Many years ago when TV used to regularly break down and the TV repair man had to visit we remember sitting in front of our set watching a load of interference, rolling horizontal lines and a unintelligible audio. This went on for around 5 minutes until we realized that we had been watching the latest film in a Channel 4 season of Czechoslovakian animation. Thankfully things have moved on a bit since then and The Old Man Movie Lactopalypse is a feature length film from directors Oskar Lehemaa & Mikk Magi that’s evolved from their student film school days in Estonia
The title refers to the consequences of not milking cows which The Old Milker (voiced by Jan Uuspold) does to the village cow for the locals but one day when the cow gets loose and misses its daily milking its udder inflates to epic proportions exploding and causing said Lactopalypse. Blamed for the atrocity the old milker goes into hiding. Years later the village has a new milker whose three cousins come stay Pridik, Mart and Aino stay for the summer the youngest of whom has a knack for building working electrical toys for himself. But it’s when the kids decide to let the cow have a bit of freedom and untether it where it duly goes walkabout and the kids, along with their uncle, have to go find and milk it before its udder explodes. Determined to prevent this in a slightly different manner is the old milker and three newly recruited woodcutters who decide that cutting the cows head off is the best way to prevent Lactopalypse!
What follows is a truly bizarre and surreal spectacle with some wholly bonkers scenes that includes a tree being sexually relieved, a giant flatulent bear and a character that sweats milk and the film owes much to Monty Python and a number of other influences. Mercifully this is all in stop motion animation, and pretty low budget stuff it is too that is a world away from the likes of Aardman because the majority of the scenes and jokes rely heavily on bodily secretions that will divide audiences who will either find this hilarious whereas others will find it scatological and puerile. The truth is that it is probably somewhere in between.
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Here’s the directors plus actor Jan Uuspold at a Q&A in London…..
Here’s the Old Man Movie :Lactopalypse trailer……
