When the villagers killed Constantin Tirescu, they thought it was justice. Vlad Cozma thinks it was murder. Now Constantin thinks pickles might go nice with blood.
Dennis Harvey at Variety called it "drolly funny if a tad long-winded". I think he is right on both points. Second one first -- coming in around 104 minutes, I think shaving ten minutes off would help the pacing and get more of an audience. Not saying it drags, but it could be faster.
First point second, it is quite funny, in an offbeat way. Romanians doing a conga line to "Spirit in the Sky", old men asking if Italy has nice pizza (it does, and ice cream, too). And weird comments like a character being "too ***** to stick his finger up my ***." The fast food nightmare scene was excellent, too, both funny and sickening at the same time.
Faye Jackson says, "Romanian is a language that uses a lot of word play and slang and my Romanian simply isn't good enough to write dialogue that sounds like Romanian as it's spoken. So I had to write it in English." She has been asked why it was not in Romanian since they filmed it there and it starred Romanians. Perhaps the right thing to do would be to get a new director, but since Jackson did so well, that seems unnecessary in hindsight.
The gore is commendable, very good and not too gross for a horror film, especially the scene with the police officer. I am not entirely clear why the cop has born without ribs, though. (I suppose he might have been born with ribs and had them removed later, but it is still weird.) I am waiting to see what Faye Jackson does next. The director's next project is "sort of Dirty Pretty Things meets the A Team, except nothing like that at all". Wow. Yep, wow.
