[Film Review] Night of the Living Dicks at the Fantasia International Film Festival is a Fun Horror-Comedy About Misogyny

There's a lot of dicks in the Night of the Living Dicks (2021). They come in all shades and sizes: the harassers, the hateful, the patriarchal, the underhanded, the blowhards, and the worst of the worst—the fake 'nice guy.' 

I expected the Finnish Night of the Living Dicks, a 19 minute short directed by Ilja Rautsi, to be a funny sketch parody of Night of the Living Dead, where zombie dicks rose from the graves to terrify people, but it's wonderfully different. Instead, it's a horror-comedy about dick pics and the horror of receiving them, but more than that, it's about the horror of misogyny. 

Night of the Living Dicks is exceptionally well-made with lots of body gore. It opens with Venla confronting the man who sent her a dick pick in an interview at a newsroom. She later finds a pair of glasses that allows her to see men with dicks for heads, so she sees them for who they really are, not who they pretend to be. 

But it's not just men; it's women too. Women can be just as misogynistic as men, sometimes more. Venla sees her friend, a pick-me girl (a woman who seeks approval and validation from men), as a gaping vagina, splitting open at the seams, a horrid split hole begging for attention and clout from disingenuous men, even if that means throwing other people under the bus.

Night of the Living Dicks echoes the original Night of the Living Dead, in that it is shot in black and white, but dick-headed men drag about the streets, oozing biased hatred like organic matter. The filmmakers spent a lot of care and money on the dick-heads, which periodically explode, SPLAT.

The joke in Night of the Living Dicks is a physical one—most (all?) of the men have dick-heads, even the 'nice guy,' in fact, the one nice guy in Night of the Living Dicks struggles with his own dick-head, he tries hard not to be a dickhead, but he can't help himself. He later leads us to the monster dickhead, and his clique of dicks, the dickest of the dicks. 

Yes, it's horrifying; but we can laugh at the dicks, and their owners, we can laugh at them, and that's what makes Night of the Living Dicks so good. The short examines misogyny with comedy and through horror while also exploring what it means to have cishet white male privilege and to be oblivious to it, or worse, enjoying privilege because it gives you a competitive advantage.

Night of the Living Dicks is one long dick joke written and directed by Ilja Rautsi, and it's glorious. His screenplay, "Hatching," directed by Hanna Bergholm, a body horror film, was picked up by IFC Midnight and will premiere in 2021.

Night of the Living Dicks, is screening at The Fantasia International Film Festival, as part of their Botanicum Eroticorum short film selection.

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