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Reviews (469)

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Spirit Riser (2024) Boo!

English In every respect, Spirit Riser is a dilettantish, feeble-minded mess from a director who perhaps had a few interesting surrealistic ideas, but otherwise lacks talent as a storyteller while having only a hint of skill as a filmmaker. The execution is entirely amateurish and trashily cheap, and the incoherent acting “performances” are worse than amateurish. The story is not only haphazard and perfectly nonsensical, but also desperately overwrought and overwhelmed by an overabundance of characters. The attempt to build some sort of complex metaphysical-dream mythology runs up against the fact that the film can’t even maintain continuity between two consecutive shots, let alone between individual scenes. Some films are so bad that they are fun to watch, and this one would also work that way as a ten-minute Dadaist sketch, but its exhausting runtime of more than ninety minutes is a fatal overdose.

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Requiem for a Maiden (1991) 

English A psychological drama about an innocent girl who finds herself in a children’s home among mentally ill wards who are terrorised by evil caregivers? No, Requiem for a Maiden is rather a full-blooded exploitation thriller set in a women’s prison with a thick atmosphere and psychedelic music like that heard in a giallo horror flick. Nudity in the showers, sadistic and lecherous nurses, harsh disciplinary punishments, characters tied to beds or radiators, locked in cellars or in cages, litres of sedatives, a muddy courtyard surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire, total helplessness, one black-and-white character next to another. The acting performances are brilliant, but the screenplay has a lot of weaknesses. Of course, the ironic highlight is Filip Renč himself as the gallant saviour who heroically chews out the apathetic firefighters and then climbs up a ladder into the flames to save the burning children.

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The Wailing (2024) 

English With its non-linear narrative, The Wailing is an unconventionally structured horror movie gradually developed through the multiple consecutively arranged stories of its young protagonists, whose lives are closely connected to each other through the fact that the same murderous apparition appears to them. However, the plot is not centred on the search for the origins of the troublesome spirit or any effort to get rid of it, but on the personal dramas of the female characters. The film contains various topics (adoption, grief, flirting, paranoia, voyeurism), and various stylistic techniques are used in the individual segments – in one, the displays of modern devices, notebooks and mobile telephones are used; in another, grainy shots taken with a cheap handheld camera. Despite the alternating time periods and geographical breadth, all of the protagonists are filmed in the same way with the same slow build-up of suspense and expectations, while each storyline reaches its climax separately. The Wailing offers convincing acting and accomplished directing, but it could have benefitted from a brisker pace in places and the removal of some of the less important digressions.

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Chainsaws Were Singing (2024) 

English A very off-the-wall romantic musical comedy featuring a pair of young people, a girl in trouble and a family of cannibalistic murderers who kidnap the aforementioned girl (the romantic formula involving the rescue of one’s beloved is enriched with powerfully exaggerated brutal violence involving a lot of the supporting characters being cut to pieces with a chainsaw or meeting some otherwise bloody end, and it’s taken as humour in all circumstances). The film gives the impression of a cheap, perverse work by several enthusiasts which, however, defies its categorisation among amateur films thanks to its relatively strong comedic qualities. Those qualities are due primarily to the stylised performances of the actors portraying the individual protagonists (some of whom have undeniable comedic talent), the humorous dialogue, the wacky situational gags and funny song lyrics (especially when they cleverly make fun of various stereotypes), the solid work with practical effects and editing, and the overall creative imaginativeness and inventive filmmaking playfulness (kind of a mix of Bad Taste, Monty Python, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Cannibal! The Musical). Thanks to their unrestrained creativity and spontaneous acting, some of the sequences have unmistakable cult potential. However, the problem lies in the fact that the two-hour runtime is simply too long, as the wheels clearly start to come off after the first half-hour (which is hilarious). An hour and twenty minutes would have been ideal. As it stands, both the story and the humour become needlessly watered down by the overly long digressions and, unfortunately, by a number of humourless dead spots.

