Must Love Death
September 27th, 2009
Just landed back at the homestead after Must Love Death. This will be my first mini review from this years Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF).
The best thing that ever happened to Normans depressing life was being hit by a car. He starts a relationship with the driver, a beautiful young woman named Jennifer whose life is equally troubled. The love affair ends when a misunderstanding with Jennifers boorish on-again-off-again boyfriend finally pushes Norman to consider suicide. He answers an ad looking for four like-minded people to plot ending their lives in a mass suicide, but when he arrives at the meeting, the alleged suicides turn out to be a couple of torturous, though incompetent, murderers looking for a willing victim. Norman is forced to fend for his life, and a comical and macabre fight against death begins.
MUST LOVE DEATH is an anti-romantic comedy that artfully blends two opposite genres, romantic comedy and extreme horror. German writer/director Andreas Schaaps first feature film is truly original, delivering a twisted, genre-bending thrill-ride of a date movie.
I have to disagree with the above description. Must Love Death does a poor job of blending two genres. In fact it simply jumps between torture scenes and romantic scenes. Never the two shall meet in this movie; either someone is having their arm nailed to a chair or you’re watching the guy work up the courage to kiss the girl at her door step.
The romantic comedy bits were a drag, it felt like I was trapped in a bad chick flick for a good chunk of the movie. Part of this was due to the fact that all the comedy was actually happening in the torture scenes. Out in the woods where our villains are torturing young folk is where some solid laugh out loud moments live.
Overall the movie was just too disjointed without much carrying you from scene to scene. If they’d ditched the romance and just gone for a torture-comedy-horror it would have had my full attention.
Rating: 5/10
As a side note the film was screened at the Plaza and there were some problems with the short film that played prior so it was cut off half way thorough. It also appears that they projected the Must Love Death screener DVD. A few times throughout the movie there was copyright text overlaying the bottom of the frame. It wasn’t overly distracting but CIFF was handing out free tickets on the way out as a gesture of good will. I’m impressed with the CIFF organization and volunteers as usual.