This is, quite simply, a horrific little film. I cannot pretend that it is enjoyable to watch. It is brutal and utterly bleak. And yet I find myself thinking about it frequently, weeks after having viewed it.
Collected in Spike and Mike's 'Unprotected' DVD, 'Gack Gack' (I'm assuming this is what chickens say in German since the alternate English title is 'Cluck Cluck') pursues a single nasty scenario: a henhouse-office in which ranks of chickens sit at typewriters all day doing nothing but typing 'Gack Gack Gack Gack Gack Gack', filling pages with the single word. (Already existential hell, right? And appropriate from the culture that brought us 'Arbeit macht frei'.) Worse, this operation is presided over by an astonishingly foul office manager: a hippo whose rage over a mistyped 'Gak' invariably results in the murder of a hen (the culprit? a hen picked entirely at random? it is not clear that the boss knows whose 'Gak' is it); and who exalts in working his bovine secretary's udders for his own pleasure, even as she weeps at being so used. A ray of hope--the hippo's death by heart attack--is introduced specifically to be smashed down when the iguana (tuatara?) replacing him, a superficially pleasanter personality, ends up being more of the same: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Spike and Mike program humor almost exclusively in their collections, and it is quite possible that they found this short funny in that 'sick and twisted' way of theirs. I don't find it funny in the least; I think it is desolate and desperately depressing; and the horror it evokes in 7 brief minutes is precisely why is it very nearly a great film.
Collected in Spike and Mike's 'Unprotected' DVD, 'Gack Gack' (I'm assuming this is what chickens say in German since the alternate English title is 'Cluck Cluck') pursues a single nasty scenario: a henhouse-office in which ranks of chickens sit at typewriters all day doing nothing but typing 'Gack Gack Gack Gack Gack Gack', filling pages with the single word. (Already existential hell, right? And appropriate from the culture that brought us 'Arbeit macht frei'.) Worse, this operation is presided over by an astonishingly foul office manager: a hippo whose rage over a mistyped 'Gak' invariably results in the murder of a hen (the culprit? a hen picked entirely at random? it is not clear that the boss knows whose 'Gak' is it); and who exalts in working his bovine secretary's udders for his own pleasure, even as she weeps at being so used. A ray of hope--the hippo's death by heart attack--is introduced specifically to be smashed down when the iguana (tuatara?) replacing him, a superficially pleasanter personality, ends up being more of the same: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Spike and Mike program humor almost exclusively in their collections, and it is quite possible that they found this short funny in that 'sick and twisted' way of theirs. I don't find it funny in the least; I think it is desolate and desperately depressing; and the horror it evokes in 7 brief minutes is precisely why is it very nearly a great film.