Brocéliande

Yes, absolutely dreadful, And this coming from someone who loves bad movies - but there's a limit. I enjoy all sorts of horror/suspense films, and have seen some wonderful work from European film makers. Broceliande is sadly not among those those wonderful pieces of film-making. The camera work is worse than amateurish. Not the fashionable, shaky MTV "cameraman needs Ritalin" type of camera work so many film-makers use to camouflage their lack of talent. This is simply bad frame composition and terrible image composition. The acting is farcical when it is not entirely two-dimensional. The dialogues are stilted and unnatural - even more so than your usual run-of-the-mill horror/suspense film delving into pseudo-mysticism. I think that what put me off the most was the horribly choreographed fight scenes at the end of the film. These were bad to the point of being ludicrous. I've seen what a small budget can do, and it can do wonders. This was just bad film-making. Very, very sad.

Another try, another miss. France may be doomed for not being able to produce a good horror movie. I mean... the least they could do was to shoot the movie in the forest of Brocéliande, but even the forest is fake ! It was shot near Paris ! The subject is useless, the actors are really insignificant and the text makes you wish you were deaf. Nothing could save it.

Bad... to the bone. I wasn't warned. I want my money back.

I HATE THIS MOVIE!!!!!! I have never seen such utter, complete trash in my life!!! I live in France so it turned out that I was in the front line to watch this awful movie. At first, it seemed cool, kind of like something about a cursed forest that chomps people. Unfortunately, it turned out it was something QUITE different: a good start with a girl that meets a guy and all that whatnot, then the girl gets threatening messages in the form of ravens shut up in her bathroom closet(ludicrous), from that bit and on, the movie starts to slide downhill very quickly with a lot of desperate thrashing in the process. The movie ends with sacrificial druids galore and ancient ugly, stinky creatures coming back from the past to kill a few people. Many questions were rushing around my head by then: why the heck did they bring back that scummy monster? Do druids look like maniacs dressed in bedsheets? Why did they even bother making this movie?? The "climax" of the movie was so goofy I laughed all the way through it: the "awful" stinky monster does battle with the two young women(who appear to be expert kung fu masters) and the professor gets sliced in two or something. What surprised me was that the monster was so slow and ungainly in battle, wasn't it supposed to be a god of war or something? Anyway, the movie in it's death throws was a pitiful sight. A brief condensation of the contents of this movie: Kung fu mayhem+druid stones+mysterious murders "à la thriller"+ancient prophecies+shabby ravens+old clumsy boneless war god+nutty professor=complete and utter, diseased, boneless, worm eaten, GODFORSAKEN, GODDAM, RECYCLED, FAKE, WANNABE, LUDICROUS SH*T!!!!!!!!! Things I learned from this movie: -Ancient war gods are lousy at kung fu. -All young women who study archeology at university in France are kung fu experts. -Professors are so resistant they can survive being sliced in two by a saw-mass-whatchamacallit without any injuries.

The actresses are cute and the sets, while simple, quite OK. Apart from this, there is nothing to save from this movie. Incredibly bad acted, dumb to tears dialogues, all-too-expected plot, a lot of goofs and inconsistencies (for instance, a pretty young girl gets hits in the head by a morning star and not only she survives, but barely with a scratch !)... To make it short because it does not worth more, even the fans of the genre can avoid it.

In the early 00's, production companies had a short-lived craze for supernatural genre movies in France after "The Crimson Rivers" and "Brotherhood of the Wolf" turned out to be hits, so several movies were green-lit or saved from their "direct-to-video" fate. However, France, as opposed to the US, UK or Italy, has little tradition of fantasy B-movies and it turned out quickly that "Samouraïs", "Bloody Mallory" or the "Crimson Rivers" sequel were ill-advised attempts at recreating a kind of magic that had never existed in French cinema in the first place. As they flopped, producers have gone back to their usual fare: derivative farces or the umpteenth self-referential tribute to French New Wave by a former critic from "Les Cahiers du cinéma".

"Brocéliande" could only have been green-lit during this short window, as it serves no other discernible purpose. It's your by-the-book slasher movie mixed with vague mythological element and horror references and you'll find bimboesque female characters, a French University looking like a US campus and plot twists so lazy you don't even care because you had guessed it by yourself an hour before, even before the movie started.

These elements make all the fun of a 70's or a 80's B-movie and you expect them in a 70's or 80's movie. However, we're not in the 80's anymore and nobody warned director Doug Headline, as this tribute to the slasher movie genre is nothing more than a derivative slasher movie. Headline himself is no rookie and has been writing as a critic about this kind of pictures since the early 80's but as a first time director he shows a lack of skill and ambition that makes "Brocéliande" a bore.

When you put together clichés from a movie subcategory and hand them to a skilled and inventive director such as Wes Craven or Quentin Tarantino, you get a "Scream" or a "Death Proof", movies that are imitations from old guilty pleasures but also magnify these clichés and add a great deal to them. That's called "talent" and that's why you can't confuse these recent movies with their original inspirations shot decades ago.

"Brocéliande" takes the lazy path and only reproduces the worst elements from past movies (unfortunately for the male viewer, the gratuitous nudity is mostly missing). There are very strong similarities (presumably unintentional) between the plot of "Brocéliande" and the reviled "Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch", as both deal with supernatural Druidic evil rituals and some silly attempt at taking over the world on Halloween night. As even the plot of "Halloween 3" makes more sense than this one, it means that something seriously wrong went with "Brocéliande".