I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

"Kantemir" is mind-numbingly awful, and you wouldn't think it was going to be that bad when it started. The look of the movie is great--nice colors, decent cinematography, and decent mood-setting music. And then, as luck would have, the characters begin to speak...The participants have all gathered in a remote setting (natch) to rehearse a play. Most of them are washed-up actors, newbies, or just wannabes. Robert Englund (of "Nightmare on Elm Street" fame) plays the lead. It seems he is estranged from his daughter and is trying to make amends. You never really find out definitively WHY he's estranged, although I think it may have had something to do with his drinking. The remaining cast is a collection of caricatures: a nymphette who will screw anybody to further her (nudge/nudge, wink/wink) career, the stoner, the wife of the alcoholic Englund, an innocent, wide- eyed virginal girl (who looks like she's just been hit in the head with a brick), and the director/author of the play. This is without a doubt one of the worst movies ever made. The "writer" of this script should be drawn and quartered. The dialogue in here is so cliché-ish, so hackneyed, so tedious, it's worse than listening to nails on a chalkboard. The viewer is expected to believe the actors for this play are somehow transformed into the characters of the play because of some curse. I lamented in another review about how Eric Roberts must have hit rock bottom for his appearance. Such much be the case for Robert Englund. This POS is beneath him, and I don't know why he touched it with a 10-foot pole.Rated R for violence. NOT RECOMMENDED.

A fascinating existential examination of the nature of reality and the struggle to grasp its meaning. Director Ben Samuels is clearly a quite gifted film maker and while this is on the surface a horror movie, that is only the structure within which a deeper story is expressed. Mark Garbett and Ralph Glen Howard have fashioned a compelling and engrossing story that is intensely disturbing, fantastical, and terrifying. Samuels truly excels at creating an atmosphere of dark unease and hovering horror. The suspense and mystery is unrelenting as a journey through a hellish landscape that questions life itself is taken by the characters and in effect, the audience. Robert Englund gives a superb performance and once again proves once again what a fine actor he can be. Astonishing set design and cinematography heighten the surrealistic tone of the film and help make this motion picture a frightening, unnerving, and powerful intellectual experience.

I sat down to watch "Kantemir" solely because Robert Englund was in this movie. But not even this iconic horror legend could do much to salvage the sinking wreck that was "Kantemir".The story is about a group of actors and actresses coming to a secluded mansion to perform in an act. They haven't been shown the script and have little idea what they are about to embark on. When the mysterious director show up with a strange book, the boundaries between play act and reality becomes a blur, and what might be a story is all but too real.Right, well the storyline didn't really offer much of anything. Sure it had potential, but it was just not skillfully utilized much less so brought to the screen. If they had opted to go another way with the script, or had a different set of creative minds at work, it might have been something much more enjoyable to witness.The storyline was dragging the movie down, but the who feel of the movie wasn't working in favor of the movie either. You just don't really buy into the storyline of the movie at any point during the length of the feature, and it seemed that some of the acting talents didn't either.Granted that Robert Englund was the one pulling the load here, the rest of the cast weren't really anything memorable.For a horror and/or thriller movie, then "Kantemir" was frightfully devoid of anything that would even put the audience on the edge of their seats. Everything was too scripted, too forced and too unnatural on the screen."Kantemir" scores a meager 3 out of 10 stars from me. I have seen worse horror movies, but this wasn't just anything extraordinary. Your money and time is better spent elsewhere, unless you are a die-hard fan of Robert Englund.

A troop of actors gather together in an isolated Gothic mansion in autumnal Pennsylvania to rehearse a play. The play is as Gothic as the setting and centres around the romantic and murderous intrigues surrounding a medieval Transylvanian merchant's family. Cue the actors being unable to differentiate the play from reality, a cursed book, assorted gypsies, witches, vampires, slow motion running in forests, killer hounds and other assorted hokum. It isn't bad. It's just run of the mill - which is worse. A shame really as, given the unusual premise, in more creative hands it could have been much better. On the plus side it does have Justine Griffiths who would look good even reading a telephone directory, which in this case might be more engaging.