User reviews

This movie is as though a lesser talented director took a shot at breaking every taboo boundary that exists. Unfortunately, even with English subs the overall story lacks significantly (if it exists at all). Instead, you are left with a long movie collage of ramblings and animal torture, disturbing , and images of corpses littered around religious monuments with no true background or context. "Extreme" movie done poorly.

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 picked up a copy of this film back in 2010 but was highly disappointed when I found there were no subtitles, so for a long time I had no idea what was going on. Sufficed to say, I finally found the subtitles so I can properly give this title a review.

Many people may regard this as a horror film, due to the horrific content, but to me this is about as far from horror as you can get. There's no build up of tension, no jarring moments (other than the extreme gore, excrement and decay) and no backstory. This is as art house as art house gets, and if you've seen any of Marian Dora's other films, you know what you're getting. At first glance, this film is rather tedious and underwhelming. But after really watching it, I found the cinematography to be rather awesome. To me this film portrays decay and death rather well. You can almost smell the rotting flesh, human excrement and other foul stenches you would find in an open air mass grave. Marian Dora certainly knows how to portray putrefaction and disgust. This sort of film will have it's supporters and it's definite critics, as it should, but perhaps that's just because it's so hard to define. The acting was mediocre, the script a bit overplayed but well made and the camera work quite well for the obvious small budget. So I'll give it high marks on these merits. There's one thing that I absolutely hate...

The animal cruelty. No movie producer should ever feel the need to kill a cat on camera for shock value. That's just stupid, wrong, and should be punishable by prison time. I give this film a big fat ZERO for the use of several animals for death scenes. I can look past the pig slaughter, because you eat a pig after you kill it. But just wasting an animal for no reason? That's terrible. Torturing a human on camera, or smearing excrement on them, or whatever is fine because people have the cognition to understand what's happening, a cat does not.

For the latter part of this review, I will never be supporting Marian Dora's work from this point forward. This is sad because I really like his work as an artist, but I cannot get behind art that harms animals for no reason. I give this a 5 star only on the merits it deserves, if it had been without the cruelty, I would have rated it far higher and I would be purchasing all of his work.

Violence, gore, pornographic content and the like can be powerful things when used properly in cinema, and can help underscore an important point or to shock when well-placed. Melancholie der Engel is garbage of the highest quality simply because it has no placement and no subtlety in how it uses its arsenal of degeneracy and instead barrages you nonstop with stuff that is designed to disgust. There is no plot to speak of, just moments that dovetail to and from one another to create a new stage for something awful to happen.

I am not some conservative old man shaking my cane at the teevee for being "too lewd" or something, but I think that this movie needs to be destroyed and forgotten. This is like what a fourteen year old would create if given fifty thousand dollars and was told to make something "hardcore". Movies don't need to be art to be good, but this is neither and tries to be both.

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.

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.

"Melancholie der Engel" by Marian Dora lasts over 2 hours of length.It's also one of the most extreme horror movies I have ever seen.I saw this vomit-fest without English subs,so the most of the dialogue went beyond me.Still the plot is fairly simple:two closely-bonded nihilists meet two women at a carnival and eventually bring them back to an abandoned house near the woods.The house which is filled with animal bones and decaying dolls.Other characters are introduced like BDSM woman,an old painter pervert and a wheelchair-bound girl.The orgy of drug use,rape,sexual perversion and animal cruelty begins there...Lots of pseudo-intellectual nonsense is spoken and many animals are killed.Even the cat has its throat slit."Melancholie der Engel" literally oozes decay.There is some of the most revolting gore ever captured on screen along with various scenes of sexual perversion bordering on hard-core porn.This is truly unforgiving and deplorable journey into perversion and death.8 extremities out of 10.

Melancholie der Engel is a truly terrible movie. Far from the worst I've ever seen, but nonetheless awful.

First off, the positives:

The movie has decent cinematography. It is clear Marian Dora has talent as a director and cinematographer, and that is especially displayed in his film "Cannibal", a far superior film. As visually unattractive and dull as the camera looks, Marian Dora's shots are for the most part good. Sometimes, the camera gets irritatingly close to the object in sight to the point where it's hard to tell what you're looking at, but for the most, it's smooth and generally pretty.

Though the soundtrack is generally one of the negatives of this movie, there was one long organ piece that is played twice in the movie that was legitimately gorgeous. Those are all the positive things I have to say about this movie.

Now, the negatives:

The worst and most offensive thing about this film is that is the most excruciatingly pretentious film I have ever seen. I have nothing against arthouse cinema, and I appreciate genuinely deep, philosophical and artistic media. This film fails at that however. The philosophical insights of this film are not only incredibly nihilistic, but not very interesting, deep, or thought-provoking. The film uses imagery, visual symbolism, and parallels to depict this ideas, but they are not only annoyingly obvious and unsubtle, they are just plain boring. Melancholie der Engel poses itself as an intelligent, gorgeous, masterful art piece among the likes of Bergman and Tarkovsky, when it has very little to offer except surface-level quasi-Nietzschean philosophical ideas.

