The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

UK, USA, Ireland

121 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is the closest Yorgos Lanthimos has gotten to making a straight-up horror movie. I recognize that the events of the film are pretty open for interpretation, and a lot of people would argue that everything was a product of intense psychological manipulation rather than some supernatural force, but I think we can have both. I think, after a point, the level of mind games and manipulation in this film become something supernatural, or at least the line between the two becomes so blurred as to become functionally useless.

If you're not familiar with Lanthimos' directorial style (or if you've only seen The Favourite, which is more "normal"), a little background: Every single one of his movies has the same perfectly deadpan line delivery from all characters at all times. I could count on one hand the number of times anybody in his films shows an emotion. Banter that would be inconsequential is delivered with no trace of human warmth, so a discussion about wristwatches becomes something that feels deeply alien. The things people say aren't necessarily that weird (although bringing up your daughter's first period to a coworker is... not exactly wholesome), but the way every actor delivers every line makes it feel like Lanthimos' films are all populated with bizarre creatures pretending to be human.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer... I really don't know how to describe it or talk about it. There's so much to unpack. The first thing that comes to mind is how it utilizes a plot that, while not exactly light entertainment, is not unheard of: The idea of having to kill or sacrifice one member of your family to save the rest of them. But while this concept is ostensibly the main focus of the film, it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel like it's a movie about anything, it just feels like a voyeuristic look into the lives of imitation people. This film, and Yorgos Lanthimos' others, defy the idea that cinema should, on some level, reflect reality. It's like he's using humans to play roles that were written for living room furniture.

Despite the opacity of almost everything about this, however, there are themes I recognized, namely the horror of the nuclear family unit- this is something I've seen discussed recently, as so many new horror films are turning to the nuclear family as the source of all tension and discomfort (Hereditary in particular). There is one instance in this entire movie where somebody behaves like a normal person, and it's when Nicole Kidman's character confronts Colin Farrell in their kitchen, dressing him down for doing nothing while his family suffers. Her brief monologue there is the only time I felt like someone was showing a logical reaction to what was happening. And Farrell's character immediately reacts by asserting dominance in an altogether rather macho way, tossing dishes around and shouting and making a wreck of the kitchen- which, implicitly, through the enforcement of gender roles, is his wife's domain. His wife dares to step up against him and so he ruins her space. His character's trajectory as a whole seems to be an encapsulation of the masculine Western father figure. He has one moment of emotional breakdown throughout the whole film and he has to do it outside of his house, away from everybody, lest they see him feeling anything.

At the heart of this movie is an old-fashioned curse put on the main character's family, as mentioned before, that will cause them all to die painfully unless he kills one of them. This curse is the revenge of the son of a patient he accidentally killed. The son is by far the most terrifying part of this movie and is genuinely one of the most unsettling characters I've ever seen because he so obviously has immense power, but he doesn't reflect it outwardly. I had these moments, especially in the final scene, where I couldn't help but see him as God. He effortlessly ruins these peoples' lives and does it without any particular malice, without a real feeling of hatred or a held grudge. He's so utterly calm and untroubled by everything he inflicts upon the family that it seems to take no more effort than brushing your teeth in the morning. A character like that who is not only extremely powerful but either unaware of or aware of and unbothered by their power is something really disturbing.

I rated this five stars because I don't really know what else to do with it. Certain scenes from it are probably going to stick in my mind forever. The daughter calmly demanding that she be killed, professing her worshipful love for her father and brother. Both children dragging themselves around on paralyzed legs. The look of- triumph? hatred? satisfaction? on the family's faces at the end. What I found more disturbing than anything else was that those same most upsetting scenes became almost funny after a while of watching them, and I could see Yorgos Lanthimos' intent for this to be a black comedy. There's so much here, conceptually, in such a layered and tense package.

Over Your Dead Body (2014)

directed by Takashi Miike

Japan

113 minutes*

4 stars out of 5

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It's been way too long since I've seen a Takashi Miike movie. Every time I think I have his directorial style pinned down, I watch something like this that highlights just how versatile he is. Even so, Over Your Dead Body is way more subdued and atmospheric than I was expecting from him, and that's exactly why I found myself totally enamored with it.

