Begotten (1991)

This movie... if you can call it that, is from some no name director trying to be edgy. It's disgusting and makes no sense at the same time. This director maybe the next Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy btw

Okay I admit that I am very mad at this film after watching it for the first time. I came in with such anticipation of seeing the creepiest and weirdest film I've ever seen and it was neither of those. It feels like a bad student film very derivative of early short films by Clive Barker and David Lynch. People have claimed how visceral it is, but I simply found it boring and very cartoonish. The one thing I did enjoy were the sound effects of crickets and fires crackling, etc. The flaw with these sounds are they help put you to sleep for what is already a very boring piece of art. Is combining strange negative filming, no dialogue and minimal sound effects an interesting idea? Perhaps, but all these things have been done before, separately and with much better results. The story, if there is one, is just a convoluted mess. Although the style of filming may be interesting it also makes it difficult to tell what exactly is going on. I'm sure many reviewers who love this film will say I don't understand it or don't like experimental films. Hey, I love experimental films like the ones by the aforementioned Barker and Lynch. I even watched the BRILLIANT experimental film from 1955 called Dementia a few days before I watched this film and absolutely loved it. If you want to give the director some points for originality go ahead, but I assure you, you'll watch it once and never feel the need to see it again.

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.

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.