The Dark House

This is an astounding film, bleak, grim, more than gritty and for those of us who were not brought up in an Eastern Bloc country a remarkable insight into the machinations of small town corruption Polish style.

Films like this should be seen by a wider audience, it was a captivating experience to sit and view the inner workings of this elaborate (sometimes overly) story.

There was just too much 'going on' in the story and some of it could have been left on the cutting room floor to give a tighter film, but that is a small critique of what is a disturbing look back at communism at 'street level'

If you like your cinema real...don't miss the opportunity to see this slice of Polish communistic vodka sodden culture.

This is very grim, we see lives of poverty and desperation and brutality.

There acting is good, everyone delivers from Srodon as a likable coward to the bullying police officers.

The pace is quite slow, there is a lot of build up since both plot threads are worked out in parallel and we have to wait until both are ready before the pace can increase, this made it hard to watch in the beginning but it's worth persisting.

Both threads are dark and have a few twists.

There is a bit of humour, some drunken humour in the past thread and some more gallows humour in the current time thread.

The ending is very dark and surprising, and has a couple of extra twists.

As the title says its really bad, some of it is funny. It is a polish film i don't really know what to make of some of the things i seen in this film. Apparently it takes roughly 8 police and 2 civilians and a witness to examine a crime scene. Doesn't help that the police are swilling vodka like its going out of style, also one of the cops has a baby during this movie. None of these things tie the storyline together or really have anything to do with anything really. It was entertaining to see drunk people/cops get smashed and fight each other and act like general retards. The murders are equally silly and the people doing that part were generally unbelievable as the police. I'd stay away from this movie unless you like watching drunken people on screen acting like tards

In 1978, in Poland, Edward Srodon (Arkadiusz Jakubik) loses his beloved wife that had a brain hemorrhage and becomes alcoholic. He decides to sell everything, leave the town and begin a new life in another place. His bus breaks on the road, and he walks in the rain until a farm to ask for shelter. Zdzislaw Dziabas (Marian Dziedziel) and his woman, Bozena Dziabasowa (Kinga Preis), welcome Srodon and he drinks with Dziabas, who shows where he manufactures his moonshine. Srodon proposes Dziabas to increase his production of the booze to sell to the soviets and they calculate how much they need to produce. Srodon shows his money and spends the night in the bed of Dziabas' son. During the night, he goes to the toilet and Dziabas and Bozena stab the son in the dark instead of Srodon in a night of murders. In 1982, the prosecutor and a team of police officers reconstitute the night to check what happened in that night.

"Dom zly" (2009), a.k.a "The Dark House", is a weird and bizarre low budget-movie. Indeed, it is one of the worst movies ever made. The screenplay in two periods, 1978 and 1982, does not work well. The locations are awful, with an ugly cast and dirty people that drink all the time. The police officers are alcoholic and most of them corrupt. The movie is totally overrated in IMDb, and I was lured by the title associated to the rating and reviews. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): Not Available.

The Dark House sees a man pack up and leave after the death of his wife. He stumbles across an old farm house where a father and daughter live. This is no simple narrative though. Running parallel to this is the same man taking police through the scene of a suggested crime. Is this man a witness? A suspect? A victim? The film gradually unfolds to reveal his story. This sounds engaging on its own but there is yet another layer. Political aspects may have some control over the police and how they want this case to turn out. The police aren't exactly in the moment, talking about their doctors, having snowball fights, blowing up condoms to hit each other with, or just enjoying the vodka. There's certainly a lot of satire that I probably missed, not being polish, but this is still a well plotted and beautifully shot thriller.