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I've described this to alternately as "Dracula meets A Simple Plan," and "what would happen if Guy Richie directed a vampire movie." That's not exactly right in either case -- it's not quite as dark as A Simple Plan and not as funny or urban as something Richie would direct. But I went into it expecting something campy, low-budget and derivative, and in reality Strigoli is anything but. The plot follows Vlad, a shiftless twenty-something ex-med student with a reputation for squeamishness that gets him branded a "pussy" by the residents of his small Romanian village. Vlad is back in town after a stint in Italy that saw him working in a KFC after failing to take the physician's certification exam. Visiting the town's only store for cigarettes, he finds the townspeople sitting in wake over the body of the town drunk. Being his keen med student self, he notices that the body shows signs of strangulation. The townsfolk, however, insist that the man died of an accident. Given that they're displaying the trappings of a wealth they don't posses, he suspects the local land baron, Constantin Tirescu, of having paid them off to cover his dark dealings. Of course, what he doesn't know is that the townspeople suspected Constantin as well, and lynched him in the movie's opening scene. The nice things they suddenly possess were stolen from his house following his death. Not knowing this, he goes to confront a seemingly still-very-much alive Constantin about it. Constantin, for his part, doesn't seem too miffed about the stolen possessions. He does complain that he's constantly hungry, however... If it sounds like you know where this movie is going, trust me, you don't. What probably could have been a very straightforward revenge picture is transformed into a weird and hallucinatory journey as Vlad tries to figure out what's going on in the town, uncovering a byzantine web of plots and conspiracies which enmesh the living and the undead. It's not without its flaws. The pacing is slow in parts, and the storyline is a little bloated. It feels like they could have shaved about 20 minutes off of it and had something tighter and consequentially much better. The acting, too, feels a bit flat, although it might just be the accents. Still, there's a lot of originality here, and that's saying something for a genre as stuck on itself as vampire movies. It's rare that a vampire tale brings anything new to the myth, and Strigoli definitely does this. There's also an oddball humor here that I found very charming. Overall, I'd say it's an above average movie that's heads above most anything else in the genre. If you can find it, it's well worth a watch. 3.5/5
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Mar 10, 2010 10:07
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 07:01 |
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