Kika
Kikai is the misnamed story of male confrontation, enstaged between the usual alpha and the usual beta. That the politically engaged derps involved in production insistently try to present male interaction from a female view, and go as far as to entirely spuriously name the production after a randomly chosen femaleii does relatively little for anyone.
The film is not very interesting because its ideal construction is extremely formulaic (the alpha "gotta have a fatal flaw", and what could his "fatal flaw" possibly be other than being a meaningless and incomprehensible if thoroughly detached serial killer, duh) and because it's filmed by poor people on a tight budget in the 90s. The 80s weren't this terrible for the Almodovar crewiii ; but because of the extreme social importance of 90s pornography in destroying the old version of female society its means of production are both widely recognizable and strongly associated. So no, you can't make "a film" in general on cheap 90s VHS the way you could have made "a film" in general on the cheapestt 35mm you could find back in the 80s.
That said, there are some working gags (such as the titular Kika admitting that her principal concern is divining whether she's getting fucked today or not ; or the tit-spotlights), and altogether the reconstructed allegory of "the press" in the shape of an annoyingly maleducated chick carrying the period equivalent of a Go-Pro is not without merit, at least as far as the 90s are concerned.iv
I suppose the only way to send this off is to say it's not an item for the general interest, but only conceivably interesting to the scholar, and even then rather limitedly.
———- 1993, by Almodovar, with his usual crew (they aged). [↩]
- Seriously, the "make-up artist" Kika isn't even in this film! She's a groupie of the film, struggling at the edges to make it in somehow, that's it. [↩]
- No, it's not just one person, it's a group. [↩]
- Meanwhile even this deserted, long abandoned press died (as death usually works in human society -- first the men figure out it's a corpse, then as it starts cooling the women get "empowered" into it, then it finally stiffs up). [↩]
