"Where the Hell Are We?"

Hallelujah the Hills! A man chops vigorously at the trunk of a tree containing 36 girls. Somebody grabs somebody's nose in a nutcracker and darn near twists it off. A yokel sits on his front porch and earnestly whittles a new seat for a two-holer. Two young men stalk a birthday cake and then pump it full of bullets. One of them runs slowly across the screen, stark-naked. "Cuckoo!" says a clock on the sound track. "Cuckoo!" And it really is.

"Where the hell are we?" somebody wants to know as the film begins. We are lost in the woods of Vermont, that's where, and so are those two schloonks on the screen. One is called Jack (Peter H. Beard) and the other Leo (Marty Greenbaum), and they are both in love with Vera. But Vera has just married Gideon and the boys are terribly upset. How could she! How could she be so cruel to two passionate admirers who have seen her at least once a year for the last seven years!

To console themselves, the rejected suitors organize the first surrealistic camping trip in world history; and before the trip is finished, sober old Vermont turns into a landscape by Salvador Dali. First off, the boys light up a 12-ft. stack of logs--to boil a can of soup. Then they go jeeping across an open field in pursuit of a terrified farmer--whom they try to lasso. And all the while they recollect in flashback the crazy things they did while they were courting--like, say, the time Leo peeled a banana, slipped it in the breast pocket of Jack's best suit, gave him a hearty slap on the chest.

To pratfall farce the film superadds cinematic shenanigans. It resorts to slow motion, fast motion, stop motion. The screen continually changes size and shape. One frame carries Russian subtitles and another Japanese. Suddenly a grizzly bear materializes on the screen and just as suddenly dissolves. At one point, while the heroes grapple in a foot of snow, the sound track plays ethnic music from equatorial Africa. And all through the film, the cinemate moviegoer will be able to detect sly little mementos of D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni--and Ma and Pa Kettle.

Written and directed by Adolfas Mekas, a hard-shell cinema nut who lives on Manhattan's Lower East Side and has never made a feature film before, Hallelujah is the weirdest, wooziest, wackiest screen comedy of 1963 --and what's more, it cost only $75,000 from concept to can. Often corny and sometimes precious, it is nevertheless a slapstick poem, an intellectual hellzapoppin, a gloriously fresh experiment and experience in the cinema of the absurd.

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