Tears of Kali

Three horror stories based on members of a transgressive Hindu cult that return home but changed in some way. In the first story our former cult member is now in an insane asylum and is visited by a reported who wants to find out about what went on at the cult. Somewhat slow going as story is told in flashbacks while the two sit on chairs and face each other. Reporter is particularly interested in what lead to the death of the participants. What seemed rather boring suddenly turns very exciting with a surprising twist in the story. Things get quite bloody.

Second story has a violent young criminal visiting a psychiatrist for mandatory therapy. The patient seems to have some type of agenda but the psychiatrist is up to the task. Again, things slow down a bit and get weird. Then there's a strange twist in the story that is very well written and surprising.

Final story deals with spiritual healer who claims to be able to remove the persons illness from them with his hands. One of the patients is a former cult member, so the successful healing gets more complicated. Again, we are surprised by a twist. Has a pretty gory scene in there.

There some nice female full frontal nudity as well as male full frontal nudity for some reason. I found the stories to be very well written and the director succeeds entirely in setting up each story with its surprising twist and the gory aftermath.

Note: review of the German DVD.

Unfortunately, the R1 DVD of "Tears of Kali" is dubbed in English with no subtitle option. It was hard to fully immerse myself in the creepiness of the film considering that the dub job is one of the most hideous these ears have ever heard. I would love to revisit this in the future with English subs. The movie has a fair share of sick gore, but more interesting to me is that it has a unique and more familiar take on cults than most horrors (especially 70s exploitation) do. It works sort of like an anthology horror in that it consists of three shorts that take place in present time. The catch is that each features characters who were once connected to the Taylor-Erikkson cult in India in the 80s. Very original and creepy movie, but damn that dub job!

Three macabre and bloody tales are loosely connected by a mysterious cult which practices bizarre rituals.

The first story tells of a woman named Shakti, an ex-member of the Taylor-Erikkson cult who is now an inmate at a mental hospital. A journalist (supposedly investigating the cult) interviews Shakti, but it transpires that she has other reasons for wanting to talk to the woman...

The next story follows a violent young drug abuser who is sentenced to rehab. His doctor turns out to be a follower of Taylor-Erikkson and his methods of treatment are far from orthodox.

The final tale deals with a faith-healer who unwittingly releases an evil force from one of his group (who is terminally ill). The malign monster is seeking a new healthy host, and has got its evil eye on the healer.

The movie is obviously low budget, and the dubbing on the version I saw is pretty lousy, but Tears of Kali is original enough and has plenty of nastiness and gore to make this movie worth a viewing. It takes a while to get going, but those willing to make the effort will be rewarded by some nice death scenes which don't skimp on the red stuff.

The second story is my favourite as it manages to be quite creepy and genuinely disturbing (and it also features a scene in which which a guy has to peel off his skin!).

It may not be a wholly successful venture, but the makers of this film certainly have to be praised for trying something a bit different.

"Tears of Kali" is the debut film of German writer/director Andreas Marshall. I know him from the surprisingly good 2011 neo-Giallo "Masks", but this is quite different. "Tears of Kali" is a horror anthology, and although far from flawless and often suffering from the shortage of budget, I have to award it with a couple of extra good grades. Why? Because it is genuinely macabre and unpleasant to watch, and - being a horror fanatic - you just got to appreciate that! How often do we not complain that horror movies aren't frightening enough? Well, here you have a film with the potential to truly freak you out with its eerie stories, depraved characters, and nauseating gore.

The omnibus doesn't have a real wraparound story, but all three segments are connected to a spiritual cult in India named after its founder (and über-nutcase) Eriksson. In the pre-credits opening sequence we already witness how a naked girl cuts her own eyes out in a filthy room full of dead bodies, so this isn't exactly the joyful sunshine-and-rainbows kind of cult. "Tears of Kali" comes recommended, but only to people with strong stomachs and nerves.

