An ex-soldier with a criminal past takes refuge in the woods. A demonic figure seeks the seed of killers and the blood of the damned to feed his mandrake garden. DIS is an infernal descent into the root of the mandrake legend and a man who wanders too close to that legend and the unnamable terror behind it. What you sow you will reap.
Italy
Mexico
Italy
Mexico
I love the premise here but sadly I think it’s poorly executed. Bill Oberst Jr isn’t a great actor and that along with the movie’s low budget doesn’t make for a great time. I dug the ending though and the atmosphere of the whole thing.
I was surprised how straight forward this film was after I was finished watching it and did just a bit of research. I thought maybe there was more going on thematically, but it simply is a fucked up horror story based on folklore and Dante's Inferno. And I kinda like that too.
Oberst is great and the horror is really grimy and weird. Beautiful cinematography as well.
If you're aren't offended to easily by a mixture of sex and horror, dis is well worth a watch.
Someone had told me that this was a psycho-sexual touch of Dante's Inferno with the influences of Tarkovsky. WOW. That sounds amazing... and I wished I had watched that film.
I can see how someone might mistake this for Tarkovsky, with slow wandering shots of a man walking silently in nature, much of which looks very nice... I guess. But this doesn't have the grace and skill that Tarkovsky had to give time to an image and reflect on specific visuals while he lets it breath. This film starts off with a violent graphic act then has a man wander about only to have violent graphic acts performed on him.
The film runs around 60 minutes and yet still feels…
Nightmarish scenes in (mostly) solitude are interspersed with too many flashbacks that didn't do much except pad the hour long run time. I'm not sure I completely understand it, but I enjoyed it anyway.
I also got a kick out of the movie being so quiet and then the lead actor would let out a soul-wrenching scream and the cat on my lap pops his head up like what the fuck was that?!
A kind of quasi folk horror/art house/ torture porn mishmash. It does have a vision, unfortunately it doesn’t have anything to say. A straight forward story that just presents what happens isn’t necessarily bad though. The location scout earned their money for sure. One nitpick about the acting is that the main character reminded me a bit of Lemongrab from Adventure Time in some of the screamy sequences. To be fair, most people would likely sound like Lemongrab if they were put in the same scenario.
Artsy simply to be artsy and that makes it often incoherent and feels masturbatory. I was pretty pulled in for the first 30 min but then nothing happened, and then nothing kept happening. Lots of silly nudity disguised as artistic nudes but like the crew just wanted to see a bunch of tits and strippers. It's okay, just don't pretend your making something significant by putting masks or lace on the women lol
I see a lot of reviews singing it's praises and that's not surprising. If this had an A24 logo stamped on it we'd absolutely never hear the end of it.
It's slow, and by slow I mean again, nothing interesting happens. The first line of dialogue isn't spoken til damn near halfway through and even then it's nothing profound or interesting.
I finished it but mostly cause I didn't care about having to look for something else at the time
I thought I wanted more mandrake lore, but I was wrong. Well, at least not this kind of hellish version. I did end up watching all of Dis even after the disturbing beginning, mainly because I wanted to see iconic horror actor Bill Oberst Jr and because it was relatively short. But with the sexually graphic content and the fact that it seems padded with a lot of meaningless nothingness, it wasn’t for me. Granted this could be the perfect depiction of the sixth through ninth rings of hell because it sure felt like a possibility while it was on.
The Greater Unknown Challenge Film 38
Honestly at this point, I'm not sure how half of this stuff ends up on my watchlist. This wasn't good or interesting, but it was an hour long and now I've seen it so none of you have to! Some okay shots of Bill Oberst Jr walking around a forest at the beginning, but the flashbacks were a bad narrative choice. Also, I'm worried I may have grown out of extreme cinema, because I keep feeling so unimpressed by it :/
