Öt perc gyilkosság (Five Minutes of Murdernote ) is a 1966 Hungarian Black Comedy short created at the Pannonia Film Studio, directed by József Nepp. In the short, a sadistic director presents a film that's nothing but a string of creative murders to satisfy the audience's thirst for violence. Instead, the peace-loving viewers become so outraged that they spread the chain of killings into the real world.
The short is an absurdist meta parody of crime, spy thriller and horror films from the 1960s, featuring 44 varieties of death in a range of styles and genres, from realistic to over-the-top comical, gruesome, fantastical and even venturing into the realm of science fiction. As an example of the '60s Hungarian new-wave of animation that distanced itself from the artistic and technical achievements of past animated features, it was done in a loose, sketchy art style with very simplistic animation and minimalist background art, focusing on social satire and grotesque humor over visual appeal.
It can be viewed here
on the Hungarian National Film Archive's official Vimeo channel.
Types of murder, in order:
- Hit on the head
- Being strangled
- Blown up with a cartoon bomb
- Set on fire
- Shoved out a window
- Gutted with a knife
- Ran over by a car
- Inflated like a balloon until popping
- Cooked alive
- Drowned in a bath tub, then dissolved in acid
- Throat cut with a razor
- Accidental acid bath
- Hung by necktie
- Electrocuted to dust
- Suffocated via gas
- Locked in a Freezer
- Shot in the head by a sniper
- Buried alive
- Poisoned
- Annoyed to death by a child's scream
- Child murder committed by a candy man
- Eaten alive by a sea monster
- Crucifixion
- Scalping
- Thrown off by a horse and ground into dust
- Stoning
- Locked in a barrel sent tumbling down a cliff
- Shot by poisonous dart
- Blow dart blown back at the killer
- Die laughing from tickle torture
- Body paint that instantly solidifies
- Starved in a cage with food just out of reach
- Shot to death by rapid machine gun fire
- Knife in the back
- Heart attack from fright
- Killed via radioactive material
- Nuked until the Earth explodes
- Thrown out of space ship
- Zapped to death by an alien
- Dying from instantly transmitted disease
- Shot at point-blank
- Stabbed
- Choked
- Stabbed with an umbrella
- Etc...
Other tropes featured:
- Black Comedy: Written by József Nepp, Pannonia Studio's uncrowned king of morbid, dark satire, the whole short is about playing up the comical absurdity of messed-up deaths and murders seen in fiction.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Most of the murders, especially as the short progresses into absurdity.
- "Everybody Dies" Ending: How the director's film ends. It's implied however that this will happen in the real world too, since the film was so shocking that the audience begin killing the director and each other in disgust.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The short has nearly no plot, just a bunch of murders. Although it is technically seven minutes long, the title refers to the short within the short, in which there is indeed about five minutes between the first and last deaths.
- Genre Mashup: The fictional short starts out with simplistic and relatively realistic murders, before turning into a spoof of crime thrillers, spy films, fantasy, horror and science fiction.
- Hypocrite: The audience members at the end who berate each other for murder and vigilantism, then proceed to kill each other as punishment.
- Karmic Death: Nearly all deaths, as one murderer promptly gets killed by the next in line.
- Minimalism: The short demonstrates the basics of the 1960s Hungarian animation new-wave. Everything is as rudimentary as possible, the animation is composed of crude scribbles, there are no backgrounds unless necessary (at one point, the ground simply vanishes between frames because it was no longer needed), and colors are barely used.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The horrific events are accompanied by a cheery jazz score.
