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tonight's feature: Black Death (2010) on Prime
Black Death looked pretty good on paper and by paper I mean the snippet of text that comes with every Amazon Prime Video movie. It stars Sean Bean and Carise Van Houten of Game of Thrones fame so it feels like it should have at least some pizazz. But after a while, this grim black plague film starts to feel like an underwhelming episode of Game of Thrones itself.
The premise: in plague-sickened medieval England, Osmund the monk (Eddie Redmayne) is doing his best to not die and lives in the monastery. He sends his secret girlfriend away with a big bag of bread and onions and promises to meet her in the forest in a week. He prays for a sign from Jesus and suddenly the bishop's envoy shows up and asks the monks for a guide to a village near the forest. Osmund signs up to get the hell out of dodge. He soon finds out that the envoy Ulric (Bean) and his band of unwashed warriors are actually looking to capture a necromancer in a remote village to bring him back for a trial and execution because of raising the dead, eating man flesh and so on. Of course terrible things start happening and many a witch will be burned and many a man stabbed and hanged. When the group finally arrives, the village doesn't have any plague and that makes Ulric and his men suspicious, but maybe they just have soap and water and know how to use it? Langiva (Van Houten) allows the men to stay in the village but keeps mocking god, which goes over like you'd think. Heavy drama ensues.
It's definitely not a bad movie but I feel like whoever wrote the script hates christians AND pagans. I thought the pacing was a bit off and some of the plot choices could have been better, including a the tacked-on ending, but I liked it. My wife said it was terrible and predictable. I would give it 7 medieval salves which would definitely qualify as witchcraft out of 10 while my wife said it should only be 6 infected plague armpits out of 10.
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