The Angels' Melancholia

This movie is as though a lesser talented director took a shot at breaking every taboo boundary that exists. Unfortunately, even with English subs the overall story lacks significantly (if it exists at all). Instead, you are left with a long movie collage of ramblings and animal torture, disturbing , and images of corpses littered around religious monuments with no true background or context. "Extreme" movie done poorly.

Always mentioned in forums and lists on the internet as one of the most disturbing horror films ever made, "Melancholie der Engel" (2009) justifies its reputation as a cursed film due to its scenes of scatology and extreme cruelty.

The film takes the viewer on an odyssey of disturbing and reflective moments, addressing themes such as life, death and moral decay from a nihilistic perspective. The oppressive aesthetic is in keeping with the genre's proposal, making it a truly frightening work of horror. Despite bringing interesting philosophical debates, a well-crafted soundtrack and careful framing in the photography, much of the experience is overshadowed by scenes that go beyond the limits of what is acceptable, such as explicit animal cruelty and sequences involving excrement, made without simulation or practical effects. The subtext does not support the project, making it clear that the enigmatic director Marian Dora intended to shock the public through an underground production aimed at art house cinema. For viewers unfamiliar with this type of transgressive content, the film may seem like nothing more than a jumble of bizarre images and disjointed philosophical dialogues.

"Melancholie der Engel" was not conceived for all audiences, but rather for a select group that enjoys the paraphilias portrayed in the film. Without its more problematic scenes, the film would certainly have achieved more consistent results, even if it would inevitably lose its infamous crown as a disturbing production.

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.

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.

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.