Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
"Sberné surovosti" or "The Junk Shop" is a black-and-white short film from 1965, so this one is already over half a century old and it was the first effort as writer and director for Juraj Herz who was around the age of 30 here, even if he acted in other projects before, but not in here apparently. This one he came up with together with writer Bohumil Hrabal and you can see the location where great portions of this film take place in the title. I personally thought some of the characters were fun to watch here, but still overall the writing did not impress me as this was mostly thanks to the actors' gimmicks and occasionally also through situational comedy. But great performances or genuinely funny scenes you probably won't find in this over half an hour. Maybe fewer characters could also have been the better choice with more proper elaboration then on those in the center. A plot is hardly existent here as it feels like it's all about the strange situations and not really about character development. The dialogues most of the time did not do too much for me either, sometimes the jokes were overdone too. All in all, I would say the first half for this one was a bit better than the second half, but the weak is more frequent than the strong and I have to give this early effort by (Czecho-)Slovakian filmmaker Herz, who later on also worked here in Germany, a negative recommendation and a thumbs-down. Pity. I thought I'd enjoy this more.
