Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Okay, if you’ve gone over the 2012 Ohio Independent Film
Festival program by now you are probably thinking that MURGO KENO MUTANT ("Attack of the Killer Mutant Chickens") is
some sort of prank announcment; a Bangladeshi short about martial-arts chefs battling a
flock of deadly chickens ravaging the future Bangladesh . What is this thing?
First of all, for those of you unfamiliar with world geography (those whose map
of the world probably just shows a large “DOWNTOWN CLEVELAND CASINO” landmass
and not much else), Bangladesh
is a small, rather impoverished country adjacent to India . No, the United States
is not at war with them as yet.
I think MURGO KENO MUTANT might be the first piece of
Bangladeshi cinema I’ve ever beheld, and while it is probably not
representative, all I can say is...wow!
First, know that it is a cartoon. Simple-but-slick
animation – not live action. Sorry if you were expecting, I dunno, a Punjabi/Hindi-language
version of the Troma gore-comedy POULTRYGEIST. Filmmaker Nayeem Mahbub and
company render the material in a neat, CGI-assisted echo of the “Filmation”
type Saturday TV action-adventure cartoons of yesteryear (you can tell how I
wasted my youth instead of learning junior auto repair or something maketable,
dammit).
Setting is indeed a Bangladesh under siege from
chickens. The popular food
fowls have turned rogue and now hunt humans. Even so, people still enjoy their
chicken kebabs and capons, so a super-hero-ish trio of chefs at a greasy spoon
occasionally go after the angry birds with heavy weapons and kung-fu skills.
After one big chicken firefight a lone surviving rooster happens to get
irradiated by a meteorite. He becames a giant ALIEN-PREDATOR level
super-chicken, mates with a hen (a very funny “Bollywood” musical interlude)
and raises an army of man-sized chicken warriors to take revenge on the
super-chefs. But it’s okay, as the humans observe that bigger chickens, even
mutant killer ones, translate into more meat for their customers.
You’re probably wondering if this is shrill animal-rights
propaganda. While I’ won’t dissuade anyone from going vegetarian, I’m actually
given to understand the filmmakers did this as a comical response to the
bird-flu scare, as big in Bangladesh as in anywhere else. So it’s just a lark,
of as much import as that running giant-chicken fistfight that’s become a
recurring gag on “Family Guy.” But Nayeem Mahbub’s film is a funny one, and one
quarter-of-an-hour not soon forgotten. (3 out of 4 stars)
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