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Too much of everything

So much average

How sad is this?

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

As a longtime lover of surrealist and experimental cinema, "Begotten" has remained on my radar for a while now. I've heard many varying perspectives on this polarizing film, and I did not finally decide to watch it until today, and all I can say is: .This is not a normal film by any means. Instead, it's really a piece of visual art, and I don't say this to sound like a hipster who's intellectually far more superior than the fools who surround me, I say it because that's really what it is. Technically, it is definitely a movie, but its classification cannot end there. It's too unconventional to not be given some sort of heavy artistic label. Of course, just because something is heavily "artistic" does not mean that it's good by any means, and maybe this isn't really good, but I definitely enjoyed it overall.There's definitely quite a lot of bad things about this film. First of all, some sections are way too slow and this painstaking slowness made me blackout several times while I as watching it, allowing my mind to wander freely and think about totally unrelated things. However, the sections in which it does hold your attention are really quite spectacular and rank with the likes of great surrealist films like "L'age d'Or" and, my all time favorite movie, "Eraserhead". However, it misses some of the key elements those films had that made them so entertaining-for example: humor! I feel as if humor is an essential part of surrealist cinema. Sure, some surreal films do perfectly fine without it, but those are few and far between (I mean, "Antichrist" is objectively a perfectly crafted film and there is literally no reason to alter it in my opinion). Nearly everything David Lynch has ever worked on has at least a few laugh out loud moments, and Bunuel was once notorious for his hilarious mockeries of religion, the bourgeois, and society in general. Although I must admit that I can't really find a spot in "Begotten" in which humor would be appropriate...Other problems that I had with the film dealt with its rather pretentious use of religious imagery. I get that the entire film is about the death and rebirth of gods, but you can tell this story without the common religious symbols that are used in tons of other avant garde art pieces! It's stale territory and can only be properly pulled off by a genuinely masterful filmmaker. And while the man behind this work certainly has the potential to be such, he has yet to fully prove said potential. I may sound like I'm picking on this film quite a bit, so I'll lay out some of the reasons I gave this oddity such a high rating: -the visuals are pretty damn beautiful despite their gritty feel, and whenever they aren't beautiful it's due to some of the film's intentionally disturbing imagery -in terms of a horror film, "Begotten" may be unusual but it's still extremely effective, filled with the creepiest visuals imaginable and an atmosphere so dark and strange that it almost flawlessly replicates the weirdest of my nightmares. -it's a successfully otherworldly experience, and that's one of the best and most important things I think that film can do -the scenes that are intriguing are almost endlessly watchable and have gained an impressively iconic status among horror fans in the modern day.Thanks to these several key qualities I can enthusiastically recommend "Begotten" to bug fans of artistic, surreal, scary, and disturbing cinema. I cannot guarantee that you will enjoy it, but it's worth watching at least once as a unique and unsettling curio and a mild modern classic of the avant garde.

After some deliberation I have decided that this film is not actually worth watching. Begotten is an early film by E. Elias Merhigne, who would later become known for the Shadow of the Vampire. Shadow of the Vampire is actually a brilliant film, not only thanks to Willem Dafoe's intense portrayal of Nosfereatu and John Malkovich's iconic portrayal of Murnau, but also thanks to I discovered this film on some sort of social media related to artistic horror cinema. Of course, artistic doesn't often mean good and the number of times artistic actually means pretentious is enough to make any cinephile uncomfortable. The Begotten is a film that has taken what the early David Lynch shorts had in terms of creepiness and stripped it of any sense of narrative or even cohesive form. Begotten instead replaces these essential elements of film with some vague, religious symbolism. However, unlike the films of Lynch and Jodorowsky, the religious imagery comes off as completely disingenuous. The shear length of the shots wreaks of pretension and an overly ambitious attempt at being "strange." All in all, this film tries way too hard and in so doing fails at either being disturbing or profound, when it sets out to be both. One can identify elements of Maya Deren, especially Meshes of the Afternoon, but still, the film fails to live up to its ambitions as a work of creepy art. Another film make that comes to mind who has done similar things is Crispin Glover with this What Is It? trilogy. However, even Glover's purposely shocking, pretentious Nazi Shirley Temple and Down syndrome sex imagery is superior to the half-assed attempt that Merhige made in Begotten. The sparseness of the soundtrack and the juxtaposition of nature sounds with a repetitive beating heart does invoke a creepy and even spiritual element. Still, I can't help but feeling that this is some charlatan ploy to evoke some primal fear in me and it doesn't quite work out for a hardcore genre fan. I must admit, I enjoyed moments of this film, but all in all I must say, this is a pretentious work that gives art cinema a bad name. Cinephiles must live not on convulsions alone. Begotten is a student film that doesn't nearly live up to the legacy of student films like Lynch's the Grandmother or Cronenberg's From the Drain. This review originally appeared at http://paranoidcinephilia.blogspot.com

Begotten (1990) *** (out of 4) Ultra-bizarre film from director E. Elias Merhige that's pretty much impossible to explain in terms of plot.This is the type of experimental film that you could show to a hundred different people. Some are going to find it completely plot-less and downright horrid. Some are going to think it's a masterpiece of visuals and give you ten paragraphs of what the film is trying to "say." Others will be puking their guts out within the first few minutes and won't be able to give you a decent idea of what was to follow. I'm not going to sit here and pretend to know what this film was trying to say or do. Hell, perhaps it's not trying to say anything. The only one who knows for certain is the director himself and I'm not going to try and pretend to speak for him.With all of that said, did the film work? There's no question about that. I hadn't heard of the film until recently when it started to make some lists of the most disturbing movie ever made. I'm not going to agree with that but there's no question that there are some visuals here that won't leave your mind. I mean, how many movies can you think of that starts off with God killing himself in a brutal manor and then Mother Earth impregnating herself with his seed. From here with see countless violent images of death and just about everything else that you can think of. Again, most people aren't going to be able to stomach the film even if they do find it's direction and visuals to be masterful.Roger Ebert once said a film is successful if the director accomplishes whatever they set out to do. I'm pretty sure that means this here was a major success. The director would go onto direct films like SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE and some Marilyn Manson videos. The amazing visuals in this film is what makes it so mesmerizing and there's no question that it contains a sickening atmosphere unlike any other movie I've seen. The artistic value alone makes this film something truly special and I guess the only thing you can compare it to are the early shorts of Luis Bunuel.

Unfortunately you first have to make sense of the movie in some way to understand what you are seeing, and in this film thats near impossible. When making a film the idea is (i thought) to make a firstly a compelling story/plot. Tho this movie did (sorta) achieve that it failed to bring it to the audience in such a way that it is either compelling of even comprehensible. At first i wondered whether the look of the movie was because of budget, then i found out it was intentional and took hours upon hours to make a single minute of film. So the idea was to make it look as gritty and abstract as possible. That the film makers gloriously achieved.But besides that, what exactly was the point? Hardly any entertainment , perhaps only shock value even tho that got old rather quick. At the end of the movie I was left confused , asking myself whether it was an visually abstract original , unique film or a piece of art overdrawn with one or two moments of shock value repeated over and over. This is probably the most subjective movie i have ever seen, tho i haven't seen many films like this, closest that compare would be ERASERHEAD and TETSUO. Those both had at least story lines you could (sort of) follow , this movie ,if you don't watch out, could just easily be a bunch of awkward,bizarre , incoherent mumbo jumbo. For a selective audience.Enjoy_ Evil_Fred