FrightFest Halloween review – The Bitter Taste
This German film – written by star Julia Dordel and director Guido Tölke – starts as if it’s just going to be another riff on The Most Dangerous Game, then tips in more and more elements from gothic horror, paranoid satire, action-adventure and puzzle-based historical-mystery. Like its heroine, the film suffers a little from having so much stuff piled on top – every peril gets worse, every trial is more dangerous – that it’s hard to keep it all in your head as it unfolds at a very rapid clip over a quite lengthy running time. It has quite spectacular locations going for it, and even if some of the challenges set by the script – elaborate fights with mediaeval and modern weaponry, outrageous gore/monster effects – aren’t entirely met by the production it’s consistently, refreshingly surprising and Dordel has great physical presence (and, obviously, a willingness to suffer a great deal for her art).
Marcia Laurenz (Dordel) is a guide for a hunting party of wealthy assholes – she needs the money to pay for an operation to fix a gammy leg she got in a previous career as a fencer – and gets fired after one of her more obnoxious clients has a heart attack in the woods. She leaves the preserve with a valuable envelope belonging to the client – which coincidentally turns out to be a major mcguffin – and literally runs into a woman in a tracksuit running across a lonely road on the estate of the mysterious Countess Badesky. Pursuing the woman is a black-hooded figure who seems to be some sort of vampire-witch-cannibal hybrid and is almost impossible to shake off, even after it’s lured into the path of a chuff-chuff train and ground under the wheels.
Then, on her own, Marcia is stuck in a small town on the estate where the local cop (Anne Alexander-Sieder) is sceptical of her story and handsome eel-fisherman Josh (Nicolo Pasetti) is the only person who’s even remotely interested in helping her out. A lot of odd, strange details emerge – more women in tracksuits are arriving on every train, a surprising number of authority figures in this backwoods town are women, the Badesky dynasty share a lot of history with brand-name baddies (Dracula, Zaroff, Bathory), the heart attack asshole and a one-eyed minion with a chainsaw want that envelope back, and the local monsters are holding a competition based on traditional martial skills (riding, shooting, swimming, fencing and running) which are the origin of the modern pentathlon. Some of the twists and reveals are heavily foreshadowed but there are so many of them that the obvious stretches – and really truly wild coincidences – are beside the point.
At about three-quarters of the way through this two hours-plus movie, something happens which made me think the listed running time was a mistake and the downbeat ending had just happened … only then the film springs yet another twist which powers it through an even more outrageous climax, with Dordel in a bloody, bedraggled white wedding dress running through castle tunnels and battling monsters as if it were her destiny. This is very rough around the edges, but a few of its eccentricities – a mix of accents and the occasional speech balloon dialogue (‘stop trying to do my job’, ‘we’re not so different, you and I’) – actually work for it.
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