Pakt der Druiden

After a few misfires, we are still waiting for THE French horror movie that the critics will certainly vilify, but will launch a new trend. Not this time. Doug Headline can't be accused of not being knowledgable in the genre (He is editor of a high-class fantasy imprint, has worked for legendary magazine Starfix.), but why a scenario that uses EVERY cliché in the book (except maybe the Odious Comic relief) ? Why make it so predictable ? Even the nods towards Argento fails flat. It's not even an euro-teen movie like the German "Anatomy", much better, just a compilation of scenes that barely seems to have any relation one with the other and features LOTS of plot holes. The whole "Celtic" aspect is barely touched. And, after a "revenation" painfully predictable, the screenplay offers us a boring, endless chase in a subterranean necropole which seems bigger than Parisian catacombs. I really wanted to love this film. Really. But even a mother would not. Oh, and writer Valerio Evangelisti was supposed to have a cameo, but I vainly looked for him.

What should i say? I only saw this flick for curiosity, and this is truly a shame... I grew up in Brittany with stories of celtic legends, and spent 5 years in Rennes, the town in which this film is said to take place... Shame that not any actor nor camera from this flick ever arrived in Rennes. They could at least have chosen a likely town, or a likely forest, but nothing even SEEM like Brittany nor Rennes... And calling it a film about celtic legends is really making a fool of the audience. Besides those details, it could have been a good film, but it's crap. Silly scenario, silly characters and no originality. Definitely to avoid.

In the early 00's, production companies had a short-lived craze for supernatural genre movies in France after "The Crimson Rivers" and "Brotherhood of the Wolf" turned out to be hits, so several movies were green-lit or saved from their "direct-to-video" fate. However, France, as opposed to the US, UK or Italy, has little tradition of fantasy B-movies and it turned out quickly that "Samouraïs", "Bloody Mallory" or the "Crimson Rivers" sequel were ill-advised attempts at recreating a kind of magic that had never existed in French cinema in the first place. As they flopped, producers have gone back to their usual fare: derivative farces or the umpteenth self-referential tribute to French New Wave by a former critic from "Les Cahiers du cinéma".

"Brocéliande" could only have been green-lit during this short window, as it serves no other discernible purpose. It's your by-the-book slasher movie mixed with vague mythological element and horror references and you'll find bimboesque female characters, a French University looking like a US campus and plot twists so lazy you don't even care because you had guessed it by yourself an hour before, even before the movie started.

These elements make all the fun of a 70's or a 80's B-movie and you expect them in a 70's or 80's movie. However, we're not in the 80's anymore and nobody warned director Doug Headline, as this tribute to the slasher movie genre is nothing more than a derivative slasher movie. Headline himself is no rookie and has been writing as a critic about this kind of pictures since the early 80's but as a first time director he shows a lack of skill and ambition that makes "Brocéliande" a bore.

When you put together clichés from a movie subcategory and hand them to a skilled and inventive director such as Wes Craven or Quentin Tarantino, you get a "Scream" or a "Death Proof", movies that are imitations from old guilty pleasures but also magnify these clichés and add a great deal to them. That's called "talent" and that's why you can't confuse these recent movies with their original inspirations shot decades ago.

"Brocéliande" takes the lazy path and only reproduces the worst elements from past movies (unfortunately for the male viewer, the gratuitous nudity is mostly missing). There are very strong similarities (presumably unintentional) between the plot of "Brocéliande" and the reviled "Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch", as both deal with supernatural Druidic evil rituals and some silly attempt at taking over the world on Halloween night. As even the plot of "Halloween 3" makes more sense than this one, it means that something seriously wrong went with "Brocéliande".

Really!Here the French cinema hits rock bottom ,and compared to it, the least appealing of the American adolescent horror movies,the likes of "Friday the thirteenth" "Freddy" and co are masterpieces of the seventh art.

It's all the more infuriating as there were exciting original elements :the forêt de Brocéliande and its legends ,the druids and King Arthur ,all were splendid assets for a dreamlike fantasy and horror film.Alas! Filmed ,as an user aptly pointed out in a fake forest,near Paris ,the movie is fake horror,fake Celtic history,fake vestiges -you should see the professor (Wilms who was a wonderful M.Le Quesnoy in "la vie est un long fleuve tranquille) scream for the "invaluable scrap" -which the production probably bought in a dime store-fake characters ,fake excavations...

The boys disguised as druids are unintentionally very funny ;so are the girls who seem to be experts in martial arts.And what can we say of the professors? of the monster? A ten year old would write a better screenplay than this grotesque farce.To think that people can spend money for such drivel when artists are still waiting for a producer!

Word to the wise:Maurice Leblanc wrote a marvelous story dealing with druids and old ceremonies in his Arsene Lupin saga called "l'île aux trente cercueils" .A miniseries was made 30 years ago.Avoid this "Broceliande" garbage and try to see it instead.

I HATE THIS MOVIE!!!!!! I have never seen such utter, complete trash in my life!!! I live in France so it turned out that I was in the front line to watch this awful movie. At first, it seemed cool, kind of like something about a cursed forest that chomps people. Unfortunately, it turned out it was something QUITE different: a good start with a girl that meets a guy and all that whatnot, then the girl gets threatening messages in the form of ravens shut up in her bathroom closet(ludicrous), from that bit and on, the movie starts to slide downhill very quickly with a lot of desperate thrashing in the process. The movie ends with sacrificial druids galore and ancient ugly, stinky creatures coming back from the past to kill a few people. Many questions were rushing around my head by then: why the heck did they bring back that scummy monster? Do druids look like maniacs dressed in bedsheets? Why did they even bother making this movie?? The "climax" of the movie was so goofy I laughed all the way through it: the "awful" stinky monster does battle with the two young women(who appear to be expert kung fu masters) and the professor gets sliced in two or something. What surprised me was that the monster was so slow and ungainly in battle, wasn't it supposed to be a god of war or something? Anyway, the movie in it's death throws was a pitiful sight. A brief condensation of the contents of this movie: Kung fu mayhem+druid stones+mysterious murders "à la thriller"+ancient prophecies+shabby ravens+old clumsy boneless war god+nutty professor=complete and utter, diseased, boneless, worm eaten, GODFORSAKEN, GODDAM, RECYCLED, FAKE, WANNABE, LUDICROUS SH*T!!!!!!!!! Things I learned from this movie: -Ancient war gods are lousy at kung fu. -All young women who study archeology at university in France are kung fu experts. -Professors are so resistant they can survive being sliced in two by a saw-mass-whatchamacallit without any injuries.