Melancholie der Engel

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.