Maléfique (2002)

Here is another movie that somehow eluded me. I've known about it but for some mysterious reason I ignored it, until now. Which was very, very stupid. Maléfique is a movie that every horror fan out there should see.

The entire duration of the movie is basically set in one room (with the exception of two short scenes) and it is a damn fine feat to keep a constant momentum for 90 minutes. Maléfique does that, with honors. The movie starts with an excellent intro where a man paint a strange symbol on a wall, using the blood of a dying man as paint, taking it from a open wound in the "soontobeacorpse"'s stomach. We then flash forward 80 years to the same location, a prison cell, where a new intern has been incarcarated. He shares his cell with three other people: Marcus, a violent transvestite, Paquerette, seemingly retarded who ate his six months old sister and Lassalle, an intellectual who killed his wife for unknown reasons. Our "hero", Carrère, is here for a trial for fraud but is waiting for his wife to post bail. When he realizes that his wife has taken ownership over his company and is refusing him to see his young son, he gets a bit peeved. At the same time he finds a mysterious book hidden in the wall of the prison cell, some sort of diary describing a way to create a portal that will lead out of there. None of the belives any of the writing at first but when Lassare reads an incantation out loud at night and Paquerette loses his fingers on both hands "because the wall ate them", they start to take it a bit more seriously. When one of the characters try to destroy it, well, lets just say that the book punishes him in a way that almost made me look away from the screen. They try to get rid of the book after that but we all know that it will appear again, under really mysterious corcumstances...

Good stuff indeed. Maléfique is a blast from start to finish thanks to an intriguing story that never goes into some arthouse lalaland which so often happens when filmmakers really dont know how how to wrap things up properly. These guys have a story to tell and they tell it well, with a great ending which obviously is inspired by all those cool horror comics from EC and Warren. It is also populated with interesting characters who are all well acted and not just horror movie clichés. They all have their little quirks and weird ways of behaving which just adds to the entertainment. Another bonus are a couple of nice gorescenes which are all painful to look at and beautifully executed with old school special effects. Yes, I liked this film a lot. It has a french tinge of Lovecraft and Clive Barker which cant be a bad thing if treated properly and it's twists are never overly murky in its details. A must see actually.