Review - Beyond Remedy (2009 - Dir. Gerhard Hroß)

Do some filmmakers actually title their films to make it easy for reviewers? (Another prime example is the low quality Atrocious.) Why not just call your film, Less Pleasurable Than Intimate Fun With A Rotary Hand Whisk? It would certainly save me the bother of a) watching it, b) reviewing it and c) binning it.

A group of phobia-suffering medical students go to a hospital where they are treated with some fairly extreme techniques. There are some fairly strange phobias too: one sufferer is afraid of mirrors (he's not a vampire though, just ugly), but the strangest is a surgeon who's afraid of scalpels; that's like a baker who's afraid of baps. To make matters worse a chain-mail wearing surgeon-killer is on the loose (I'm making this sound far more interesting than it is).

You might have guessed that Beyond Remedy is not a good film. In actual fact, every aspect of the film is really, really bad. The acting from the whole cast is sub-porn. I half expected a moustachioed plumber to arrive in the middle of a scene and remove his huge tool from a tidy box. But the acting is worse than that. It pains me to say it, but it is sub-Mary's dad from Eastenders. (For overseas readers, Eastenders is a British soap, full of bad actors, the worst offender being Mary's Dad whose lines mainly consisted of saying, "Oh, Mary love." He appeared in the first years of the soap and his acting set the zero-level that every other actor can be measured against.)

(Mary's Dad: sadly he doesn't make an appearance in Beyond Remedy)

You don't normally notice editing in a film, generally because it's done well. Beyond Remedy is a lesson in how to break the rules of editing, but not in a good way. The highlight is a shot of our heroine jumping from a ledge, fifteen feet above the ground.  Cut instantly to her landing softly in a fella's arms. To be fair to the editor, this could be the director's fault; if you only get the footage of her jumping from a foot off the ground there's not much you can do with it.  

Everything else is the film is poor: the lighting, the droning music, the virtually silent sound effects and the comedy prosthetics work. I bet the caterers even served up hummus sarnies. I'm not going to rant any longer. Just be glad you haven't had to sit through this shambles. It only gets a 1/10 because at least they've had a go and it's not an irritating film, unlike our 0/10 offerings. At least I only paid a quid for it.

1/10

evlkeith

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