This rare "Latvian horror film" isn't really a horror film proper, but more of a grotesque fairy tale similar in tenor to "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders," albeit with more of a softcore sexploitation tilt. It's often handsome and imaginative (if variably accomplished in technical terms) in its soft-focus Gothicism, but also kinda cheesy in that much of it just seems an excuse to get the admittedly very pretty young heroine kinda-sorta-almost raped over and over in nightmarish or dreamlike circumstances.
She's a student whose priest-principal allows her to model for a Madonna statue at the request of the artist he's hired to create that work. But the painter turns out to be a leering hedonist, as well as, er, possibly some kind of spider-demon. So our heroine is forever running from variably-imaginary perils (they're mostly posited as dreams or hallucinations, until at the end they are apparently "real" enough to require the priest's physical battle with spider-man) of a mostly erotic nature, whether she's harassed by a sort of orgiastic Bosch painting come to life early on, or being ravished by a giant tarantula puppet. Sometimes she's scared, sometimes she kinda likes it--you know, the usual contradictory nonsense for this kind of enterprise, in which the constantly undressed heroine must embody the target male viewer's fantasies of both violation and lusty consent.
The director is certainly talented in the visual realm. But a major problem to "Zimeklis," one that heightens the silly side to its horny Gothicism, is its really tacky synthesizer score. It's a shame an otherwise fairly elaborately realized (if still modestly scaled) fantasy should get such rinky-dink accompaniment. The overall atmosphere of arty quasi-surreallism would be greatly enhanced by something more in the realm of Eno-type ambient sounds, Tangerine Dream, or chamber-quartet-type composition.
She's a student whose priest-principal allows her to model for a Madonna statue at the request of the artist he's hired to create that work. But the painter turns out to be a leering hedonist, as well as, er, possibly some kind of spider-demon. So our heroine is forever running from variably-imaginary perils (they're mostly posited as dreams or hallucinations, until at the end they are apparently "real" enough to require the priest's physical battle with spider-man) of a mostly erotic nature, whether she's harassed by a sort of orgiastic Bosch painting come to life early on, or being ravished by a giant tarantula puppet. Sometimes she's scared, sometimes she kinda likes it--you know, the usual contradictory nonsense for this kind of enterprise, in which the constantly undressed heroine must embody the target male viewer's fantasies of both violation and lusty consent.
The director is certainly talented in the visual realm. But a major problem to "Zimeklis," one that heightens the silly side to its horny Gothicism, is its really tacky synthesizer score. It's a shame an otherwise fairly elaborately realized (if still modestly scaled) fantasy should get such rinky-dink accompaniment. The overall atmosphere of arty quasi-surreallism would be greatly enhanced by something more in the realm of Eno-type ambient sounds, Tangerine Dream, or chamber-quartet-type composition.