A bit of an oddity this. Likely to reinforce your views if you already harbour any suspicions that infants are fleshy little monsters that turn their host human beings into dangerously deranged, hysterical nitwits.
Little Otik (a.k.a. Greedy Guts) is based on a Czech fairy tale about a husband who tries to appease his sterile wife by fashioning a tree stump in the shape of a baby. The log-being comes alive as if in response to the woman's all-consuming desire for a child and starts to eat copiously, eventually adding human to its diet. (Though the one person I really wanted Otik to munch mysteriously survives!)
Jan Svankmajer's film is a couple of steps back from being either a comedy or a horror movie. I didn't watch it through in one go, but whenever I had it on I ended up a bit nauseated by the experience. Svankmajer picked actors with a quirky-creepy sort of charisma - think Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean.
The early scenes are part silent comedy with stop-action animation mixed up with performances from the live actors seemingly in sympathy with the cartoon form. Throughout the 125 minutes the action is often cropped interruptively in a way that would be more suitable in a short film and after a while, the close-ups of faces, mouths, food etc grow a little bit distracting.
Interesting and certainly memorable, but no classic.
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