Bela Kiss: Prologue

I often find that even the lamest of horror movies have one or maybe even two redeeming features that make them just about bearable, whether that be a gratuitous shower scene, hot bimbo sex, a dwarf with a machine gun, mutant flesh-eating rodents, or simply some cheesy OTT gore, like someone's eyeballs randomly popping out of their sockets.

Natural Born Killer opts for both a sex scene and a shower scene, yet neither of these elements make this film any more entertaining, both somehow failing to provide any nudity. The remainder of the film is as equally dull and disappointing, as five bank robbers check in at a remote hotel to wait for the heat to die down, only to find that the staff are a bunch of weirdos in league with notorious serial killer Bela Kiss, who has apparently found a way to prolong his life.

Veering wildly in style from standard teen horror fare to torture porn to art-house horror, Natural Born Killer (AKA The Kiss of a Killer, AKA Bela Kiss: Prologue) is a complete and utter mess: boring from start to finish (very tame gore and absolutely no little guys brandishing extreme firepower), it is one of the few films that I have had to rewind at least five times at various stages because I kept falling asleep.

I really ... really ... really ... really wanted to like this. I mean it. I even know someone who was involved in the production - though that person themselves said it didn't turn out good. Now that being said, let me state the positive things up front. Because this looks really good - camera and effects are well done. I can't imagine this having a big budget so Kudos to whoever was responsible for the look of the movie.

There is also the basic element of the movie. The Bela Kiss "true origin" this is sort of based on. Actually the movie might have been better if it concentrated on the past and wasn't trying to be modern and mixing the elements from back then to nowadays. Especially considering this is called Prologue ... more like Epilogue/Eulogy - sorry but the joke was too easy to not do.

That being said and which I think justifies me not giving this worse than the 3/10 it got, do not watch this dubbed in German. It is horrendous! And that is putting it mildly. Unfortunately for some reason Netflix Germany considered the German (clearly dubbed) soundtrack to be the "original" audio. Not sure who was responsible for that, but it is way wrong.

Having said that, I already rated it "higher" because I am giving this the benefit of the doubt, that the actors actually are able to communicate their feelings verbally. Unlike their dubbing counterparts - even so the characters are paper thin, the movie is filled with cliches and the characters almost always do the exact opposite of what a sane human being would do. Which is nothing new when it comes to horror movies ... but especially bad, when you have not much else going for yourself.

Which brings us back to my point: I just can't be leniant ... I can't just pretend this is good when it is clearly not - as a movie.

I enjoyed this movie. From the onset it was mysterious and engaging. There was no clear direction where the film was going. I knew nothing about the I story, hadn't read the back of the case (which is how I like to view movies).

We meet a group of young bank robbers, who I have to say seem the most innocent kind of bank robbers ever featured in a film. They are on their way to a safe hotel set in the woods. On the way they come across a car blocking their path and a suspicious chap with a gun.

The hotel is mysterious and enigmatic, the leader books them in under fairy tale names. Which for some reason stands out as a key moment in the film to me but probably isn't. There are several moments in the film like this.

Even though the initial characters aren't particularly interesting there is something very watchable about the movie, what is happening around the main characters is more enthralling than they are.

As the movie progresses the owners of the hotel become more prominent within the film and demand your attention. Details seem to be important.

The crescendo is gory and violent, lots of blood. As the film closes it seems to lose some of it's charisma. The ending is a little disappointing, just seemed lacking the magic that ran through the rest of the film.

Not bad for a film, which invited such scathing opinions; "Kiss" is a tense film with 440 pounds of excess emotional baggage. The build up to mischief at Hotel Transylvania takes its sweet time in coming to play and terms with Nikolai's accent and horrendous dialogue delivery. The kills are subtle and effective, things go nuts and all woozy in the third act when one of the guests is administered a certain paralyzing agent through tea, a hot cup of tea. "Kiss" also goes the extra mile and explains to us that the immortality is the only trait the hotel management and staff share with vampires, that and the blood I assume, since there was loads of it in this slasher, haunted hotel flick. The rest are mere "fairy tales", says the butler to the victim,

With its enticing, "true story" history from 1914 to present-day and a jumbled, nonsensical plot, "Bela Kiss" entertains some with its 'no-show' kills, mediocre to laughable acting, the back-story. Vision of the Avengers fame as a serial killer, the home-coming of a twist, no-clue-title, and blood, gallons of blood, bath tubs full of blood.

Bela Kiss is theoretically based on a true story about a notorious serial killer whose crimes were discovered as WW1 was gearing up when the military attempted to confiscate barrels of gasoline and discovered mutilated bodies inside.

The soldiers that made the discovery are supposed to be so horrified that they immediately run off vomiting (apparently they weren't familiar with the horrors of trench warfare yet). Flash forward to the present and we have a van with five young people that just pulled a robbery and go to hide out in a no-tell motel for a while to avoid the cops. The place is elegant but very creepy, run by a crew of weirdos and filled with secret passages.

Once inside, we are told the not so interesting story of Bela Kiss, played Rudolf Martin, an actor perhaps best known for having played Dracula twice in both an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a TV movie called Prince of Darkness. Bela's back-story is dull, and perhaps in an attempt to make it seem more interesting, it is filmed in a visually lush, audacious style that reminded me of the film adaptation of Perfume A Love Story.

The move plods along bouncing from the uninteresting story of Bela Kiss to the uninteresting story of the young thieves, who pulled the robbery for some mysterious "boss" and are now turning on each other because of some soap opera style bickering between the leader and another guy over one of the girls (Kristina Klebe of Chillerama and Zombie's Halloween remake).

Basically, the only reasons I watched this movie were vague comparisons to Hostel and the presence of actress Kristina Klebe. Neither justified sitting through this dull, self serious mess. It's neither entertaining nor scary, there's a lot of blood but most violence occurs just barely off screen, and the plot contortions in the third act are just stupid.

Put simply, Bela Kiss is the prologue to a story that I have absolutely no interest in seeing completed.