The Angels’ Melancholia (2009)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Load of rubbish!!

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

This is "Melancholie der Engel" or "The Angels' Melancholia", a German film from 2009 and before watching this one (again), I read that some people consider this the most shocking and disturbing film they have ever seen. Well, it certainly is shocking and disturbing, that much is safe. The director and one of the writers is Marian Dora and here we have a contender for his most known work. It's probably either this one or "Cannibal". But lets talk a bit more about this one. It runs for a massive 2 hours and 40 minutes almost, which is really really long and you feel it during the watch. It drags so much and it is never an achievement in terms of convincing story-telling. No matter how much Dora or anybody else tries to convince me about the cinematic value of this movie, I will never say that there is any. Several of the actors are extremely untalented and their line delivery sounded wooden beyond belief. Kinda expected though, why would a seriously talented actor destroy his career with something like this. The title sounds like a Wim Wenders film and reading the storyline here on the title's IMDb page, one could think that this could really be a cinematic achievement actually. It is no such thing. It is violence (against humans and animals), cheap thrills, obscenities, naked people being physically and emotionally tortured. I mean I am perfectly fine with this as long as it fits in and adds to a creative approach and outcome. Haneke and Tarantino have shown this many times how violence can turn a good story into a great one. But Marian Dora is obviously not a gifted filmmaker looking at this one. It is all for the gore, for the violence for the abuse (also the one of the audience) in here. There is absolutely nothing beyond that and that's why I think that this project has become a massive failure. I highly recommend to stay away.

I've used IMDb since it started and never made an account, but after watching this over hyped sham, I had to say some thing to spare future viewers from this load of pseudo-pretentious offal.NOTE: SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW....not that it matters as the only thing spoiled is the time wasted to watch this tripe.This is the type of movie when some crack head director with dreams of nihilist angst tries to bore to death anyone foolish enough to endure two hours and thirty-eight minutes of cerebral pain, utter random nonsense, and stupidity.Other reviewers talk about the animal deaths and get all "faux squeamish" in a contrived attempt to puke some "artistic license" to this turd. Yeah, right. Only a PETA goop would find this offensive, but I must say forcing one to watch this would be better than water boarding them. Actually, instead of water boarding, this movie should be used to force confessions from "terrorists." The o-so-shocking violent sex scenes had me chuckling. They are so bad, they give bad porn a bad name. A simple tube search for BDSM movies will provide the REAL enlightenment.They way the editor jumped from one babbling monologue to another in an attempt to legitimize the moral (or lack of) struggles made me think he was on crack...or was just wanting to get this dung heap finished! IMPORTANT: There is NOTHING redeeming about this movie. Endless pseudo-psychological blathering, poor effects, laughable violent sex scenes, and characters, that halfway through, will have you screaming for Jason Voorhees to show up and hack-n-slash them all to oblivion! If I was given the choice of mashing my toes with a ball-peen hammer or watching this slobbering drivel, I'd be grabbing the nearest hammer! Avoid...AVOID...at all costs!

Melancholie Der Engel slipped the radar of sick art-house films back in 2009. Why exactly is not known however it might be to do with the fact the company marketing this just didn't do so way back then. However in 2013 it seems to have appeared on a few websites notorious for censorship and extreme cinema. Interest is suddenly swooning around this weird art-house thriller from Marian Dora, who also directed 2006's Cannibal. For this reviewer, one watch of Melancholie Der Engel was enough. Being a big fan of controversial cinema, namely A Serbian Film and Salo, Dora's monster is almost three hours of complete weirdness and infrequent WTF moments. Zenza Raggi, who stars in an endless list of pornographic movies, leads this "tale" of a group of people who gather to strange house for the weekend to experiment in dark pleasures. Who they are and what they're doing is never fully realised or explained in dialogue or plot. Most of the films duration revolves around some seriously weird and beautiful music combining wonderful landscapes and cinematography. Some of the music sounds almost exactly like Brian Eno. However the flip side is most of the time you'll also see close-ups of skeletons of dead animals, burnt remains, bodily fluids, creepy crawlies, and just about everything imaginable to put you off your next meal. Well done to Dora for creating atmosphere which is truly grotesque and unique but most of all, powerful enough to convincingly unsettle. The characters together with the unsettling atmosphere make you believe Melancholie Der Engel takes place in another time, hundreds of years ago - another world even. Dora has some serious skills for managing to cast a group together who were happy enough to be filmed and act through with the explicit, distasteful visuals which at one time belonged only to the webs darkest. How it attains an atmosphere of depression and dread from the beginning however, is truly cheap and distasteful. Insects and animals are crushed and tortured at intervals; a small lizard is crushed to death, in another moment a snails eyes are cut off with scissors - all real. I didn't see (excuse the pun) any reason for this to happen, considering the movie has enough fictional violence and crazy debauchery on its own. For example, an old man who joins the group early on brings a girl in a wheelchair to the "party" who is openly abused and left lying around like an object. This man is later cut up (also for no reason) and left to crawl home with his guts hanging out. The group burn him on a bonfire, at which point another character is that excited he gets someone to masturbate him to climax in explicit close-up. In addition, the movie contains people being defecated and urinated on, both alive and dead. I can't rate Melancholie Der Engel high on my list simply because it does seem to be a plot-less, direction-less compilation of weirdness and sick fantasies. The general ruthlessness of the animal cruelty also put me off recommending this to anyone, which I think is understandable. Good movies should present fiction and suspend the viewers disbelief without relying on real, unnecessary cruelty. The biggest problem it has going for it though, its length, will make many viewers fast forward through it before they get to the truly puke inducing scenes, in the last forty minutes. Either way, if you're a fan of extreme movies, this one should be on your list. The way it comes together as a whole package though, is not as great as others. If Dora cut the animal cruelty and presented a new condensed cut - Melancholie Der Engel would score more points from me and be easier to recommend.

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.