The Sleep of Death

A lot of negative things can be written about "The Sleep of Death" (and I will...) but NOT that the title is inaccurate! When watching this, you can either fall to sleep or bore yourself to death. Since I don't wish any harm to nobody, I sincerely hope it's the first.

Yes, it's an incredibly boring film! I even got bored reading the other user's praising review (not BA's, but the other one) but still proceeded. In fact, I deliberately sought out this movie because earlier this year I watched "Victor Frankenstein", by the same Swedish director Calvin Floyd and also starring the charismatic lead actor Per Oscarsson, and thought it was great! It's the most faithful and perhaps even best version of Mary Shelley's classic novel, and it urged me to seek out the other works of this director. I found "In Search of Dracula" (a sort of documentary on Vampire movies that I have yet to see) and I found "The Sleep of Death" (which is based on a novel no living soul has probably ever heard of).

"The Sleep of Death" looks and starts interesting enough, with a setting in the late 17th/early 18th century, and the premise of a naïve and spoiled English Lord in pursuit of a mysterious countess dressed in black. Such a blind crush can only lead to trouble. For some inexplicable reason, though, the whole thing becomes uninteresting and tedious after 15-20 minutes already. The young Lord becomes involved with alchemists, murders that look like they may have been committed by vampires, and a sadist army general (Oscarsson) of whom I never figured out what he has got to do with the story.

The costumes look nice, and it's always a pleasure to see Patrick Magee in another macabre role, but still... not good enough.