Review of Necromentia (2009) by Cyn Z — 18 Sep 2014

Have to admit, none of the blurbs I've read about this movie feel at all accurate.

Despite a smattering of gore, some creepy steampunk-inspired characters, and an avalanche of "dark themes", Necromentia is pretty tame. That I still ended up liking Necromentia is a testament to the strength of the idea.

Three characters enter hell at different times. But unlike most horror movies where entering hell would be the beginning, here it is the end point. Necromentia is about the characters and their journey to that point, and in the process, it treks back in time to show the tasty little cycle that brought us to the end point.

The visual aesthetic is surprisingly interesting for being obviously low budget. Not every scene, mind you, but most of them do more with the aesthetics than you'd expect from the obviously low budget sheen. The director seems to know which scenes were the money scenes, and made them look especially nice.

The movie is held back by bland dialogue, which gets awkwardly punctuated by terrible delivery by the actors involved. (Necromentia is not a movie for people who can't look past terrible acting.).

They also try to cram way too many concepts into the movie, making it feel more scattered than it should. It was like the scriptwriter had an overflow of concepts, decided to write each of them into the screenplay, with minimal attention devoted to each. The movie would have been better served if just a few had been cherry-picked and fleshed out better.