--- title: "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" year: 1997 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control" fi1m_score: 82 critics_score: 81 critics_reviews: 7 published: "2026-09-17T05:03:52.447031+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T05:04:27.018904+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) Directed by Errol Morris · 1h 23m · Documentary **Fi1m score: 82** · Critics 81 from 7 reviews *In a sentence:* Four obsessives who have never met, cut together until you would swear they were finishing each other’s sentences > Errol Morris’s strangest film puts a lion tamer, a hedge cutter, a mole-rat man and a roboticist in the same edit suite and lets the cuts do the arguing. It is funny, odd and, in the garden, unexpectedly sad. The trick wears thin only in the last stretch. ## Synopsis Errol Morris interviews four American men who have never met. Dave Hoover trains lions and tigers for a circus and models himself on Clyde Beatty, the serial star he watched as a boy. George Mendonça has spent decades clipping the hedges of a Rhode Island garden into a giraffe, a bear and an elephant, by eye, with hand shears. Raymond A. Mendez keeps colonies of naked mole-rats, blind rodents that live with a queen and workers like ants. Rodney Brooks builds robots that walk like insects, with no plan and a few simple rules. Each man talks about his work, and Morris cuts between them. ## Review Errol Morris has found four men who have never met and asked each of them to talk about his work. Dave Hoover trains lions and tigers in a circus ring. George Mendonça cuts hedges into animals. Raymond A. Mendez studies naked mole-rats. Rodney Brooks builds robots that walk like insects. Morris cuts them together, for 83 minutes, and by the end you would swear they had been in the same room. It is the oddest film he has made and one of the best, with a reservation about the last twenty minutes that we will come to. What the four have in common is control. Hoover explains that a four-legged chair works on a lion because the animal cannot decide which leg to concentrate on. Brooks says his robots have no plan; a handful of simple behaviours are stacked on top of each other and walking falls out of the pile. Mendez looks at a colony of blind rodents with a queen and a workforce and sees an insect nest. Mendonça walks round a privet giraffe with a pair of shears and no template, taking off what looks wrong. Each man is trying to make something behave, and each has a theory about what is inside it. Robert Richardson shoots the interviews clean and close, the men looking straight down the lens. Everything else he shoots in whatever stock came to hand: colour and black and white, grainy home-cine footage, crisp slow motion of rain falling through a circus tent. Karen Schmeer and Shondra Merrill do the joining, and the joins are the film. Hoover talks about what a lion is thinking while one of Brooks’s robots picks its way across a floor. Mendez describes the colony while a hedge elephant stands in a downpour. Black-and-white serial footage of Clyde Beatty, Hoover’s hero, turns up throughout. Caleb Sampson’s score clanks and chimes underneath, half fairground organ and half machine, and it keeps the four strands moving at one speed. We were moved more than we expected to be by an old man talking about hedges. Mendonça describes a hurricane stripping the garden, and the years it takes to grow an animal back, and wonders who will do the clipping when he is gone. Richardson films him in a hat in the rain, in slow motion, shears in hand, and the shot goes on long enough for you to see that nobody else is there. The reviews that find the film cold have not, we think, been watching the gardener. The other three supply the comedy. Hoover speaks of his cats with the wary courtesy of a man who has been bitten. Brooks says, cheerfully, that we may all be nothing more than a bundle of small mechanisms and the sense of being someone is a by-product. Mendez says the pleasure of the mole-rats is that they look back at you. We laughed at the cut from Beatty wrestling a lion in a serial to Hoover in a modest tent describing the same move as a matter of chair placement. The reservation is this. The film has no thesis, but it has one method, and by the last twenty minutes the method is showing. A robot next to a lion next to a hedge next to a rodent was a discovery the first time and a rhyme the third; by the fourth we were watching the cutting rather than the men. Brooks in particular thins out to a voice over other people’s pictures. At 83 minutes nothing overstays badly, but the ending arrives as a slowing down rather than a landing. Morris’s *Gates of Heaven* (1978) let people talk about a pet cemetery until they had told you everything about themselves. [*The Thin Blue Line*](https://film.one/film/the-thin-blue-line) (1988) built a case. This film has