Where the Chocolate Mountains (2016, Pat O’Neill)

One digital motion image after another, feels like installation art. Lot of scrolling or rotating wood textures. Other recurring things: a woman’s face, a man’s hairy body, a laser light show. Leviathan over Arizona: Preening seagull in flames before a MST3K planet floating over a mirrored river and floating heads staring back at us: it all feels vaguely satanic Soundtrack by George Lockwood, that’s half the movie. I was already appreciating the sound effects, then after twenty minutes someone says the movie title out of the blue, sparking a series of dialogue clips from some noirish film(s). The credits list a ton of audio sources (the Prelinger archives of course, and some MST movies to match the spinning planet). Sicinski Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope: The Chocolate Mountains stretch in a southeast direction across the Colorado Desert … this 60-mile region, almost totally closed off to the public, is home to the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range … utilized by the US Navy and…