25 December 2008

Cargo 200

Written & Directed by: Aleksei Balabanov
Full credits at IMDb

Grade: 4/5

When the audience meets Cargo 200’s Angelika (Agniya Kuznetsova), a Chernenko-era CCCP hipster and Party official’s daughter, she’s wearing shin-high white socks and ruby red heels. She’s a virginal Dorothy, later taken hostage by an Ed Gein-ish policeman (Aleksei Poluyan) and tornadoed through a Soviet anti-Oz, during which she’s raped with a vodka bottle, handcuffed naked to a bed thick with putrefying corpses and raped again, this time by a man. We have no choice, then, but to call Cargo 200 (Gruz 200) a horror movie...Like the best horror movies, though, it's no mere revulser but a violent political parable.

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Watch the (Russian) trailer:

1 comment:

joao said...

i instinctly knew when i had finished this morbid piece of mind-rape that under no circumstances whatsoever the depicted story could be "based on a true story" as the viewer is informed both at the beginning and the end ("second half of 1984") and that the characters are not based on a disintegrating society but based on the sickened mind of an author.
thanks to "aschenker" i have been able to confirm this notion.
i have been lured into this malicious propaganda piece because of fraudulent advertising.
had i known that i would be exposed to such an unbearable insult at humanity and film-making i would have rejected even glancing at one minute of it.
the hypocricy of this film is mind boggling:
it pretends to mirror a "sick society" when it actually just exploits this "setting" to project the sick constructions of an embittered author (Faulkner) and film-maker onto this setting and into the brain of the viewer.
i would advise others not to watch this trash for the sake of mental and moral hygiene.