The film is populated with all manner of eccentrics and obsessives, including Machotaildrop‘s owner, the Baron, a grandiloquent former high-wire acrobat now confined to a wheelchair; the sinister Dr. Manfred; the Baron’s creepy majordomo, Perkins; the Librarian, the only girl in the compound; assorted “stars” like the permanently embittered Blair Stanley; and a screeching, often indecipherable martinet, who’s the ostensible leader of a gang of skateboarding anarchists known as the Manwolfs.

Machotaildrop backs up its loopy, idiosyncratic indictment of our consumerist culture on the most basic level.There’s a decidedly second-hand look to the proceedings – a Value Village aesthetic. Everything in the movie seems to have been made in the eighties or earlier and rescued from somebody’s attic.

This thrift-shop principle is evident in the film’s distinctive sensibility, which is simpatico with the work of Canadian mavericks like John Paizs and Guy Maddin, while invoking Jean Vigo and head movies (one of the performers seems to have escaped from El Topo). Yet for all that, the film seems completely unselfconscious, devoid of overt influence and defiantly singular. It is definitely something new (and strange) under the sun.”

A hit at last year’s TIFF.