isantistao

I tried reading the book by Sade and couldn't get through it because it was too graphic for me, which is saying a lot because I usually like these kinds of things. So eventually I tried watching the movie, and boy was I disappointed! This movie does NOT live up to its hype. Maybe its because its 50 years old and the standards were different back then....but that was also the time when The Godfather was made, so film makers had the art down by then, and it was also the time when the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was made, so they were making movies with extreme and graphic violence...and yet this one movie that is based upon one of the most graphic classics in all of literature seems to have failed in both art and being graphically shocking.

Now granted, I am a horror movie fan, and I know this wasn't a horror movie, so I wasn't expecting that level or style of violence...but people are supposed to get tortured in this movie at the end and yet we do not really even see it, the view of these acts is obscurred, and not in such a way as to make it seem more artsy or dramatic either...rather the opposite. This movie is not only not a horror film, but it is also lacking in drama. There is little done to dramatize the acts of the movie that are supposed to shock us, which don't even happen all that frequently either. So all in all the movie is boring and tedious to get through. And not only do the "shocking" acts fail to shock due to not being dramatized, but its also because they are often not even brought into center focus by the camera and made to seem larger than life as movies can do, but rather the opposite, oftentimes they happen off center and are not a focal point so they seem smaller than life. And when they are the focus of the scene they are often not even made to look all that realistic!

And that brings me to the big problem here, in spite of this being some sort of progressive artsy film maker doing all this, as someone who has taken a film class and watched countless films, this one seems totally lackluster. The camera work is almost completely absent, the camera men do not even move around that much its almost as if a camera were just set up on a tripod and left there. And so many other elements of film are not used well, such as cinematography. So no this film is not some sort of monumental work of art, its a failure. It's shock value falls short. It is not entertaining. Its message is obvious and something we've already redundantly talked about for centuries so its not giving us new information. Fascism is bad, yea we all get it you don't need to enlighten us as to that...And you certainly weren't going to do so by showing us a movie about fascists who force children to eat their feces and violate them and such (if you wanted to expose that kind of thing then do so in real life, what good does a fictional story about it do us? Especially when it has no real artistic or entertainment value...) The one interesting quote from the movie is that "fascism is true anarchism", and that was worth hearing as some food for thought, but I would have been better off just seeing that one scene and not the rest of it. Because as for the rest I found it difficult to sit through and not because I was getting too offended and uncomfortable, but because I thought I was signing up for those thrills but never really got them. And it only gets worse as you go, until by the end they aren't even really showing you whats going on and its just frustrating.

So all in all I'm going to give this a 4, which is me being generous because this movie is certainly below average (which is especially disappointing when it's purported to be such a big deal), but I don't want to be too judgemental because it was made 50 years ago and the standards were different back then (except for the fact that there were both great works of art, and seriously graphic and gory movies being made back then so I also don't want to be too lenient). And just let me say that I don't recommend watching this movie unless you are a film student and really feel like you need to for educational purposes or something, but be prepared for a let down if you are well versed in film (especially suspense and horror).

I was disappointed by this. It started out good, but the only good part was at the beginning, as that was the only time it showed the main character doing a killing. All of the other kills happened off-screen for the entire rest of the movie, even at the end. The movie was boring after the beginning, and anti-climactic and left me feeling like I had just wasted an hour and a half. The acting and dialogue were also not good, it was all delivered very monotone and robotic like. Very disappointing. I give it a 3 just for the first act.

This is an example of what happens when you have a good idea that you try to turn into a film but don't know anything about film making and just wing it and end up with something terrible. Pretty much all of the elements of film making are completely absent from this movie. Here's the list of them:

Cinematography - The lighting in this movie is non-existent and most of the scenes are dim or dark and don't give you much to look at. The color palate of this movie is also non-existent making every scene look somewhere between bleak and bad.

Photography - There is no moment in this movie that you can pause and say "look at how good this scene/set looks, look how well framed this shot is..." etc. Nothing in this movie looks good.

Writing/Story - Like I said before, this is a good idea, but somehow the writers managed to write it in the least compelling way possible. There were only a few compelling moments in the movie and even they were still so poorly written that literally every moment of this story was a chore for me to watch. And we're talking about a story that is about a family of elite cannibals who harvest organs from people in order to achieve eternal life. These should be villains as compelling as Hannibal Lector, and with a story to match...but they aren't, they are just plain boring. As are all the other characters because they go through no character development and have no interesting monologues. Every aspect of this story is poorly written.

Acting - It's hard for good actors to save a poorly written character, and these actors are obviously not good. The acting is just as weak as the writing so of course there are no good performances to save it...though to be fair even the greatest actors probably couldn't.

Camera Work - A good horror movie, like a good action or drama movie, relies upon good creative artistic camera work in order to dramatize events and people and make them appear larger than life. But there is no such camera work in this movie. So things do not appear larger than life, but smaller. Moments that should appear dramatic simply do not. It's like the camera man had no education in shooting film and doesn't know anything about how to do it to make it look good and would instead just pick a spot and stand there holding a camera without even doing anything...probably because in addition to having no education he was getting no direction from the director in how to do it. Which brings me to the next point:

Directing - This is ultimately where the fault lies. These directors didn't know what they were doing and so everything was poorly executed. They were the writers too, and probably just all around show runners in charge of too many roles that they didn't have experience or knowledge in and couldn't do a single one even if they were doing it by itself and yet they were doing it all and so what we get is this complete failure that doesn't even contain the elements of film. It doesn't even contain any...

Production - What you are watching looks like raw footage that has just been edited together with no production. It is in pretty low definition for the time it was made, looks grainy and bleak. Contains no CGI what so ever...and not even any scoring (sound) or soundtrack like other movies do. They just plain skipped out on putting any sound in the background or doing anything to enhance the images visually and make them easier to look at. That is how lackluster this movie is.

So ultimately I will give this 2 stars because I liked the premise and think it had a little bit of potential, and I made it through to the end without turning it off. But that being said, this is on par with something made by a first year film student. Its a real shame that a movie based upon such a compelling idea would be made with such reckless abandon, forsaking literally every element of film making that makes it an art form. This movie is crap that I wished I hadn't taken the time to watch all the way through...but I did so because the directors later works are very good and I often give them 10 stars, so obviously they learned a lot about the art of film making after this, and had to start somewhere...and that place was a bad film that I do not recommend you watch.