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Metamorphosis
R2 - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (5th October 2011). |
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The Film
 Metamorphosis (Jenö Hodi, 2007) 
The last decade or so has seen a burgeoning interest in vampire-themed fiction and its abiding theme of doomed love largely thanks to the commercial success amongst teenaged audiences of television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Mutant Enemy/Fox, 1997-2003), Hollywood vampire-themed films such as Blade (Stephen Norrington, 1998), Van Helsing (Stephen Sommers, 2004) and 30 Days of Night (David Slade, 2007), and, more recently, Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series of novels and their popular film adaptations (the first of which was released in 2008, the year after Metamorphosis was produced). One outcome of this resurgence of interest in the myths surrounding vampires is a growth in the number of straight-to-video pictures that exploit this long-standing but very malleable subgenre of the horror film. Produced in 2007, with money from a large number of European countries, Jenö Hodi’s Metamorphosis tackles the real-life historical figure of Countess Bathory, whose alleged habit of bathing in the blood of virgins proved popular as the basis for a number of exploitation films in the 1970s, including Countess Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1971), an episode in Walerian Borowczyk’s portmanteau film Contes Immoreaux (Immoral Tales, 1974), a number of Spanish horror film star Paul Naschy/Jacinto Molina’s films (including Carlos Aured’s El retorno de Walpurgis/The Curse of the Devil, 1973, and Naschy’s self-directed El retorno del Hombre-Lobo/The Night of the Werewolf, 1980) and Jorge Grau’s 1973 film Ceremonia Sangrieta (The Legend of Blood Castle). Somewhat bizarrely co-written by Alan Katz, the Chicago-based sitcom writer who has worked on such shows as Blossom (Touchstone, 1990-5) and M*A*S*H (Fox, 1972-83), Metamorphosis opens with a title card, also read aloud for us in voice-over, which declares that ‘At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Hungary was engaged in a bloody war with the Turks. However, deep in the Carpathian Mountains, a small village of Csejthe faced an even more dangerous and cruel enemy. Evidence of mutilated corpses was discovered – young girls gruesomely tortured to death, flayed alive. Officials believed the perpetrator of these horrific crimes was Satan himself… embodied in the Countess Elizabeth Bathory’. Following this title card, the opening sequence is set in Hungary, 1610, and begins with riders on horseback approaching Castle Bathory. A bloody battle ensues as the riders lay siege to the castle. In one of the rooms, a woman – Elizabeth Bathory (Adél Kováts) – is killed, in front of her young daughter, by a man named Thurzo. 
Cut to the present. Constatine Thurzo (Christopher Lambert) is the only surviving descendant of the Thurzo that killed Elizabeth Bathory. Constatine has travelled to Hungary from England, in an attempt to halt the funeral of his brother. He demands that his brother be buried at a castle in the mountains. However, ignoring Constatine’s demands, one of the mourners proceeds to drive a stake into the heart of Constatine’s dead brother. After the other people have left, Constatine unearths his brother’s remains and promises the body that he is going to bring him to the castle ‘to rest alongside your father’. Nearby, a group of American youths are driving through the Hungarian countryside in search of Castle Bathory. Deciding to take a shortcut through the cemetery, the young people stumble across Thurzo’s car. They are startled by a woman (Irena A Hoffman) who seems to come out of nowhere. Enigmatically telling the Americans that ‘Life is filled with unexplained mysteries’, the woman introduces herself as Elizabeth. The students offer Elizabeth a lift, and they ask her to tell them about the Bathory legend. One of the men in the group, Keith (Corey Sevier), suggests that, ‘If she [Bathory] were alive today, she’d be hospitalised, given treatment, not counselled by the local witches who just filled her head with superficial nonsense’. In response to this, Elizabeth states, ‘I have never heard anybody speak sympathetically about her before’. 
The young people take a tour of the monastery near Castle Bathory. One of the monks cryptically tells them that there ‘are three stages of existence’: life, purgatory and heaven/hell. ‘Everybody spends time in purgatory’, the Americans are told. ‘Purgatory’s a place of unknown dangers, and if one is destroyed there, he is destroyed forever, and his soul ceases to exist’. Elizabeth asks Keith about his interest in the Bathory legend. He reveals that he was interested in architecture and, through that, fell in love with 17th Century Renaissance ideas and European history. He claims that he was ‘born in the wrong time at the wrong place’. ‘The seventeenth century is a time period for which I have great fondness as well’, Elizabeth tells him, and Keith and Elizabeth kiss and make love. In the monastery, the young people are warned against making the pilgrimage to Castle Bathory: they are told by one of the monks that shortly before, a group of tourists began the journey to the castle but died ‘in a brutal wolf attack’. The young people decide to make the journey anyway, but after leaving a local inn they are harassed by a group of local thugs. However, Elizabeth quickly dispatches them with a dose of what could best be described as ‘vampire-fu’. Travelling to Castle Bathory, the car that the Americans and Elizabeth are riding in crashes and the group tumble from the wreckage. Continuing on foot, they encounter a group of tourists who, like them, are intent on visiting the Bathory castle. They also meet a nun and a priest, Brother Alexis (András Kern), who may or may not be the spirit of a dead man. Together, the various groups begin the journey to the Bathory castle. However, before setting off Elizabeth disappears, writing a cryptic message in lipstick for Keith. This leads Keith to ask Brother Alexis about the mysterious Elizabeth; Alexis tells him that Elizabeth is the daughter of Countess Bathory, and she is a vampire. 
En route, the group is attacked by wolves. Their fortunes don’t improve when they arrive at Castle Bathory, where they find themselves stalked by Constatine Thurzo, who is also apparently a vampire. As the last of his bloodline, his aim is to kill Elizabeth. The film runs for 98:12 mins (PAL) and appears to be uncut.
Video
The film is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, with anamorphic enhancement. The compositions look good, and as a DTV production of the digital age, this may very well be the film’s intended aspect ratio. The film has the same running time as the US DVD, but considering the sloppy look of the American disc it’s likely that the US release is a PAL-NTSC standards conversion (rather than this disc being an NTSC-PAL conversion). The film certainly looks good on this disc.  
Audio
Audio is presented via a two-channel stereo track. This is effective and clean. In the opening sequence, some of the dialogue is in Hungarian, with burnt-in English subtitles.
Extras
The sole extra is a trailer for the film (2:00).
Overall
A slightly confused narrative (a more forgiving soul might refer to it as ‘elliptical’) may or may not disguise reshoots or production problems (the early disappearance of Constatine, and his return at the end of the picture as a vampire, is given little explanation), but regardless of this, in its final sequences the film degenerates into a trite vampire-themed stalk-and-slash film/cat-and-mouse chase. Christopher Lambert is underused, but as the vengeful Thurzo he offers a threatening performance that is hampered by some terrible lines: ‘What do you want?’, one of the women asks Thurzo, to which he responds, ‘Only to kill you and drink your blood’. There are hints of an interesting theme of the loss of faith, but like most of the ideas in the film this is dangled before the audience and remains underdeveloped: as Thurzon despatches two of the Russian tourists, he mournfully notes that ‘My dead brother was a man of faith. He prayed every day. Yet he was buried with a stake stuck through his heart. I am what’s real. I am life eternal, and I am the light of the world’. The film also ends with a ‘twist’ ending that is telegraphed halfway through the narrative, and which is unsatisfactorily explained away by little more than gobbledegook. The occasionally risible dialogue, which seems to have been post-synched, and the group of American tourists running around an exotic locale, recalls the wave of tacky, clichéd late-1980s Italian horror films such as Oltre la morte (After Death; Claudio Fragasso, 1988). Taken in the right spirit, Metamorphosis is camp fun, but Lambert is severely underused and there’s little here other than the regurgitation of long-standing clichés. For more information, please visit the homepage of Network. This review has been kindly sponsored by: 
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