There are several things I would rather do than watch a new Lars Von Trier film. I might for example like to have my eyes torn out and have fire ants placed in my sockets. I might like to have broadsword shoved through my belly, or get soaked in oil, lit on fire, and tossed from a catapult. Or… well you get the idea.
The problem is that some of Lars Von Triers early movies (Breaking The Waves, The Kingdom) where so fantastic that the majority of film snobs have somehow failed to notice that he has lost his god damned mind. From the stupefyingly overrated Dogville (which to paraphrase Almost Famous took Von Trier 3 hours to not accomplish what it took Sam Fuller 80 minutes to do in The Naked Kiss), to sending his mentor to “the most miserable place in the world, (no not a screening of one of his films), to writing Dear Wendy a film of almost indescribable tedium, to having Robots direct his films (I shit you not, check out the AV Club), the past half decade have been one bizarre bad idea after another.
So it is shocking and a bit frightening that Lars Von Trier is making a long awaited return to horror. After all two of his best films, The Kingdom and Epidemic, where horror films. Really good, freaky horror films. However, even the somewhat disappointing (but a freaking masterpiece next to Manderly) Kingdom II was made 10 years ago, long before the robots took over.
So can the new maddeningly overrated Von Trier make a decent horror film? For now I’m going to have to say no. The film is called Antichrist, and is based on the premise that it was Satan, not God who created the world. This does not seem a particularly terrifying concept, and indeed sounds like something that a stoner would make up as he warbles on in his dorm. Von Trier’s newest opus will start shooting this summer according toProduction Weekly
L No word if it will also be directed by robots. I repeat fucking robots.
