Solo Review: Malefique (2002)

Sub-Genre- Evil Book/Stupid Readers
Cast Members of Note- More French people that I don't recognize... I'm beginning to feel less worldly than I thought I was. The four leads were fantastic though.

Four French guys are in a prison cell together; One is retarded and likes to eat everything he sees; another has tits, real ones, and is in love with the retarded guy; another is an older guy who likes to get anally-explored by the one with tits; and the last one is just some average guy who loves his family back home. Wow, he's kinda boring.

Who isn't?

They find a book one night when the retarded guy knocks a brick loose from the wall during an attempted rape on the new guy. It's a creepy old book, full of cryptic writing and Satanic-like drawings throughout, written long ago by a serial killer who loved Black Magick as much as he did killing women for their placenta. When they begin to read the book, it randomly causes fires, and makes all sorts of creepy shit happen.

"We should probably keep reading then, no?"

It's the retarded guy  that steals the show here; not only does he piss his bunk, soaking the Tranny below him, but he gets his fingers chewed off by a wall, and when he eats some of the books pages (because he's fucking retarded), he becomes Human Origami!

I won't ruin the ending for you here, mostly because the last scene blows, but I will say that the Unicorn Army was a nice touch; I never knew their horns both shot Rainbow Lasers and produced frozen custard!

"He ate the last chapter!"

Not counting the last two scenes, I absolutely loved this movie. It's brilliant in many ways, and it was good at keeping things interesting and tense with most of the movie being set in one room. The characters, and more so the actors that played them, carried this movie, and made Horror gold on a minuscule budget. Criminals or not, I actually cared about what happened to them for the most part.

The mood/atmosphere/ambiance got pretty creepy once you realize that the book they're messing with is something evil as all hell. I wanted to know more about the book, to see where it lead them, where it came from... but the teases we got were more than effective enough.

Oh, so the book leads you into the fire. Got it.

 

I think the very end was a bit of a cop-out. I was wanting a more cataclysmic resolution, a harsh payment called due for messing with the book; what I got instead was something that felt like an old Twilight Zone episode.

Stupid doll.

Fuck that doll. Seriously.

There's some good bloody stuff here, although it wasn't over-plentiful; a wall that eats fingers, various lacerations and cuts, painting with innards, one guy gets turned into a human pretzel, and a reverse-aging scene that was pretty creepy.

Nice slippers.

Other than the transsexual guy with tits breastfeeding a retarded dude, nothing.

"I'm lactating."

Don't mess around with magic; leave that for Criss Angel. (No one really cares if he dies.)

The French Prison Project?

I really want to give this one an A, because right up until the very end it deserved a higher grade, but it's not happening. Even with the LAME last couple of minutes, it's well worth checking out, as it's leaps and bounds better than 95% of the American Horror were subjected to.

B

This movie definitely has a heavy Lovecraftian presence going on, even going so far as to name Yog-Sothoth and Hastur. That's kinda neat.