The structure of this film is very much unlike a traditional movie that has a beginning, middle, and end. If you're only used to watching things that present a clean narrative, Over Your Dead Body can feel disorienting- and even if you aren't accustomed to linear storytelling, it can still be disorienting, because it is. It's a dark, ominous entry into the rituals and repetitions of Japanese horror stories, and it's treated as... not quite an adaptation, but something like a meditation on Yotsuya Kaidan. The plot, insofar as there is one that can be explained, is actually fairly simple: Two actors performing in a play of the aforementioned ghost story find their lives starting to resemble their roles. With this in mind I expected something a simpler film about a cursed play, but it is so, so much more than that.

The play is, for all intents and purposes, the centerpiece of the film. The play is the film, and vice versa. I lack words to express how incredible the talent was here in producing a setting that looks unlike anything I'd ever seen. It is shot like a normal movie with multiple camera angles, but the majority of it takes place while the characters are rehearsing a play on a huge rotating stage in front of a classroom, with an audience. I don't know the details of how the stage was constructed, but I can't imagine much of it was computer-generated, or at least I hope it wasn't. The scene transitions in the play were achieved by rotating the entire stage to another side with a different set built on it, and occasionally the actors would walk across the stage while it was turning with perfect grace in a move that I know I would absolutely faceplant if I tried to do. The way this movie looks is probably my favorite thing about it, and to be honest I don't really care if it's technically a good movie or not- it's so deeply atmospheric that I felt like all that mattered was how intensely I was drawn into it from minute one. Every scene just drips with shadows. It's all flickering candles against a fathomless dark, fake Bunsei-era backdrops with fake wanton women draping themselves over the low roofs, and measured, tempered motions. The play is the film. The film is the play. The line between acting and living is not there, because they bleed together.

I think this movie encapsulates what I find so interesting about Japanese horror: the sense of ritual, the feeling that every ghost you see is part of a longer tradition of ghosts that has a place within folklore. I'm not talking about folklore as in something stretching back into time immemorial, because oftentimes what we think of as "folklore" is simply a modern invention with a fake patina applied to it- which is another rant for another time- but as a story continuously being told. Oiwa and Iemon as a recurring imprint bleeding through the pages of every onryō story ever told- or maybe every onryō story is really the same one. Is Over Your Dead Body a movie about these stories, or is it one itself?

There is no shortage of what you might usually expect from Takashi Miike here, despite it all being shrouded in such thick darkness; there's a couple ultra-gory scenes and one animated blinking doll who is severely lodged in the uncanny valley. None of it is really ever explained and a lot seems to just have no meaning at all, and maybe a better and more critical reviewer would address that, but this one hit me right where it needed to to make me stop paying attention to anything else. I could have spent all night in that heavy, oppressive atmosphere of pretend samurai and interchangeable ghost women. I think this requires multiple watches to feel like I'm truly understanding it, if there is much to understand.

*(I don't know why most places list this as 93 minutes long. It's close to two hours.)

Cargo (2019)

directed by Arati Kadav

India

113 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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India is the foremost country that I feel like I should be watching more movies from, but when most Indian films are well over two hours long... I really have to pick and choose what I think I have the attention span for. So as soon as I saw that Cargo was sci-fi, I was in. Since I didn't look into any critical reception or seek out much information about it at all, I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that it's an absolute delight of a film and something that hit me right in the heart.

The immediate draw for me was this film's aesthetics. I've talked at length before about how I really appreciate a good cardboard spaceship, and while the exteriors of the spacecraft in Cargo were supplied by CGI, the internal sets still have a strong DIY feel. That vibe is vital to making a spaceship feel like an actual place that people inhabit, as opposed to a workspace with the cold unfamiliarity of a cubicle farm- which can also be a useful aesthetic, if you're trying to make a point about alienation in your film, but for something like Cargo where the characters live and work on their spacecraft and personalize it to their liking, things like carpeting and retro electronics are essential. The video feed back to Earth is displayed on old CRT televisions, not transparent tablets or holograms projected from the walls. Dials and switches are chunky and tactile and machines give off electric shocks because they're old and need their batteries changed. The spaceship is well-kept, but it's still dim and a little dingy around the corners. The low-lit quiet evening atmosphere of the entire movie feels intimate, comforting, and very human for a film where most of the main characters aren't humans.

