Frontier

After their feature debut PLASTIC UTOPIA was deemed too strange by most festival programmers, the brothers Zellner responded like any truly independent, outsider filmmakers would: by making something even stranger. Filtering Soviet propaganda through a mouthful of powerful East Texas psychedelics, the unblinkingly straight-faced FRONTIER ostensibly adapts a "literary masterpiece" from the nation of "Bulbovia," dutifully capturing the Bulbovian people's rituals of frontier building, national conquest, accordion-based folk songs and raw-chicken duels. Strangers in a strange land, Bulbovia's dimmest explorers (David Zellner and Wiley Wiggins) attempt to dutifully colonize a new world but soon find their buttoned-up shirts and rational thoughts melting away into beetle-eating, tree-molesting, wife-swapping chaos. Like a Guy Maddin remake of AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD or STALKER's metaphysical "zone" as day-dreamed by some drunken Austin-ite, FRONTIER takes classic art-film tropes and obsess