DVD Review: Necromentia
Necromentia (2009)
Studio: Image Entertainment
Release Date: September 14, 2010
Directed By: Pearry Teo
Cast: Chad Grimes, Layton Matthews, Santiago Craig, Zelieann Rivera & Zach Cumer.
Review By: Annie Riordan
You have to draw the line somewhere. At some point, you just have to say: “Okay, that’s it. No more movies featuring obese guys cavorting around in pig masks and bearing questionable stains on their clothes.” I mean, I was fine with Motel Hell, but Jin Won Kim’s “The Butcher” was the last straw. I gave up pig mask movies and bacon immediately. Lasted about two days without the bacon.
So last week, I’m scrolling through Tumblr (shut up, I do what I want) and happened upon a screen cap featuring – what else? – a morbidly obese man in a pig mask and a loincloth, dancing around a Pee Wee’s Playhouse inspired set and gleefully singing a song about suicide, complete with “follow the bouncing ball” graphics. Seriously, how could you not be curious?
Deep in the dank, festering underbelly of Some Inner City, USA, a man named Hagen toils in a basement room, tending to the corpse of his dead girlfriend, Elizabeth. He’s doing all he can to slow the process of decay, convinced that she will eventually return from where she’s gone, but there’s a limit to his skills and both time and putrefaction are winning the war. Just as Hagen is about to give up in despair, in walk two men who, from their outward appearances, are either members of an outlaw motorcycle gang or severely sleep deprived tattoo artists.
In fact, they’re neither. They’re just two guys who happen to know exactly what Hagen’s been doing and why. Travis, the frontman, also knows that he’s doing it wrong and convinces Hagen that he knows how to bring Elizabeth back. Unfortunately, it’s painful. Also unfortunately, it lands Hagen in one of Hell’s pipe lined boiler rooms, where a gas mask wearing demon and a huge reptilian monster are eagerly awaiting his arrival.
Beginning at the end of its story and reversing gears, Necromentia tells us the tales of Travis, former junkie and S&M dungeon master who would do anything to bring back his dead kid brother, a wheelchair bound autistic lured into suicide by demons. It is also the story of Morbius, a demon who was once a man and who sees in Travis an opportunity to get revenge on the people who betrayed and murdered him…his girlfriend, Elizabeth, and her lover, Hagen.
Marred only by some pretentious, long-winded dialogue and an excess of obvious padding, Necromentia is still highly watchable, a welcome change from the steady glut of unimaginative hack n’ slash I usually subside on. It’s a deeply sick look at the kind of irreversably fucked up people whose seedy lives and heinous crimes are usually reserved for shows like 48 Hours on ID. The demons in the boiler room are merely the parsley on the steak plate. These people seem real, as only a fan of forensics shows such as myself could attest. They are their own Hells, and the radius of their despair and inhumanity spreads slowly outwards like a cancer, swallowing everything good and positive that comes into contact with them.
It’s a great help too that the cast – consisting of no one I’ve ever heard of before – can act, and do so to the best of their abilities. The special effects are more than decent, considering the budget, which I can only assume was meager. There’s no CGI here. There’s rubber monster suits, buckets of bloody entrails and that goddamned Pig Man, shimmying about with as much jiggle as possible, nasogastric tubes shoved up his snout and enthusiastically singing about being sodomized by the Easter Bunny. I kid you not, boys and girls. I wasn’t sure whether to giggle or dry heave.
A trip through Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride with Ed Gein would be as close as you could come to duplicating the experience of watching this film. Throw in a good case of stomach flu and a handful of angel dust while you’re at it. Now it’s up to you to decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
