My movie watch on 19 April 2024 was a decidedly strange but engrossing satirical sci fi comedy movie from six years ago entitled Sorry To Bother You, which wickedly lampoons the perceived evils of capitalism run wild.
Directed by Boots Riiley, released in 2018 by Universal Pictures, and set in an alternate Oakland, California, Sorry To Bother You stars LaKeith Stanfield as feckless young adult waistrel Cassius 'Cash' Green, who, desperate for money to avoid eviction for not paying his rent, takes a job as a bottom-rung telemarketer.
However, and to everyone's surprise (not least of all his own!), a gift for vocal mimicry makes Cash so inordinately successful a telesales operative that he soon attracts the attention of Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), the CEO of an enormous but highly controversial company called WorryFree.
WorryFree makes its gazillions from employing poor people via lifetime contracts, for which they receive free housing and food for life in lieu of wages, but they must work there in perpetuity. In short, a (barely) legal form of slavery – but as Cash discovers when invited by Lift to take on a very special role there for the eye-watering sum of $100,000,000 during five years in that very special position, that ain't the half of it!
No indeed, for in a truly shocking manner, Cash finds out that Lift's scientists are actively but covertly transforming the company's contracted workers into bizarre half-human half-horse monstrosities called equisapiens, because such entities will work harder and longer than normal humans. The first equisapien seen in the movie is actually played by Forest Whitaker, wearing an animatronic horse head (see later for more details).
Cash, realising how he has been lulled by financial greed into this realm of horrors, plans to expose Lift's abominable actions, but Lift has already taken drastic steps to ensure Cash's compliance, Let's just say that those steps are not to be sniffed at – or, more precisely, are not to be sniffed, literally!
Darkly funny but also bitingly acerbic, and co-starring Danny Glover as Cash's older co-worker Langston (Glover had originally been penciled in for the lead role of Cash until conflicting work commitments meant that he had to decline it), Sorry To Bother You certainly appeals to my more outré cinematic tastes, and is definitely well worth a watch. It takes its title, incidentally, from the conversation opener that Cash and the other telemarketers habitually use when engaging with prospective clients over the phone.
Also worth noting is that in stark contrast to so many bizarre on-screen monsters featuring in modern-day cinema, the equisapiens were created not by CGI but by more traditional physical means, utilizing a horse body suit and an animatronic head operated out of screen shot by puppeteers, including one who specifically operated the head's eyes. Each equisapien has its own unique head (designed and built by Amalgamated Dynamics, who also created suits for Alien and Predator), but the same horse body suit is used for all of them.
If you'd like to view an official trailer for Sorry To Bother You on YouTube, be sure to click here, and for a dramatic spoiler trailer revealing the enslaved equisapiens, click here.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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