danielkr-1

When you have a premise as schlocky as this, jokes are unnecessary. Still, visually rich, nicely paced, and impeccably scored. It's a rare low-budget film that looks this expensive.

It's always nice to see Udo Kier. He manages to be funny while playing his part completely straight. Dude is a national socialist treasure. If the rest of the movie was written for characters like that instead of the caricatures it used, the whole experience would have been sublime.

The Americans are all broad stereotypes here, and this may be the thing that is bugging me since I'm American. If this is how the world sees us, I fear for our future. Though really, I couldn't say I'm surprised either. We've provided plenty of buffoonery in the last 20 years. Even so, where are the British in all this? It's not like we were the only country in WWII. What's why it wasn't just called WII.

Well in any event, there are worse ways to spend an hour and a half.

I just stumbled across Seduction on an obscure Roku channel (Pub-D-Hub) under its title EROTIKON, and was really wowed by the gorgeous cinematography, subtle and complex acting and effective visual storytelling. And that last one is especially important because the inter-titles on this print were in the original Czech, and therefore completely alien to me.

The leads were both richly complex people, evolving over the course of the brisk hour and a half from seemingly shallow types (virgin and callow seducer) into rich, fully rounded characters.

A great exercise in visual storytelling!

I've seen this kind of thing before - science fiction movies made by people who seem to really be kicking and screaming against the genre. It's like they are saying, "those fans like heads in jars? Fine, let's give them heads in jars." If anything the premise seems to be a weird excuse to hang a soap opera on. The space ship is implausibly large inside, the black and white cinematography is bland. The actors, surprisingly, seem fine in roles which are pretty aimlessly written. BUT, there are two things I can get behind in this movie. It does have the virtue of brevity, clocking in at just over an hour. And it's always nice to see an American villain for a change.