The film takes place some time after the signing of a peace treaty between humans and Rakshasa, who are beings from Hindu and Buddhist tradition whose identity the English subtitles """conveniently""" boil down, like the majority of non-Christian, non-human creatures, to "demons". They are largely associated with bloodlust and the love of war, but as with most things, there's more complexity to them than that, and I'd recommend reading some of the source literature to inform your own opinions. Anyway, the peace treaty allows for Rakshasa to operate space stations above the Earth where souls are sent upon death to be reincarnated. The main character of the film has been working alone on a station for so long that he forgets how lonely he is. The theme of a man floating above the earth on his own, in his solitude becoming unaccustomed to the companionship of others, is not unique in sci-fi. We quite often use space as a screen on which to project our fears of isolation and abandonment. A second character is introduced and the two play off each other to work through their own individual issues- him with his loneliness, her with self-doubt and insecurity. I realized afterwards that in a lesser film- or, tbh, probably just one directed by a man- I could have bet money on at least one kiss scene between the two leads, and I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that they were emphasized more as becoming companions than becoming romantically involved.

As well as the two leads, a lot of time is spent exploring the concept of the reincarnation station (a pun so horrible I kind of wish it worked in Hindi), which I thought was super interesting. In one of the first film adaptations of Dante's Inferno, 1911's Italian "L'inferno", Virgil and Dante reach Hell through a hole in the ground. I love stories like that where a dimension or place typically thought of as metaphysical can simply be reached through physical means. When you die, you go up to a spaceship. The concept of everything being on the same material plane like that is something I find interesting to explore and, oftentimes, like in this movie, also visually fascinating.

I'm not doing a great job explaining this movie because it is so singular-feeling. But I do want to talk about it forever anyway. It had an effect on me- I don't know how, I think it was all that cozy, quiet, gentle space, the ship drifting above the planet ushering stubborn irritating humans to their next form. Before I knew it, I was actually crying at the scene where a couple, deeply in love, find each other again immediately after they get reincarnated. There's something really tender about this movie. It's funny, it's understated, it's comforting, it's engaging. I would heartily recommend it for anybody who's into lo-fi sci-fi and immersive atmospheres created with only minimal CGI. I wish there were other things like this but then this wouldn't be so special.

Premika (2017)

directed by Siwakorn Charupongsa

Thailand

91 minutes

4 stars out of 5*

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This is a horror movie about a karaoke ghost who will come and kill you if you sing badly.

...specifically, it's a horror comedy about a karaoke ghost who kills you if you can't sing. I want to emphasize that, because this movie has a very distinct style of humor that a good slice of the populace is going to absolutely hate. I don't know what else to call this other than "YouTube humor", because it's the kind of humor that cheap YouTubers utilize to grab people- mostly children- and appeal to their short attention spans long enough to give them views. Instead of actual jokes, most of the humor comes from adding zany sound effects to mundane actions and dialogue. There's a lot of hard smash cuts and the maturity level stays consistently at that of a 12-year-old boy. Regardless, because I have an awful sense of humor, some of these attempts to be funny did work on me- mostly the sound effects. I can't resist a good Scooby Doo-style chase scene.

However, the vast, and I mean VAST, majority of the "jokes" are just laughing at people and calling them ugly. Sometimes they mix it up- sometimes it's laughing at people for having large breasts. But for the most part, literally this movie's whole sense of humor is fueled by belittling people for things that are largely out of their control, and even if they were in their control, are no excuse to make fun of them. Most of the time it's general "haha, this guy is ugly" stuff, but one scene which was personally very distressing to me as a dysphoric trans person involves a trans man being forced to sing the woman's part in a karaoke duet. He is put in a dress and makeup and aggressively demeaned by his duet partner. I was excited for the gay romance that happens in another corner of this movie, but after the duet scene I felt thoroughly disgusted.

All of the bigotry is surprising when you consider the ending of this film. I'll try not to spoil it because it explains the whole backstory of the karaoke ghost, but keeping things as vague as possible, it involves xenophobia and sexual abuse and depicts victims of those things getting revenge. So I don't understand- if you can stick up for marginalized people in one category, why can't you stick up for all of them? Why defend people from rural areas and then go to great lengths to insult transgender people at every opportunity?

I gave this movie four stars with an asterisk, the asterisk denoting that I have serious issues with the film. I wish I didn't, because I genuinely love this as a horror movie. I now want to emphasize the horror part of it because I got the sense that this was made by someone who does love horror and keeps up with current trends. The cinematography is beautiful even in scenes where it takes a backseat; the ever-present neon is a great nod to current and past visual tropes and it's used well. The gore is not constant but still over-the-top enough to signal that it's meant as a joke (imagine if you got a paper cut and the blood just spurted straight up in the air like that?) and they obviously had enough budget for CGI to make it look decent- a rarity. I don't know when the last time was that I saw a person-cut-in-half scene that didn't look awful. Tons of Thai urban legends are also invoked, so I really do feel like this leaned more heavily on the horror element than the comedy, which is what I look for in any movie like this since I don't generally like comedies.

