Melancholie der Engel

What the heck was this movie about? I can never ever get back the 2.5 hours that I used of my life to watch this movie. There is very little sequential movement through this story and the randomness and extensive focus on the irrelevant produced a waking coma that I may never recover from. The symbolism is impossible to follow and even the nudity, to include random ball and sack shots, was out of place and added little to the comprehensibility of this film. This would be a perfect film for someone on death row who had nothing else to live for and was anxious to end their life in confusion.

Holy hell, I've just watched this since I finally got my hands on the English subtitles.

The movie has little to no plot, backstory or continuity whatsoever. The only thing that saves this movie is the excellent way in which the director manages to depict decay, death and several mental illnesses. Unfortunately, these themes however, exist within a vacuum and feel disjointed as hell. Trying to understand this film objectively is largely a futile exercise. The movie feeds on the reaction of the viewer, that's the only power it has, which makes it extremely fragile.

I would suggest to skip this movie, or if you're just curious about the sheer madness on display, watch a few selected scenes, there are plenty, I assure you.

I've owned a copy of Melancholie der Engel for a few years now, but never watched it as it was in German without subtitles. Recently, I found the movie on YouTube with English subs, so I finally gave it a whirl.

Even with subtitles, it didn't make sense.

Directed by Marian Dora, who gave us the disturbing Cannibal (2006), this film is an extreme arthouse horror that pushes the boundaries in terms of shocking content, the filth and debasement depicted including vomiting, stoma and anus fingering, and the five '-tions' - mutilation, urination, defecation, masturbation, and ejaculation (all shown in graphic detail). While this might be exactly what extreme cinema fans are looking for, the whole thing proves extremely boring thanks to its pretentious approach, unfathomable storytelling and excruciating two and a half hour plus runtime.

Fool that I am, I carried on to the bitter end regardless of the fact that the execution was very tedious and I soon became inured to the abhorrent acts inflicted on the cast. What I did find upsetting was the unnecessary cruelty towards a variety of innocent critters: a tiny newt is slowly crushed, a snail has its eyes cut off with scissors, a worm is sliced into pieces with a scalpel, and a cute cat is killed. People can do what the hell they like to each other in the name of their art (and they do), but leave the animals out of it (unlike the turtle in Cannibal Holocaust, I can't imagine that the cat became food for the cast and crew).

1/10. A repetitive, incomprehensible exercise in repugnant behaviour that couldn't be more wearisome if it tried. If you think you're hardcore enough, watch it back to back with Philosophy Of A Knife.

The horror status this movie has got is pretty high... Possibly, seen as a must for die hard horror fans...

I'll start off on a high, Melancholie der Engel has great camera work, & to a large extent, the soundtrack is OK...

However... Its just waaay too long...

There is some great sick scenes in there, but it just gets boring in between, & the dialogue is terrible... Which for me is the biggest bummer, as regarding the storyline, there is just nothing to grab onto, at all, its basically just random scenes of emptiness...

I'm guessing this movie got rated so sick for the animal cruelty in it, which of course is bad... However compare that to the extreme scenes of paedophilia in 'A Serbian Film'... Well... I know which were more disturbing for me...

At the end of the day, this movie is only worth a watch to see how it compares to the rest of the so-called sick movies...

With its focus on audiovisual composition, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA essentially is an emotional experience. Not enough, the complexly developed story also stretches out to themes of friendship, passion, revenge and death wish. This assumes intense preoccupation with all the multiple layers of the movie. In aesthetic, tender images the stunned audience witnesses events that blurred the frontiers between reality and fiction probably already during the shooting. Just apparently in contradiction the events are accompanied by citations of German contemporary history, which gives Marian Dora's work a powerful intellectual historical basis. The movie's structure is similar to the baroque cathedral which gets a central role in the movie: The story and (only on the first sight) marginal details get mirrored like a symmetry axis and seem to be the counterpart of the leading characters destiny.

A personal work of director Marian Dora, the movie defies all formal conventions of storytelling. In nearly all scenes the movie breaks up to the audience's expectations. Established viewing and thinking habits as well as generally accepted and provided moral patterns are getting destroyed and stay unusable. If comparisons are appropriate at all, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA has its place between the work of Jodorowsky or Pasolini. However, the movie can't deny its German roots and openly admits its highly controversial underground cinema status: Poetic, radical, original, unwieldy and impossible to forget.