Too much of everything

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

"The Dstettensaga: The Rise of Eschenfried" is a social-commentary sausage, run through a Monty Python meat grinder and seasoned with a sprinkling of "Kin-dza-dza!" Two heroes search for the elusive Echsenfriedl (translation: Freddy Lizard) as they wonder a post-apocalyptic world armed with the "newest" gadgets (a VHS camera and a "field telephone" connected to a 10-foot-tall satellite dish carted around in a wheelbarrow). Most of the movie has an a no-budget, anti-aesthetic, DIY, zombie-flashmob vibe, while other parts are beautifully filmed and prove surprisingly striking. The soundtrack sounds like a 8-bit video game, which suits the retro-nostalgic content and visuals.The main plot, of a out-of-date media mogul who tries to stop progress (which here means "Tele-O-Vision"), is part satire and part parable about old vs. new, how the latest thing soon becomes problematic and old-hat and usurped by yet another new thing, and so on. Some of the satire may resonate most in Northern Europe (one plot thread has farmer collectives capture travelers and make them fill out faded EU grant applications before cannibalizing them for slow food). But if you're been wondering where you can see people wearing tinsel dance around a gravel pit singing into a vibrator about free markets, this is the place. There are some good lines ("My dear, I wish I could show you on a rag doll where Baby Jesus has touched me."), but most of the humor comes from funny ideas. At first it is unclear why a militia of heavily armed postal workers is manning checkpoints and confiscating technology until one asks, "Who will have to do the dirty work … when everything goes wrong again with the New Media? We, of course! The Postal Services! And the Postal Partner Militias … And the carrier pigeon raisers." Certainly, this is the only movie set in the Austrian Alps to declare that "the hills are alive with the sound of illiterate nostalgics!"

This brilliant piece of insanity shows off a potential post-apocalyptic world like you have never seen before. Savage farmers, militarized postal workers and more fantastic characters and brilliant subplots than you can shave an antenna at. The protagonists are just strange and broken enough to be relatable, the acting is fantastic considering the no-budget state of the movie, and the chosen locations just scream wasteland. Even if you don't get the tons of high-brow in-jokes, it's a lot of fun to watch this unique story unfold. Highly recommended.

Invigorating no-budget agitprop craziness by Austrian art-tech-maniacs "monochrom". Grenzfurthner and his merry band of discourse-pranksters are well-known for creating interesting little universes (like "Soviet Unterzoegersdorf") to make entertaining political and philosophical statements. "Die Gstettensaga", their first feature film, is taking classic post-apocalyptic tropes to tell a story of subculture and its inevitable corruption and decay. Is it an allegory for the Egyptian Revolution of 2011? Or for the demise of punk? Or for the impossibility of freedom of information? All of it, I assume, and more... and spiced with plenty of nerdy references that will make you squeal with delight.Gstettensaga is a lot of fun -- and it will leave you with a refreshingly bitter aftertaste.

Here's the tl;dr: Die Gstettensaga is what would happen if Beckett and Brecht collaborated on a post-apocalyptic cautionary tale against the dangers of cargo culture in the modern world. If you liked most of the words in that sentence, just skip the rest of this review and go watch the movie. The film has a quality of constant anachronism. It takes place in a sparsely populated and ambiguous Europe after a war between the last great superpowers has destroyed civilization. However, the last great superpowers here were China and Google, which gives an idea of the tone of the entire project. It's either constantly winking or possibly squinting against the glare of the postmodern spectacle, and it's impossible to tell which. This kind of ambiguity runs through the whole film, but it comes off not as ill-defined so much as a mirror to the ambiguity of the modern world. The chiptune-flavored soundtrack creates an atmosphere of retro-futuristic uncertainty in much the same way that Wendy Carlos' moog classical did for _A Clockwork Orange_, and it's never clear if the ridiculous outfits are due to post-collapse scarcity or the progress of fashion. Constant in-jokes to nerds of a certain age create a sense that society was rebuilt by a cargo cult who primarily had access to technical manuals of the 90s, which, if you think about the ways in which we archive things, may not be too far-fetched. Despite this, my movie watching partner, who is not nearly as steeped in that world as I, was in hysterics through most of the movie, so this quality isn't alienating to other viewers. There's a print magnate (who claims to have invented typesetting) trying to come to grips with New Media (the "Tele-O-vision"). There's a musical number that could be straight out of Jesus Christ Superstar involving what happens when you try to recreate NASDAQ with broken household items. And, without giving spoilers, there is a scene which somehow manages to deconstruct both zombies and cat memes. With one foot firmly planted on critical theory, the other in the mire of internet culture, and a third, recently evolved pseudopod grasping for meaning in a post-meaning world, Die Gsettensaga is a darkly hilarious commentary on our culture from a perspective only allowed by it having been destroyed and rebuilt by nerds.