I have seen a lot of messed-up movies in my life.
As I kid, I was raised on a steady diet of horror films and have become relatively desensitized towards gratuitous sex and violence in my movies. I once saw a movie that featured a mouse in a werewolf costume crawl out of a woman’s vagina.
I have never, ever seen a movie like Srpski Film (otherwise known as Serbian Film).
Gratuitous does not even begin to describe the filth on parade during the film’s length. Watching the movie, I actually scanned the audience, checking for undercover police that might be waiting in the dark as part of a sting operation — lurking in the shadows until the exact moment where they would jump out from the back row and arrest all of us in the audience for what we were watching.
There is stuff shown in Serbian Film that you have never seen before — unless you have a predilection for canvassing the darker corners of the Internet — and there are things in the movie that you will never forget. No matter how much spray paint I may huff or television sets drop on my head, I will always remember the time I danced with darkness and exposed my soul to the evils of Serbian Film. I may develop Alzheimer’s and forget the identities of my friends and family but I will always remember the time I watched a full-grown man have sex with a newborn baby.
Let me back up.
Serbian Film is a horror movie directed by Srdjan Spasojevic, a Serbian filmmaker and man who I would never want to meet in a dark alley.
In the film, Srdjan Todorovic plays Milosh, a washed-up porn star that has given up the business for a quite life with his beautiful wife and lovely young son. When financial troubles begin to rear their ugly head, though, he decides to take a lucrative new job that is offered to him — one that will pay enough to keep him and his family comfortable for the extent of their lives.
Milosh is introduced to Vukmir, an intense businessman with a desire to make the ultimate in artistic pornographic expressions. He is putting together a porno film and he wants the best — specifically Milosh, a man renown for his ability to achieve long-lasting erections on demand.
From there, things go south fast.
I can’t, guilt free, go into any real detail about the content of Serbian Film. My conscious prevents me, for example, from talking about the scene in which a man hacks at a chained woman with a machete while he has sex with her. My purity also prevents me, for example, from talking about the movie’s use of a male’s penis as a deadly weapon. I would be absolutely remiss if I spent any real time talking about the cruelty to children captured in the film and the inappropriate use of a cattle sex stimulant to turn a man into a raving rapist. I won’t even touch on the film’s climatic twist — a scene that makes Oldboy seem like a Sesame Street sketch.
I should say, though, that Serbian Film is actually quite good. The film is shocking, yes, but the acting is solid and the plot well-paced. There is a quality script the film does an excellent job building tension. It just so happens the tension’s pay-off is completely offensive.
Serbian Film is a movie that will never again be shown in theaters in the United States. Best Buy will never stock the film on their shelves. Netflix will never carry the movie in distribution. You will probably never get a chance to watch this movie.
This is probably a good thing.
God, I love South by Southwest.
Category: SX Fantastic
Director: Srdjan Spasojevic
This trailer is most assuredly NSFW:
Inside Pulse — Movies will be on the ground at SXSW! For live coverage from the event, follow Robert Saucedo and Travis Leamons on Twitter at @robsaucedo2500 and @skipkassidy.
The South by Southwest film festival will be held in Austin from March 12 through the 20th. For more information about attending the festival and the films being shown, visit www.sxsw.com/film.
