s an eccentric picture and a singular one; it contains many of the tropes seen in earlier Guy Maddin or John Paizs films, and later in movies like The Goose or The Twentieth Century, but there is no sense of copycatting in any of these movies, just a shared inventiveness and mutual inspiration! Whatever city these movies all come from, it must be a weird and intriguing place! Ha ha, I give East of Euclid two and a half human pyrohy!