We have a scene where Amari Cheatom returns after something unspecified has gone wrong and he is pursued by a never-seen gang whereupon he and Hickson argue. Joel Potrykus makes the film into a fascinating portrait of paranoia and disintegrating mental health as Hickson appears to be going off the rails without his psychiatric meds. Unlike Alien Implant, The Alchemist Cookbook sits on the fence between the infuriatingly dull and the quite interesting. As The Alchemist Cookbook started in, Potrykus’s focus on the dull observance of Ty Hickson pottering around doing nothing seemed to be heading in the same direction. On the other hand, I also had the memory of the excruciating Alien Implant (2017), which very similarly consisted of a single character alone in a cabin in the woods as her mental state deteriorated. Ty Hickson conducting alchemical experiments in a trailer in the woods Ty Hckson – maybe having sold his soul to The Devil He is joined in several scenes by his best friend Amari Cheatom – there is one particularly funny scene where Hickson dares Cheatom to eat a tin of catfood – but most of the show involves Hickson alone in the trailer and woods. For much of the running time, there is only one character present – Ty Hickson’s Sean. The whole film is shot in an abandoned trailer in the woods and the surrounding area and lake (so small it should really be called a pond). Joel Potrykus is an independent filmmaker and it goes without saying that The Alchemist Cookbook defies commercial filmmaking conventions. Although for all the title The Alchemist Cookbook and the chemistry experiments we see Ty Hickson engaged in, it is never actually clear what he is trying to achieve.
#2016 / THE ALCHEMIST COOKBOOK MANUAL#
I must admit that I was intrigued enough to watch the film by the title alone, which has clearly been intended as a play on the popular, frequently banned revolutionary manual The Anarchist Cookbook (1971) by William Powell. I had previously seen Ape at a midnight screening where it was being promoted as a cult film, although it only left me emerging from it afterwards scratching my head. Potrykus has previously made Ape (2012), Buzzard (2014) and subsequent to this Relaxer (2018), a mind-boggling masterpiece about a guy playing a videogame on a couch that defies any easy attempts to pigeonhole it.
#2016 / THE ALCHEMIST COOKBOOK MOVIE#
In a movie filled with wrongness, watching him power through a bag of Doritos is somehow the uneasiest.The Alchemist Cookbook was the third film from Michigan-based filmmaker Joel Potrykus. His efforts, while rarely pleasant to watch, give this bizarre little squiffle of a film some real fascinating impact. Here, he appears to be taking his cues from somewhere in another dimension, sporting tics and obsessive patterns that don’t land anywhere on the standard Hollywood chart of afflictions. The Alchemist Cookbook’s biggest weapon, however, proves to be Hickson, a talented actor who was downright terrific in the SIFF fave Gimmie the Loot.
With an effects budget likely ranking in the single digits, Potrykus’s film beats the recent Blair Witch revamp in making the woods a place where a Terrible Thing could be lurking behind every twig, especially-and most impressively-during the daylight. The fact that it’s often genuinely scary helps, too. Any attempt at a plot description, though, neglects the small, absorbingly bizarre bits scattered through virtually every scene. The camera keeps uncomfortably close to the main character as he works on his slowly disclosed plan, while barely tolerating the occasional visits from a semi-concerned family member (the hilarious Amari Cheatom).
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