Império Proibido

"Viy", a.k.a. "Forbidden Empire" is a fantasy film with a confused story about a British cartographer that flees from England (actually from his future father-in-law) expecting to raise a fortune in the East to marry his beloved girlfriend but finding a cursed place. The film has wonderful special effects but is hard to be followed since the pretentious screenplay is not well-written and is totally disconnected with many plot points.

The 1967 film is a Russian classic horror movie and a little gem. However this unnecessary remake is a complete mess and difficult to understand which the target audience is. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "A Lenda" ("The Legend")

Forbidden Kingdom is surreal and pragmatic at the same time. Its a disorienting mix that mostly works, even though it probably should not.

There's a lot of fantastical, hellish fantasy elements in this film, that have a rather medieval feel to them. Horned demons, winged sprites and variety of other bizarre creations. This sits alongside a rather pragmatic tale of rationalism with an inexplicable, religious twist.

The acting seems reasonable but I feel a lot has been lost in translation. Its pretty clear the Russian component of this film has been dubbed. As a result I suspect is a lot of the meaning conveyed in Russian that would help to fully explain the story has been lost. As a result, for English speakers like myself, this film may have a disjointed feel to it. There is no clear segue between the scenes that make up the story and as a consequence no sense of cohesion and unity in the overall story itself.

Its worth briefly mentioning the cinematography used in this film. Its truly exceptional and really gives this film great visual depth and beauty.

All in all, for a non Russian audience this film may be a little too difficult to grasp and fully appreciate. As I said, the English translation does this film no favours. As a result its hard for me to offer an unequivocal thumbs up. That said, this is still a highly original and very creative film, reminiscent of works by Tim Burton. As such, I would suggest its still worth your time. Seven out of ten from me.

I liked the movie. When I was going to see it I had already known that it was not a screen version of Nikolai Gogol's story but "a movie based on it". That's why I was not disappointed as some people who went to the theatre to see just a new version of 1967 "Viy". Because it is not.

This new "Viy" took the same legend from the book (based on a Slavic folklore legend), the same characters, the same location - a small Ukrainian out-of-the-way village, added some new characters , CGI (quite good), shuffled everything, sprinkled it with humour (sometimes dark)and eminently suitable music. And as a result, we have an interesting mystic story definitely worth watching.

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.

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 ...