“I didn’t think I’d spend my life with him,” Yolanda Signorelli says of Harold von Braunhut, who still is very much with her circa 2017 in “Amazing Live Sea Monkeys” even though he died in 2003. von Braunhut wasn’t Signorelli’s type to begin with, having imagined herself as a bodybuilder bing in the looks business herself as a model and actress, but she describes being wooed by his ability to perform magic tricks and his invention of X-Ray Specs in 1960s and the next thing you know, she’s in charge of a sprawling estate that she can no longer keep the payments up on after his death. In a house that has no electricity and surrounded by frogs and raccoons, she doesn’t seem to have any regrets, but she couldn’t have had any idea what she was getting into when she got married to von Braunhut, a feeling filmmakers Mark Becker and Aaron Schock parlay into their compelling profile of Signorelli.
When introducing the widow with the power out, it isn’t only Signorelli who is kept in the dark in terms of where Becker and Schock are really headed, but the initial predicament she’s in is compelling enough, locked in a battle with Big Time Toys, the longtime manufacturer of von Braunhut’s invention “The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys,” for which he supplied the three-packet recipe for the brine shrimp to come alive after hitting the water and Big Time would create the plastic tank and offer distribution. The arrangement had worked a decade, but Signorelli alleges that Big Time outsourced their efforts to a Chinese company including a substandard variation on the brine shrimp part and while she continues to collect the user complaints demanding replacements when it’s her address on the box, Big Time stopped paying Signorelli long ago. When the filmmakers approach the company’s CEO Sam Harwell for what appears to be a surreptitious interview at a toy fair, perhaps unaware of what purpose it will ultimately serve, he hardly seems sympathetic when he broadly says about his business, “People say the toy business must be so fun, but it’s a fun knife fight.”
How much Signorelli brought this upon herself becomes the animating question in “Amazing Live Sea Monkeys” — not the present-day legal troubles, which couldn’t have been predicted, but the choice she made to settle down in the first place with von Braunhut, a man of mystery who came through on the promise to provide her a home and a life full of surprises, only for her to find that some of them were not so great. When the filmmakers are clearly enamored with Signorelli themselves — the breezy cool that she surely had when she met her husband is still very much on display — they seem a little too timid to ask this directly, particularly when the more unsavory parts of von Braunhut’s past are revealed. When it’s plausible that Signorelli saw this much more as a marriage of convenience than the film actually suggests, the idea she might have no idea about the truly ugly stuff that von Braunhut was into starts to make sense, but it’s hard to tell whether the reason she can’t enter von Braunhut’s old office is because it’s literally toxic when the estate has fallen into such disrepair or she really can’t bear the memories and after observing her leave with no further interrogation, it can nag that the most she’ll address what she knew or didn’t about his later years is a brief bit of off-screen dialogue where she simply says the couple drifted apart because they didn’t share the same views.
Still, as much as the lurid turn of events in von Braunhut’s tale threatens to take away from Signorelli’s sharing her own — arguably replicating what transpired in life, “Amazing Live Sea Monkeys” proves buoyant as its main subject is. When Signorelli recalls how her husband first stumbled upon the idea that would transform both of their lives upon entering a pet store where he marveled at the activity of the brine shrimp that the proprietor dismissed as fish food, it can seem as if she’s speaking about herself when saying that von Braunhut showed people to look a little deeper and that nothing should be discarded. When von Braunhut made use of her beauty to help him sell the product both in ads and as arm candy to attend social functions where he could build the business, it’s amusing that once again the superficial elements of Signorelli’s story are bound to draw audiences in when the film delivers on the strange and sordid yarn she finds herself caught up in, but by the end, it’s satisfying to see Signorelli step out of the shadows in any sense of the term as she is allowed to show what it takes to survive.
“Amazing Live Sea Monkeys” will screen again at SXSW on March 14th at noon at Alamo Lamar 2 and 7 and March 15th at 10:30 pm at Alamo Lamar 9.