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Four Friends go
to Nether Silesia (a district in
Poland) in hopes of finding out what happened to
their friend who disappeared there one year ago.
They stumble onto an old abandoned factory, and
that's where the terror begins. It turns out that
the locals are conducting experiments in order to
attain immortality - and the friends just became
the involuntary guinea pigs.
Poland used to produce quite a few horror flicks
back in the 80's but since then it's been more or
less dead on the horror front in Poland. Until now.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like they've gotten
very far since the 80's since Pora Mroku feels
extremely outdated - both technically and story-wise.
The movie that's been described as Poland's answer
to Hostel is more along the lines of old European
trash horror than anything else. I don't know if
you remember the "Fantom Killer" movies that were
released a couple of years ago but Pora Mroku is
actually along the lines of that in terms of quality.
Obviously it's not as gory nor as graphical in
terms of nudity (in fact, there's no nudity to be
found in here at all) but the basics are the same;
cheap, sleazy and completely without substance.
The vague premise revolves around a couple of very
annoying teens who go looking for their friend who
disappeared a year ago, only to become involuntary
guinea-pigs in deadly experiments conducted by the
locals in a small community. The script is heavily
flawed and the editing is absolutely horrible.
Remember how annoying those video game sequences in
House Of The Dead were? Well, in Pora Mroku we get
a lot of quick flashes of torture scenes randomly
pasted every now and then to remind the audience of
the fact that they are indeed watching a horror flick.
These quick flashes are completely unnecessary as
they're just flashes of what's about to happen later
on in the movie. Furthermore, the story has some
serious continuation problems and while the movie
starts out with the four teens as the main characters,
40 minutes later we have two completely different
main characters to follow and the four teens are
almost completely out of the picture.
Pora Mroku was marketed as a gore-flick but to my
surprise this ended up being rather dry. Sure, we
get a lot of blood splatter but there's no actual
gore to be found in here which kind of defeats the
purpose of making a torture-porn movie in the first
place. I do appreciate the fact that they stayed
true to Polish film industry (make no mistake about
it, Pora Mroku certainly does feel very Polish,
there's nothing Americanized about it) but I wish
that they could've at least tried to break out of
their comfort zone. I'm honestly not surprised that
this was such a major flop because the movie has
got no soul what-so-ever. This felt like a poor
attempt at reviving the Polish horror industry for
all the wrong reasons and let's face it, this just
didn't cut it.
A guy gets stabbed in the eye, that's about it.
Errr, what's with the cheap muzak? It felt like
I was watching the movie in an elevator.
Pora Mroku is certainly very Polish - but not in a
good way. It's a failed attempt at a Polish version
of Hostel and it feels extremely outdated. The old
people wanting immortality was just too much for
me to take, it was too cheesy and out there. This
certainly didn't breath new life into the Polish
horror movie industry.
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