WATCH YOUR FAVORITE
MOVIES & TV SERIES ONLINE
TRY FREE TRIAL
Home > Drama >

Cowards Bend the Knee

Watch Cowards Bend the Knee For Free

Cowards Bend the Knee

When he takes his girlfriend to a seedy abortion clinic in the back room of a combination hair salon / bordello, Guy Maddin meets the madam’s daughter and falls in love. But she won’t let any man touch her until her father’s murder has been avenged.

... more
Release : 2003
Rating : 7
Studio : Power Plant, 
Crew : Director,  Writer, 
Cast : Darcy Fehr Louis Negin Amy Stewart Mike Bell
Genre : Drama Romance

Cast List

Related Movies

Running Scared
Running Scared

Running Scared   2006

Release Date: 
2006

Rating: 7.3

genres: 
Drama  /  Action  /  Thriller
Stars: 
Paul Walker  /  Cameron Bright  /  Vera Farmiga
The Love Guru
The Love Guru

The Love Guru   2008

Release Date: 
2008

Rating: 3.8

genres: 
Comedy  /  Romance
Stars: 
Mike Myers  /  Jessica Alba  /  Justin Timberlake
Youngblood
Youngblood

Youngblood   1986

Release Date: 
1986

Rating: 6.2

genres: 
Drama  /  Romance
Stars: 
Rob Lowe  /  Cynthia Gibb  /  Patrick Swayze
Breakfast with Scot
Breakfast with Scot

Breakfast with Scot   2007

Release Date: 
2007

Rating: 6.7

genres: 
Drama  /  Comedy
Stars: 
Tom Cavanagh  /  Ben Shenkman  /  Benz Antoine
D3: The Mighty Ducks
D3: The Mighty Ducks

D3: The Mighty Ducks   1996

Release Date: 
1996

Rating: 5.5

genres: 
Drama  /  Action  /  Comedy
Stars: 
Emilio Estevez  /  Jeffrey Nordling  /  David Selby
New in Town
New in Town

New in Town   2009

Release Date: 
2009

Rating: 5.7

genres: 
Comedy  /  Romance
Miracle
Miracle

Miracle   2004

Release Date: 
2004

Rating: 7.4

genres: 
Drama  /  History
Stars: 
Kurt Russell  /  Patricia Clarkson  /  Noah Emmerich
Mystery, Alaska
Mystery, Alaska

Mystery, Alaska   1999

Release Date: 
1999

Rating: 6.7

genres: 
Drama  /  Comedy
Stars: 
Russell Crowe  /  Hank Azaria  /  Mary McCormack
Sudden Death
Sudden Death

Sudden Death   1995

Release Date: 
1995

Rating: 5.8

genres: 
Drama  /  Action
Slap Shot
Slap Shot

Slap Shot   1977

Release Date: 
1977

Rating: 7.3

genres: 
Drama  /  Comedy
Stars: 
Paul Newman  /  Strother Martin  /  Michael Ontkean
The Game That Kills
The Game That Kills

The Game That Kills   1937

Release Date: 
1937

Rating: 5.8

genres: 
Mystery  /  Romance
Stars: 
Charles Quigley  /  Rita Hayworth  /  John Gallaudet
Ice Angel
Ice Angel

Ice Angel   2000

Release Date: 
2000

Rating: 5.5

genres: 
Fantasy  /  Drama  /  Comedy
Stars: 
Nicholle Tom  /  Tara Lipinski  /  Nancy Kerrigan

Reviews

Bereamic
2018/08/30

Awesome Movie

More
Chirphymium
2018/08/30

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

More
Kien Navarro
2018/08/30

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

More
Justina
2018/08/30

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

More
MisterWhiplash
2008/12/29

It's not in Guy Maddin to make what Hollywood people would call a "normal" movie. Armed with 8mm cameras, loads of lights, sound effects (if not actual sound equipment), and a mind like a steel Dziga-Vertov trap marinated in Winnipeg and sex and murder, he makes movies the way he damn well pleases to do them, which usually are done like super-kinetic, libido-charged fever dreams that come to represent a kind of consciousness that could be misconstrued as a music video if not for the fact that it's a 1920's silent film about revenge-plotting women and blue hands ala Evil Dead that kill innocent victims while hockey is always a major subject (and, sometimes, with players in full wax museum mold).It might not always make sense- and by this I mean relatively to some of Maddin's best and strangest like Brand Upon the Brain! and The Saddestmusic in the World- but it's never less than boring and always more than enough for the open-minded. And by this I mean open-minded enough to find oneself in the horror-movie world of a hockey player named Guy Maddin (yeah, not the first time and wont be the last the director has a character named by himself), who goes through a psycho-sexual-homicidal journey through a pair of blue hands which belong to a devious girl's father. They aren't actually his hands put on his, however, they're just painted blue. But there's an effect that comes with this: the hands kill ala Evil Dead without Maddin really wanting to. So come a series of events involving wax-painted hockey players who can come to life, an abortionist that works out of a beauty parlor, another woman who cant stand how Maddin waxes her legs, and, yes, plenty of frenetic Canadian Hockey.That's what it's aboot, so to speak, but there's more, much more, particularly in Maddin's 10-chapter set-up, and featuring Beethoven's 7th among other classical selections (frankly I enjoyed the 7th in Saddest Music more, but this is even crazier, which helps). Everything moves at such a pace and clip you wont know what stops and goes. But Maddin's mind works wonders as a master of his craft and at relaying his own personality and life experiences in the framework of what is essentially a really demented B-movie. It's like with Jodorowsky: he makes movies with his you-know-what as opposed to his head. I wouldn't want it any other way.

