Melancholie der Engel

Violence, gore, pornographic content and the like can be powerful things when used properly in cinema, and can help underscore an important point or to shock when well-placed. Melancholie der Engel is garbage of the highest quality simply because it has no placement and no subtlety in how it uses its arsenal of degeneracy and instead barrages you nonstop with stuff that is designed to disgust. There is no plot to speak of, just moments that dovetail to and from one another to create a new stage for something awful to happen.

I am not some conservative old man shaking my cane at the teevee for being "too lewd" or something, but I think that this movie needs to be destroyed and forgotten. This is like what a fourteen year old would create if given fifty thousand dollars and was told to make something "hardcore". Movies don't need to be art to be good, but this is neither and tries to be both.

I've owned a copy of Melancholie der Engel for a few years now, but never watched it as it was in German without subtitles. Recently, I found the movie on YouTube with English subs, so I finally gave it a whirl.

Even with subtitles, it didn't make sense.

Directed by Marian Dora, who gave us the disturbing Cannibal (2006), this film is an extreme arthouse horror that pushes the boundaries in terms of shocking content, the filth and debasement depicted including vomiting, stoma and anus fingering, and the five '-tions' - mutilation, urination, defecation, masturbation, and ejaculation (all shown in graphic detail). While this might be exactly what extreme cinema fans are looking for, the whole thing proves extremely boring thanks to its pretentious approach, unfathomable storytelling and excruciating two and a half hour plus runtime.

Fool that I am, I carried on to the bitter end regardless of the fact that the execution was very tedious and I soon became inured to the abhorrent acts inflicted on the cast. What I did find upsetting was the unnecessary cruelty towards a variety of innocent critters: a tiny newt is slowly crushed, a snail has its eyes cut off with scissors, a worm is sliced into pieces with a scalpel, and a cute cat is killed. People can do what the hell they like to each other in the name of their art (and they do), but leave the animals out of it (unlike the turtle in Cannibal Holocaust, I can't imagine that the cat became food for the cast and crew).

1/10. A repetitive, incomprehensible exercise in repugnant behaviour that couldn't be more wearisome if it tried. If you think you're hardcore enough, watch it back to back with Philosophy Of A Knife.

Holy hell, I've just watched this since I finally got my hands on the English subtitles.

The movie has little to no plot, backstory or continuity whatsoever. The only thing that saves this movie is the excellent way in which the director manages to depict decay, death and several mental illnesses. Unfortunately, these themes however, exist within a vacuum and feel disjointed as hell. Trying to understand this film objectively is largely a futile exercise. The movie feeds on the reaction of the viewer, that's the only power it has, which makes it extremely fragile.

I would suggest to skip this movie, or if you're just curious about the sheer madness on display, watch a few selected scenes, there are plenty, I assure you.

With its focus on audiovisual composition, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA essentially is an emotional experience. Not enough, the complexly developed story also stretches out to themes of friendship, passion, revenge and death wish. This assumes intense preoccupation with all the multiple layers of the movie. In aesthetic, tender images the stunned audience witnesses events that blurred the frontiers between reality and fiction probably already during the shooting. Just apparently in contradiction the events are accompanied by citations of German contemporary history, which gives Marian Dora's work a powerful intellectual historical basis. The movie's structure is similar to the baroque cathedral which gets a central role in the movie: The story and (only on the first sight) marginal details get mirrored like a symmetry axis and seem to be the counterpart of the leading characters destiny.

A personal work of director Marian Dora, the movie defies all formal conventions of storytelling. In nearly all scenes the movie breaks up to the audience's expectations. Established viewing and thinking habits as well as generally accepted and provided moral patterns are getting destroyed and stay unusable. If comparisons are appropriate at all, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA has its place between the work of Jodorowsky or Pasolini. However, the movie can't deny its German roots and openly admits its highly controversial underground cinema status: Poetic, radical, original, unwieldy and impossible to forget.

Melancholie der Engel is a truly terrible movie. Far from the worst I've ever seen, but nonetheless awful.

First off, the positives:

The movie has decent cinematography. It is clear Marian Dora has talent as a director and cinematographer, and that is especially displayed in his film "Cannibal", a far superior film. As visually unattractive and dull as the camera looks, Marian Dora's shots are for the most part good. Sometimes, the camera gets irritatingly close to the object in sight to the point where it's hard to tell what you're looking at, but for the most, it's smooth and generally pretty.

Though the soundtrack is generally one of the negatives of this movie, there was one long organ piece that is played twice in the movie that was legitimately gorgeous. Those are all the positive things I have to say about this movie.

Now, the negatives:

The worst and most offensive thing about this film is that is the most excruciatingly pretentious film I have ever seen. I have nothing against arthouse cinema, and I appreciate genuinely deep, philosophical and artistic media. This film fails at that however. The philosophical insights of this film are not only incredibly nihilistic, but not very interesting, deep, or thought-provoking. The film uses imagery, visual symbolism, and parallels to depict this ideas, but they are not only annoyingly obvious and unsubtle, they are just plain boring. Melancholie der Engel poses itself as an intelligent, gorgeous, masterful art piece among the likes of Bergman and Tarkovsky, when it has very little to offer except surface-level quasi-Nietzschean philosophical ideas.

The reason for the film's infamy however, is another negative thing about it. The film is known for being "disturbing" and full of sadistic, perverse, and foul imagery. This links back to my previous criticism of pretentiousness, as the film acts like these obvious shock value material is deep and meaningful. The film is full of grisly animal abuse, defecation, bodily fluids, torture, rape, and much, much more. The scenes are usually completely out of context and serve no relevance to previous or future material. It is clear Marian Dora wanted to make a shock movie, but he also wanted it to be presented as "art". So he would include a plethora of repulsive imagery, throw some dramatic music over it, and label it as "powerful" and "deep". I would rather any day a movie that embraces its foulness like A Serbian Film that doesn't try to hide under the facade of being art.

Some more minor complaints include: The editing was disjointed, annoying, and full of low-effort transitions. The soundtrack, with the exception of the one aforementioned organ piece, was generally very cheesy, melodramatic, sappy, and for the most part, extremely irritating. It certainly contributed to the pretentiousness of the film. One character, the old man, serves no purpose to the film besides killing animals and beating women. Additionally, the acting was mostly bad, with Katze being the main exception.

The film was overlong, overstuffed, and plain boring. You'd expect a film this full of nasty, gross imagery to be anything but a snoozefest, but it absolutely was. The film isn't disturbing, it's icky and revolting. And being stomach-churning doesn't stop it from being incredibly boring. The film is full of dull monologues that it becomes incredibly tedious and difficult to sit through. I found myself getting very drowsy and almost falling asleep during the first. The nasty imagery couldn't keep my interest, since it was also not very interesting or shocking either.

I will admit, I prefer this over August Underground or Slaughtered Vomit Dolls. There are some good things about this movie. But it was unbearably pretentious - it tried desperately to be "high-brow" and "artsy" but it failed horrendously. Just because the film isn't entirely bad doesn't mean it's worth your time. It was still a waste of time and a terrible experience. If you want a deep, philosophical arthouse movie that's actually good, watch "Stalker", "Andrei Rublev", or "The Seventh Seal". Want a disturbing and horrifying movie that isn't garbage? Watch Come and See, In a Glass Cage, Salo; Or the 120 Days of Sodom, or Cannibal Holocaust. There are so many better options than this stinker of a movie. God bless.

2/10.