Director Peter Fleischmann, who won international recognition 10 years ago for Hunting Scenes from Lower Bavaria, here creates an unusual science fiction/eco-disaster metaphor for a portrait of West Germany. When a mysterious plague breaks out in Hamburg, the surviving inhabitants are driven south and, not incidentally, crazy. With author Fernando Arrabal as a venomous dwarf, Berlin transvestite Romy Haag as the woman without a shadow, “Peter Fleischmann's chaotic film about chaotic events is far more stimulating, unconventional, and intelligent than its...reviews suggest.... One would probably need to be a transsexual mystic with ecological leanings not to find this colourful ruin of a film discomforting.... Fleischmann's direction is every bit as eccentric as the characters of this apocalyptic farce....” --Hans C. Blumenberg, “Die Zeit.”