More
tedg
2007/08/10

When you love someone deeply, everything seems deep. When you love them in reality, sometimes the experience is ordinary.Real films have that element of romance and in a way a filmmaker has arrived in my life if he or she makes a film that doesn't affect me. But of course that's after this person has already burned a door into my heart.Maddin is on my list of the very best filmmakers, and on a much shorter list of the ones that matter and are still working. He's changed the way I dream. Some of the visual humming I do to myself is his tunes. So I consider it a sort of triumph to have a relationship with him where he says something that matters to him, and he says/shows it with the same skill as before... and it doesn't matter to me.Its a sort of transcendent Zen thing to be able to know something so deeply to be able to discard it easily.This is a film put together from his own life. Its a different sort of narrative adventure than we usually get from him. Usually we have an inner substrate, a narrative model made explicit in the movie that is preserved enough for us to see the contrast between it and the way we are seeing it. A virgin's diary, a sad song. Here, the narrative is a life proper. The reason it fails for me is that I already know what I need to about this mind, because he gave us sticky artifacts that are sent out into an ether where souls flit. This time, he cannot do that, the artifacts stick to his embodied life, not mine. For me to accept this, I'd have to have some sort of resonance with him as a human.And I don't. I cannot. Its part of the arrangement when you begin as we have: he's the sender, I'm the lucid receiver. We both cannot be receivers, the way he has structured his art. I think I will advise you to stay away from this if you are serious about Maddin. It will take me some time to recover the ability to accept things from him as selfless, world-connected art.He knows this. There's a bunch of business about humans as wax statues.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

More
Polaris_DiB
2005/12/07

Understand that I'm getting a bit tired of people comparing every strange movie that comes along to a David Lynch film too. Unfortunately, Lynch is the norm and just about one of the most accessible strange filmmakers out there, so sometimes the comparison is needed for a starting point, like in this case.This movie is, roughly speaking, the story of a swinging hockey player who gets entrapped in a bunch of relationships, including most prominently one with a scarred daughter who wants her father's death revenged. Her father's killer? Her mother. It includes but is not limited to perverse sexuality, weird psychoses, and severed arms.It's shot in black and white and is a silent film, which creates for it a sort of removed surreality/abstractness which is, honestly, reminiscent of Eraserhead and Lynch's Lumiere and Company short.What makes it Maddin's, though, is the use of imagery from his childhood (the barbershop, the hockey players, etc.) set to a blatant sexuality which goes beyond just being blatant but enforces it: you see the sexual image, and then the words follow saying exactly what you were thinking. No more subtlety and deranged fetishes, this is straight-forward Freud and primal scene.Because of this, this film as a whole remains true to itself and never lets go of its own private Universe, one that we could never live in and yet, terribly, can relate to, figure out, and eventually even understand.Beyond that, there's not much that can be talked about this movie besides the fact that it there's no common approach to it. It has no genre (besides maybe Silent film) and is disconcerting, requiring a certain level of viewer interaction that most movies don't ask for. For fans of strange and insane cinema, it's great; for anybody looking to be entertained, this is most definitely not for you.--PolarisDiB

More
paulduane
2003/10/28

Well, this is quite probably one of the most uncategorisable films I've seen - you couldn't possibly call it a comedy, with its beauty salons that moonlight as abortion clinics/brothels, and its disturbingly self-lacerating portrait of the director as a cowardly lecher and cold-blooded murderer. But parts of it are hilarious. Go figure. In brief, the plot concerns Guy Maddin, hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons, who takes his pregnant girlfriend to the above-mentioned clinic for a termination and then leaves her (literally in the middle of the procedure) for the brothel-keeper's beautiful daughter, played with incandescent and slightly scary intensity by Melissa Dionisio (that surely cant be her real name, can it?) only to discover that she can't allow herself to be touched by a man's hands (an uncharacteristically direct quote from Lon Chaney's 'The Unknown') until her father's murder has been avenged. And then she produced the jar in which she keeps, preserved, her father's hands... After that we get a twist on that old chestnut 'The Hands of Orlac', combined with a surprisingly explicit dose of sexual excess and weird psychology, as young Guy ends up in deep trouble of every sort imaginable, through his own inability to control his lusts. Told in ten chapters of six minutes apiece, this was intended as a gallery installation but it works just fine as a movie. As long as you don't mind a regular dose of jawdropping strangeness and a large splash of shocking, unfathomable directorial masochism.

More
Watch Instant, Get Started Now Watch Instant, Get Started Now