Kin-Dza-Dza (2 DVDs Set) [LANGUAGE: ENGLISH, FRENCH; SUBTITLES: ENGLISH, FRENCH, SPANISH, ITALIAN, GERMAN] [ NTSC ] [ ALL REGION ]

Lucky for me I found this movie on Amazon Prime. It is one of those classics like "Rocky Horror Picture Show", "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" or "American Graffiti" that you want to watch time and time again. Hurry and get Prime so you can watch this one twenty times!I won't try to explain the languages. The movie is mostly in Russian, some Georgian, and with English subtitles. There is also the language of the planet Pluke, which consists of two words. "Kyu" which is an obscene word for everything bad and "Koo" which means everything else. The viewer should turn on the English subtitles and press on.The plot is weird. A middle aged Russian "Uncle Vovo" goes out for a loaf of bread and noodles and meets a Georgian student "The Violinist". They try to help a barefoot stranger and get accidentally sent to the planet Pluke, where they find that they both test positive on an electronic test as being members of the slave class "Patsaks". Then they meet two improbable characters, a fellow Patsak and a "Chatlian" or member of the ruling class. Patsaks have to wear bells in their noses and Chatlians get to wear cool hats. Their Chatlian friend's hat looks something like I'd imagine a Russian jock strap to be.The two aliens promise to take them back to earth if they can help them obtain a device which will turn their non-working space ship into a working one. The price? Matches, which turn out to be more valuable than gold on this weird desert planet.Throw in the points that the space aliens can read minds but nobody ever thinks the truth, the Patsaks have to stay in cages and sing for a living, water is distilled from rocket fuel and everybody has to curtsey for anyone wearing yellow pants, curtsey more for pink pants wearers. Cops wear blinking lights on their heads and there is another planet where any Plukian gets automatically turned into a cactus.And it gets better.The music is, in a word, horrible: consisting of Uncle Vovo playing a violin out of tune and all of the actors singing out of tune - with Patzacs in cages of course. So Rocky Horror Picture Show will still need to be on your list. There is no ultra violence and there is no Russian who could top Eli Wallach's performance so you'll still have to keep watching "The Good the Bad and the Ugly", no romance to speak of, so of course you'll have to keep watching "American Graffiti". But for everything else satirical and just plain funny, this is the show.

I originally saw this movie in Russia while visiting a friend. I know some Russian, but not nearly enough to follow a movie like this -- but it didn't matter. I was captivated by the sheer unusualness (is that a word?) of it. It struck me as a cult classic even then. (For those who have ever seen the Monitors, it has the same sort of bizzaro aliens movie with weird, impossible-to-predict twists.) The odd visuals were made even more captivating to me by the bits of Russian I could understand.Not long ago I bought the DVD with subtitles, and it was hugely entertaining. It obviously filled in all the gaps of my limited understanding when I saw it the first time, and I got to focus on aspects of the movie I missed the first time around. It gives a glimpse at parts of Russian culture that are different from American culture -- for example, the prevalent use of matches rather than lighters, going up to complete strangers and asking for help in a non-panhandling manner being not so unusual, stubbornness, and a person's circumstantial sense of obligation to someone he barely knows.The story involves two Russians (well, a Russian and a Georgian) who encounter someone who says he's from a different galaxy and is trying to find his way back home. Unfortunately for him, he just looks like a normal shoe-less homeless person, until his gizmo accidentally sends the two Russians to the middle of a dessert... that turns out to be on an alien planet. The rest of the movie centers around their attempts to get home, and includes subplots like the monetary value of matches, stone-age space technology, multilingual telepathy and an extremely limited spoken vocabulary, unusual keys to social structure, and my personal favorite, the primary means of raising money on the planet's surface being impromptu concerts of questionable quality. People who like Danny DeVito should get a kick out of his Russian equivalent, Evgenniy Leonov, the "Chetlanin" who bosses around the "Patsak" (the category in which our hapless Russians find themselves).Whether you are a fan of sci-fi, foreign-language films, have a Python-esque sense of humor, or just like weird movies, Kin-Dza-Dza is a worthy investment.

I've seen this movie many, many times. First time was in a theater, back in the USSR in 1986. It's one my early exposures to science fiction, and had a major impact on my world view, and love for science fiction.The story is funny, tragic, and suspenseful at times. Deals with your understanding about the world, class and racial discrimination, authority, and abuse of power.I'm lucky that I've spoken Russian since I was a child. The dialogue has many nuances that would be picked up by a native of the Soviet Union or from some of the former sates. Unfortunately it is lost in the subtitles in modern translation 22 years after the movie releaseTake for instance "Patzak" is jumbled up from "katsap", an ethnic slur. "Etsilop" Is jumbled up "Politse" police. So, on planet Pluke, "patzak" has to be subservient, and they all are afraid of the "etsilops" beating them up. Racism and police brutality.Mr PG, the leader of planet Pluke, is a joke, because they were making fun of the Premier General of the Soviet Union. There are so many cultural references, many had to be hidden from the censorship in the USSR at the time.