slammerhard

Low-brow and low-quality comedy targeted to the wide uneducated audience is what has dominated Greek film/tv/theater for decades.

Once in a while, there will be attempts to combine this particular brand of Greek entertainment with foreign elements. A couple of years ago Kako and Kako 2 came out and in the 80's there was Drakoulas ton Eksarhion.

In Minore you got bouzouki music and traditional Greek guys playing backgammon. You also got tentacled monsters that looks as if they were created with A. I software and some cheap looking gore. If that wasn't bad enough, the film lasts one hour and fifty minutes and for the first hour absolutely nothing happens.

It is no surprise Minore didn't last in Greek cinemas more than a week. It didn't do better with international audiences.

If the creators of Minore had taken their viewers more seriously maybe there would have been a more positive response.

"It's all Greek to me," summons up everything one can say about this film.

With lots of sex and violence, obviously influenced by Lucio Fulci, especially New York Ripper and Contraband, this is a precursor to the later films of the French extreme wave. It's not very well done, the pacing is terrible, it seems the French don't know how to pull off a decent action film. It's a mishmash of styles patched together in a haphazard manner, there is even an outdoor garden scene with meticulous framing that will remind you of the films of Eric Rohmer.

There is blood and extreme violence but the gore effects are not as good as those in Italian b movies. As long as you don't set your expectations too high it can provide the goods. It's also got a Greek guy as the main villain.

There was a good reason all those slasher films from the 80's had a running time of 90 minutes maximum, and although Mr. Leone must have spent a significant portion of his youth watching them, he didn't learn the lesson. The running time of Terrifier 2 was bad enough, which makes you wonder if there were any test screenings before the official release.

The third one was probably intended to be released with the running time of a Lord of the Rings film and was probably filmed that way, but when he was forced to cut down to two hours, he removed whole chunks of the film, and what was left doesn't make much sense. What you got here is a poor story with badly written characters that, due to the removed parts, lacks continuity. You get characters disappearing, and getting killed off screen, as if the director had entirely forgotten about them and only realized his mistake at a later stage.

At least it looks better than the second one, with better photography. The makeup fx are good when they're shown in quick shots, but when the camera-for the sake of nastiness-lingers too long, it gives away the rubbery texture and the obvious fakeness.