妻子和她的学生

　　火、水、风、土、和空气，生命五种核心元素曾经注入在一本书--命运之书。黑暗笼罩了大地，需要借助笔和书的力量，但这本书却失踪了，人们以为它永远消失了，但数百年后却又再度出现……

　　西部荒野，住着麦克林夫妇——伊萨克（阿什利·祖克曼 Ashley Zukerman 饰）和莉兹（凯特琳·杰拉德 Caitlin Gerard 饰）。这里条件艰苦，环境恶劣，人烟稀少，野兽横行。莫大的孤寂令莉兹时常警惕地环视四周，防备一切可能的危险。某天，哈普尔夫妇——吉迪恩（迪伦·麦蒂 Dylan McTee 饰）和艾玛（茱莉亚·古丹妮·泰勒斯 Julia Goldani Telles 饰）搬到了麦克林家附近，成为他们的邻居。两家人很快就成了好朋友，特别是莉兹有了艾玛这个好姐妹，似乎心理也正常了许多。　　好景不长，某晚艾玛的情况变得很糟糕，她担心神秘的存在将危及她的孩子。荒野大风卷起，乌云密布……

　　Set in an underground dungeon inhabited by bundled, ragged human beings, after the nuclear holocaust. The story follows the wanderings of a hero through the situations of survival. People wait for the Ark to arrive and rescue them while their habitat falls apart.　　Delving deep into the dusty and long abandonded vaults of b-cinema in search of lost gems always leaves me with a bittersweet taste. On one hand the discovery of unexpected gems where no one would think them possible is a rewarding experience. On the other hand though it makes one wonder how many of these remarkable low-budget oddities, personal love affairs of directors never quite famous and now all but forgotten, have almost forever slipped from memory?　　n any case what we have here is a little post-apocalyptic gem from Poland that is really better than it has any right to. The dystopian near future of O-BI, O-BA finds a group of survivors of the nuclear war that ravaged the Earth inhabiting an underworld concrete bunker and biding their time as they wait for the mysterious Ark, an air ship of some kind that will come and save them. The Ark proves to be an elaborate hoax, carefully designed to give hope to the malnourished and desperate denizens of the bunker, while in the meantime the dome that separates their miserable existence from the nuclear winter outside is slowly caving in.　　What first striked me about the movie is the design of the bunker and the depiction of the survivors. The survivors are gaunt, filthy and terrible-looking penitents, dressed in rags and aimlessly wandering the neon-lit halls of the bunker like automatons. The bunker is a rundown, seedy place, with bright neon lights peering from all sides like the eyes of malignant beasts.　　On one hand it is a slightly 80's depiction of the dystopian future but the movie never stoops down to MAD MAX cheese. Instead it combines biting political satire with the bleak outlook of a world with no future, black comedy with barbs on apathy, religion and power. The survivors, for example, are fed some kind of flour dropping from a tube that hovers in the air - later on we discover the food supervisor uses books and the Bible itself as filler for this meagre meal. There are many such short symbolic touches, perhaps not life-changing or faith-restoring, yet playful, clever and inspired.　　One thing is for sure; O-BI, O-BA is not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi schlock. It overcomes its modest budget with creativity and has genuine artistic aspirations both from a writing and directing perspective. My opinion is that it should have been filmed in black and white instead of colour though. The director uses atmospheric light and shadow to great effect and it would have registered even better in stark black and white. The blue-green neon on the other hand outstays its welcome after a while. Just a minor gripe in an otherwise solid b-movie with its heart set in all the right places.　　Imagine a less bleak THE ROAD (Cormac McCarthy) being injected with the satire and humour of DR.STRANGELOVE and you're getting there. See it if you can find it.

 Dorothy, now an elderly woman haunted by her past, tries to warn her granddaughter Emily before dark forces pull her into Oz, a once familiar land now twisted by horrors.