Necromentia

Four disjointed stories of horror loosely connected by a tattooed quija board.

Story one is about a guy who keeps his dead wife in a bathtub and tries to bring her back....or rather....keeps saying she promised to come back. No mention of when she died, but funny how there's no decay.

Two thugs come in and make an offer to bring the wife back. Something about gateways. But there is a fatal flaw with the plot. The guy doesn't choose his fate, as the narrative says...it's thrust on him against his will.

Story two finds two brothers -- one who appears to be a crippled mute. Mr. Skinny -- a fat guy with a pig mask pops out of the TV and the kid finds him funny even tho he's covered with blood. Lots of torture scenes here, but I couldn't follow it. It's all over the map and not one frame makes sense.

I THINK this 3rd story is about a guy who wants his brother back, but by this time all logic breaks down. The stories appear to be intertwined in a way that no sense can be made of them.

That's it for me. I don't even know what the 4th tale is supposed to be but it appears to be related to the first in a way and features an extraordinarily effeminate man who loves a woman a bit too much.

Net net -- this is a clunker.

I love the idea of this movie but the logistics don't work and that kills the final product for me. Told in a Pulp Fiction piece-it-together style, it tells the story of love, betrayal and resurrection but leaves out some fairly important information. How did the parents die? Why does their will not provide for adequate care of their children? And even *if* you're a junkie, how, when you run an underground scarification business, do you NOT charge your clients enough to survive on? Seriously. That ran through my head throughout the whole movie. Also - how do you cut off a client's finger and just continue on as if nothing happens? For me, this shows that no matter how much thought went into the movie (and it's an interesting premise), in the end Reginald choose cheap gore-points over an actual vision. The movie just...ends without a major plot point resolved.

The performances work well and the direction is decent. The pacing needs tweaking so as not to allow the viewer to actually think about the plot holes. While consistently a little too dark, the movie looks fantastic which is why I kept watching after the questions started popping up.

The pay off isn't worth the time invested. Worse, you really need to pay attention and that makes the ending even more disappointing.

Necromentia is a nice little underground horror movie that is taking a bow for Clive Barkers mighty Hellraiser. The basic concept of people fiddling with the occult to take a peek into the beyond (except for here they don't use a Rubik's cube but rather S/M body carving and occult symbols), the music, the demons with the hooks and chains on their faces... I guess its pretty obvious. Anyway, Necromentia is not a plain rip-off. It deals with the fate of 3 different characters whose fates are connected as you understand by the end of the movie which is kind of told in a reverse fashion. The movie is rather slow but tends to break out into some gory face bashing and twisted body-modification stuff. The visuals are gritty and green-tinted like in so many movies nowadays but the look of the movie is pretty cool. There is also some pretty twisted scenes here like the fore-mentioned S/M carvings (which in one scene start like your typical torture porn just to turn out to be a chick paying to get cut up by some kind of male fetish dominatrix) or a demon with a pig mask seducing people to commit suicide. The whole setup of these scenes is really great, so I was rather disappointed to see hell and its demons presented in such a low-tech fashion. Basically all hell visions are filmed in a dark corridor with steam pipes. In the beginning it works and the eerie feeling of the flickering lights looks great until you see every demon in this setting. The demons are pretty straight and often remind of a Marilyn Manson Video with gas masks and all the typical gimmicks... nothing special except for one which looks really messed up.

There is really some potential here but the way they presented the core of the movie, which is hell, as well as the plot that pretty much leads nowhere are a real let down. So the interesting story telling devices and visual are just not enough to get Necromentia above the average.

This movie looked so promising in the beginning and had potential, but it was never given chance to fully become what it could have.

The movie is dark and gloomy, which is nice for this type of movie. And the creatures in the movie looked cool, although there was far too much inspiration "borrowed" from Clive Barker's "Hellraiser" franchise. And also the big creature in "Necromentia" seemed to be a replica of the "Nemesis" monster from the "Resident Evil 3" game (and/or "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" movie).

As for the cast and acting, well nothing bad here. Good performances all together.

The story was fairly good up until halfway through the movie, then it lost its breath and the movie suffered horribly from it. The movie grew stale and boring at that point. But I still sat through the entire movie.

The ending? Well it did tie up the circle of the story throughout the movie. But nothing breathtaking or spectacular. And also there were no scares throughout the movie. I was constantly waiting for something grand to happen. Unfortunately, it never did.

"Necromentia" is not one of the better horror movies out there, and it certainly is not among the worst either. Just below mediocre. Suitable if you are bored an evening and got nothing better to watch...

While trying to open a portal to Hell to retrieve a long-lost love, a man finds his quest of locating the designated victim to draw the symbols required to do so far more challenging than the Dark Angel who assigned it to him thought it would be.

An ultimately disappointing effort, this one was just flat-out flawed and not really that worthwhile. The main point of contention with this one is that it's just confusing and not all that easy to follow, tending to use far more flashbacks than necessary, most of those filled with going so far out of the traditional plot line (we do have about four or five of them, and none of them intersect until the finale) that overall it just becomes so confusing as to what's going on that eventually it just becomes moot as to what's going on. This one does have some wonderfully absurd images and ideas, as there's one scene with a pig you have to see to believe, and the concept of what's going on works when it's kept to a visual standpoint instead of trying to spell it all out, but that doesn't come close to justifying the rest of the flaws in here, and overall this one is just a jumbled, incoherent mess.

Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and Nudity.