This holiday season has gone on long enough! Bring on the bubonic plague, necromancers, ritual sacrifices, eviscerations and all the other rollicking, desaturated 14th-century good times promised by the forthcoming B-flick Black Death. I know! How did this not get fast-tracked for Christmas weekend?
On the one hand, we all know that nothing with Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne and a gizmo that'll "splay any man from his a**hole to his apple" can really be that bad. And so as the actors travel with an expedition to find the one village curiously left untouched by the lethal illness sweeping the Dark Ages. On the other, this is just bleak, bleak, bleak to the point of near-hilarity -- a kind of "hit the dirt, hide the showers" exercise with all the big overhead camera shots and grumbled dialogue really anchoring the portent you just don't get from a title like Black Death alone.
I smell a Bad Movie We Love on the horizon. Or maybe it's just "the fumes of the dead hanging in the air like poison," as observed at the :15 mark of this red-band party. Round up the family.
VERDICT: Sold.
[via Latino Review]