FrightFest review – Dieva Suns (Dog of God)
Directed by Lauris and Raitis Abele – who also scripted with Ivo Briedis and Harijs Grundmanis – Dog of God is a throwback to the animation style of Ralph Bakshi circa Wizards and Fire and Ice, in the service of an earthy, base, physical recreation of a grim, grotesque middle ages … all plague boils, perverse kink masked by lunatic religion, weird sex practices, pockmarks, seepages, slimes, terrible weather, mud and excrement. It’s an environment when a barefoot waif gets momentary pleasure by stepping in a nice fresh warm cowpat.
Drawn from a historical witch/werewolf trial – with testimony reused verbatim by the script – it’s shot through fantastical elements. In the hallucinatory opening, self-styled ‘dog of god’ Thiess (Einars Repse) rips off the Devil’s big balls in Hell – later, they serve as the source of a super-potent aphrodisiac used by a fat old Baron who needs to sire an heir but also by accused witch Neze (Agate Krista) to get revenge on a community which has turned against her. The source of the trouble is hypocritical priest Bukholz (Regnars Vaivars) who torments his crippled unacknowledged son/sidekick Klibis (Jurgis Spulenieks) – who he also orders to flagellate him – and reveres a ludicrous supposed holy relic (a straw from the manger in Bethlehem). When the straw goes missing and Bukholz has an erotic dream about Neze, he decides she must be the thief and a witch (she’s an alchemist/healer who also runs the local tavern) and – though the King of Sweden has ordered an end to such practices – sets about using the witchfinder’s arsenal of tests (dropping the accused into icy water, etc) to determine her guilt.
Neze sways the court when the Baron needs his sex potion, in order to impregnate his over-fed wife (there’s a wafer-thin mint joke/reference), but she can’t be naïve enough to think the wobbly human jelly aristo will come through when he promises to protect her from the god-bothered bastard. So Thiess, who barges into the trial, becomes the instrument of deliverance and justice – a holy wolf, sprung apparently from the decaying carcass of a man-headed dog, who intervenes in the trial to bring about a mini-apocalypse which turns into a ribald if joyless orgy. Dieva Suns is an ugly-looking film – rotoscoping has never been my favourite form of animation – but that’s possibly deliberate, since it tries for the stench-of-death version of the middle ages, referencing everything from The Seventh Seal through Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales to Hour of the Pig. It has a lot of gross-out gags, which are occasionally funny but often just noxious.
Discussion
No comments yet.