Word: guignol
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Doctor Octopus shakes it like a gorilla with a new toy, Hobgoblin tosses flaming pumpkins, Electro makes malefic use of a giant socket plug, Hydro Man spritzes everyone, and the scoop plummets what feels like hundreds of feet from the sky into concrete canyons that suddenly seem grand--Grand Guignol, that is. By the happy-ending salvation in a giant spiderweb, this out-of-body, out-of-mind experience reduces cynical theme parkers to burbling kids. "Gee," they say as they stagger out, "that was the best ride--ever!" And the Universal bosses raise their fists in an unspoken "Gotcha...
...actors do their part, pretending to speak their lines and offering appropriately comedic or horrific facial expressions, but ultimately they are only playing caricatures. The costumes are brightly colored and straight out of a carnival, making the mock terror of Caligari's Grand Guignol play seem ridiculously stylized...
...silent 1920 German Expressionist film of the same name about a mysterious hypnotist who enters a German town and causes all manner of horror and havoc. The film, in turn, draws upon the work of a curious theater of the time based in Paris called the Grand Guignol. For over six decades, the Guignol produced plays resembling a grotesque puppet show, but with live actors. Real-life crime and bawdiness were brought to the stage for elite audiences craving campy entertainment full of fake blood and unthinkable acts of horror...
...does not matter whether or not audience members are familiar with the silent film or the tradition of the Grand Guignol, because the production never explains why it bothers to resurrect these influences. There is some thing to be said for paying attention to pieces of theatrical history that many historians would like to sweep under the rug, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari exhibits postmodern tendencies by creating a Guignol play-within-a-play. But while the production has its own modernized aesthetic, it remains essentially a fragment of the past. Even with all its technical wizardry, this production...
...facility at all; the impression given off by his early style couillarde--his "ballsy style," as he called it--is of a thwarted, tumultuous, half-articulate imagination bashing against the limits of its own abilities. He produced dark, macabre paintings of murders and orgies whose motivation, despite the guignol of their subject matter, remains as mysterious as their muddy paint and overladen black tonalities...