Vila Roza

First of all, I'm not exactly sure why I'm not giving this 10 stars, but I'm just not. I am not a film maker or a journalist. Just a huge horror movie fan who has seen A LOT of movies. I watch horror movies because I want to feel all those typical horror movie feelings. Heart racing, closing your eyes and peeking through your fingertips, can't get to sleep, stare at the screen and yell, "No!!!!".

This movie gave me ALL of that.

I usually don't watch foreign horror because I can't be still long and often enough to watch subtitles all the time. But this was one, is a mix of English and Bulgarian and WELL worth it. I might even dip into some Japanese horror now.

Wow , I thought I've seen it all , but this has to be the worst of the worst .The stupidest movie on God's creation , holy crap and I sat through the agony and the hardship of watching this stupid ass movie .A ll these people in the house are in trouble oh well we'll just stay .They don't try to leave it is just hilarious pile of rubbish oh my God anyone here looking at these reviews of five and a six.., this doesn't deserve a negative one. It's just a horrible display of rancid crap. That's all it is . I can't describe it any better, oh my goodness , it is just too funny and it just goes on and on. 2 hours and seven freaking minutes of this putrid asinine movie director should go teach piano lessons or something just a horrible display.

There's always one guest that seems intent on ruining the evening. Steven, played by David Chokachi, is the jerk in question here. Loutish and determined to cause a fight, he disrupts burgeoning friendships between George and Dora and newlywed Vassil and Nadya. It's almost as if he has some agenda of his own.

Slowly the 'normal' people seem to fall under Steven's influence and become infected by whatever is fuelling his fury. This kind of descent is not totally original, and it's true to say the running time is a little too long, but Director and co-writer Martin Makariev does a great job loading the increasingly intense scenes with a thickly spread sense of suspense. This subtitled Bulgarian film features some scenes - mostly those involving Steven - that are spoken in English. Well worth seeing. My score is 8 out of 10.

Photography in the very beginning takes the watcher to a mountainous region in Bulgaria. It's beautiful, in a scary way - great unsettled mountains and forests makes one feel very small. From the beginning there's a bit similar feeling like in The Shining. Isolation, a small group of people, and something hauntingly wrong in the location. While many horror films takes place in an isolated location, they rarely deliver the feeling as well as in Vila Roza.

You can tell the director has a vision how to make a horror story interesting. The film avoids many clichés, especially the one I really hate (which is when they go to library to read a Gothic book about demons or sorcery etc). There are some clichés, but director seems to make a good use of them.

All and all it's definitely one of the best horror flicks I've seen in a while and I recommend this to any horror movie fan.

Despite having its flaws, Vila Roza is among the few modern Bulgarian movies that I can really recommend. It uses some clichés from the horror genre, but the actors perform well and for me it did not feel fake. In my opinion the Bulgarian actors play their parts better than their foreign colleagues and their inclusion seems a bit unneeded at times. The fact that it is based on real case and evidence is intriguing, especially when they add the footage from the actual investigation. To sum it up, this is a movie that kept me interested in the plot, offered intense moments and generally made me wonder why are most of the contemporary Bulgarian movies usually lacking a lot of its positive features.