All told, the spirit of this thing is what I loved about it: I love the disembodied crawling body parts, I love the goofy horror, the stuff that makes me laugh because seeing it reminds me of all the good horror-comedies I've seen. I don't love that it makes everyone in the world who isn't straight, cis, and fair of face into the butt of one huge joke. I mean, there's a post-credits (technically during-credits) scene that literally is just several characters from the film photographing a wedding and openly mocking the groom to his face, calling him old and ugly. The moral here seems to be that only beautiful people are worthy of sympathy. I wonder how the story would have changed if the karaoke ghost's actress had not been conventionally attractive. Would her murder have still been framed as such a tragedy?

War God (1976)

directed by Chen Hung-Min

Taiwan

83 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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I might've mentioned before that some of my favorite kaiju movies are ones where the kaiju is just a giant human being instead of a monster. I think the defining difference between films like that and films that just happen to have a huge person in them is that the human-kaiju has to fight other kaiju, but War God doesn't technically qualify as a kaiju movie due to being Taiwanese, so the distinction is useless except for comparing and contrasting. Which I'm going to do a lot in this review, because although they come from different countries, this movie feels a lot like a mid-70s Godzilla movie in all the worst ways.

I love Godzilla, but a frequent trait that most if not all Godzilla movies share is that they spend so much time messing around before getting to the big fights, which usually take up a solid 20-30 minutes at the end of the film. All of the action is mostly concentrated into that chunk of time, and everything beforehand consists of mildly interesting plots and schemes that only barely hold your attention. War God is like this to such an extent that you can practically feel the scriptwriters struggling to pad out the runtime. If you cut out all the scenes that consist of two characters screaming the same word at each other over and over, you could save a whole lot of time watching this. Imagine if the iconic "Tetsuooooo!!" "KANEDAAA!!!!" from Akira took up 20 minutes of the film. That's what this is like.

Most of the non-boss-battle storyline involves science so silly and bizarre that it's basically a kiddie magic show, and this is shown using what feels like a beginner filmmaker's special effects reel. They throw in "anti-gravity" where I have no doubt you'd see wires if the picture quality wasn't so poor, "reversed time" where everyone and everything moves backwards, wobbly video effects to show people getting dizzy or something, and many more very rudimentary special effects. The practical effects are better- not in a technical sense, they're pretty rudimentary too, but I'm happier watching special effects that involve guys with papier-mache heads duking it out than I am watching somebody shake the camera while everyone pratfalls and screams "earthquake!" Poor effects are also a trademark of a lot of earlier Godzilla movies, but I mostly find it charming more than anything else.

War God resembles Godzilla in aesthetics only, however; its morals couldn't be further from the message a lot of films in the Godzilla franchise try to impart. The bad guys that Guan Yu must battle at the end are Martians with a serious superiority complex who took notice of Earthlings attempting to use nuclear energy and came to destroy us so we would halt our scientific progress towards a potentially dangerous end. Which is... basically Godzilla. But instead of giving us words of warning about the dangers of scientific hubris and nuclear power, these Martians are quashed, utterly butt-whipped by a groaning, red-faced Guan Yu summoned up from a spirit-laden carving created by a blind man. I find the parallels between this and Godzilla to be very interesting. Godzilla has become, if he was not intended to be so in the first place, a symbol of Japanese identity; a defender of the Japanese homeland and a constant reminder of the horrors of war. Guan Yu is similarly a symbol of national identity and he is a war god, however he is used to combat the sort of warnings that Godzilla would seek to remind us of.

Ultimately, this isn't the best movie ever in terms of watchability, especially because right now, the best print you're going to find is a YouTube video where the English subtitles are cut off on both ends, so English speakers will only catch the middle of every sentence unless it's short enough to not run off the edges of the screen. But the reason I think it's neat is because it's an example of the continuation of a tradition into the modern era, and it shows that humans have really always been humans and will adapt whatever new technology we develop into a medium for telling the same stories we've always told. Guan Yu spoken about via parchment paper and ink versus Guan Yu spoken about via film and green-screen. It's the same thing- a continuing story.

