“What you are about to see is a horror film -- with all the degeneracy peculiar to that genre,” explains Jan Svankmajer, the legendary Czech surrealist filmmaker, in a prelude to the bizarre “Lunacy.” His film may be a lot of things, but “a horror film” is not one of them; if anything, Svankmajer's movie is a rhetorical spoof on what comprises horror. But, by attaching such self- consciousness to his project, he dilutes any potential his movie has at summoning from his audience the responses of fear and dread so essential to all horror.

“Lunacy” functions like a whimsical cabaret of Expressionist horror-movie tropes that sometimes amuses but never fully engages the viewer. Its events revolve around Jean Berlot (Pavel Liska), a timid neurotic living in a strange country trapped somewhere between Victorian and modern times. Svankmajer's milieu is a Murnau-meets-Mel Brooks clash of cars and horsedrawn carriages, bodices and blue jeans, computers and candelabras -- a compelling mix whose effect is nonetheless more cerebral than visceral.

No one in “Lunacy” is right in the head. While ensconced in the castle of local nobleman The Marquis (Jan Tríska), Jean is subjected to a royal wigging-out that involves sacrilegious sex and weird resurrection rituals. When he protests these practices, The Marquis upholds the virtue of shameless pleasure and takes Jean to an asylum where the inmates roam about happily satisfying their visceral urges. With the help of Charlotte (Anna Geislerova), a sweet yet unstable nurse, Jean tries to reestablish order to this madness. But what he doesn't figure on is the vicious cycle of madness that Svankmajer's trapped him inside, a world in which the rulers and the ruled live in state of constant, symbiotic insanity.

It's an ideology worthy of Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade, on whose works “Lunacy” supposedly riffs. But Svankmajer's telling is so labored in expression that all the wit and spontaneity is wrung out of it. Svankmajer underscores his themes with prosaic speeches and an overly deliberate pacing that ruins the spirit of giddy outrage that “Lunacy” means to convey. Where that spirit partially comes through are in Svankmajer's animated sketches in which stop-motion body parts, meat and chicken feathers (don't ask) caper about in a charade that comments on the story action. It's all too much and too obtuse to find much success -- all except for “Lunacy's final shot. Don't miss it, for it sharply and poignantly encapsulates everything Svankmajer wants to say but fails to in the movie's preceding two hours. Starring Pavel Liska, Jan Triska, Anna Geislerova, Martin Huba, Jaroslav Dusek and Pavel Novy. Directed and written by Jan Svankmajer. Produced by Jaromir Kallista. A Zeitgeist release. Horror. Czech-language; subtitled. Not rated. Running time: 118 min