Cidade Sombria

A mysterious and suspenseful film dealing with astonishing happenings. It concerns a priest called Owen : Vincent Gallo who hires a team to guide him into Moscow underword. His purport, along with his companions formed by a couple of Russian natives, is to find his friend Sergei, Rade Serbedzja, who was missing while researching dark legends about fantastic sanatic cults, as well as about a door leading to hell beneath Moscow. As in the bunch of misfits are the following ones : the beautiful Oksana Akinshina, the cunning tracker Joaquin De Almeida, Sage Stallone, among others. Along the way, they encounter scary demons and a group of children haunting them. A film by Luna in which the gates of the underworld have been opened !.

This is a supernatural and suspenseful shocker with thrills, chills and terrifying scenes.This ghost story picture displays lots of creepy, scary happenings and rare moments. It is set against the backdrop of seemingly endless underworld corridors in Moscow city, while a reverend accompanied by a motley group uncover strange evidences of horrifiyng spirits and bizarre devils . It keeps the mystery all around until he final, resulting in a complexing and puzzling conclusion. The main and support cast are acceptable, Vincent Gallo as an obstinate reverend with whom fall the beautiful Oksana Akinshina who previously starred Kyla 4 ever, the Portuguese Joaquin De Almeida, the veteran Joss Ackland, Rade Serbedzja, Sage Stallone who's Sylvester's son, and Spanish actors as Julio Periñan, Alex O'Dogherty, among others.

It packs an atmospheric and eerie musical score by Javier Navarrete, an expert musician who has composed great international successes such as : Pan's labyrinth, Wrath of the titans, Mirrors, Byzantium, Inkheart, Fireflies in the garden, Greta, among others. As well as dark and sinister cinematography by Ricardo Aronovich. The motion picture was regular but professionally directed by Maria Lidon or Luna, in her last one. Lidon is a good filmmaker who has only made three passable films, all of them starred by Joaquin de Almeida : Stranded or Naufragos 2001 with Vincent Gallo, Yo Puta 2004 with Denise Richards, Daryn Hannah and this Moscow Zero. Rating 5.5/10.

There are good movies, and there are bad movies, and then there's Moscow Zero, a film so utterly bad it makes spending a month in solitary with an insurance salesman an attractive entertainment alternative.

With an incomprehensible plot about the gates of Hell opening within a labyrinth of tunnels under Moscow, the film is a mess of repetitive and nonsensical shots of a little girl running through tunnels, red lights floating about, and strange wall shadows, none of which serves to mount any fear or tension, but instead elicits the reaction of "here they go again with the girl (or lights)" from the viewer.

Directed by María Lidón, who for reasons I can only conclude as shame, was billed as Luna, the movie stars Vince Gallo as Owen, an American priest who travels to Moscow in search of Sergei (Rade Serbedzija), a friend and colleague who has gone missing in the tunnels. He enlists the help of a series of locals who, with the exception of Oksana Akinshina, are all portrayed by Spanish actors trying with limited success to inflect Russian accents.

Along the way they cross paths with members of some sort of underground leather-coated religious mafia headed by a portly Val Kilmer, whose career seems to be in such free fall that he's resorted to appearing in dreck like this, and henchman Sage Stallone (Sly's son), who seems to have been cast merely so the Stallone name can be included in the film's marquee.

Apart from watching the troupe try to navigate their way through the tunnels with the aid of a comically drawn map, and repetitive shots of them being followed or eluded by a pale faced young girl, not much else goes on throughout. Dialogue routinely switches between English and Russian, with actors frequently taking turns in each language, and entire conversations are uttered half in one and half in the other with the only apparent reason being they felt like it, adding a frustrating dimension for the viewer, over and above trying to figure out the crazily cobbled together story.

About the only thing Moscow Zero gets right, however, is its title, which could only have rendered a more accurate description of this movie if the word Moscow had been omitted.

This movie is not as bad as people are making it out to be. The special effects may not be the best, but this is not a horror movie or action movie. Not every movie producing company has the same financial resources. Moscow Zero is more of a psychological thriller. It is a story about fear and how we protect ourselves from the unknown in order to survive. I also find some parts of this movie humorous like the sexual tension between Owen (a priest) and Lyuba (sexy blond outcast) and when the "elders" think the food the children bring them is animal meat (of course they can't see it). This movie doesn't hand every thing to you, some of it you have to infer. I for one enjoy movies that make you think after it is over.

After watching this film I decided that it was so awful that I must join IMDb and write a review to warn other people of the pit falls of renting/buying this film. To be fair to the film there is only one good section to this film and that is the end credits cause then you know that this crap is well and truly over. I watched it to the end in the hope that I may get a little bit of pleasure out of the film. Just tunnels more tunnels and an old man talking to himself (If you watch this film too many time so will you). As for Val if he keeps selecting films like this he may as well kiss goodbye to his acting career. There is no point in even writing about what is in the film as that has already been done. Keep your money and sanity and keep well clear.

MOSCOW ZERO is a really dark, mystical and supernatural film. The plot is very straight to follow since it's just about a quest to find SERGEI (played by Rade Serbedzija) an old friend of the father OWEN (played by Vincent Gallo) that went to the catacombs of Moscow alone. The entire movie is passed in there. Though the film has a very open ending, which is, by the way, very well connected to the mysterious and mystical ambiance that is always present… What I appreciated the most in the film was precisely this mystical and supernatural ambiance of this story and the way it was shot. It has a great cinematography, creating very dark and claustrophobic scenarios. The soundtrack is also good, because it also has mysterious, dark, melancholic and melodic music, like a ghost story must have! One other detail that I also appreciated was the fact of the demons were characterized only as shadows, as a dark light in the underworld… I found it so much better than the traditional way of characterize demons as little monsters with sharpened teethes, horns and a back tail…

I think this film is very well produced, though I agree it's a bit slow sometimes and could have been more suspenseful. However I also think this melancholy present in the plot and the soundtrack fits perfectly in a dark and mystical story like this.

The acting is reasonably good, but I only would like to mention the Portuguese actor Joaquim de Almeida, playing YURI character… It was a surprise to me hearing him speaking some lines in Russian, but he's a "box of surprises" anyway…

I also would like to say that I think this movie is too much underrated here on IMDb. I Liked this film, especially because of its ambiance as I said before, and I found pretty absurd that a user can say things like this: "There are two shameful reviews in IMDb promoting this movie and they are typically fake, written by users with only one review in this site". Just because he has more than 3000 reviews he thinks he's opinion is better than anyone else's! It's really sad…

My final vote to this different but good film is 7/10.