Directed by Guy Maddin. Narrated by Isabella Rossellini. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, June 8, at the Vancity Theatre

Whatever else it might be, Brand Upon the Brain! is definitely not your standard autobiographical motion picture. Although the protagonist is named Guy Maddin, like the film’s director-cowriter, it is a matter of historical record that Winnipeg’s Master of Straight Camp did not come of age in a “mom-and-pop orphanage” off the Washington coast, where his mad-scientist father resorted to diabolical means in order to reverse the course of his equally crazed wife’s aging process. Neither did young Guy consort with demented waifs who yearned to cut out “beating human hearts” during the course of black masses they habitually held.

Originally shot on Super 8 film stock in Seattle with an all-American cast (the kind of cultural inversion that Canadian cinema’s most playful genius would obviously get a perverse kick out of), the black-and-white film fairly explodes with double exposures and lap dissolves, not to mention more film references than you can shake a Pauline Kael at (of which the most important are probably Victor Sjí¶strí¶m’s The Outlaw and His Wife, the sort of horror movie that European émigrés made after moving to Hollywood in the late 1920s, and—however briefly and improbably—Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North). Throw in inter ­titles (many courtesy of the filmmaker’s usual cowriter George Toles), foley, a deliberately archaic musical score, and a diabolically whacked-out sense of humour, and you have the makings of a thoroughly good time.

Of course, as always, there is a serious side to what Maddin is doing. But because his tongue is planted so firmly in his cheek that it threatens to penetrate the flesh, he can deal with material that might give even David Lynch cold feet. In this instance, the red-hot coals are the feverish chaos of pubescent sexuality and the various vampirish ways in which adults feed on children in general and their own offspring in particular.

Most people won’t notice this because they’ll be too busy laughing their heads off, but the worm of experience, originally described by William Blake more than 200 years ago, threatens to infect the budding of innocence at every turn.