The Nut-crack-up? Creature from Swamp Lake?

Rating: 8/10 (27 January 2011)

SHE'S CRACKING UP screams the poster for this jaw dropping new film which just might be the cinema world's very first horror ballet movie. In Australia we have a poster of porcelain beauty Natalie Portman with a big plaster crack from her jaw to her brain. Subtle it is not. A bit like the mad dolly toy that rattled from under the bed in a Pixar 'toon. This film, with especially hilarious moments for the slow learners in the audience to know that SHE'S CRACKING UP plays it like a mix of a Joan Crawford 60s shocker like STRAIGHT JACKET or BERSERK except that in BLACK SWAN we get THE (blood) RED SHOES as if played by Audrey Hepburn still in WAIT UNTIL DARK mode. While not quite the lurid standard of 60s guignol tabloid mania we sure are in the same league for some of the way. Hilarious and tingling scenes abound eg: Mommy Dearest played by Barbara Hershey, and especially the headless legless ballerina toy still twirling away on the music box to the off key deranged tinkling music. Mix in some sexual ALL ABOUT EVE understudy antics, add some FORTY SECOND STREET rehearsal calamities with the director berating the fragile star, pepper in some WAIT UNTIL DARK apartment creepiness, even 70s hi art junk like EYES OF LAURA MARS and voilà: Natalie Portman looking like Audrey Hepburn in a Crawford-esque shocker pirouetting The Red Shoes for good measure: and serve it up with murky colorless digicam wobble vision with too many close-up stalker-vision moments. The BLACK SWAN even has her sprout a few feathers and smash a mirror and show us blood that might not be there. While not quite the female answer to NORMAN BATES ON ROLLER SKATES we are however in spinning madness territory, sort of a ballet-horror RED RIDING HOOD parable: first period for a virgin mental anguish, and the discarding of girlhood playthings (see the stuffed bed toys get shoved in the furnace) ... BLACK SWAN is no doubt a startling and hilarious ballet film about overwhelming pressure to get laid to become a temptress so you can dance properly in a black tutu. How Euro-horror can we get here? I expected to find this was secretly directed by the ghost of Mario Bava. THE CREATURE FRIOM THE BLACK LAGOON and BLACK SWAN have a lot in common........ BLACK SWAN delivers and the swirling marsh madness of our little horny ballerina stepping up (and out of her mind) to deliver the performance of a life time makes for a real horror movie leaping about on tippy toes while you sit there bug eyed at the sheer lurching hallucination of it all. Maybe it is meant to be funny. You should see BURLESQUE as a chaser, it is almost the same but knows it is silly. All BLACK SWAN needed was some torn fishnet stockings and BURLESQUE SWAN could easily be ready to go.