Swirlee is a short film about a sad man who just wants to be like everybody else, but he can’t—because he’s made of ice cream. Swirlee is a wild, one of a kind film that’s darkly delicious. Writer Chris Gore summed up the indie short nicely: “Swirlee is like Goodfellas meets The Elephant Man by way of Edward Scissorhands.” The fifteen-minute movie was meant to be just a cog in a larger project, but now stands as a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been.
Swirlee was the brainchild of actor James Lorinz. He’s appeared in such cult classics as Street Trash (1987) and Frankenhooker (1990), in which he had the lead role. His resume also includes an episode from the first season of NYPD Blue, which starred friend David Caruso. Lorinz wrote a rough draft of the unconventional Swirlee when he was a film student at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. But the idea had come to him much earlier.
I remember always waiting for Mister Softee to come down the block, and the truck would come and you’d see his cartoon face and you’d think, “What if this guy was alive? What would it be like?” (from Cheap Scares!: Low Budget Horror Filmmakers Share Their Secrets)
A fellow student was cast as the lead, but the project failed to get off the ground. Lorinz envisioned a film that would have the realism of Raging Bull, but be a black comedy. He wanted audiences to take the Swirlee character seriously—after the initial shock of seeing a man with an ice cream cone for a head.
I wanted to do a story about a guy who wasn’t totally human, but I would make the audience accept him through the urbane relationships he has with the various characters. I would put in elements of exploitation that would appeal to distributors (making it a gangster picture with violence and sex), but I would retain the very human story about this poor deformed guy. In other words, if I can get the audience to accept the image of the ice cream cone within five minutes, and to understand the kind of story it’s going to be, then it won’t be a gimmick, and the story will play out as drama, which makes it funny. (from The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made)
“Try me, I’m delicious.”
In this world, Swirlee was born made of ice cream because his mother took a flawed drug called “Nodropinem.” An unknown side effect of the medication was a baby that is the manifestation of any food the mother craved during pregnancy.
More ‘Swirlee,’ after the jump…
