Popular reviews

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★★ 17

  The Cremator is a two-layered experience of immense depth, let alone one of the counted films in history that can be called "ahead of its time".

  With a staggering cinematography, the most memorable male character in the Czech New Wave, a neo-noir ambience, an hypnotic directing, a terrifying score, and probably a leading performance that deserves to be held as one of the best in cinema history, The Cremator is an unapologetic downward spiral to delusional madness of a man that strongly believes in the purifying power of cremation and the metaphysical advantages provided by premature death in order to stop human suffering. The presence of this intellectual personage is so imposing, that the rest of the characters around him…

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★★ 3

  a concentration camp survivor reworks the horrifying wide-angle, POV subjectivity of something like Peeping Tom to fit the snarling, darkly comic, absurdly disturbing headspace of a compulsive, obsessive cremator who gradually morphs into the arm of a genocidal machine and may or may not think he's the next buddha due to his occupation of "liberating" souls from their bodies. an unbearable close-proximity depiction of how evil can delude itself into thinking it’s actually a work of purity and spiritualism with very few psychological and ideological tweaks. 

  full discussion on ep 219 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ★★★★★ 5

  A bizarre foreign film that owes a great debt to Rudolf Hrusínský whom played the deranged megalomaniac Karl Kopfrkingl! His eerie performance was absolutely riveting! On a scale between 1 and 10 he had a creep factor of 1000! Hours later I still can't get his image out of my head!

  Haunting surreal psychological chiller about a man whom like Hitler had grandiose delusions of grandeur and visions of creating a better world via their own warped beliefs and ideologies!

  I find it hard to fathom a film as stylish and mesmerizing as this is 45 years old! It was obviously way ahead of its time!

  The cinematography is as captivating as the film is deliciously macabre!

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  Review by Joshua Dysart ★★★★★ 7

  If you’re a handsy repressed smug conformist with no original thoughts yet love to hear yourself talk, you’re probably a secret fascist just waiting to be given permission by an authority figure to murder. That’s just facts. You romanticize and aggrandize yourself, but like all romantics you’re just a blockhead tool waiting... longing... to be told you're important.

  Director Juraj Herz was a survivor of Ravensbrück concentration camp as a child and you can see how that personal experience gave him bold proprietary permission to mock and explore this horrifying subject to such great effect.

  The tying of transcendental buddhism to our protagonist’s increasingly manipulated and ideologically thirsty mind is sweet perfection. Magical thinking is most often the out for…

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  Review by COBRARocky ★★★★★ 5

  Has the exact feeling one would expect from a movie that was locked in a vault for 20 years. To my knowledge this is also the only Holocaust related film made by a survivor too which just gives it an even more eerie feeling.

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★★ 17

  The definitive answer to the question, "What if you took David Lynch, Carnival of Souls and Angst and put them in the dreamlike, strange universe of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad?" And it would be a psychological horror film about a well-meaning man who descends into complete madness when a Nazi convinced him he has German blood.

  This is one of those films that cannot be adequately described in words. It's a magnificent and stunning piece of visual storytelling blended with a brilliant script made up of mostly monologues that may appear merely odd, but when combined with the rather experimental camerawork and sound mixing, the nightmarish cinematography that intensifies the psychological aspect of the movie and attacks all…

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  Review by braden ★★★★½

  “I’ll save them all. The whole world”

  Holocaust survivor Juraj Herz’s fiercely creepy The Cremator is a disorienting character study closely following a Czech cremator’s seduction into Nazism; carefully linking his initially unassuming behaviours to his eventual delirium and imposing nature as he’s gripped by delusion and despotism. Stanislav Milota’s incredible cinematography and Jaromír Janácek’s dizzying editing are so forceful in getting inside the mind of Kopfrkingl, creatively cutting between scenes in reverse shots to make dialogue flow seamlessly and create a stream of consciousness that matches his rambling; as well as getting uncomfortably close to its actors or using POV shots to keep him feeling sharply authoritative throughout his dark spiral. Emphasised particularly thanks to Rudolf Hrusínsky’s phenomenal performance, the film is genuinely chilling in how natural it’s development seems to feel; capturing this horrifying transformation in such a precisely intricate, believable way that makes it so eminently disturbing.

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  Review by spap1 ★★★★ 8

  this is going to be a difficult review to write without just going into a rant. 

  why the fuck do evil people have to be so evil? 

  the psychical decision making behind being evil.

  if we look at the past of evil individuals, they are people who feel as though they have been under appreciated and misunderstood for what they believe themselves to be offering. Hitler was a failed artist, constantly rejected from perusing his dream, Stalin was a man from a poor background, mercilessly picked on by his own highly educated comrades. 

  there is always something behind that evil. of course, the evil itself is a banal thing, a pathetic little consequence of a failure that stems most deeply…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black

  The more I think about it, the more I think this is a very twisted horror-comedy masterpiece of the darkest kind.

  Shot like a hazy dream, it follows Rudolf Hrusinsky as the titular crematorium worker as he gives what is essentially a movie long monologue about his own twisted spirituality, actions, and slowly building madness/mania. Despite the fact that he dominates the film utterly, there's still somehow space for a surprisingly large cast of supporting characters who are much more fleshed out than seems possible. Notable are Mr. Strauss and his awkward wife, Mr. Dvorak the nervous smoker, the family of the title character, and Mr. Reinke, the Devil-as-Nazi-recruiter who matter-of-factly lures Mr. Kopfrkingl (the mad protagonist) into megalomania and…

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 5

  Hooptober #29

  The Cremator begins quirkily, with odd subject matter and fast edits. A man who believes cremation relieves a burden is the lead character, a rather strange setup. However, the genius of The Cremator is the shock when you realise where this dark tale is headed. Set on the eve of World War Two, in Czechoslovakia, this man who burns bodies becomes a metaphor for the greatest evil. At first the film is about the loss of Czech identity, but soon it becomes about a path towards a nationalist ideology and the purity of bloodlines. The Cremator exists in a world of disease and darkness and bodies, with the vices of drugs and prostitutes, and the evils of fascism…

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  Review by Disgustipated ★★★★★ 7

  Hooptober 4.0 - 2017 - Film #31

  Kopfrkingl, hereafter to be referred to as Fatface, has an attitude towards death and the human body far different from my own. For me the mere thought of a corpse is both frightening and downright disturbing. On the other hand, Fatface works in a crematorium. As a cremator, the handling of dead folk is his daily bread and butter. Touching a corpse would send a shudder all the way up and down my spine, whereas for Fatface it is as benign as touching the keyboard and mouse I tap away at all day long. This is very much underscored in the film when I watched in horror as he ran his comb through…

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  Review by Graham 8

  broken bodies ... falling
  faces ... ripped apart
  thoughts ... divided
  lives ... shattered

  The first few frames can share a lot about a film, and during the opening credits of Spalovač mrtvol I was already getting the feeling that this would be a very special event.

  With an astonishingly well directed and edited outcome, the film presents as being way ahead of its time and yet, feels eternal. A film that captures the megalomaniacal, destructive force of a broken psyche as it falls deeper and deeper into the darkness. A film that scratches at humanity and laughs at its viewers torment. A cruel experience that grows, frame by frame to deliver raw toxic-shock in the form of Karel Kopfrkingl,…