Resplendent visually, Color TV, No Vacancy is a fever dream, a seedy, sexy jaunt down the rabbit hole (somewhat literally) of director Daniel Brown’s brain, exploring subconscious reimagining of fairytales and myths. The narrative threads are not always clear, and the interconnectedness of the vignettes is not neatly established, but there is a fantastic power to the images he crafts that subvert the chaste, sanitized versions of these characters that we’re familiar with. 

Drawing upon his childhood growing up in Reno, Brown and his team constructed a motel in an abandoned second-hand store. A motel brings with it a certain set of associations, of people up to no good mostly, and the choice of setting fundamentally shapes one’s reaction to what comes. 

What comes are 4 stories, dealing with the intersection of power, sex and fantasy. The images are primary and the rest of the film progresses outwardly from these kinetic moments—Brown says that the inspiration for the film came from an incredibly vivid dream where he saw a someone kill a man with a samurai sword and he bled a rainbow. That scene makes it into the film, but is not the only showstopper, as a man becomes covered in gold, an abducted angel is set free, and a mermaid draws a man into her world. 

Themes of domination, and seduction abound. It is a rather cynical film in some ways, the casual misogyny of certain characters will make you uncomfortable, but the will to power on display is meant to do so. We are dealing with characters from stories where our best impulses are celebrated—love, heroism, sacrifice. Love here is waylaid by desire, devotion is used for power, worship is perverted into addiction. We aspire to our nobler impulses, but Brown seems to revel in our baser ones, and the extent that they are dramatized so beautifully is deliciously uncomfortable. 

Brown has been featured on the site before, Your Lucky Day, was a viral hit back in 2010, and he works as a commercial director in Seattle with several Staff Picked music videos to his credit. He is currently working on a project to adapt the comic book Layered Jacket.