ALBINA AND THE DOG-MEN

From avant-garde filmmaker and novelist Jodorowsky (Where the Bird Sings Best, 2015, etc.), a picaresque tale driven by metamorphosis and travels between space-time dimensions.

After Crabby, a prickly, hunchbacked, acid-voiced teenager, loses her father and is kicked out by her mother, she embarks on a “tour of Chile, a country as long, thin, and foreign as her [Lithuanian Jewish] father.” She makes a living selling adulterated cocaine until a storm of biblical proportions washes up Albina, a beautiful albino giantess being chased by Himalayan monks. Crabby saves Albina, feeling maternal toward her. Yet they establish a club in which Albina dances naked before miners stricken with sexual desire and religious ecstasy. Unfortunately, Albina suffers from an illness that, during moonlight, transforms her into a dog in heat. When she is threatened by men and bites them, they too are infected, and all become overcome with animalistic desire. Drumfoot, a corrupt cop who tries to take advantage of Albina using Crabby’s criminal past as blackmail, falls victim to her bite. Across enormous rocky deserts, he pursues the duo, who are joined by a helpful hat-making dwarf torn in his love between the two women. Bizarre similes add to the carnivalesque atmosphere throughout. The whites of oglers’ eyes are “like unconscious pelicans,” and passing clouds are “like seagulls with rickets.” In their quest for an antidote to Albina’s canine disease, they encounter an Edenic hidden jungle where ancient Incan warriors and a witch doctor live. Each character mutates in some regard, between dog and human, ugliness and beauty, mortal and deity. Albina’s transformation is the most cosmic, and her origin story and subsequent quest whirl off into mysterious if occasionally repetitive territory, a mélange of Zen Buddhism, Inca origin myths, and Christianity.

A violent, raunchy story in which the sacred and profane manifest with supremely absurd humor.