Even though she just got back from her stay the Caligari Insane Asylum, frustrated housewife Mrs. Van Houten (Laura Albert) is sent back right in when her wimpy dork of a husband can’t abide her unbridled horniness. This delights the malevolent Dr. Caligari (Madeleine Reynal), who uses every opportunity to further her wild experiments in neurochemical brain transplants. Shocked by her unethical behavior, the staff that work for Caligari attempt to stage a coup in order to take over the asylum. Hilarity ensues.

Thanks to a friend of mine, I managed to see this outlandish sequel years before I ever laid eyes on the original The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). He said, “You need to see this batshit crazy movie!” And he was right, I did need to see it. Writer/director Stephen Sayadian and screenwriter Jerry Stahl’s hyper camp masterpiece is quite unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Dr. Caligari (1989) hovers -no, it undulates between pretentious arthouse riffing and camp comedy very successfully. If you are a fan of John Waters and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), you will find a lot to enjoy here.

Laura Albert, who I’ve enjoyed in underseen 80s horror fare like The Unnamable (1988) and Death by Dialogue (1988), is particularly fearless in Dr. Caligari. Her role requires a great deal of nudity and… let’s just say imaginative plot twists that show both her range and her perseverance in the face of the bizarre. The most normal thing that happens to her in this movie is when Mrs. Van Houten has an out of body experience where she sees a guy in a kewpie doll mask making violent love to her on a gurney in front of herself and her fellow asylum patients.

Fans of Repo Man (1984) will be well advised to check this one out as both the lovely Jennifer Balgobin and the criminally underrated Fox Harris play major roles. The biggest surprise is John Durbin, who plays Gus Pratt, a gleefully deranged cannibalistic patient. He was also the “send more paramedics” zombie in The Return of the Living Dead (1985). Debra De Liso, from my beloved The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) has a small role, as does Stephen Quadros of Demon Wind (1990).

Out of financial necessity, Sayadian was not only the director on this film but was also the cinematographer and production designer. The first thing I noticed about Dr. Caligari is how outrageously tacky and filled with small, cool details that only a labor of love could produce. With money as tight as it was, I’m surprised Sayadian didn’t do the score too! I love the film’s eclectic (boy oh boy, I’m going to exhaust my thesaurus in this review) music by Mitchell Froom that occasionally reminds me of something out of a “Tales from the Crypt” episode.

There’s a lot of unsettling themes and gross out body horror packed into this film’s 78-minute running time, but it’s just such a likeably maniacal vision that I was very taken with the whole thing. I was simply agog at the tongue twister dialogue featuring some beatnik poetry-style kink that comes flying at my face in nearly every scene. Here’s a couple of quotable doozies for you: “I want his boy thing! Twist it like a rubber band until it snaps!” and “Mind your nerve ends, lovebunch.”

Dr. Caligari is so brazenly weird that aliens might decide to skip visiting our planet if some freako film fan at NASA launched a copy of this one into space. Everyone coated in pancake makeup, staring right at me, and saying some bonkers ass shit is just delightfully confrontational. I can’t tell if this disjointed oddity is supposed to be profound, inane, or just scattershot enough so that something, anything lands. This is why I almost always love when a film “tries too hard” (a phrase that I hear hipsters throw around all the time because they’re assholes), because so often, the results are worth it.

The colors in Mondo Macabro’s print of Dr. Caligari are going to blow your fucking head off. This has to be one of the most eye-piercingly garish things I’ve ever watched in HD. You can watch the film in widescreen or in full frame to replicate the old VHS’s aspect ratio. And you can watch it with either an audio commentary with Sayadian or with just the isolated music and effects track. In both the commentary and the interview with him on the disc, the director has a lot to say about the film’s production.

Stephen Sayadian an interesting dude and is one of those low-key strange dudes who you can totally see making an unhinged piece of art like this. There is also some great interviews with the films screenwriter and frequent Sayadian collaborator, Jerry Stahl. Interviews with cast members Albert and Reynal are excellent as both actresses look back on the film, and especially working with Sayadian very fondly.