Caligari's Cure is the first narrative film of veteran Chicago independent filmmaker Tom Palazzolo, whose energetic underground documentaries (Love It/Leave It, Enjoy Yourself, It's Later Than You Think, Ricky and Rocky, etc.) capture America as an absurd human comedy. Caligari's Cure is loosely conceived as a remake of Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; described as a “neo-expressionist autobiography,” it falls somewhere between comedy and horror. Village Voice reviewer J. Hoberman writes: “(T)he difficulty with which an adult represents his own childhood--let alone another's--is the running gag of Tom Palazzolo's Caligari's Cure. In Palazzolo's cosmos, the kids are even played by grownups; he's recast incidents from his Catholic midwestern working-class boyhood with personnel recruited from the Chicago Art Institute.... The brazen, comic-book mise-en-scène resembles that of Red Grooms or the Kuchars; the tacky, off-kilter sets--houses as ostentatiously ramshackled as Frank Stella's recent sculpture, wallpaper like Lucas Samaras's quilt-shard collages, decrepit furniture painted pale pink or dusty green--are a kind of arty-idiot Toonerville Trolley Americana.”