A pair of red lips sings to the audience. A square couple decides to get hitched before catching a flat in a rainstorm on their way to a party. A criminologist fills us in on what happens next. A live chicken has its head cut off and starts to dance while space disco plays on the soundtrack. Wait, what? Anyab starts off as a ripoff of The Rocky Horror Picture Show before becoming something else entirely, veering away from the source material at the exact point that it starts to get too racy and queer for Egyptian audiences. If Rocky Horror's central thesis is "don't dream it, be it," then Anyab takes this to heart, jumping into a series of metatextual interludes that simultaneously attack Egyptian capitalists as being vampires while also gleefully pilfering from decades of western culture, spoofing The Pink Panther while needledropping the score from A Clockwork Orange. If you can't make a James Bond movie, why not just steal the music while attacking the for-profit doctors who rip off the working man? Not everything here works, but there's a shameless sense of outlaw recklessness to it all that makes watching it so much fun.
