Erland Josephson and Rade Serbedzia. Variola Vera introduced large-scale genre el- ements into then-Yugoslav cinema and seemed poised to win critical accolades, how- ever the year of its release was the only year in the history of the major film festival in Pula (now in Croatia) that the Grand Prix honour was not awarded to any film.
STRANGLER VS. STRANGLER (Davitelj protiv davitelja, 1984)
A fantastic serial killer black comedy with great cult potential, Strangler vs. Strangler
revolves around a big, fat, shy, mother-fixated man, played with deadpan perfection by one of Serbia’s greatest comedians, Tasko Nacic. He lives with his cruel matriarch and sells flowers, adhering to his motto of “Those who don’t like carnations don’t de- serve to live!” His victims are the young women who refuse to buy his flora and hu- miliate him in public. The film follows three main characters: the strangler, the incompetent and highly neurotic inspector on his trail and the nerdy rock singer at- tracted to the killer’s exploits.
DÉJÀ VU (Reflections, or Vec vidjeno, 1987) This horror thriller, directed by Goran Markovic, concerns a troubled piano teacher
named Mihailo and his efforts to keep his sanity through a love affair with a poor but industrious girl. When she dumps him for a younger man, he becomes unable to dis- tinguish the “reflections” of his history upon his own present and is driven over the edge. Overrun by the ghosts of his past, Mihailo embarks on a killing spree. Déjà Vu won most major Serbian awards for best direction, best film and best male and female protagonists.
A HOLY PLACE (Sveto mesto, 1990) Loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s story “Viy,” this delightfully perverse film by vet-
eran filmmaker Djordje Kadijevic is a Gothic masterpiece in which Slavic folklore is effectively merged with a decadent, erotic subtext about disturbed psyches inhabiting an isolated farm. A young priest is forced to spend three nights locked in a church, singing psalms over the dead body of a woman who was a witch while alive. Now she’s something much worse. One of the first victims of the civil wars in ex-Yugoslavia, which fell apart less than a year after the film was completed, A Holy Place’s negatives still remain imprisoned in a Croatian film lab.
FULL MOON OVER BELGRADE (Pun mesec nad Beogradom, 1993)
A rather unsuccessful attempt to marry the supernatural to real-life horror, Dragan
Kresoja’s Full Moon Over Belgrade looks and feels clumsy. He uses wartorn Serbia in the mid-1990s as a background for a story about zombies on the battlefields and the vampires who are pulling the strings behind the scenes, which ends up being mostly laughable.
T.T. SYNDROME (T.T. sindrom, 2002) A group of young people are trapped in the old Turkish bath inside the Belgrade
fortress, and a mysterious killer in a black leather jacket starts offing them one by one. It all seems to be somehow connected to a strange, rare disease, and possibly an alligator in the sewer. This giallo/slasher by Dejan Zecevic is a derivative yet pretty effective homage to B-horrors with solid amounts of gore, a decent score and plenty of Dario Argento-type weirdness.
SHEITAN’S WARRIOR (Sejtanov ratnik, 2006) An old book of spells. An ancient Arabic demon (Djinn) awakened in today’s Bel-
grade. Horny teens. Parties. A nerd hungry for revenge. Lots of blood. This is a low- budget effort even by Serbia’s standards, but it is full of energy, humour and action, and the makeup effects are well above average. Director Ste- van Filipovic and his youthful cast give it their best.
ZONE OF THE DEAD (Zona mrtvih, 2009) This Serbian co-production with Italy and Spain features an in-
ternational cast headed by Ken Foree (the original Dawn of the Dead), who’s back to slay more zombies. He’s accom- panied by Kristina Klebe (Rob Zombie’s Halloween) and Ariadna Cabrol ([REC]). A derivative zombie flick, it deals with the accidental release of toxic matter into Serbia’s most polluted city, Pancevo, and the ensuing mayhem – an outbreak that strictly follows the routine of Italian low-bud- geters from the 1980s. The over-use of shaky-cam makes decent makeup effects barely visible and the action scenes
Serbian Scares: (clockwise from top) Sheit an’s Warrior, Déjà Vu,Th e She-Butterfly, (below) Zone of t he Dead, and (opposite) T.T. Syndrome.
hard to follow, while the poor dialogue is made even more laughable by the thick accents of the Serbian actors.
TEARS FOR SALE (Carlston za Ognjenku, 2008) Tears for Sale, directed by Uros Stojanovic, boasts elements of black comedy,
fantasy, Slavic gothic, action, war, drama, romance, et cetera, merged into a magical whole with baroque visuals that evoke the dark beauty trademarked by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Terry Gilliam. It is a tale of two gorgeous sisters from a village devastated by World War I and their quest for love in an envi- ronment governed by backward stupidity and death. Its script shows a softer, more obviously humorous side to the work of Alexandar Radivojevic (co-writer of A Serbian Film). Sadly, EuropaCorp (the film’s distributor, co-owned by French filmmaker Luc Besson) cut out the subplot with the witch-grand- mother’s ghost who accompanies the girls.
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