Brocéliande

2003 "A legendary forest, A world of nightmare..."
3.4| 1h30m| en| More Info
Released: 08 January 2003 Released
Producted By: Canal+
Country: France
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

Chloé, a student specializing in Celtic History, participate in a dig in the forest of Broceliande while a series of murder occurs on the campus. Chloé must soon face the mythical monster behind the string of murder and use her knowledge to make it out of the forest alive ...

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Reviews

Protraph Lack of good storyline.
FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.
Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.
effigiebronze While watching this unexceptional little flicker, I decided to view it as a French version of a BUFFY episode, and in that light it's really not half bad.The characters totally mirror an American-style TV series, with a bit of oddball Gaelic perspective thrown into the mix. The production values are straight TV (the settings seem to consist of a municipal park, someone's grandmother's house, and a boarding school in the off-season), and the 'effects' are pretty lame. However, the cast is easy on the eyes; I can't say any of them are great actors or anything, but personally I found the Euro-styled appearance of all the characters amusing and diverting.If anyone's looking for a Godard-type 'un de film' this absolutely ain't it; but as a not-bad riff on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, and especially watching it as though it were a one-off pilot for a French TV ripoff of BUFFY, it works reasonably well. Seriously. If it were a TV series, and nothing else was on, I'd watch more of these.
El Bacho In the early 00's, production companies had a short-lived craze for supernatural genre movies in France after "The Crimson Rivers" and "Brotherhood of the Wolf" turned out to be hits, so several movies were green-lit or saved from their "direct-to-video" fate. However, France, as opposed to the US, UK or Italy, has little tradition of fantasy B-movies and it turned out quickly that "Samouraïs", "Bloody Mallory" or the "Crimson Rivers" sequel were ill-advised attempts at recreating a kind of magic that had never existed in French cinema in the first place. As they flopped, producers have gone back to their usual fare: derivative farces or the umpteenth self-referential tribute to French New Wave by a former critic from "Les Cahiers du cinéma"."Brocéliande" could only have been green-lit during this short window, as it serves no other discernible purpose. It's your by-the-book slasher movie mixed with vague mythological element and horror references and you'll find bimboesque female characters, a French University looking like a US campus and plot twists so lazy you don't even care because you had guessed it by yourself an hour before, even before the movie started.These elements make all the fun of a 70's or a 80's B-movie and you expect them in a 70's or 80's movie. However, we're not in the 80's anymore and nobody warned director Doug Headline, as this tribute to the slasher movie genre is nothing more than a derivative slasher movie. Headline himself is no rookie and has been writing as a critic about this kind of pictures since the early 80's but as a first time director he shows a lack of skill and ambition that makes "Brocéliande" a bore.When you put together clichés from a movie subcategory and hand them to a skilled and inventive director such as Wes Craven or Quentin Tarantino, you get a "Scream" or a "Death Proof", movies that are imitations from old guilty pleasures but also magnify these clichés and add a great deal to them. That's called "talent" and that's why you can't confuse these recent movies with their original inspirations shot decades ago."Brocéliande" takes the lazy path and only reproduces the worst elements from past movies (unfortunately for the male viewer, the gratuitous nudity is mostly missing). There are very strong similarities (presumably unintentional) between the plot of "Brocéliande" and the reviled "Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch", as both deal with supernatural Druidic evil rituals and some silly attempt at taking over the world on Halloween night. As even the plot of "Halloween 3" makes more sense than this one, it means that something seriously wrong went with "Brocéliande".
Mathilde VDB What should i say? I only saw this flick for curiosity, and this is truly a shame... I grew up in Brittany with stories of celtic legends, and spent 5 years in Rennes, the town in which this film is said to take place... Shame that not any actor nor camera from this flick ever arrived in Rennes. They could at least have chosen a likely town, or a likely forest, but nothing even SEEM like Brittany nor Rennes... And calling it a film about celtic legends is really making a fool of the audience. Besides those details, it could have been a good film, but it's crap. Silly scenario, silly characters and no originality. Definitely to avoid.
slowdriver A rather enjoyable debut from a director who seems to have a sincere fondness for horror films of a bygone era. In this fairly simple storyline (a murder mystery that turns into a monster movie), film buffs will find a hodge-podge of references to many genre classics, like Dario Argento's thrillers of the 70s or English Hammer films (in particular John Gilling's Plague of the Zombies for its ritual scenes), and even to stranger oddities like Jack Arnold's "Monster on the Campus" or the Avengers British TV series. Add a bit of Celtic mythology for a background, some fight scenes, and stir well... Now mixing all this into a pleasant, if air-headed, B-movie makes for an interesting challenge! It doesn't always succeeds but is certainly better than other French genre efforts in the field. The direction is often stylish and the performers have fresh faces, the music score is quite good.Of course this is a low budget production (it probably didn't cost more than a couple million dollars), and does suffer from it: several scenes could have been helped by better production values. And there are a few plot holes and a couple of long stretches. But it finally wins the day by retaining its charm to the end just out of sheer unpretentiousness. Not so common a feat, these days.