BLACK DEATH
Directed by Christopher Smith
Produced by Robert Bernstein, Douglas Rae, Jens Meurer & Phil Robertson
Written by Dario Poloni
Released by Magnet Releasing
UK. 97 min. Not Rated
With Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Carice van Houten, Kimberley Nixon, John Lynch & Tim McInnerny
 

If you take out the graphic torture and religious controversies, the medieval thriller Black Death could be a 14^th century Scooby-Doo. A plucky band of heroes investigates a seemingly supernatural mystery only to uncover it was all a cheap scam—“I would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for you meddling Crusaders!”

The tale, directed by British horror filmmaker Christopher Smith (Severance), goes like this: in ye olde England, amid an outbreak of the plague, rumors circulate of a village immune to the disease because its inhabitants have renounced God. A fanatical bishop’s envoy, Ulric (Sean Bean), sets out with his crew of mercenaries and torturers to find the town and see if the stories are true, and if they are, they intend to capture the necromancer who leads the villagers. Once they find this fellow, they hope to shut him up in their traveling torture box, a metal cage on wheels with a hand-cranked spike that can rip a man “from arse to Adam’s apple.” This is the Middle Ages, mind you, and if cheap tourist-trap museums in Europe have taught us anything, it’s that they had diabolical tortures. (Expect to see toes yanked off with pliers, men torn apart by horses, women burnt, etc.) But to reach the village, they need a guide. So they take Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), a young monk, who agrees to lead them to the village for reasons of his own: he wants to reunite with his sweetheart (Kimberley Nixon), who’s waiting out the plague in a nearby forest.

Unfortunately, the monk is a wet sponge—a drearily anachronistic bleeding heart. His sappiness is a sop to modern audiences who apparently can’t be trusted to identify with characters or watch a movie inhabited entirely by people with worldviews too different from their own. But his too-modern conscience is also needed for the film’s moral dilemma. You see, the village, isolated by a stretch of marshland, turns out to be a happy hippie commune full of lusty wenches and hearty craftsmen. While the Christians are searching for a necromancer, it’s obvious the buxom Langiva (Carice van Houten) is their druidical queen, helping them thrive in matriarchal bliss—ha! the patriarchal pigs!

Well, not exactly. The holy torturers—with possibly the exception of the sad-faced and loyal Wolfstan (John Lynch), who also narrates the film—are bad, and the pagans might be worse, with the underlying suggestion that all religions are trickery, wickedness, and thought control. Still, Osmund is tempted to join their side (largely for a reason I won’t divulge), and in a cynical and clever if not perfectly executed twist, his fate becomes a sort of repeat of Ulric’s.

For all its occasional B-movie smarts, this is ultimately a cartoonish, movieland Middle Ages. Dario Poloni’s screenplay mistakes campy wordiness for eloquence—people don’t die, they’re “gripped by the icy hands of death.” (And you caught the names, right: Langiva?) The cheap production values have an unmistakable Renaissance Faire vibe. And as there are burly men with swords, we see an unnecessary but obligatory hack ’n slash scene that plays out like a video game. Brendon Nafziger
March 11, 2011