Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made
Directed by Michael Laicini, David Amito
In 1988 a screening of Antrum at a cinema in Budapest resulted in the tragic death of fifty-six people when the building caught fire and burned to the ground. Other deaths linked to the film resulted in Antrum being condemned as a 'cursed' film and its master negative destroyed. Now that a print has been found in a Bulgarian archive, the deadliest film ever made has been re-released.
A cursed film from the 1970s about a brother and sister who travel to a forest to dig a hole to hell.
Cast: Nicole Tomkins, Rowan Smyth, Dan Istrate, Circus- Szalewski, Shu Sakimoko, Kristel Elling
Member Reviews
This film sucks so much ass I sold my soul to SATAN to erase it from my memory. Fortunately Satan was kind enough to let me remember the only good part of the film— the dude raping the dead dog.
NO. just no. don’t watching. bad bad. not good bad.
Lame, boring. tired not to fall asleep.
At the intersection of cosmic and folk horrors, 1970s low budget exploitation cinema, mythic cursed movies and faux documentary there is Antrum. Unfortunately everything from the framing device to the grainy aesthetic of the "discovered" lost print is entirely citational and derivative. Even John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns had to come up with a subject for a cursed movie nihilistic enough to inspire a desensitized audience accustomed to seeing extreme gore, torture, sadism and sexual violence to engage in a penitent riot of self-mutilation. Antrum, even with its "snuff" scenes grafted anachronistically into the fake film within a film with a framing documentary, is just not unsettling enough to live up to the self-generated hype. Which is perhaps the point; we know the production and post-production histories of cursed horror classics and the idea that occult rituals or pools full of real corpses could cause the horror to transcend the screens and infect reality exerts a perverse fascination. Siblings digging a hole to Hell to liberate the damned soul of their euthanized pet dog is not even Czech New Wave cult film fare. And the deer rape hunters, who might be demons in human skin, behave like a heavily sedated Hungarian version of the Sawyers from Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Even the black and white dumpster behind a diner sequence fails to have the impact of Mulholland Drive's sublime jump scare in a non-horror movie. If you are a film studies major who enjoys finding allusions to Lars Von Trier and Giallo soundtracks Antrum exists to validate your (and my) specialized body of trivia, but otherwise the timer that accompanies the legal disclaimer counts down to disappointment.
Deer Me. Upsetting at times, but I was waiting for coherence that never came.