Wave Twisters

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USA • 2001 • 46m •

• Directed by: Syd Garon, Eric Henry. • Starring: DJ Q-Bert, D-Styles, Flare, Buckethead, Riche-Van Desuasido, DJ Flare. • Music by: DJ Q-Bert.

A crew of heroes, cleverly disguised as a team of oral hygenists, is determined to save the lost arts of Hip Hop (B-boying, Graffiti, MCing, and of course, Skratching) from total extinction. The lost arts are being oppressed throughout inner-space by lord Ook and his evil minions the Chinheads. The dental commander and his team, armed with the ancient relic known as the Wave Twister (the only weapon powerful enough to defeat the enemies), travel to the far ends of inner-space for a final confrontation with the sinister army of oppressors.

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Trailer #1

1:13

Trailer #2

1:05

Review:

A group of space dentists get drawn into an intergalactic war over the power of old school hip-hop as represented by the Wave Twister device, which they have in their possession but a villain known as the Red Worm wishes to seize before it is used to defeat him. No, really.

This film opens with graphically animated dental work being carried out on a variety of weirdly twisted creatures in a space ship by a blue dentist, and visually it gets weirder from that point onwards. This is the film version of the album from DJ Q-Bert which is all electronic beats and scratching -' lots and lots of scratching to mix together all sorts of sounds and clips. I stress this because this is a film that will either appeal to you or not, I really don't see how there is a middle-ground here for someone to say "yeah, twas OK I guess". The key appeal here will be to older hip-hop fans who love the b-boy side of the genre, with scratching, graffiti art and so on; I won't pretend to be able to do any of that (and I would look daft if I tried) but I do enjoy it as a culture and audibly is where this film worked for me. The music is quite brilliant from start to finish and it just makes it more impressive that we have the artists themselves scratching within the film -' those who think there is no skill to this should really watch them in actual while hearing the results.

The music is sort of folded into the main story which is weird just describing it, but really transcends weirdness when you actually see how it is delivered. As a fan of some Adult Swim shows, I am not unaccustomed to odd animation but this really is something else; indeed this film is probably what Adult Swim animators watch when it is their turn to get high and watch cartoons. It is very odd indeed and it did take me a minute not to hate it for the visuals (especially the dentistry) but quickly the strength of the music and how well the two fold into one another makes it work surprisingly well, albeit in spite of itself. The mention of Adult Swim is relevant though because it is worth noting that this film was released in 2001 -' over a decade ago, but yet this style of animation (and its weird excesses) is something that feels much more modern and new and as such Wave Twisters can be considered to be ahead of its time in terms of what it did. It is no less weird for being influential, but for sure it deserves to be discussed in those terms.

For me, this was a great film despite being one that visually incredibly weird and often uncomfortable to watch. Those that hate hip-hop (or who think hip-hop is what plays on commercial top 40 radio) will struggle with it for sure, but for those into scratching and others b-boy aspects of the genre, this is a brilliant animation that you need to see.

Review by bob the moo from the Internet Movie Database.