Melancholie der Engel

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.

In 2009's "Melancholie der Engel" we are introduced to a group of people that have gathered in an old house and from there on the movie turns to a pretentious art house movie with disgusting imagery. There are quite a few scenes in this that are stomach-turning because they are so disgusting and disturbing that not everyone will even be able to watch this. The plot is weird and full of artsy stuff that was not entertaining at all. Every now and then something sick and disturbing happens to shock the audience just for the sake of it. In between there are quite a few nice shots and the overall cinematography was pretty good considering the low budget. However the overall result is way too long and unconvoluted. In the end some of the pictures will stay in the viewers head for a while but that's about the only achievement this movie gets. [3,0/10]

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.

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.

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.