A twelve minute animated amazement from 1981 that remains shockingly little known. It’s a Claymation outrage that plays like, as a review in the third issue of Shock Cinema magazine proclaimed, “Will Vinton after 23 hits of black acid.” I’d add that it also recalls the work of Jan Svankmajor and Bruce Bickford, yet offers a vision of big city Hell on Earth that remains totally unique.
A reported five year labor of love by filmmaker Rick Goldstein, NIGHT ON THE TOWN was screened at student film festivals (where it allegedly caused numerous walk-outs) in the early 1980s before spending the following three decades “lost.” That was until the 2010s, when it turned up on YouTube, courtesy of Goldstein himself.
Presented largely without dialogue, it opens with an Edward Much “Scream” faced transient awakening in a grungy second floor motel room. He heads off to the communal bathroom, where two junkies reside, one of whom shoots up and vomits a mass of yellow goo. Returning to his room, the transient confronts a burglar who jumps out the window and dies on the street below. The transient heads down to the street himself, where he witnesses more bad behavior by a variety of street scum—including a beheading and a guy hit by a car—before being dragged into a nearby bar.
In this seedy establishment the transient is given a vial of pills and hallucinates madly. Among the astonishing sights he, and we, see are worms devouring people and subsequently transforming into various objects, a woman impaling herself on a long stick and a man attacked by a chair amid a riot of miscellaneous mutations and dismemberment.
Eventually the transient comes to and crawls out of the bar, only to be submerged in a flood of human innards and meet a fate that can be viewed as either optimistic or horrific depending on one’s point of view.
Technically this no-budget film isn’t quite up to the standards of the aforementioned works of Messrs. Vinton, Svankmajor or Bickford, being notably underlit and featuring stop motion that’s often quite jerky and/or flickery. But then again, considering his limited resources what Rick Goldstein pulled off here is damned impressive (take it from one who’s sat through many an amateur Claymation film). The button-eyed, wool faced humanoid characters that people this film’s universe are extremely distinctive creations, and its depiction of an urban inferno all too convincing.
One could perhaps argue that Goldstein’s script isn’t entirely up to snuff, with (for instance) the hallucinations that climax the film being gratuitous and unnecessary given that the “reality” on display was quite hallucinogenic to begin with. But taken purely as a piece of visionary animation NIGHT ON THE TOWN is very nearly a masterpiece.
Vital Statistics
NIGHT ON THE TOWN
Richard Goldstein Productions
Director/Producer/Screenwriter/Cinematographer/Editor: Rick Goldstein
Cast: Peter Challis