Monster Road: Collector's Edition

Even in the cultish world of clay animation, Bruce Bickford stands out as an offbeat filmmaker. His collaborations with Frank Zappa in the 1970s—such as the 1979 concert film Baby Snakes, among other projects—made him a revered alternative culture figure. Today, the sixtysomething Bickford continues to make disturbing movies (that hardly anyone ever sees) in his basement. Documentarian Brett Ingram's labor-of-love portrait takes viewers into Bickford's insular world, where he lives seemingly cut off from everyone except his father, George—who is descending into the haze of Alzheimer's—and his own deep-seated neuroses. Drawing on home movies, childhood sketches, interviews, and clips from Bickford's recent work, Ingram explores Bickford's psychological monsters, illuminating the mind of an artist who produces meticulously animated battle scenes, unsettling metamorphoses of humans changing into creatures or being consumed, strange manipulations of scale that reduce men to dwarves or render them as giants, and other disquieting imagery. A poignant but never pitying profile, this intriguing study of the driving force behind an artist's work has been recognized with a slew of festival awards, including Best Documentary Jury Prize at Slamdance in 2004. DVD extras include rare samples of Bickford's animation, deleted scenes, and more. Recommended. [Note: Bickford's half-hour-shy 1988 film Prometheus' Garden is also newly available at the same price.] Aud: C, P. (M. Johanson)