Arvidnelson.com The online home of Arvid Nelson, writer of Rex Mundi & Zero Killer

Kin Dza Dza: The Best Science Fiction Movie You Ain’t Never Seen

Kin Dza Dza is a deliriously wonderful sci-fi flick, made in the Soviet Union in 1986 – one year after Back to the Future! I'm therefore ashamed I'd never heard of it until last week, when a friend directed me to a bootleg up on Google videos, right here.

I can only describe this movie as the bastard offspring of Monty Python and Louis Buñuel, and it really is a tragedy has yet to be released in the United States. The story follows Vladimir Mashkov, a Moscow construction foreman, who, along with a despondent Georgian music student, stumbles onto a deranged homeless man who insists he's from another galaxy.

Then things get really weird.

The two earthlings find themselves transported to the mysterious, backwards galaxy of Kin Dza Dza, where matchsticks are worth hundreds of times their weight in gold, where all the water has been sucked up and turned into spaceship fuel, where all anybody knows how to say is "Koo".

Koo!

It surprises me this film got past the Soviet censors. The entire thing is a biting satire of the Soviet Union, where thuggish "Ecilops" (that's "police" backwards) can zoom out of the sky at any moment to steal all of your stuff, where artists are – literally, now – forced to perform in cages, and where the high and mighty masters of the universe will turn you into a plant or stuff you into a metal box just for trying to escape your miserable existence.

I repeat: Koo!

But Kin Dza Dza is more than satire, it's a beautiful movie, beautifully photographed, with beautiful set design, despite the fact the entire thing was probably made for close to $50 (I don't know what that comes to in rubles). Everything, from the writing to the acting, is just about as close to perfect as you can get this side of Tenture.

Very highly recommended. Again, you can see the whole thing right here.

And, in completely unrelated news, Queen Sonja #9 came out last Wednesday, the next-to-last, a.k.a. "penultimate", issue of my first Sonja story arc. More good, clean family fun from Yours Truly and the folks at Dynamite Entertainment. I just got my comps of this issue, and the cover looks even better on paper! You can get this issue, and the four that came before it, from my good friends at tfaw.com.

Koo!

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