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Mr. K (2024) 

English Mr. K, an ordinary man and travelling magician, spends the night before one of his performances in a hotel that he can’t manage to leave the next day. First, he is unable to find the exit because of the labyrinthine corridors and then his escape is prevented by the other guests, the hotel staff and even the hotel itself, which functions as a living organism. The surreal and Kafkaesque story reflects the essence of human existence, when we are all basically captives of certain formulas, routine activities and rules from which we cannot escape. In that respect, the hotel serves as a metaphor for the world in which there are various levels of the social hierarchy, from the working class to the upper crust or, as the case may be, a planet that is gradually collapsing/regenerating and with the growing number of people on it starting to run out of space and doing more and more harm. However, the plot doesn’t go anywhere in particular and the film only slowly piles up strange situations and repeats the protagonist’s encounters with the bizarre characters that inhabit the hotel. As time passes, more allegorical scenes with an unclear meaning are added and the climax is outright abstract metaphysical nonsense. However, it’s worth mentioning the impressive set design of the hotel interiors and the appropriately cast Crispin Glover in the lead role.

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Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (2024) 

English The story of a famous actor, recapitulating his career (including his theatrical beginnings), private life and activities during his years spent bound to a wheelchair. The numerous film clips and period materials complement the statements of Christopher Reeve’s children and other members of his family and fellow actors, as well as extensive home videos from the family archive. The film naturally draws a parallel between the fragility of human life and the invincible Superman, which became the actor’s most famous role. However, Super/Man is not merely a celebratory portrait, as it brings up several moments in Reeve’s life that are deserving of criticism. I learned a number of new things from the film. Some shots and events are touching without sliding into emotional extortion (Reeve’s return during the Oscar ceremony and Robin Williams’s eulogy at his funeral). The ending is tragically devastating. Primarily, however, this is a documentary about a man who refused to give up despite a serious injury and decided to overcome his inability to move (with the tremendous help of his wife, friends and others) not only for himself, but for other patients afflicted with paralysis.

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Cloud (2024) 

English A slowly told thriller about a morally questionable reseller of goods on the internet, around whose neck a noose begins to tighten when he loses his anonymity and is then sought by enemies whom he wronged in the past. Most of the film is realistic, while the tension of the situations in which the protagonist finds himself escalates, gradually, moderately, without music and without spectacular attractions (up until the home-invasion passage). Due to the sudden twists in the characters’ behaviour, however, the final action culminating in a shootout is like something from a different film, though it doesn’t change the tone or the slow pace. A coherently directed but not very exciting genre movie.

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Fréwaka (2024) 

English A caregiver goes to the home of a delirious elderly woman and gradually succumbs to her own delusions and imaginings arising from some kind of family curse, childhood trauma and her problematic relationship with her own mother. This folk horror movie makes effective use of traditional elements (ritual objects and religious ornaments, the rural setting of the Irish countryside, the old house with an attic and a mysterious basement hidden behind a red door guarded by a horseshoe and seven nails) and thanks to the work with the natures of the protagonists and with the actresses portraying them, it skilfully arouses the viewer’s interest in the characters, though at the same time it is suffused with complex symbolism that is not easy to unravel and properly interpret. The fatefulness and psychological depth of the story thus get lost in the unclear meaning and the sometimes confusing relationships between the characters.

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Please Don't Feed the Children (2024) 

English An implausibly constructed thriller/horror movie about a badly constructed fictional world in which a cannibal virus wreaks havoc – and is ignored through 98% of the run time, as most of the plot is about how a group of adolescent (and not very convincingly portrayed) protagonists are held captive by a psychopathic woman who lost her daughter and desperately seeks her replacement. Unfortunately, the simplistic dialogue also gives the impression that it was written by teenagers, and the more you think about the story, the less sense it makes. In technical terms, it’s not badly filmed and a there are a few suspenseful and bloody scenes that will please fans of the genre, but Please Don’t Feed the Children is an otherwise half-baked, repetitive, not very fluid and generally very simple spectacle overrun with clichés.

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Jimmy & Stiggs (2024) 

English This is how I imagine a film adaptation of the computer game Doom would look. An isolated labyrinthine space through which the protagonists fight their way closer and closer to hell. In this case, the setting is a single apartment in which the idiosyncratic horror director and his partner eliminate one alien after another in creative ways, while shouting obscenities, mistrusting each other and indulging in copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, which is often filmed from the first-person perspective. It’s off-the-chain madness, but it possesses certain screenwriting and directing qualities. The film has a well-thought-out narrative structure, substantially funny dialogue, a varying relationship between the two protagonists, fitting music and a lot of creative energy, playfulness and imaginativeness, which it applies to the scenes of violence. Thanks to the omnipresent neon lights, phosphorous colours and practical effects, Jimmy and Stiggs evokes the spirit of the best splatter horror movies of the 1980s and early ’90s. You’ll be hard pressed to find a wilder and more entertaining slaughter flick.