Slovenia: The Curse of Valburga (2019)
Last time I mentioned three kinds of horror films. The second kind, films made not for any artistic merit but because they're fun, most definitely applies to the silliest film I've seen since we left Pakistan.
The film opens with an extremely unpromising first act (a five minute scene is dragged out for twenty minutes in order to set the film up - and given that the film is only 80 minutes to begin with it made me dread what I was about to see) in which idiot Marjan outlines his money-making idea to brother Bojan and their psychotic friend Ferdo. Ferdo and Bojan are such dislikeable characters that it's a very long twenty minutes, especially as most of them are spent swearing at one another. Finally Marjan pitches the plot (let's scam tourists by selling tours to something ridiculous). It seems that a distant cousin of Dracula, Baron Valburga, lived nearby and was also rumoured to be a vampire. His estate was later acquired by the authorities and run as an asylum before everyone mysteriously vanished and the building has remained vacant ever since.
As set-ups go it's neither original nor particularly interesting (although I'm a sucker for anything with a setting where everyone mysteriously vanished), which is why I found my attention wandering.
I needn't have worried; within five minutes of arriving at the estate Bojan and Ferdo have already been killed by a mysterious person armed with a sort-of crossbow that fires revolving saw blades. Yes; this is a comedy horror. Is it scary? No, not particularly. Is it comedic? Yes. Is it violent? Hell, yes. Extremely so. Does it work? Well... that depends on what you want from a film.
None of the people on the tour behave like you'd expect people outside a horror comedy to behave. There's a group of Swedish Goths intent on finding some sort of Necronomicon in the chapel; a guy who wants to film porn with two models; a German couple who spend the film drinking. (To be fair, that joke actually works, mainly because the two actors seem to be having genuine fun with the roles, and partly because they keep producing cans of lager from a bag that seems to have an impossibly infinite supply of them.)
The killers are (obviously) the lunatics who have now taken over the asylum and a are actually a family of cannibals determined to begin the Slovenia Circular Saw Massacre franchise. The comedy comes from the increasingly violent deaths (they're bloody, but so cartoonish that most people couldn't be offended by them) and the next hour is spent as the tourists - whose numbers are thinned every few minutes - try to find the way out.
Quite why they're so lost (the estate isn't that big) is never explained, but then this isn't the kind of film where things are explained at all. The cannibals are lunatic cannibals because that's what you get in films like this. They're killing people because that's what the antagonists do in films like this. The tourists are running around blindly because that's ... you get the idea.
This isn't ground-breaking filmmaking. It's not clever horror. It's not realistic horror. Yes, it's funny in places and yes, it holds the attention (after the terrible opening), but, truthfully, it's not good. The plot doesn't really make a great deal of sense, the actions of every character seem designed purely to service the meagre plot, and a lot of the time is spent watching people die horribly. But seen in the right frame of mind, this is fun. It's a popcorn film, and it's extremely honest about what it is. No attempt is made at subtlety or even subtext (although I suppose, grudgingly, you could make some kind of reading of the film as the estate representing Slovenia itself, the residents being the locals and the tourists being, well, tourists. The fact that our "heroes" are unpleasantly sexist and offensive opens up questions, although the cannibals are actually gender blind and quite equal-opportunities focussed, so perhaps there's more to such a reading after all. Maybe this really is a deconstruction of modern Slovenia as it tries to reconcile its past with its future. Or perhaps I'm reaching), but if you're in the right mood, this is fun.
Note: Although made and released as The Curse of Valburga in Slovenia, international audiences were given the slightly more familiar The Curse of Dracula.
Disc: DVD (Region 1, USA)
Source: eBay
Availability: Still widely available. The UK also has a DVD (with the 'Dracula' title); Germany has a Blu-ray.