Cowards Bend the Knee (2005)

The plot of Cowards Bend the Knee in brief: A hockey player ditches his girlfriend (who then expires but comes back later as a ghost) for a seductress who gets a doctor to replace his hands (but he only pretends to) with her dead father's so she can avenge her pa who was murdered by her ma and her ma's lover. Loopy stuff put across by defiantly skuzzy, expressionist black-and-white Super 8, whiplash editing, and pulpy intertitles like ''Beauty salon by day...Bordello by night.'' EXTRAS In a quip-laced commentary (''No one drops dead like a ballet dancer''), director-writer-cinematographer Guy Maddin claims this jampacked melodrama is ''hugely autobiographical'' — minus the amputated hands bit, which came to him in a dream— — ith nods to Euripides, Turgenev, Fritz Lang, and Lon Chaney. The disc also includes a peek at his next opus, The Brand Upon the Brain!, which looks similarly strange and

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