I Am A Knife With Legs

A wonderfully strange and deliriously funny low-budget offering, the wonderfully titled I Am A Knife With Legs has the title ‘cult classic’ written all over it. Part genre film and part musical-comedy (in the broadest sense of the term) it is wacky triumph for writer/director/producer/composer /editor/sound designer and star Bennett Jones.

It is a wild and strange ride that may have audiences bemused, but perhaps also perhaps entranced if they buy into surreal and quirky imagination of Bennett Jones.

The film, which premiered at the Fantasia film festival in Montreal, is at heart a compilation of various skits, sketches and musical numbers (understandable given the fact it has been constructed piecemeal over a seven year period) but it is made with a whole lot of heart and a delightfully left-field sense of humour. Whether it could sustain a formal release is another matter, but it could be a cult hit is shown as part of a series of special screenings.

Jones plays Europop star Bené (a not-so subtle play on his own name) who is in hiding in Los Angeles having discovered there is a fatwa taken out on him. While he waits for Death to arrive, his manager Beefy (Will Crest) has decided to protect his star and try and prepare him for Death’s arrival.

Bené is the perfect example of the Europop star – white leather shoes, garish trousers, t-shirts cut to emphasise the abs – but rather inept when it comes to coping for himself. He even gets advice from Beefy on how to vault a railing to escape his apartment, should an assassin come calling.

The musical sidebars are fun – but not quite as inspired as you want them to be – but the key to the film is its surreal humour as this pop star in hiding tells the story of his youth (with fine use of drawings rather than footage) and how his girlfriend Baguette was killed by a suicide bomber.

Things get seriously odd when a killer finally turns up leading to a clumsy parkour chase and an encounter with a six year-old Chinese girl dubbed “the most dangerous person who will ever live.” It is a wild and strange ride that may have audiences bemused, but perhaps also perhaps entranced if they buy into surreal and quirky imagination of Bennett Jones.