If you are a fan of the Bathory legend, Gothic period films or Anna Friel, this is worth a watch, mostly for Anna Friel's performance and the high quality technical aspects of the film (the cinematography, set design and costume design are fantastic and help the film come off as quite epic at times). I also really liked the twist on the Bathory tale, which I wont describe here to avoid spoilers but I will say it may be the best thing to come from the film. There were times I truly enjoyed watching Bathory and was enthralled by the story.
But having said all these nice things and recommending a watch for certain people, I cannot emphasize enough how dreadful this film was. The dialog was horrible, many of the actors in important roles come off as amateur at best, and the worst crime here is the addition of the monks as poorly conceived vehicles for exposition and totally unnecessary comic relief. This element of the film is so terribly bad and inappropriate that whoever introduced it into this film needs to never, ever be involved in making another movie again because they are clearly incompetent. That may sound over the top, but I cannot stress enough how much it hurt this film. I saw the need for exposition, but it could have been done in a myriad of more appropriate ways, and the comic aspects were so completely out of place here it killed any mood the film created. It truly helped ruin what could have been a fantastic movie.
That is the most obvious example of what makes Bathory so disappointing - seeing the potential of what could have been great constantly squandered by bad film making. They made a world class epic film with excellent technical work, a great re-imagining of the Bathory legend and a good performance by Ms. Friel, but regularly sabotaged it. The entire time I watched it the thought running through my mind was "It could have been so good!", so it was quite a frustrating experience.
I gave Bathory a 4 which I think is fair. To explain - on one hand it may deserve a bit higher rating, but on the other hand I was originally going to give it a 2 or 3 simply because when the film was at it's best you see it could have been an 8 - 10 but they just kept ruining it. I went higher because I felt a score that low wouldn't give enough credit to the people who did a very good job in an otherwise bad film but anything over a 4 would be rewarding the incompetence as well.
What a missed opportunity.
But having said all these nice things and recommending a watch for certain people, I cannot emphasize enough how dreadful this film was. The dialog was horrible, many of the actors in important roles come off as amateur at best, and the worst crime here is the addition of the monks as poorly conceived vehicles for exposition and totally unnecessary comic relief. This element of the film is so terribly bad and inappropriate that whoever introduced it into this film needs to never, ever be involved in making another movie again because they are clearly incompetent. That may sound over the top, but I cannot stress enough how much it hurt this film. I saw the need for exposition, but it could have been done in a myriad of more appropriate ways, and the comic aspects were so completely out of place here it killed any mood the film created. It truly helped ruin what could have been a fantastic movie.
That is the most obvious example of what makes Bathory so disappointing - seeing the potential of what could have been great constantly squandered by bad film making. They made a world class epic film with excellent technical work, a great re-imagining of the Bathory legend and a good performance by Ms. Friel, but regularly sabotaged it. The entire time I watched it the thought running through my mind was "It could have been so good!", so it was quite a frustrating experience.
I gave Bathory a 4 which I think is fair. To explain - on one hand it may deserve a bit higher rating, but on the other hand I was originally going to give it a 2 or 3 simply because when the film was at it's best you see it could have been an 8 - 10 but they just kept ruining it. I went higher because I felt a score that low wouldn't give enough credit to the people who did a very good job in an otherwise bad film but anything over a 4 would be rewarding the incompetence as well.
What a missed opportunity.