Viy - La maschera del demonio

As a huge Fantasy / Sci-Fi fan, I'm not sure how this movie escaped my attention before it dropped on Amazon Prime. Russian film with a cast speaking Russian, but strangely with a couple of very good British actors in leading roles speaking English. The sets, costumes, special effects are surprisingly good and the production value seems pretty high. Although, some of the special effects at times don't make a lot of sense. This would have rated MUCH higher if not for the bad dubbing. I mean COMICALLY BAD voice acting in the dubbing, especially in the initial setup at the start of the movie. If you can make it past the midpoint, it gets a lot better. Objectively, this is a pretty good movie, with a traditional villain storyline that probably isn't going to surprise you much, but still good. But the bad dubbing almost kills it.

I've seen several recent fantasy and sci-fi Russian movies and they all feel like the story is a badly assembled jigsaw. Is it that the Russian story makes sense and somehow they can't translate to English? I think that's unlikely. Viy is a strange combination of Dracula and Sleepy Hollow, with a few English actors to make it mainstream, but the rest, including cinematography, is Russian. Jason Flemyng plays the main character, an English scientist having to deal with Slavic superstition in "uncivilized" Russia (yes, it's not Transilvania, which is in Romania, I would have hoped Russians at least knew that), with Charles Dance in a few irrelevant scenes.

The idea was interesting, the special effects nice, but it felt like something was terribly wrong with the assembly of the scenes and the dialogues. You probably have to watch in Russian (if a version even exists).

Poor Nikolai Gogol... The British empire came to "put order" in the East, eradicating the Ukrainian folk from his masterful long tale "Vij". This is an overlong, convoluted, revisionist version of Gogol's story, reducing the fantasy elements to dumb babble passing for "scientific" explanations of the beliefs and fears of an agrarian, superstitious community in Transylvania during the 18th century. Better watch the 1967 "Vij" or Mario Bava's masterful, free adaptation "La maschera del demonio" (1960).

Just in case you didn't know (like me), this is sort of a remake of a 1967 movie. Though as some have stated here and on other places, it's not really a remake or people shouldn't expect it to be one. Whatever the case, this has pretty good special effects in it. The acting on the other hand is hard to rate.

Why is that? While watching (in English in this case), you might realize that something is off with some of the actors. I can only assume, but most of them either couldn't speak English or their English was so bad, they had to be synced. And that is very apparent in many scenes. Obviously Jason Flemyng does not have that issue. And if you are a fan of Fantasy Fiction, you will still sort of love this. But there are things that just don't work or are too convoluted ...

Thoroughly enjoyable bit of weirdness. The movie looks great and there is some great comedic timing from a lot of the characters here too. The juxtaposition of peasant superstition and aristocratic "there's an explanation for everything" is a great mix. For most of the movie, what is supposed to be real or an illusion from the story's point of view is in question. This reminds me of parts of Pan's Labyrinth, Naked Lunch, Van Helsing, among others. It does have some flaws in the logic and the pacing at times, and it can be a little confusing separating the characters from their grime to make sense of the story. This is one of those movies that's got a lot of art house in it so it's not going to appeal to everyone, but if you like a unique mix of camp, fx, and writing that leaves some questions unanswered you'll enjoy it. I highly recommend this one. I would go see a sequel in a heartbeat.