SparkMore
n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.
Leoni Haney
Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.
Fulke
Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.
happyreflex
Lars von Trier is a genius when he actually makes a film, as he did with Element of Crime and Europa, two visually stunning films that I absolutely love. But here, von Trier does not so much tell a story as tell a story about people writing a story and then give us all-too-brief segments of that story. If von Trier had just filmed the story about the doctor who tries to cure a plague but instead ends up spreading it, we would have had another masterpiece. Indeed, the segments that tell this story are wonderful. But to get to these gems, which make up perhaps 5 percent of the movie, we have to wade through intolerable stretches of 16mm excrement. Lars and his friend think up this idea, visit this place, talk to Udo Kier, frustrate and infuriate the viewer with impossibly boring stretches of cinema verité. The experience was painful. In fact, I'll deduct some credit for pain and suffering.
j_chy
I have sat through some crappy movies, but 53 minutes in, I just don't care. The movie has found my inner apathy and it has embraced it. It has some pretty B&W images here and there, but not enough to garner interest. Even Lemmy Caution couldn't save this stinker. In my mind's eye I see a buxom Bugs Bunny on the back of a fat horse and Elmer Fudd in a horned helmet.Into the mail-DVD-service (not the "red" company) return envelope it goes, unfinished, unenjoyed and rejected in favor of an hour of spider solitaire on my notebook computer. They should pay me to watch this one.
c_mari
Lars Von Trier seems to be able to make just two kind of movie: awful ones and excellent ones. Epidemic has been scheduled in order to obtain money for another movie - Lars intended to ask money for two different movies and to use almost all of the money to realize the first one (Europe), leaving few dollars to realize the second one (Epidemic). Epidemic has no script, no actors and almost no director. It's just a funny joke. It can be amusing if you are really involved with Lars, Niels, and his wife, otherwise it makes no sense. I rate one star just because it is not possible to write "rating does not apply". If you are interested in Lars Von Trier visual and poetic art, try to consider before the more recent (and in some way, more "accessible") works like "Breaking the Waves", "Dancer in the Dark", and "Dogville". "Europa" can be the following step and, if you like it, maybe "Idioterne" and "Forbrydelsens element" can be the following one. The TV series "Riget" I and II are really enjoyable and are an all-audience product - Lars said it made them just for money. Obviously, they're not a mixture of "E.R." and "Twin Peaks", as someone said. The style of "Epidemic" is very similar to that of "Riget", but the plot is meaningless. From a certain point of view, "Epidemic" is like an home made movie: it can be funny according to the ones who made it, and maybe it can be appreciated by their friends, but shouldn't be programmed on the big screen (...unless someone has given you some money to make it...)
McBuff
* SPOILER WARNING * Director Lars Von Trier, who stars as himself in this mock documentary meta-horror black comedy drama (!), comments early on that "a film should be a pebble in your shoe". With this, he may have accomplished just that. It´s an annoying mess of a movie, which tries to make sense in the last scene, but by then you have been subjected to tons of extraneous footage, bad dubbing, clues and a pretentious movie-within-a-movie, also called Epidemic. Von Trier and cowriter Niels Vørsel tries to finish their script and convince film institute executive Claes Kastholm to finance their movie about a mysterious plague spreading through Europe, but the epidemic seems to have started in real life as well. Or something. The chilling giallo-inspired climactic hypnosis sequence (with real life hypnotist Svend Ali Hamann) is effective, but Von Trier´s ad hoc filmmaking style will test the viewer´s patience. He does, however, make an interesting visit to the hospital, as a sort of premonition to his later hits "The Kingdom 1 + 2". Udo Kier appears briefly as himself. A box office disaster; well two, actually, if you count the vastly ignored re-release in 1997. *½
