Dad, Lenin And Freddy

Her older sister was born on Lenin's Birthday, 1978. She was born on the 10th December, a date she shares with "no one famous"*. Her older sister has tried to kill her three times, but now she has a more pressing goal - a mystery, in fact - her father has been disappearing, and she believes that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and, er, Freddy Kreuger are responsible.

Ably invoking a very specific time and place - the household of a senior apparatchik in a Greek Communist Party during the fall of the Soviet Union - this is an entertaining if occasionally anachronistic slice of silliness. It has some very neat touches - the copy of A Nightmare On Elm Street that she watches when abandoned on her big sister's boyfriend's sofa is a cunning reconstruction. There are other neat moments, a glowing bust of Lenin, her surveillance diary, the presents she's brought from a sudden trip to Moscow, but then an almost inevitable strobe sequence, the bane of short film.

Rinio Dragasaki's direction is neatly done - the film within a film manages to look not only like A Nightmare On Elm Street but like what one remembers of that film. The juxtaposition of Kreuger and the Cold War is somewhat reminiscent of the South Park episode Insheeption, but these are very different entities. While both are playing for laughs, this is pushing more towards nostalgia - there's a slice of early Nineties eurotechno that's genuinely ridiculous, not because it's so awful but because it's so amazingly stereotypical that your reviewer assumed it was a parody. However, Asi Me Gusta A Mi is a real thing, and worth finding. In another scenes- a call for silence for a speech from Gorbachev is just on the right side of absurd.

Avra Vordonoraki, almost lost beneath a big black fringe, is charming in the lead, her harried father, Yannis Tsortekis, all careful glances at the television and comradely concern. Christos Karamanis' cinematography is good, the highlight being the reconstructed video artifacts on that much played copy of the film that's not quite A Nightmare On Elm Street.

For all its good moments, the film never feels truly cohesive. If we assume Lenin is thesis, Krueger antithesis, the synthesis that emerges is disjointed. It's entertaining enough but, with a notion quite as unhinged as this, it never quite manages to live up to the promise in its title.

* Discounting Ada Lovelace, of course, and Emily Dickinson.