Jug Face (2013)

directed by Chad Crawford Kinkle

USA

81 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is such a weird little movie, and on revisiting it a second time I only liked it more. It means a lot that it's so confident of its premise when its premise is so strange: A community of people live in the woods and worship an entity known only as The Pit, a name that seems to encompass both the actual pit, as in a hole in the ground filled with red silty water, and some invisible force that occasionally comes up out of the Pit and rips people apart. We never see what the thing in the Pit looks like because all the pit-induced death scenes are from a pit's-eye POV. If you're really averse to supernatural stuff you might even look at this as an "all in their heads" type of movie, since most of the things we see could be explained away as human delusion if you have a mind to see it that way. But I don't care for that explanation. I like this as a movie about a sect that sprung up around some incomprehensible thing living in the mud.

(Also, I live in Georgia. Face pottery is a thing here. It originated in the 19th century among slaves, and as with most things, white people decided they liked it and didn't want to think about the fact that black people made it. So we get stuff like this and the myriad of search results for "face jug" on Etsy. It totally doesn't suck or anything that white artists make entire careers off of things that were invented by the people they once, you know, considered to be their property.)

I really just like Lauren Ashley Carter so much. She's most of why I enjoy this movie as much as I do whenever I watch it. I think she's underrated as an actress and especially as a horror actress. She just has this... presence, and I know that's a strange term to apply to somebody like her who is a very physically small person, but every single role I've seen her in, she brings this gravitas to. It's something in the way she walks, just something about how she carries herself- I really liked her short role in Gags the Clown as a cranky newscaster, and I felt like that encapsulated a lot of the vibe that she gives off, but even in roles like this one where she plays a more subdued personality, it always feels like there's a real depth to the character.

Her character in Jug Face certainly makes some questionable decisions, though. Another reason why I like this movie is because it does not follow a predictable format of characters being solely good or evil. Carter's lead is a young woman who is kind of self-centered in that way that young people growing up under repression are because they know they deserve independence but are also taught to be ashamed of wanting it. The things she does are, for the most part, because she wants to do them, but she's unfortunate enough to live in a backwards community that thinks women are meant for making babies and nothing else. It's not black-and-white whether her actions are good or bad because she lives in a place where that doesn't hold the same meaning as in wider society. And the way the movie treats these things is also not the same as they would be treated elsewhere- the film's idea of justice is the community's idea of justice. Objectively, Carter's character does do a bad thing when she hides her own face jug knowing that other people would probably suffer for it- but she does it because she really wants to not die. It's a justifiable action from someone living in her circumstances, and the people living in her circumstances would probably argue that the bleak ending of the movie is justifiable as well.

I like Jug Face because it really does immerse you into this bizarre sect (I don't know what else to call it) in a way that feels almost... respectful, although I cannot at all call this respectful because it plays into stereotypes of Southern people and poor people that I hate. But this is just such a unique and interesting movie that does a lot with not very much visually, and I personally think it's The Good Stuff.

Planet of Storms (1962)

directed by Pavel Klushantsev

Russia (USSR)

72 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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The landing of a Soviet probe on the surface of Venus and its survival long enough to take photos of the planet is something that I feel is underappreciated outside of Russia. I get a little thrill when I look at those pictures because even though it's just a yellowish barren landscape it feels so deeply alien. We never talk about Venus as a potential location for research, mostly because all we hear about is how hostile the environment is- which is very true, but the Soviets went ahead and landed a probe anyway, and we have them to thank for some of the most exciting and precious pictures from outside of our own planet.

Planet of Storms imagines a Venus where people can walk, breathe without space helmets, and interact with their surroundings without immediately getting crushed by the pressure and blistered by the heat. This was around when the Venera program- the series of probes that brought the Soviets their data and pictures of Venus- was just kicking off, the first one having been launched a year prior to the film's release (the one that gave us pictures wouldn't be launched until 1975). So they might have known some about conditions on the planet, but for the context of Planet of Storms, I assumed that they knew full well how hostile it was and were choosing to imagine a brighter version that teems with life instead, because knowledge that a place is unreachable is certainly not enough to stop anybody from making films about people going there and having a grand old time. If anything, it's the opposite.

So we get to see cosmonauts hanging around in little DIY spacecraft wearing their suits and ties (when not in space-suits) and turning off their gravity boots to have jaunts around the cabin. They go down to the surface and encounter giant man-eating plants, fight guys in dinosaur suits that look like tiny Godzillas, poke an actual brontosaurus, and accidentally trip out on oxygen deprivation. The film is full of that Soviet sci-fi charm where everything is cobbled together on a soundstage but still captures the imagination better than the most expensive CGI, but it's not all fun and games and huge clunky robots- there's a philosophical undercurrent here. It's endearing to watch how seriously everyone takes it, there in their particleboard spacecraft suspended by fishing wire against the painted galaxy. And I took it seriously too, I listened to the ideas they presented and I appreciated everything at face value. Just because watching this in 2020 makes it lose its novelty doesn't mean it isn't worthy of admiration.

