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Now admittedly, if a movie has a title like "The Creeping
Garden", you'd expect some sci-fi/horror blend, something along the
lines of Day of the Triffids
- and you'll probably be disappointed at first that it's just a
documentary about a certain kind of fungus ... but on closer look, the
thing's actually quite a bit closer to the realm of sci-fi/horror than
first suspected, as it's about a certain kind of plasmodial slime mould
that's actually able to not only grow like a plant but also (even if at a
very slow pace) move like an animal, and that's able to react to certain
stimuli (again, only very slowly). Now in the grander scheme of nature,
this slime mould might be rather insignificant, but there are persons from
all fields of arts and science that are strongly fascinated by this, from
mycologists to fringe scientists, from hobby botanists to musicians, from
visual artists to experts in robotics, from dreamers to conspiracy
theorists ... Now granted, to anyone seriously researching the
nature of plasmodial slime moulds, this documentary will (most probably,
I'm no biologist) offer nothing new, at best a nice distraction - but
that's not what the film has set out to achieve in the first place,
instead it is about the fascination with the subject matter rather than
the actual thing, it allows its interviewees to go off into science
fiction-based direction, celebrates some of the wilder ideas - and
ultimately the film will make one smile and want to learn more about slime
moulds at the same time. And frankly, even if The Creeping Garden might
not be a sci-fi/horror hybrid per se, the information given might inspire
quite a few nightmares at least ...
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