Weird and matter of fact, gory and yet sweet, The Flesh People has a unique vibe, mixing satire and gonzo comedy, a touch of Mel Brooks – Young Frankenstein era – with hallucinogenic fancy, and a strange, odd-couple pairing at its centre that’s inspired in terms of casting and playing.
It’s the bizarro adventure of two people thrown together by economic circumstance. Ricky (Jorge Carrión Álvarez) is a failed medical student who moves in with Geraldine (Louise Heller), an actress whose glory days at the very fringes of Broadway are long behind her and who now survives by letting out a room in her filthy New York apartment. Now, in her anecdotage, Geraldine spends her days bending the ear of anyone within listening distance, huffing paint and ingesting whatever drugs are available. Which suits Ricky, who’s majorly into Vicodin, or whatever else he can score from the hospital where he still works in some capacity.
Together, these two deadbeats embark on an odyssey, in a doomed, self-deluding attempt to become useful members of society. At one point they take powerful hallucinogens together. At another Ricky removes one of Geraldine’s kidney’s in an operation done on the kitchen floor. Eventually they decide that what the world really needs more of is cannibalism and so they open a fast-food kitchen.
It’s dark and it’s funny, druggy and deadpan, with reality left far behind quite early on. Writer/director Keshav Srinivasan appears to be taking as his starting point the atmosphere of dirty old New York in 1980s indie shockers like Basket Case or Maniac and seeing how far he can push it. At least warns us – the film opens with images of blood and mayhem, and someone’s hand rootling about inside a human body (it turns out that this is the kidney operation). We cannot say Srinavasan hasn’t told us how things are likely going to go.
Talking of hands, this is mostly a two-hander, with Álvarez playing Ricky as if he were auditioning to be Kieran Culkin’s stand-in – wry, smart and passive-aggressive diffident. Heller’s Geraldine (who once played Henry V, don’t you know, though pissed herself while doing so) is an inspired character – the theatrical Withnail to Ricky’s frequently appalled I (her druggie cocktail “the osteopath’s nightmare” seems like something from the mind of Bruce Robinson) or a mercurial Nurse Rached, one second savage, the next sweet.
This is a low-budget production and usually that shows up in the acting more than anything else. That’s absolutely not the case with the two stars, who are 90 per cent of the movie. Both fizz with performative energy, individually and collaboratively. The only other significant characters are two garrulous cops (Len Bellezza, Steve Gamble) who come looking for persons missing (and now fricaseed). And Clarence (Johnny Zito), a hotdog seller who gets aerated when Ricky and Geraldine open their fast-food operation, presenting him with stiff competition. He’s obviously going to have to go too, and so, probably, is his blameless daughter, Sally (Stephanie Orta-Vázquez).
It could probably be tightened up a bit, but Srinavasan is making a point about people who don’t know when enough is enough. And there is the ever-present problem of all gonzo movies – once everyday logic is left behind so is any real sense of jeopardy. Gonzo is low stakes. I vastly enjoyed it, as a demonstration of acting bravura by Álvarez and Heller, and of wild imaginative fancy by Srinivasan, who has been hawking this film around the festivals, where it’s been picking up awards and doing really well. And so it should.
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
