Film Summary DCXCIII (City of the Dead)


How many horrible events have to take place in the town before you decide to leave.
Horrible weather, bad living conditions, rooms with dead birds in them. An entire populace petrified by your very existence.
How many more hints do you need before you realize that maybe this isn't the best place to stay.

Well apparently our first main character 'Nan' needed a lot more than that.
As she becomes the unfortunate victim of a devil sacrifice.

A Town full of witches who continuously praise Beelzebub and sacrifice people twice a year to maintain immortality.
Why they want to immortality so bad it beyond me.

They live in a horrible town, don't socialize and it looks like they live In perpetual filth.
 I don't know about you, but I'd rather just leave the town and live a conventional 70 years.
Christopher Lee did that. He lives in a quaint estate somewhere within Mississippi, outside of this horrible town.
He's a professor and he seems to be doing just fine with local sacrificing of birds

Anyways it was Christopher Lee who first led this woman to her demise.
He runs a witchcraft study class in where he gathers a small group of students to learn about. Well you guessed it; Witchcraft! For some reason it seems like only one of the students is actually interested in the course, with the rest of them being indifferent to it.
Maybe it's one of those fill-in courses you need to complete your G.E.D or something. I don't know.

Christopher Lee's character decides to utilize this girl's interest and send her up to the town as a unknowing sacrifice.
At the same time she also has this quaint boyfriend who's completely indifferent to Christopher Lee's class and thinks it's a waste of time. There's also her brother (who also happens to be a professor of science) at the school as well.
It's never specified what kind of science. I assume it's the same studie that Peter Parker has expertise in.
You know. General Science. The fill in the blank, whatever you need to be done science.

The Two of them were incredibly skeptical about Nan's travel to the town and will later head up to said Town searching for her.

This lead into the second part of this movie where a different girl is about to be sacrificed, but is inevitably saved when one of the men is able to lift up a cross and burn all the witches with power of Christian symbolism.
Honestly I thought it was going to be hokie. But seeing a bunch of weirdos in robes catch on fire is never not entertaining.

This movie has an odd tone to it. It wants to be this British horror film about the occult but it has this 1950s Americana cheap style to it. With a bunch of characters who sound like they're out of nowhere Wisconsin.
Half the time I kept expecting a Wolfman to pop up, or maybe an alien, with how corny some of the music was getting.
You get really invested in these atmospheric plot points with dark and dingy sets. But then Here comes Mr.American man in his no-nonsense ways, Followed by an orchestra of football Hooligans who sound like they're more at home in a movie about U.S. Marines fighting a giant spider. I guess it makes the movie more memorable but it also kind of kills its tone.

It's an interesting enough movie and Christopher Lee does have more than 5 minutes and that's that's kind of nice.
Unfortunately we just don't get any investment with the characters.  By the time we have enough understanding of our main character they get killed off and then replaced by 2 planks of wood that worn't interesting to begin with.
And a 2nd story that doesn't really go anywhere because we the audience already know what happened to the first girl.

It doesn't last long enough to get boring and it doesn't linger on any scene for any considerable amount of time.
Would have been nice if we got more character investment. But then again maybe they didn't have any character to invest in.
So ultimately you could just go along for the ride and watch a bunch of weirdos try to sacrifice people to their Devil god.

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