User reviews

This movie is as though a lesser talented director took a shot at breaking every taboo boundary that exists. Unfortunately, even with English subs the overall story lacks significantly (if it exists at all). Instead, you are left with a long movie collage of ramblings and animal torture, disturbing , and images of corpses littered around religious monuments with no true background or context. "Extreme" movie done poorly.

Holy hell, I've just watched this since I finally got my hands on the English subtitles.

The movie has little to no plot, backstory or continuity whatsoever. The only thing that saves this movie is the excellent way in which the director manages to depict decay, death and several mental illnesses. Unfortunately, these themes however, exist within a vacuum and feel disjointed as hell. Trying to understand this film objectively is largely a futile exercise. The movie feeds on the reaction of the viewer, that's the only power it has, which makes it extremely fragile.

I would suggest to skip this movie, or if you're just curious about the sheer madness on display, watch a few selected scenes, there are plenty, I assure you.

I picked up a copy of this film back in 2010 but was highly disappointed when I found there were no subtitles, so for a long time I had no idea what was going on. Sufficed to say, I finally found the subtitles so I can properly give this title a review.

Many people may regard this as a horror film, due to the horrific content, but to me this is about as far from horror as you can get. There's no build up of tension, no jarring moments (other than the extreme gore, excrement and decay) and no backstory. This is as art house as art house gets, and if you've seen any of Marian Dora's other films, you know what you're getting. At first glance, this film is rather tedious and underwhelming. But after really watching it, I found the cinematography to be rather awesome. To me this film portrays decay and death rather well. You can almost smell the rotting flesh, human excrement and other foul stenches you would find in an open air mass grave. Marian Dora certainly knows how to portray putrefaction and disgust. This sort of film will have it's supporters and it's definite critics, as it should, but perhaps that's just because it's so hard to define. The acting was mediocre, the script a bit overplayed but well made and the camera work quite well for the obvious small budget. So I'll give it high marks on these merits. There's one thing that I absolutely hate...

The animal cruelty. No movie producer should ever feel the need to kill a cat on camera for shock value. That's just stupid, wrong, and should be punishable by prison time. I give this film a big fat ZERO for the use of several animals for death scenes. I can look past the pig slaughter, because you eat a pig after you kill it. But just wasting an animal for no reason? That's terrible. Torturing a human on camera, or smearing excrement on them, or whatever is fine because people have the cognition to understand what's happening, a cat does not.

For the latter part of this review, I will never be supporting Marian Dora's work from this point forward. This is sad because I really like his work as an artist, but I cannot get behind art that harms animals for no reason. I give this a 5 star only on the merits it deserves, if it had been without the cruelty, I would have rated it far higher and I would be purchasing all of his work.

Violence, gore, pornographic content and the like can be powerful things when used properly in cinema, and can help underscore an important point or to shock when well-placed. Melancholie der Engel is garbage of the highest quality simply because it has no placement and no subtlety in how it uses its arsenal of degeneracy and instead barrages you nonstop with stuff that is designed to disgust. There is no plot to speak of, just moments that dovetail to and from one another to create a new stage for something awful to happen.

I am not some conservative old man shaking my cane at the teevee for being "too lewd" or something, but I think that this movie needs to be destroyed and forgotten. This is like what a fourteen year old would create if given fifty thousand dollars and was told to make something "hardcore". Movies don't need to be art to be good, but this is neither and tries to be both.

I've owned a copy of Melancholie der Engel for a few years now, but never watched it as it was in German without subtitles. Recently, I found the movie on YouTube with English subs, so I finally gave it a whirl.

Even with subtitles, it didn't make sense.

Directed by Marian Dora, who gave us the disturbing Cannibal (2006), this film is an extreme arthouse horror that pushes the boundaries in terms of shocking content, the filth and debasement depicted including vomiting, stoma and anus fingering, and the five '-tions' - mutilation, urination, defecation, masturbation, and ejaculation (all shown in graphic detail). While this might be exactly what extreme cinema fans are looking for, the whole thing proves extremely boring thanks to its pretentious approach, unfathomable storytelling and excruciating two and a half hour plus runtime.

Fool that I am, I carried on to the bitter end regardless of the fact that the execution was very tedious and I soon became inured to the abhorrent acts inflicted on the cast. What I did find upsetting was the unnecessary cruelty towards a variety of innocent critters: a tiny newt is slowly crushed, a snail has its eyes cut off with scissors, a worm is sliced into pieces with a scalpel, and a cute cat is killed. People can do what the hell they like to each other in the name of their art (and they do), but leave the animals out of it (unlike the turtle in Cannibal Holocaust, I can't imagine that the cat became food for the cast and crew).

1/10. A repetitive, incomprehensible exercise in repugnant behaviour that couldn't be more wearisome if it tried. If you think you're hardcore enough, watch it back to back with Philosophy Of A Knife.

With its focus on audiovisual composition, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA essentially is an emotional experience. Not enough, the complexly developed story also stretches out to themes of friendship, passion, revenge and death wish. This assumes intense preoccupation with all the multiple layers of the movie. In aesthetic, tender images the stunned audience witnesses events that blurred the frontiers between reality and fiction probably already during the shooting. Just apparently in contradiction the events are accompanied by citations of German contemporary history, which gives Marian Dora's work a powerful intellectual historical basis. The movie's structure is similar to the baroque cathedral which gets a central role in the movie: The story and (only on the first sight) marginal details get mirrored like a symmetry axis and seem to be the counterpart of the leading characters destiny.

