Release Date: December 3, 2013 (VOD Platforms)
Director: Lucien Förstner
MPAA Rating: R
Film Pulse Score: 2/10
The scariest thing about Lucien Förstner’s Bela Kiss: Prologue is the fact that there’s the promise of a sequel. This style over substance snoozefest packs in an uninteresting story, poor performances, and striking visuals that feel out of place and uninspired. Much like the whereabouts of the real life killer this is based on, this is a movie that should remain a mystery.
Bela Kiss: Prologue is loosely based on a series of murders that occurred in Budapest during the first World War, where soldiers found the bodies of 23 girls drained of blood and stored in barrels of alcohol. The killer, a man by the name of Bela Kiss, was never found. Fast forward to current day and a group of friends on the lamb after a bank robbery decide to hide out at a “no-tell hotel” tucked away in the countryside. As it turns out, this hotel is run by the still alive Bela Kiss and his weird family of murderers.
The first thing one notices about this film is that it’s a German production using all German actors, however all the dialogue is spoken in English. This results is some terrible line delivery and some very rough performances. If the film was shot in German and subtitled it may have worked out better, however that doesn’t make up for the poorly written script.
There’s a slightly ridiculous and completely predictable story element that connects the group of young criminals to the Kiss family, however the big reveal isn’t shocking in any way. All the characters are so typical and one dimensional that anything that happens to them feels completely inconsequential. Oh man, that one guy I had no emotional investment in and was a complete dick is getting killed. Big deal.
The pacing of the plot felt inconsistent as well, and even though it only clocks in at 106 minutes, it felt like it was never going to end. It starts off well enough, with the feel of a slow burn horror, but the final act devolves into what amounts to little more than torture porn. Sporadically throughout the film we’re also given stylized flashbacks of the Bela Kiss legend, which look good, but feel out of place within the rest of the story. These flashbacks are done in slow motion and look to be borrowing from the Zack Snyder textbook of style over all else.
As the title suggests, this is the first in what will supposedly be a series of films, but there’s so little enjoyment to be had in the prologue, it’s hard to imagine anyone willing to endure more of this bland and unoriginal story. Sure, it’s violent and it has creepy Eastern Europeans, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. A similar, but better film to see would be Xavier Gens’ Frontier(s), which surpasses this in every way.