The reason for the film's infamy however, is another negative thing about it. The film is known for being "disturbing" and full of sadistic, perverse, and foul imagery. This links back to my previous criticism of pretentiousness, as the film acts like these obvious shock value material is deep and meaningful. The film is full of grisly animal abuse, defecation, bodily fluids, torture, rape, and much, much more. The scenes are usually completely out of context and serve no relevance to previous or future material. It is clear Marian Dora wanted to make a shock movie, but he also wanted it to be presented as "art". So he would include a plethora of repulsive imagery, throw some dramatic music over it, and label it as "powerful" and "deep". I would rather any day a movie that embraces its foulness like A Serbian Film that doesn't try to hide under the facade of being art.

Some more minor complaints include: The editing was disjointed, annoying, and full of low-effort transitions. The soundtrack, with the exception of the one aforementioned organ piece, was generally very cheesy, melodramatic, sappy, and for the most part, extremely irritating. It certainly contributed to the pretentiousness of the film. One character, the old man, serves no purpose to the film besides killing animals and beating women. Additionally, the acting was mostly bad, with Katze being the main exception.

The film was overlong, overstuffed, and plain boring. You'd expect a film this full of nasty, gross imagery to be anything but a snoozefest, but it absolutely was. The film isn't disturbing, it's icky and revolting. And being stomach-churning doesn't stop it from being incredibly boring. The film is full of dull monologues that it becomes incredibly tedious and difficult to sit through. I found myself getting very drowsy and almost falling asleep during the first. The nasty imagery couldn't keep my interest, since it was also not very interesting or shocking either.

I will admit, I prefer this over August Underground or Slaughtered Vomit Dolls. There are some good things about this movie. But it was unbearably pretentious - it tried desperately to be "high-brow" and "artsy" but it failed horrendously. Just because the film isn't entirely bad doesn't mean it's worth your time. It was still a waste of time and a terrible experience. If you want a deep, philosophical arthouse movie that's actually good, watch "Stalker", "Andrei Rublev", or "The Seventh Seal". Want a disturbing and horrifying movie that isn't garbage? Watch Come and See, In a Glass Cage, Salo; Or the 120 Days of Sodom, or Cannibal Holocaust. There are so many better options than this stinker of a movie. God bless.

2/10.

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...

Brutal, disturbing, self-destructive and unpalatable to unimaginable levels.

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.

Always mentioned in forums and lists on the internet as one of the most disturbing horror films ever made, "Melancholie der Engel" (2009) justifies its reputation as a cursed film due to its scenes of scatology and extreme cruelty.

The film takes the viewer on an odyssey of disturbing and reflective moments, addressing themes such as life, death and moral decay from a nihilistic perspective. The oppressive aesthetic is in keeping with the genre's proposal, making it a truly frightening work of horror. Despite bringing interesting philosophical debates, a well-crafted soundtrack and careful framing in the photography, much of the experience is overshadowed by scenes that go beyond the limits of what is acceptable, such as explicit animal cruelty and sequences involving excrement, made without simulation or practical effects. The subtext does not support the project, making it clear that the enigmatic director Marian Dora intended to shock the public through an underground production aimed at art house cinema. For viewers unfamiliar with this type of transgressive content, the film may seem like nothing more than a jumble of bizarre images and disjointed philosophical dialogues.

"Melancholie der Engel" was not conceived for all audiences, but rather for a select group that enjoys the paraphilias portrayed in the film. Without its more problematic scenes, the film would certainly have achieved more consistent results, even if it would inevitably lose its infamous crown as a disturbing production.

Awesome cinematography. Interesting characters. Fantastic soundtrack. A piece of art. PS: The cat was not killed. It's SFX.

Marian Dova's film was indeed a step up from Cannibal. It's a dream like visual art-house film that turns the graphic and grotesque into a beautiful piece of film making. I have to say the uncut version I'm reviewing was in German language with no subtitles but that was not a major issue as there is no real narrative. The film appears to be about death and decay. We see old dolls, dead birds, insects, pigs, cats, fish, insects, and copses in coffins, cigars burning down, and old bones. The scenes involve sexual violence towards women, mutilation, urine, the smearing of excrement and general extreme horror that would normally shock. However, this is no exploitation movie; all the scenes have a dream like quality and an unsettling atmosphere which leave for an emotional experience. Good cinematography and a score by David Hess make this better than it really should be. Lots of sex, nudity and masturbation which is in no way erotic and scenes that would be controversial if in a different picture. At over two and a half hours long it's best to watch in two or three sittings as this is not a movie to grip or even shock you, just a decent piece of extreme horror art-house.

I never thought I'd ever watch this film solely based on what I read about it, but curiosity got the better of me and I gave it a watch. And I regretted it. The story really isn't clear. In fact, this film had no real story to begin with. It's nearly 3 hours long and I don't even remember most of what actually occurred in the film that wasn't graphic sex, debauchery or remorseless violence. Most of the film is just long stretches of people talking for nearly an hour until it plunges into a toilet bowl of rancid imagery for no apparent reason. It's very shameful because the cinematography and visual style for several scenes was quite good but it's wasted on such cruel and disgusting imagery that has no explanation as to why it's occurring or why it should ever occur in any sort of film. I'm somewhat jaded but there was a scene that made me so physically ill that I had to stop and take a break. It's a shameful, boring, and needlessly cruel exercise in tedium.

F.