Thursday, October 5, 2017

Krvavá pani (1980)

AKA: The Bloody Lady

Director: Viktor Kubal

Writer: Viktor Kubal

Composer: Juraj Lexmann

Starring: Jela Lukesova

More info: IMDb

Plot:  This is the fairy tale / horror account of noblewoman Elizabeth Bathory, a notorious murderer of hundreds of young women in Hungary from 1585 to 1609 to bath in their blood in an effort to retain her youth.



My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again?  No.

Boy, oh, boy did this sound good.  An animated Czechoslovakian film about the 16th Century murderess Elizabeth Bathory?  Where do I sign up?  Now that I've seen it, I'm much less enthusiastic.  It's not a bad film but perhaps my self-inflated hopes were too high.  The music is often cartoonish to the point that it hinders the film.  When things get grisly the music improves with a more horror-themed score but it doesn't save the film.  Except for the brief narration in the beginning that quickly explains who Bathory was, that's all the dialogue you get.  The animation and storytelling feels more like a fairy tale with a horror element.  The horror is what interested me most about this and that's the best part.  The movie is only 71 minutes long and it takes a good twenty minutes in before you get any sense of the film going to a dark place.  Then it's a while before any blood stuff starts pouring in.  It's an interesting watch with some nice moments of horror but it's not the horror film I was looking for.  And I don't mean that I wanted something completely different filled with blood and horror but I finished the picture imagining a few different ways the film as a whole could've gone that would've satisfied my appetite.

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