I'm going to start this review by stating that anybody offended by the content of this film has no business watching extreme cinema. What did they think this was going to be? Honestly anybody who has ever been hunting or even fishing will be scratching his head. Keep in mind this film is German with subs that are not exactly complete. With this out of the way let's try to summarise the plot of this strange and epic movie. The story begins at a carnival where two estranged kindred spirits meet once again. Brauth and Katze are not your typical protagonists by any stretch, they are sadistic and evil men who are also seekers of pleasure and pain alike. They quickly enchant a couple of women (one is a teenager) and joined by a burly mistress the troupe embark on a trip to a dilapidated farm house. There is some strange rituals the men and women perform while eating and a lot of poetic philosophy about our inner urges and nihilistic tendencies of those dwelling on the fringe of society. At least that's what I gather as my subtitles were a little rough. Anyway they are joined by an old man who tells the teen girl "I am a fag" or poet depending on your subs, they have a weird almost grandfatherly relationship in this scene. The old man also has a young crippled girl who is wheelchair bound, possibly his muse. After the group take some weird drugs a full frontal oral sex scene is shown with some great gore effects with the scalpel. The groups antics escalate into some very brutal and sadistic acts including rape, defection, urination, genital massacre, disembowelling and some good old bestiality. The plot is not that important in my opiniaon as the director Marian Dora has instead chose to focus on the aesthetics of the film. Special mention must be also made to some of the haunting music, especially the theme. This is not the kind of film that will appeal to a wide audience, yet for those who are willing to step outside themselves to experience this beautifully ugly vision from Marian Dora there is some content here they will find hard to forget. For better or worse this is extreme cinema for the freaks who enjoy the dark fairytales of the macabre.

The horror status this movie has got is pretty high... Possibly, seen as a must for die hard horror fans...I'll start off on a high, Melancholie der Engel has great camera work, & to a large extent, the soundtrack is OK...However... Its just waaay too long...There is some great sick scenes in there, but it just gets boring in between, & the dialogue is terrible... Which for me is the biggest bummer, as regarding the storyline, there is just nothing to grab onto, at all, its basically just random scenes of emptiness...I'm guessing this movie got rated so sick for the animal cruelty in it, which of course is bad... However compare that to the extreme scenes of paedophilia in 'A Serbian Film'... Well... I know which were more disturbing for me...At the end of the day, this movie is only worth a watch to see how it compares to the rest of the so-called sick movies...

Melancholie Der Engel slipped the radar of sick art-house films back in 2009. Why exactly is not known however it might be to do with the fact the company marketing this just didn't do so way back then. However in 2013 it seems to have appeared on a few websites notorious for censorship and extreme cinema. Interest is suddenly swooning around this weird art-house thriller from Marian Dora, who also directed 2006's Cannibal. For this reviewer, one watch of Melancholie Der Engel was enough. Being a big fan of controversial cinema, namely A Serbian Film and Salo, Dora's monster is almost three hours of complete weirdness and infrequent WTF moments. Zenza Raggi, who stars in an endless list of pornographic movies, leads this "tale" of a group of people who gather to strange house for the weekend to experiment in dark pleasures. Who they are and what they're doing is never fully realised or explained in dialogue or plot. Most of the films duration revolves around some seriously weird and beautiful music combining wonderful landscapes and cinematography. Some of the music sounds almost exactly like Brian Eno. However the flip side is most of the time you'll also see close-ups of skeletons of dead animals, burnt remains, bodily fluids, creepy crawlies, and just about everything imaginable to put you off your next meal. Well done to Dora for creating atmosphere which is truly grotesque and unique but most of all, powerful enough to convincingly unsettle. The characters together with the unsettling atmosphere make you believe Melancholie Der Engel takes place in another time, hundreds of years ago - another world even. Dora has some serious skills for managing to cast a group together who were happy enough to be filmed and act through with the explicit, distasteful visuals which at one time belonged only to the webs darkest. How it attains an atmosphere of depression and dread from the beginning however, is truly cheap and distasteful. Insects and animals are crushed and tortured at intervals; a small lizard is crushed to death, in another moment a snails eyes are cut off with scissors - all real. I didn't see (excuse the pun) any reason for this to happen, considering the movie has enough fictional violence and crazy debauchery on its own. For example, an old man who joins the group early on brings a girl in a wheelchair to the "party" who is openly abused and left lying around like an object. This man is later cut up (also for no reason) and left to crawl home with his guts hanging out. The group burn him on a bonfire, at which point another character is that excited he gets someone to masturbate him to climax in explicit close-up. In addition, the movie contains people being defecated and urinated on, both alive and dead. I can't rate Melancholie Der Engel high on my list simply because it does seem to be a plot-less, direction-less compilation of weirdness and sick fantasies. The general ruthlessness of the animal cruelty also put me off recommending this to anyone, which I think is understandable. Good movies should present fiction and suspend the viewers disbelief without relying on real, unnecessary cruelty. The biggest problem it has going for it though, its length, will make many viewers fast forward through it before they get to the truly puke inducing scenes, in the last forty minutes. Either way, if you're a fan of extreme movies, this one should be on your list. The way it comes together as a whole package though, is not as great as others. If Dora cut the animal cruelty and presented a new condensed cut - Melancholie Der Engel would score more points from me and be easier to recommend.

With its focus on audiovisual composition, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA essentially is an emotional experience. Not enough, the complexly developed story also stretches out to themes of friendship, passion, revenge and death wish. This assumes intense preoccupation with all the multiple layers of the movie. In aesthetic, tender images the stunned audience witnesses events that blurred the frontiers between reality and fiction probably already during the shooting. Just apparently in contradiction the events are accompanied by citations of German contemporary history, which gives Marian Dora's work a powerful intellectual historical basis. The movie's structure is similar to the baroque cathedral which gets a central role in the movie: The story and (only on the first sight) marginal details get mirrored like a symmetry axis and seem to be the counterpart of the leading characters destiny.A personal work of director Marian Dora, the movie defies all formal conventions of storytelling. In nearly all scenes the movie breaks up to the audience's expectations. Established viewing and thinking habits as well as generally accepted and provided moral patterns are getting destroyed and stay unusable. If comparisons are appropriate at all, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA has its place between the work of Jodorowsky or Pasolini. However, the movie can't deny its German roots and openly admits its highly controversial underground cinema status: Poetic, radical, original, unwieldy and impossible to forget.