One thing about it that I found interesting is that it unintentionally frames the dilemma of women raised in positions of domesticity and to inherently come second to men with the sideplot of Masha, who has to stay behind on the ship and transmit info back home. Her choice is voluntary, but really, was it? Was it ever possible for a woman to have a more active role than sitting back and taking care of things? She is not unappreciated, but her station is nevertheless the same as women the world over who are tasked with running the show in the background despite what they might want or hope for themselves. She's forced to make the most difficult choices of the entire film and ultimately goes to her own doom in service to her crew of entirely men (and one robot). I have no doubt these nuances were all eliminated in the American rebrandings of the film.

Yes, it is propaganda, but I will link here to the wikipedia article for "Military-entertainment complex". Every film you love is touched by the hands of the DoD. When you get right down to it, I'd much rather watch a Soviet movie that emphasizes inter-planetary exploration and the possibility of intelligent life on other worlds than an American film that barely even acknowledges the possibility of intelligent life in Arabic-speaking countries.

edit 9/14/20: I absolutely never thought I would be saying this, but in light of recent discoveries indicating there may be life on Venus, this review is now out-of-date.

Frisian Terror (2009)

directed by Bart van Dekken

Netherlands

73 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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I was excited when I found out there was a specifically Frisian-themed horror movie because I like Friesland! Friesland is cool! However I do have to give this a low rating because it's terribly misogynistic, using women pretty much exclusively as accessories and framing their bodies as some kind of reward for men, and it makes fun of mentally disabled people a bit in the middle. Hey, it never professed to be a good movie.

So the whole idea of this is that a guy obsessed with a medieval Frisian king goes around killing random people who do "bad things" in hopes that he'll please his beloved king. Now, I don't want to base my knowledge of Frisian history off a cursory Google search, but I can't find any information on a King Sigurd, at least not a Frisian one, which leads me to believe he was made up for this movie. The concept of somebody going around killing ne'er-do-wells to please a random king is somewhat funny to me, but the concept of someone doing it to please a king who doesn't exist is even funnier because it allows me to imagine that, in the context of the film, maybe King Sigurd isn't even a well-known king. Maybe this is like if I, as an American, forced people to swear a blood oath to uphold the undying memory of Thomas Rutherford Bacon, 19th-century Californian clergyman and leading Mugwump. The main character gives off the air of a disgruntled professor rather than a sinister killer, and every other character is so thoroughly lost in their own little world and not expecting some guy to come up to them and stab them in the name of a random medieval king that it's quite funny.

As I said, this movie never tried to be good. It is presented by a woman who proclaims its virtues but does so dressed in a bikini that is nary more than strings and with an obvious tongue-in-cheek tone. Nobody in it can act and the budget looks like it went almost entirely towards gore effects- which aren't half bad, considering. It feels very much like a bunch of disjointed scenes of some guy going around muttering to himself about a forgotten king and getting angry that the world is so sinful. Again, he doesn't do this with any kind of actual pathos or depth, it's just like hearing somebody rant and rave about some obscure subject that absolutely does not matter at all, and not in a fun "oh this guy's a real scholar" way, but in a silly and ridiculous way, like if someone got incredibly angry at receiving a single banana pepper on their pizza and demanded to speak to the manager. That's the air the lead character has- a sort of deranged, murderous Karen on a rampage.

For something that's only 73 minutes long, this lapses pretty heavily in the middle with the introduction of two guys who... I honestly have no idea who or what they were supposed to be, but it was fairly obvious that their behavior was meant as a caricature of mentally disabled people, and it was very offensive to me. This is an offensive movie in general. I think the only reason I watched the whole thing was because I was so tickled by the concept of a guy going around murdering people for doing things that he thinks would displease a random historical figure. Obviously I don't find actual murder funny, that's not the part that amused me- it's just the guy's pure righteousness, his insistence that anybody who does drugs is degrading the memory of this specific Frisian king who the drug-doers probably have never even heard of. I can't recommend this due to its offensiveness, but it's interesting if you're Frisian, I guess. I would love seeing a Frisian woman make a horror movie that doesn't include so much misogyny.