A personal work of director Marian Dora, the movie defies all formal conventions of storytelling. In nearly all scenes the movie breaks up to the audience's expectations. Established viewing and thinking habits as well as generally accepted and provided moral patterns are getting destroyed and stay unusable. If comparisons are appropriate at all, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA has its place between the work of Jodorowsky or Pasolini. However, the movie can't deny its German roots and openly admits its highly controversial underground cinema status: Poetic, radical, original, unwieldy and impossible to forget.

"Melancholie der Engel" by Marian Dora lasts over 2 hours of length.It's also one of the most extreme horror movies I have ever seen.I saw this vomit-fest without English subs,so the most of the dialogue went beyond me.Still the plot is fairly simple:two closely-bonded nihilists meet two women at a carnival and eventually bring them back to an abandoned house near the woods.The house which is filled with animal bones and decaying dolls.Other characters are introduced like BDSM woman,an old painter pervert and a wheelchair-bound girl.The orgy of drug use,rape,sexual perversion and animal cruelty begins there...Lots of pseudo-intellectual nonsense is spoken and many animals are killed.Even the cat has its throat slit."Melancholie der Engel" literally oozes decay.There is some of the most revolting gore ever captured on screen along with various scenes of sexual perversion bordering on hard-core porn.This is truly unforgiving and deplorable journey into perversion and death.8 extremities out of 10.

The horror status this movie has got is pretty high... Possibly, seen as a must for die hard horror fans...

I'll start off on a high, Melancholie der Engel has great camera work, & to a large extent, the soundtrack is OK...

However... Its just waaay too long...

There is some great sick scenes in there, but it just gets boring in between, & the dialogue is terrible... Which for me is the biggest bummer, as regarding the storyline, there is just nothing to grab onto, at all, its basically just random scenes of emptiness...

I'm guessing this movie got rated so sick for the animal cruelty in it, which of course is bad... However compare that to the extreme scenes of paedophilia in 'A Serbian Film'... Well... I know which were more disturbing for me...

At the end of the day, this movie is only worth a watch to see how it compares to the rest of the so-called sick movies...

Brutal, disturbing, self-destructive and unpalatable to unimaginable levels.

What the heck was this movie about? I can never ever get back the 2.5 hours that I used of my life to watch this movie. There is very little sequential movement through this story and the randomness and extensive focus on the irrelevant produced a waking coma that I may never recover from. The symbolism is impossible to follow and even the nudity, to include random ball and sack shots, was out of place and added little to the comprehensibility of this film. This would be a perfect film for someone on death row who had nothing else to live for and was anxious to end their life in confusion.

Awesome cinematography. Interesting characters. Fantastic soundtrack. A piece of art. PS: The cat was not killed. It's SFX.

Marian Dova's film was indeed a step up from Cannibal. It's a dream like visual art-house film that turns the graphic and grotesque into a beautiful piece of film making. I have to say the uncut version I'm reviewing was in German language with no subtitles but that was not a major issue as there is no real narrative. The film appears to be about death and decay. We see old dolls, dead birds, insects, pigs, cats, fish, insects, and copses in coffins, cigars burning down, and old bones. The scenes involve sexual violence towards women, mutilation, urine, the smearing of excrement and general extreme horror that would normally shock. However, this is no exploitation movie; all the scenes have a dream like quality and an unsettling atmosphere which leave for an emotional experience. Good cinematography and a score by David Hess make this better than it really should be. Lots of sex, nudity and masturbation which is in no way erotic and scenes that would be controversial if in a different picture. At over two and a half hours long it's best to watch in two or three sittings as this is not a movie to grip or even shock you, just a decent piece of extreme horror art-house.

Extraordinary movie which makes you think why it exists. Because there is certainly something in Marian Doras mind which is not easy for the mainstream to grasp. I'm sure there is something deeper meaning in this movie which I was not able acknowledge and I might need to watch it again to get better picture of this piece of art and the mindset of it's creator.

There was a couple of beautiful moments in the movie even thought they might seem very twisted and disturbing for majority of people. Basically this movie is what the title promises which makes it a quite succesful on it's purpose.

In the end this movie was quite boring and long. It points out the sickness in our society quite accurately and after all this whole movie was something I've never seen before on the screen which makes it unique.

This "film" attempts to convey a metaphysical understanding of the nature of men and the meaning of life. Problem is, the director - who is also the writer - comprehends philosophy at the level of an 8th grader. The result is a film-school reject production that makes Human Centipede look like the Exorcist.

The only target audience for this film is the director himself. The dialogue and interactions between the characters is so terrible it takes away from the cinematography and visual development of the film. In this respect the film would have redeemed itself if everyone just shut up.

All of this would be fine if it weren't for the fact the film takes itself serious. This is just criminal and insults the viewer. At least Dali's incursion into film resulted in an effective troll campaign.

Quite simply one of the worst films ever made.