Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Kodie Bird True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

daretostruggledaretowin After some deliberation I have decided that this film is not actually worth watching. Begotten is an early film by E. Elias Merhigne, who would later become known for the Shadow of the Vampire. Shadow of the Vampire is actually a brilliant film, not only thanks to Willem Dafoe's intense portrayal of Nosfereatu and John Malkovich's iconic portrayal of Murnau, but also thanks to I discovered this film on some sort of social media related to artistic horror cinema. Of course, artistic doesn't often mean good and the number of times artistic actually means pretentious is enough to make any cinephile uncomfortable. The Begotten is a film that has taken what the early David Lynch shorts had in terms of creepiness and stripped it of any sense of narrative or even cohesive form. Begotten instead replaces these essential elements of film with some vague, religious symbolism. However, unlike the films of Lynch and Jodorowsky, the religious imagery comes off as completely disingenuous. The shear length of the shots wreaks of pretension and an overly ambitious attempt at being "strange." All in all, this film tries way too hard and in so doing fails at either being disturbing or profound, when it sets out to be both. One can identify elements of Maya Deren, especially Meshes of the Afternoon, but still, the film fails to live up to its ambitions as a work of creepy art. Another film make that comes to mind who has done similar things is Crispin Glover with this What Is It? trilogy. However, even Glover's purposely shocking, pretentious Nazi Shirley Temple and Down syndrome sex imagery is superior to the half-assed attempt that Merhige made in Begotten. The sparseness of the soundtrack and the juxtaposition of nature sounds with a repetitive beating heart does invoke a creepy and even spiritual element. Still, I can't help but feeling that this is some charlatan ploy to evoke some primal fear in me and it doesn't quite work out for a hardcore genre fan. I must admit, I enjoyed moments of this film, but all in all I must say, this is a pretentious work that gives art cinema a bad name. Cinephiles must live not on convulsions alone. Begotten is a student film that doesn't nearly live up to the legacy of student films like Lynch's the Grandmother or Cronenberg's From the Drain. This review originally appeared at http://paranoidcinephilia.blogspot.com

Comedy Lover I went to film school and I am still so sick and tired of every pretentious student who fancies him or herself an "artiste" with something "important to say to the world" shooting a bunch of awful, grainy, gritty, black and white footage that's disjointed and poorly spliced together, apparently on a super-8mm camera, and pretentiously declaring it to be an experimental masterpiece. This movie is boring, unimportant, and stupid. The acting (what little of it can be made out) is terrible. Some of the imagery is OK but that's the only good thing I can say about this.The director clearly has some problems and I hope in the future he borrows money to get himself a psychiatrist, not more film stock. This film is one of the most boring and infuriatingly self-important pieces of crap I have ever seen -- and again I went to film school!Maybe this could have been a decent 4 or 5 minute Nine Inch Nails Video, but for what seems like two hours it's just awful. Not scary or entertaining in the least.Also it "borrows" its grainy look from a lot of other films and really wants to be Eraserhead. The great thing about Eraserhead's sound was the constant machine droning. This movie takes that idea and replaces it with a loop of crickets (or sometimes birds). Just a dumb movie pretentious hipsters need to get over.

kate fell (obsidianrose4) In a lot of reviews you will likely hear people say this film peaked in the first ten minutes or so. I don't disagree. The reason I believe this is because the imagery is the clearest during those first initial minutes. Begotten was filmed in very grainy/ blurry way that for the majority of its length it is very hard to tell what you are looking at exactly. I'm not going to lie, the movie is basically moving blurry blotches of black and white. I enjoyed the parts when my brain was able to discern anything remotely recognizable. Those images were no doubt very haunting but it wasn't enough for me at first. I saw something wrong with the whole thing. I was dissatisfied because I had expected to be relentlessly disturbed the entire time. Then it occurred to me hours after viewing that maybe I was missing the point. Watching Begotten, for me, was like stumbling in the dark, the only flashes of light you encounter reveal dreadful things that make you long for darkness again. Few movies can inspire that kind of dread and although the film was fairly boring overall there is definitely something to be said for that.

Kaliyugaforkix God cuts himself up with a razor & gives birth to Mother Earth who jerks off his corpse, inseminates herself & gives birth to son of the Earth, both brutally murdered by shrouded goons before being buried six feet under. The circle of life, and its moves us all! I don't know about the story or its occult significance but the scorched Earth presentation is sure something. I love when a movie can *truly* give you an Earth you've never visited before instead of re-heated CGI, the filmmakers gotta be tripping on distinct inner planesto take you to these kind of thru-the-looking-glass destinations & that's what we get here, deep in gimmicky art film obscurity. The overly processed image is like the faint memory of a prehistoric past that never happened, a remembrance from out of time, interwoven with a dense sound-scape of ambient noise that induces this drug like stupor, this disconnect (complete unity?) between sound & image, a rorschach quality. Its going on in our heads as much as on screen, dreaming while awake. Bingo- another wormhole exposed on camera, a subconscious mindf*ck; its somehow familiar at the same time its alienating us into silent, aghast horror. I love this kind of thing, this conscious spell casting. Overlong & threadbare but these seem minor complaints for the chance to so deeply inhabit a parallel world, to gleam a midnight transmission from Mars, this sealed hermetic universe. Going by a lot of the comments here BEGOTTEN is the very definition of poser vagueness but I'd say don't over think it. In fact don't think it at all, just let it wash over like a nightmare, something about jittering humanoids and straight razors in a black & white nowhere land. Forget Susan Sontag & just bask in the sheer exhilaration of something so aggressively odd; go prospecting on Pluto. Even as just inspired noise from the abyss, burning away the calcified remnants of a million Hollyweird mediocrities & imposing its asymmetrical test pattern on our bar-coded brains, it works. A great WTF experience & the standout image HAS to be the God with Parkinson's jittering away in his chair, clumsily committing seppuku.