Disturbing and grotesque, but beautiful and gripping

Rating: Null/10 (19 June 2008)

Everything works except the story in the second half of the picture. I will say that for the first half, the storyline works great. There's a crazy back story involving the town folk being burnt alive and killed by an underground coal mine explosion. Ash rains from the sky, fog drapes the area, and all these deformed victims begin appearing. There's this one guy who crawls out of a rotten looking stall whose feet are tied to the back of his neck with barbed wire, dead children who implode into flames, and in particular, a giant of a man with an even bigger triangular shaped beak on the top of his head, The Pyramid Head, who carries around a gigantic knife and strips the entire flesh off of humans with one pull of his wrist. All that was all cool and interesting. But then about halfway through, they just dropped all of that and suddenly all the fun went away and the film became a horrific decent into cults and macabre rituals involving the burning of a little girl. The switch is so inappropriate and totally not at all what should have happened. The film is incredible looking, the sound editing and music are very haunting and clever, the acting is quite believable all around, and the film is really pretty creepy. There were a few parts that definitely scared me. However, the switch halfway through from ghost story to crazy cult fanatic story just mucks it all up a little. There's an interesting subplot involving the husband of the woman who gets lost that remains quite engaging and helps add more suspense. The last twenty minutes of the film are a real gore-fest. There is an incredible sequence in which people are torn apart and split open by flying barbed wire, including one woman being picked up and getting ripped open from the inside out by it. It's pretty creative, but unfortunately if you only saw the first twenty minutes and the last twenty minutes, they literally have almost no connection. The way the film ends is pretty chilling, but it also appears to be a little too reminiscent of David Lynch in some strange way as it revolves around parallel universes, alternate dimensions, and people getting stuck in a twisted variation of the space-time continuum. It all sat well with me, but what caused me to get quite disturbed by the film was a particular favorite character of mine got really brutalized and tortured before slowly being incinerated. That bothered me more than almost anything I've seen in years and it happens right at the end to just to add insult to injury. The film worked in that it got to me in such a deep way, but I still can't recommend it to everybody due to the sudden jump into weird supernatural demonic stuff. It's too weird. I love the video games, however, and I really dug the references and the camera angles. French director Christophe Gans must be congratulated for making a video game movie work so well. It's the best one I've seen so far. I think even people who've never played the video game would even enjoy it for what it is. It's a little gross, but I liked it. Hang tight though. It starts out quite slow and takes it's time before picking up speed about thirty minutes in.