POMO

This crazy comedy was “made in Hungary”, but that’s not obvious on the screen. And it is necessary to mention that this is really a seriously intended Hungarian version of Hollywood comedies. Unfortunately, it is too long, has no idea where it’s headed and the characters and the relationships between them are rather spasmodically interconnected. The film’s most likable character wants to be a con man who has to seduce and “rescue” a beautiful princess from the clutches of a trio of slow-witted brothers. But these brothers are not put in the unambiguous position of fools who have been set up and we are significantly closer to them than to the rakish swindler, about whom we know practically nothing. Because of that, our sympathies are not focused where they should be and the point of the film falls apart. But even so, you get used to the initially awkward humour and if you take the film as an unserious lark, it’s entertaining. A Kind of America is worth watching, at least for the divine housewife, whose main hobby consists in watching soap operas and stuffing herself with space cakes from Amsterdam.

Bullets Over Broadway is a nostalgic, heartwarming celebration of theatre and everything that makes it such a beautiful and complete art form. Woody Allen is in the best form of his life. As I left the cinema, I wanted to hug every equally satisfied viewer and rejoice with them in the wonder that we had just witnessed. Beautiful!

Hollywood Ending has an excellent subject and a great cast, but my final impression of the film is diminished by its chattiness and excessive length. Yet another weak Woody Allen movie that is neither as entertaining nor as “artistic yet heartwarming” as his best work.

Before seeing Year of the Devil, I had no idea who Jarek Nohavica was. I was slightly confused after the end of the film but, at the same time, I found that a certain fluid mysteriousness and magic of personality had been created around Nohavica. And still today, I can’t wait to get the opportunity someday to interview him, for example. Whatever he may actually be, I will never be able to see him again separate from the feelings that this fine film evoked in me with regard to him.

The most crystalline, pure, almost virginally transparent and hare-brained Lucio Fulci movie. But I mean that in a good way. Zombie 2 is the most endearing horror bullshit and the first Euro-trash flick that I really fell in love with. The exotic tropical island setting, the seductive sexual undertone, the dumb dialogue, the mordant gore repulsiveness, the cheesy synth “midi music” by Fabio Frizzi and some really over-the-top zombie masks. The underwater fight between a zombie and a shark is incredible!

The Hunted is a B-movie with kung-fu elements that is in no way original or interesting. Well, except for the massacre of passengers on a moving train. You just don’t see anything like that!

A Victorian house that is one of the seven gates to hell and a pretty blonde New Yorker who wants to live in it after it has stood empty for a long time. In various interviews, Lucio Fulci himself says that this is an impressionistic film and the plot is secondary. However, the movie also has plot fundamentals and is only (richly) adorned with surrealistic interludes. Its greatest asset is its atmosphere and, for Fulci, a surprisingly elegant stylishness, which is achieved with great cinematography and dark music (with the exception of the appalling central motif). The latex effects are mostly deplorable. However, the film’s biggest drawback is the disastrous script, which is full of holes that cannot be explained away even by Fulci’s alibi about the film’s impressionistic nature. And the lumbering climax in the hospital could also have been brisker and more suspenseful.

My Brother Tom is a very emotional and nicely made low-budget indie film about the relationship of two outsiders (a boy and a girl) who escape from their painful real world into “their own” forest and indulge in liberatingly crazy behaviour. Their strong bond of friendship never transitions into a sexual relationship. This is a very humane and open yet extremely sad and depressing drama that – like Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark – will tear you apart emotionally. Shot with a digital, authentically shaky camera.

A hardcore underground experiment. The main subject: The search for oneself and the means of salvation from crushing loneliness. The main role in the film is played by the association of sex with death and the fetishistic obsession with “dead matter” in the form of human and animal entrails. The psychedelic wandering between reality, dreams and visions is underscored by cheap-sounding but surprisingly effective and compelling music – it’s literally beautiful in the romantic passages (piano). The violence in the film is not gratuitous, as it fulfils the role of symbolism expressing the state of the main character’s mental processes. The film is hindered by the cringeworthy acting in its reality-based (non-dream) storyline, which devalues its presentation as a work of art. In any case, it is a strongly emotional, morally deviant film requiring a significant degree of detachment and free-thinking tolerance. If you look at it through such a lens, you will be superbly entertained by the absurd splatter slapstick and you will be moved by the beautiful love scenes with the skeletal, half-decayed corpse. As I was expecting cheap, gratuitous repulsiveness, I was pleasantly surprised by Nekromantik.

An amateurish, very naturalistic and coarse film about a brutal rape and the subsequent bloody revenge taken in response. No music, no characterization of the characters, no inhibitions in depicting violence. Great sexual openness. Also absolutely zero atmosphere or poetics, terrible dialogue and some of the worst acting I have ever seen. Rating it on it’s filmmaking merits, calling it “garbage” would be giving it too much praise. However, rating it from the perspective of how it affected me, I’m giving it one star. This is a film that you have to watch alone, in the company of only your own intimacy and your television screen. Only then will you give free rein to your voyeurism, your deeply hidden natural cruelty and your longing for violence, subconsciously justifying it to yourself with the word justice.