Supposedly this touched off a riot down in Mexico when in premiered way back in 1968. I can only assume that the premiere of this movie must have preempted the latest Santos adventure or something to generate that much feeling with the crowd. The movie isn’t controversial by today’s standards – it just doesn’t make any sense.

Maybe people in 1968 weren’t used to incoherent messes posing as movies that are metaphors for the meaning of existence, but by now, we’ve all seen plenty of these uppity movies with their random images. Even more importantly, most of us have now realized that existence is in fact actually meaningless.

What you have here is your standard “lovers on the run toward a mythical city of paradise” story. Fando is the man and Lis is the paralyzed girlfriend. The world’s cities have been destroyed and Fando and Lis decide to head for Tar.

Tar is this city that is kind of like heaven or Eden or the suburbs because it’s perfect in every way. Fando even tells Lis that once they get there he’ll cure her paralysis. I guess he’s going to enroll in the Tar Medical School and specialize in spinal cord regeneration research.

We first find Fando and Lis in the rubble of a destroyed city. The people of the city are going about their business as if nothing had happened right down to the nightclub singer and piano player doing a number.

Then Fando is led away by some women and blindfolded and he gets tricked into kissing another man! Well, if that doesn’t prove we’re in a world gone mad, I don’t know what will!

Once he’s done playing suckface with another guy, Fando gets back with Lis and they set off on their journey to Tar. Along the way Fando is beating his drum that he’s saved from Armageddon and he sings idiotic songs about funerals and dogs and flowers.

Then these two are cavorting around in a cemetery and striking a series of funny poses in and around the tombstones. Imagine if the Beatles or the Monkees made a really bad horror movie. This scene would have been an outtake.

Continuing their journey, they see bodies of people laying around and then these bodies start to move and all these dopes end up in a giant mud pit. Slowly, they roll around in the mud pit, gyrating amongst themselves as Fando and Lis look on.

Then Fando puts Lis in the mud, standing her up and leaves. She starts crying out to him to come back and he does and takes her out of the mud. Then they leave. If your five year old kid told you this story, you’d be lamenting the severity of his mental condition.

The best part of all this is that Fando and Lis are just warming up! Fando looks up and sees some people sitting at a table on top of a rocky hill. He goes up there and it’s these three old women playing cards and they’re using peaches as money.

There is also a young pudgy guy sitting next to one of these old bags wearing only a diaper. One of the old hags feeds him a peach and then they start making out. Mmmmm! Baby tastes like peaches!

Then the old woman loses the hand so one of the other oldsters gets to feed this flabby freak a peach. She does and he takes her onto his lap and really gives her some of that peach baby goodness she’s been wanting.

After Fando declines to participate in the elderly peach feeding frenzy, it’s an increasingly downward spiral of stupidity and pointless nonsense.

Fando finds himself used as human bowling pin, puts Lis on display for post apocalyptic degenerates, has a flashback to an equally stupid time where he paints his name on Lis, has Lis donate some blood to a guy so that he can drink it, encounters his long dead mother, and finally just stomps Lis to death for breaking his drum.

This movie was one of those experiments like they did in The Fly where the guinea pig ended up with human hands and feet – a bad idea that turned out even worse.

I got the feeling that the director was just trying to come up with as many strange scenes as he could – why don’t we cut a doll’s private parts open and put snakes inside of it! It’s possible to make one of these nightmarish, metaphoric movies about man’s existence and still engage the audience (see David Lynch’s Eraserhead), but in the case of Fando & Lis, I just couldn’t escape the feeling that I had merely been tricked into watching a movie where guys were eating dinner while wearing funnels on their heads.

© 2009 MonsterHunter