Some people have strange friends. A perfect example is archeologist Ayse (Ipek Tuzcuoglu), whose best friend Zeynep (thanks IMDB, not only are your reviews of the movie useless, you don't even bother to give me complete credits) not just inexplicably lusts for Ayse's husband Tarik (Serhat Tutumluer), but hates everything else about her too. As best friends do, she pays a witch to put a death curse on Ayse.
An expense she could have saved herself, since Ayse is part of a small expedition lead by the archeologist Hodja ( I am not sure if this is an honorific or his first name) Ekrem (Nihat Ileri) to the ruins of the deserted village of Dengizhan. The population of the surrounding villages never dares to enter Dengizhan for fear of a curse that has been lying on the village for several hundred years.
Many hundreds of years ago, an evil witch (are there good witches in Islam? Another thing I don't know) convinced the villagers that all their problems were the fault of their young daughters, so they proceeded to bury them alive - all but one, that is. One pair of parents hid their newborn child, but the poor girl only survived for a few years. Then, a spell forced the father to kill the child. After all the daughters were finally dead, disasters struck the village and kept it untouched for centuries.
So, a jolly place to visit. Strange little accidents start to happen even before the expedition reaches Dengizhan. As soon as they arrive there, something or someone seems to do everything in its/his power to keep them from leaving. It doesn't take long until the first of them is killed.
Yes, I am ranting against the IMDb again. What exactly makes this one of the worst movies ever made? The direction isn't spectacular, but solid enough, the acting is the same. Why complain about the special effects of a film that has very few of them anyway?
Probably to avoid talking about the film's two strengths, which strangely enough lie hidden in a script that seems to work like a very formulaic American horror film, but has some fairly complex things to say about life in a society that is standing exactly on the border between faith (I'd call it superstition, but not in this context) and science, ancient beliefs and modern knowledge. Don't misunderstand me, this aspect of the movie is completely subtextual, and for some probably hard to see - but it is definitely there.
The second quality I found in the script is a certain complexity in the character's psychologies and (what I take to be) a nice sense of realism in their reactions when the first of them dies.
Surprisingly enough, I am not the only one who is aware of these aspects of Büyü, the always very recommendable Braineater in his much more detailed review sees similar things in the film.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment