After over a
month of ‘closing soon’ notices and final discounts, the RGE/Lupus website has finally
gone out-of-business. As I noted before,
some RGE/Lupus videos are available on ‘Video-On-Demand’ websites such as http://ct.vod.com/studio/2302/RGE-Films/?page_sort=rating&&&studio_id=2302
but not all are available there.
I have been
working through the RGE/Lupus videos that I purchased over the years but there
are four that I still haven’t reviewed. I
left these till the end because I really wasn’t impressed by any of them but I’ll
give short reviews of these four just for completeness. I’m splitting this into two parts for size
reasons; the next two are the only two RGE/Lupus videos that I strongly
disliked.
“The Red
Reformatory: The Teddy Bear” is a 2006 video set in a reformatory for the
daughters of political prisoners. The three
actresses who play the inmates obviously aren’t children but I found that even
the suggestion that they were meant to be children was making me very
uncomfortable. On top of that, the movie
wasn’t very interesting. The story is
all about a girl’s effort to keep the teddy bear she brought with her and
eventually her room mates help her steal it out of a storeroom but they are
caught and all three are severely caned.
I forced myself to watch this video again before I wrote this for the
first time since I got it and I can say with certainty that I really don’t like
this video.
(screenshots from “The Red Reformatory: The
Teddy Bear” and“Stalin 2”)
Of all of
the RGE/Lupus I’ve ever seen, “Stalin 2” was the one I liked the least. It is a ‘spy story’ set in Czechoslovakia during
the Stalinist era. The makers claim it
is a true story and it may be for all I know.
Four women are denounced to the secret police and taken into custody
where they are repeatedly caned during their interrogation. I had a lot of problems with this video. It is extremely dark (in both tone and
lighting) and more brutal that I really wanted to see. I also
had trouble with the subject matter since I know several people who escaped
from Czechoslovakia following the Prague spring in 1967 and, although none
where ever arrested, this story was just too ‘close to home’. Again, I only ever watched this video twice; once
when I downloaded it and once before writing this and I 'fast forwarded' through some scenes on this siting .
No comments:
Post a Comment