5/5 A Gift
  by Peter H. Reynolds (Boston, MA USA)
This is a rare treat. I waited a long time to see this once more. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder are a fantastic duo. This tops "The Producers."

5/5 Is that a horn on your nose or are you just happy to see me?
  by Thomas J. Bradley (Guilderland, NY United States)
Remember how in junior high science class taught you black is the absence of all color while white is the presence of all color. It never had any logic but I accepted it, although math class made it tough with negatives and positives (so far so good) and zero, the presence of nothing. Huh!

Well this film proved Zero is everything. Zero Mostel turns into a rhinoceros right before your eyes in a twenty five minute scene. Watch that about ten times. The first time just watch it, the second time watch Gene Wilder, who is perfect as the straight man, but who is so unaware of what's coming next, you can catch him grinning. The other eight time, realize there are no special effects and that Zero is like the careers of the entire silent era comedy people, plus Harpo Marx and Harry Ritz, condensed into less than a half hour.

This is not to put down the rest of the movie, although it is honest to say it is about on a par with television and movie rhinoceros fare of the fifties through eighties. Shows like My Mother the Rhinoceros, Rhinoceros Island, R*H*I*N*O (The movie version of medics in Korea, not the television show), Rhinoanza, 2001: Great Horned One and Five Brides for Six Rhinos.

Zero is something I have never seen before.

1/5 dreadful
  by J. Flynn (Los Angeles, Ca)
This is a dreadful film which shows little understanding of the playwrights original intention and particularly the humor inherent in the original script. Instead the director and cast go for mugging, pratfalls and a wild and now hopelessly outdated "60's" feeling -





2/5 Disappointing
  by RSMM (Boston, MA, USA)
One would think that the combination of Eugene Ionesco, Zero Mostel, and Gene Wilder would be a guaranteed success. Sadly, such is not the case with the American Film Theatre production of "Rhinoceros" as committed to film in 1974. While the theme of maintaining one's identity as everyone else goes along with the herd (originally a metaphor for Nazism, McCarthyism, etc.) is intact, Ionesco's text has been so altered that is is destroyed. Here it becomes subject to slapstick, poor unfunny added situations, exaggerated performances, and clumsy direction. The film has been criticized for "staginess," but that is not the real problem. It makes use of camera movement, external sets, etc.; it just has no rhythm. It is a trial to get through it--certainly not the case with Ionesco's original, either on stage or as read to one's self. Gene Wilder is always diverting but the character he portrays has been so tampered with that it's just unpleasant and tedious. Karen Black's character is an embarrassment as are all the other minor characters. The only bright spot in this mess is Zero Mostel, whose fifteen minutes on screen are amazing, his transformation from a dandified fussbudget into a destructive rhinoceros an acting tour-de-force; done without makeup, it encapsulates the essence of the piece. But that's it: the other ninety minutes are dreary and awful.

The DVD is very well transferred, but the extras are disappointing: e.g., an "interview" with Zero Mostel is simply text to be read frame by frame, and an article about Ionesco and the play is simply an on-screen text repetition of the liner notes. There is a very long interview with the director, in murky sound; after seeing his incompetence demonstrated in this film, no one will have any desire to see him drone on about it.

5/5 Misunderstood Classic!
  by Stephen Wilson-Floyd (Minneapolis, MN United States)
I first saw this adaptation in a college film class and have been trying to get a VHS or DVD since. Yes, it is supposed to be funny, but funny odd not funny ha-ha. Absurdist theater takes normal behaviors and exaggerates them so we see how weirdly we act and how distorted our values sometimes are. The character Zero Mostel plays is fastidious in his morals and attire, but even he changes. The character Gene Wilder plays resists to the end, but has to admit the sound of a rhinoceros is stranglely compelling. Are our civilized behaviors just neurotic expression or are we really superior to animals? Oh, by the way, I do find this movie ha-ha funny. But maybe it's a matter of taste.