no case, and its subjects are less exposed than his earlier ones because he is more interested in what they do than in who they are. Brooks thinks the future belongs to cheap robots that will not mind being lost. Mendonça thinks the hedges will die when he does. The film cannot decide which of them is the optimist, and neither could we. *Fi1m score 82, published 17 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (7) - **RogerEbert.com**, Roger Ebert (90/100, inferred): Ebert praises Morris's film as a magical meditation on four eccentric men pursuing control in odd ways: a lion tamer, topiary gardener, mole-rat expert, and robot scientist. He highlights how Morris weaves their stories with music and varied imagery into a haunting, memorable reflection on life and human endeavor. [Read](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control-1997) - **The New York Times**, Janet Maslin (Critic's Pick): Maslin calls Morris's documentary delightfully exotic as it explores four visionaries and their ideas about behavior and control. She singles out the director's ability to meld science, philosophy, poetry, and whimsy into haunting connections among man, beast, and machine, with elegant photography and music. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/30/movies/film-festival-review-life-s-lessons-from-the-lab-and-the-lion-s-den.html) - **Time Out**, TCh (90/100, inferred): This is one of the finest and most unforgettable films of the 1990s, improbably weaving together stories of a lion tamer, robot inventor, topiarist and mole-rat expert through dazzling editing and visuals. It ultimately succeeds on a profound philosophical level by exploring distinctions in consciousness. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/fast-cheap-out-of-control) - **Radio Times**, Calum Baker (4/5): Morris crafts a delightful documentary by interviewing four unconnected men about their obsessive vocations and cross-cutting between them for unexpected contrasts. The sincerity of the subjects and the director's ingenuity, along with striking imagery, make the offbeat structure appealing. [Read](https://www.radiotimes.com/movie-guide/b-hxzpxo/fast-cheap-out-of-control/) - **The AV Club**, Keith Phipps (70/100, inferred): The film is a difficult and thought-provoking piece that will probably puzzle more than enlighten. It is also an unforgettable, funny, strangely rewarding, unique exercise built around interviews with four unusual men whose stories are interwoven like a fugue. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/fast-cheap-out-of-control-1798195686) - **Variety** (70/100, inferred): The review finds the film humorously inventive and wildly original, an unclassifiable meditation on dreams, endeavor, and the future of life. It praises the stylistic experimentation and visual approach but notes that the cerebral focus leaves viewer response strictly intellectual, with little heart. [Read](https://variety.com/1997/film/reviews/fast-cheap-out-of-control-1117432669/) - **The Wrap** (80/100, inferred): The critic calls the film Morris’s strangest mishmash of a surreal, visual essay. Yet the director finds a way to make it coherent and profound. [Read](https://www.thewrap.com/every-errol-morris-documentary-ranked-from-gates-of-heaven-to-the-b-side-photos/) ## Details - **Director:** Errol Morris - **Director:** Errol Morris - **Cinematography:** Robert Richardson - **Editor:** Shondra Merrill, Karen Schmeer - **Music:** Caleb Sampson - **Producer:** Kathy Trustman, Mark Lipson, Julia Sheehan - **Cast:** Dave Hoover as Himself (Wild Animal Trainer); George Mendonça as Himself (Topiary Gardener); Raymond A. Mendez as Himself (Mole-Rat Specialist) (as Ray Mendez); Rodney Brooks as Himself - Robot Scientist - **Runtime:** 1h 23m - **Release (the US):** 3 October 1997 - **Genres:** Documentary - **Box office:** $878,960 ## Where to watch in the US - The Roku Channel: free, hd, leaving 2026-10-01 - Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $12.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-17.* Also available in: AU, NZ, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *Gates of Heaven* (1978): Morris’s first film: pet cemetery owners talk, and slowly tell you everything. - *Sans Soleil* (1983), Fi1m 82: Chris Marker’s essay film, another set of pictures that argue with each other. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/sans-soleil.md) - *Cane Toads: An Unnatural History* (1988): Australian documentary on an amphibian plague, as funny and strange as its subject. - *The Gleaners and I* (2000): Agnès Varda finds obsessives picking over leftovers and treats them with tenderness. - *Grizzly Man* (2005), Fi1m 85: Herzog on a man who thought he controlled bears; the case for the lion tamer’s caution. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/grizzly-man.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control