Director
Gerald Potterton
Producer
Gerald Potterton, Murray Shostak
Writer
Donald Brittain, Jerome Chodorov, Gerald Potterton
Cast
Barry Baldaro, Gayle Claitman, Patrick Conlon, Peter Cullen, Jean Shepherd, Joan Stuart, Ted Zeigler
contact
Canadian International Pictures
Legendary studio KK Films has a lot of money riding on renegade filmmaker Dennis McShane, and movie mogul JJ wants news on the production, preferably good. The two movie-industry monkeys face off in JJ’s office, and McShane’s initial pitch puts the anxious executive at ease—a film about love and freedom, he promises, with pirates, clowns, and a talking dog. Better yet, it’ll be the picture ever produced with an all-human cast. What later comes to light is that McShane will shoot his bizarre, highly improvised epic on location, using a multimillion-dollar contraption called the FMM 70, the world’s first all-purpose, rocket-propelled, flying movie machine.
A genuine lost gem of Canadian filmmaking and adult-oriented animation, 1971’s strange and hilarious hybrid production TIKI TIKI is among the titles resurrected under Telefilm’s Canadian Cinema Reignited program, lovingly restored by Canadian International Pictures. Directed by Gerald Potterton (HEAVY METAL), it combines animation in his pop-psychedelic style, so recognizable from YELLOW SUBMARINE, with repurposed live-action footage from AYBOLIT-66, a Soviet children’s fantasy film. A sassy satire of Hollywood (easy-riding McShane is a clear stand-in for Dennis Hopper at the time of his disastrous indulgence THE LAST MOVIE), TIKI TIKI was itself a rather hubristic deviation. By Potterton’s own admission to the Montreal Gazette in 1973, the production company was unsure whether its target audience was “kids or stoned teenagers or whatever.” Whichever of those categories apply to you, you’re bound to get a kick out of this weird and wonderful slice of Canadian countercultural cool. – Rupert Bottenberg
Showings
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