"Cane Toads: The Conquest 3D" Los Angeles Film Festival Review

I was telling you about this brilliant mock-documentary some time ago, and now guys over at Collider had a chance to see the film in its 3D glory at LA Film Festival.

Here is their review. :-)

Cane Toads: The Conquest 3D Review

Director Mark Lewis has a made a career out of directing odd and quirky documentaries that center around animals. He’s directed documentaries about rats, chickens, cattle shows, and ferrets. In his latest film, Cane Toads: The Conquest 3D, the director returns to a subject which he explored previously in 1988 with Cane Toads: An Unnatural History. In that film, Lewis told the story of the cane toad and how it was taking over Australia. The toad had been brought into the country with hopes that it would eliminate a pesky bug which was ruining the countries sugar plantations. The cane toad failed at doing that job and instead began to multiply by the hundreds and began to spread around the country at a incredibly fast pace.

Cane Toads: The Conquest picks up decades later from where Lewis last left off. The cane toad has now spread all over Australia with 1.5 billion toads hopping around and the number just keeps on getting higher. Lewis not only revisits this odd bit of history and how it’s affecting Australia, but he also spends most of the film documenting the colorful characters that have been affected by these toads as well.

What Lewis has made is not a scientific nature documentary, but instead a deadpan comedy which just happens to be a nature documentary. From its opening scene set “million of years ago” that ends with a giant cane toad starring you down before rushing at you while the screen cuts to black and its title card appears in the most dramatic fashion, it’s clear that Lewis isn’t taking this subject too seriously and just wants to have fun.

Thankfully, the rest of the film is filled with scenes like this. There are dramatic inserts of toads spliced into archival footage, a scene depicting an acid trip as experienced by a dog after licking a toad, and a sequence showing an art piece done by a man who decided to pose all of his dead stuffed toads reenacting a wrestling scene and a car accident. All of these scenes and a lot of other ones are done in such a serious manner that you can’t help but laugh.

If the documentary wasn’t fun enough by itself, the 3D surely helps. Lewis constantly decides to use 3D to his advantage by creating a number of scenes which show the beauty of Australia, but shows the depth and distance of all of the scenery by placing a toad in the forefront. Plus, the acid trip as seen from a dog’s perspective is also something great to see in 3D. If you’re able to not take anything in the documentary too seriously and see it as a comedy, then Cane Toads: The Conquest really is a surprising amount of fun and I recommend you seek it out if it comes by your town.

Can't wait to see it! :-)