In the first story, a suspiciously behaving reporter receives permission to interview a former cult-member at the sanitarium, and it naturally goes quite wrong. In the second story, a troubled young man needs to see a psychiatrist to help him deal with his drug abuse and rage attacks. The shrink is a disciple of the Eriksson cult, though, and his methods turn out rather barbaric. In the third and last story, a fraudulent healer and his faithful wife/assistant actually succeed in exorcising a demon from the mind of a female patient (and Eriksson pupil) for once, but the demon is now loose in the healer's basement and looking for a host. Segment #2 is my absolute favorite, because of the psychopathic shrink and the deeply uncomfortable atmosphere in this story.

I don't quite get the hyperbole of some of the reviews of this film on either end. Tears of Kali is not at all a slightly flawed masterpiece, but it doesn't completely suck, either.

On the low budget and cheesy end, aspects of the film play like a stereotypical Uwe Boll flick; it's difficult to not cynically think of this as another German tax shelter film. Stylistically and atmospherically, Tears of Kali occupies a weird middle ground between recent microbudget schlock like Insaniac (2002), The Crucifier (2005) and The Bonesetter (2003), and a major studio, high-budget horror film. If you watch it expecting microbudget schlock, as I did after seeing the DVD title screen sequence (like most films, I purposefully avoided knowing much about the film before I popped it into my DVD player), you'll be impressed with the level of professionalism exhibited. But if you've only watched major studio, high-budget horror, it's entirely understandable that you'd come to the conclusion that this is one of the worst films ever. The bottom line, then, is that you should probably only watch Tears of Kali after you've watched at least a dozen or so microbudget films. That way the technical clunkiness, the relative incoherence of much of the story, and the numerous other problems with the script, performances, direction, editing and so on won't be such culture shock, and you'll be able to better appreciate what Tears of Kali does get right.

The premise of the film and even many ways in which the story is developed are impressive. There are a lot of good ideas here, both plotwise and structurally. I'm a fan of "anthology" films as well as television shows like The Twilight Zone, The Hitchhiker and Tales from the Crypt, so the fact that the script is broken up into three separate but related stories along with bookended segments worked well for me. Writer/director Andreas Marschall even weaves in a fair amount of sophisticated, nuanced threads, thematically and more literally, allowing viewers to interlock the stories more with the bookended segments in their heads as they watch.

However, Marschall errs on one serious front--the "show, don't tell" rule. Far too much of the film consists of people talking about interesting events that we do not get to see. The first story after the opening bookend is especially guilty of this, and it doesn't help that the story being told is fairly complex and kinda gobbledy-gooky (it hinges, as does the whole film, on a maybe ridiculous but fun mixture of mystic, new-agey psychology, cults and a couple ideas from Indian religions), and it doesn't help that the story being told has lots of characters, most of whom have odd names (and the film doesn't have the greatest English dubbing job, and the DVD has no subtitles).

Surely the show-don't-tell violation was chosen to keep the budget down. Even with the bookends, Marschall only needed four settings, most limited to just a couple rooms, and he avoided having to hire lots of extras, having to work his way through complicated logistical issues of location shooting and so on. While that's a good excuse for limiting the film, it's not a good enough excuse to violate the "show don't tell" rule in the way that it's violated here, because it seriously hurts the film.

Horror fans who enjoy gore and special effects will also find enough to like here, as long as they're not the kind of gorehound who gets wrapped up in arguments about what film is the goriest. Quite a few scenes are a bit brutal and difficult to watch, and especially compared to most microbudget films, the effects and make-up are extremely impressive. Each story hinges on some twist of character or another that results in a good, suspenseful and visceral extended sequence. Marschall has his mechanics down well for those kinds of scenes, with the exception that occasionally "battle" scenes are a bit too choppy and blurry. In terms of visceralness, the bookended sequences reminded me a bit of the Nix-cult scenes in Lord of Illusions (1995), but unfortunately they're not shot, acted or constructed quite as well.

In any event, if you're a horror fanatic to the extent that you're a completist--that is, you try to see every horror film ever made--there's plenty to enjoy in Tears of Kali as long as you're generously forgiving. By definition, though, you must be generously forgiving of horror in general to be that kind of fan (otherwise you wouldn't subject yourself to all of those schlocky films, and that's pretty undeniably a large number of films). If you can the positives to fare like The Christmas Season Massacre (2001) or Silo Killer (2002), then you'll find plenty of positives in Tears of Kali, too. Just don't expect anything close to a masterpiece.