2. A group of inmates rebel against those in charge of an institution on an island. They go wild smashing stuff up, starting fires, and slaughtering animals.
Which Werner Herzog film (released in 1970) is this?
From Quiz What's in a Title? The Films of Werner Herzog
Answer:
Even Dwarfs Started Small
"Even Dwarfs Started Small" is Herzog's grotesque vision of a world where everything is out of proportion for its inhabitants (who are all dwarfs), making even the simplest of household objects, or routine actions, become dreadfully gruelling.
"Even Dwarfs Started Small" was Herzog's second feature film to be released and was filmed just after "Fata Morgana", a quasi-documentary feature shot in the Sahara. When talking about the two films Herzog admits a great deal of overlap and overspill. Herzog has said that there isn't a crystal clear line between his documentary films and his fictional feature films, and the viewer does get the impression that on "Even Dwarfs Started Small" Herzog's direction is very much about setting up scenarios and then filming what happens.
The film was shot on the volcanic island of Lanzarote and Herzog includes footage taken ad hoc of a group of cannibalistic chickens, something not in the screenplay, but which fits his ethos that "there is something ultimately wrong in creation itself...not a very optimistic view of mother nature." A whole host of animals feature in the film, sometimes involved in scenes that got the goat of animal rights activists who condemned the film. Actually, Herzog was almost unilaterally blasted for the film, managing to outrage everybody from extreme leftists to white supremacists via religious moralist lobbyists.
"Even Dwarfs Started Small" is gloomy, pessimistic, apocalyptic and terrifying, but the human warmth generated by the dwarfs ecstatic pleasure in wreaking havoc and the continuous laughter make it hysterically funny.
About the red herrings (all 1970): "Rabbit, Run" is a film based on the novel by John Updike; "And God Said to Cain" is a spaghetti western starring Herzog's future collaborator Klaus Kinski, and "Beneath Planet of the Apes" is the sequel to "Planet of the Apes".