Armageddon Gospels (2019) User Reviews

If your house is haunted ring, Renta Ghost

[darren-153-890810 · 3/10 · 18 July 2021]

I'm guessing the other reviewer was part of the team behind the film.

The trailer looked quite bad I love anything to do with rituals.

15 mins in and you soon realise these are students who somehow got funding to make it. Pretty bad acting and incredibly pretentious.

It's basically wants to be A Field in England meets Midsomer but is in fact more like Renta Ghost.

Pretty Dreadful

[kerensa2001-216-95656 · 3/10 · 4 August 2021]

I hate leaving bad reviews on independent movies, but this film is just awful. Incredibly amateurish acting and as someone with a theatre background I see nothing theatrical about these actors they "act" like first year drama students. There really is no story or plot at all. Some vague references to things are never explained or revealed. A confusing mess of very simple lighting effects, characters with heavy masks on whose voices you can barely make out, as they are so muffled. It really is very pretentious and ultimately pointless.

Pick a path...

[curiouspoetic · 13 February 2022]

What does it mean to be a refugee in your own land?

Armageddon Gospels is a ritual in fable form, mythically invested in the reawakening of the old gods of Albion, and a meditation on what those gods might dream into being: An exploration of a ritual journey, a descent, and the possibility of a return.

But return to what?

How does a culture integrate what it learns in the crucible of crisis? What has to die? What might be born out of that death? What might we become and how might we live if we could only find the courage to ask the right questions at the right times?

Other reviewers have pointed out that this film is not what they expected, perhaps not what they wanted. That's fine by me. The unexpected is exactly what is needed in these times.

Pretentious and Ultimately Empty

[Roger-Shallot · 2/10 · 9 September 2021]

An ambitious effort that falls spectacularly flat. It seems that the acting was deliberately theatrical, but most local amateur groups could do it a lot better than this. The script is intended - I suspect - to be endlessly discussed by devotees, but in the end is such a tangled mess that its worthy - if a trifle preachy - message is almost entirely obscured. One reviewer here awards 10 out of 10, but seriously, I can only assume it was written by somebody involved in the making of the film, or a very close friend/relation of somebody who was. I am also growing wary of reviews that resort to the use of 'Juxtapose' in order to sound more profound than they really are.

Two stars for the ambition, but I'm not sure multiple viewings would enhance the experience. Comparisons to Penda's Fen are amusingly misleading.

At a pinch, might be worth a single viewing, but only if you have a high tolerance for pretension.

Blakean.

[lordcorneliusplum · 9/10 · 28 October 2021]

Its easy to understand why a lot of people wont like this film - its a long way from mainstream Hollywood product, or even independant underground cinema. Its more like a film from the sixties or seventies, the old idea of the Head Movie. It reminded me slightly of the Incredible String Band film Be Glad For The Song Has No Ending. Like that film, its theatrical and amateurish, but that just gives it a homemade charm. Its also deeply, deeply pretentious, but what art of value isn't ? Better that than trying to be all things to all people just to chase the dollars.

The earnestness of the film really impressed me, it felt like someone was desperately trying to communicate his or her thoughts and feelings rather than just regurgitating ideas and memes from other films. Its also quite beautiful, rich in greens and greys and browns and blues, a reflection of the summer when this was shot. The acting is fine, a bit theatrical, and the cast are young, which probably puts some viewers off, but made me think of mummers plays and radical theatre, which worked well with the aesthetic of the film.

This isnt really a folk horror film, or even a horror film at all. If you need to put it with company, its like the little cousin of Jodorowsky or Derek Jarman rather than the Wicker Man. Its film as folklore, an evocation of myth, rather than a horror film that uses those tropes as subject matter.

A knowledge of myth and folklore will help when watching this - without it, you're going to be lost. Thats your problem, however, not a problem with the film.

It could have used a bit more visual flamboyance - costumes and camera angles and such - but its obviously a very low budget production, so thats easy to forgive.

This film succeeds because of its ambition, because it dares to do something unique, because its full of imagination, because its full of personality and individualism, and because its an attempt to work a magick ritual as film. Oh, and just for the record - i have no connection with whoever made this film, im just someone who has an open mind and enough imagination to enjoy being challenged by culture rather than stupefied by it.

How is this a horror movie

[deadgirlrising · 27 July 2021]

Long, boring, okay maybe not so long, but it sure seemed it. But I found no horror elements in it. Not a good movie at all. I wasted what seemed like an entire evening watching this crap.

Challenging but Rewarding

[sammcell · 10/10 · 18 October 2020]

Like John Harrigan's other film Strange Factories, this is an incredibly dense film that rewards multiple viewings. The juxtaposition of the gorgeous scenery and the darkness of the emotional content gives the film an almost trance inducing dream like effect. The emotional content is so difficult in fact it might have been unpalatable without the gorgeous setting and Jo Burke's brilliant score.

The acting in the film is intentionally ported from the theater rather than being the cinematic style of acting one would expect in a film. To my mind this is a brilliant choice as it both underlines the ritual aspect of the film and opens the film's ritual to the viewer instead of presenting it as a closed object to be passively consumed. This could prove challenging for some viewers so my advice on first viewing is to forget expectations, and hold off on trying to understand the film intellectually on your first watch.

That said there is a lot going on in this film for the intellectually curious. The film is a meditation on pain, loss, grief, and love - juxtaposing the director's loss of his mother to Alzheimer's with the political upheaval of Brexit, and the tremendous artistic loss of David Bowie, whose death for a lot of us threatened to make the world feel a little less enchanted at a time when we needed all the magic we could get.

Watching the refugee Gods who make up the bulk of the cast struggle with the limitations of their new human flesh works on its own but will be recognized as a metaphor which cuts to the bone for anyone who has watched a loved one lose themselves to dementia. I myself was often reminded of watching my grandmother become a scared and confused person lashing out at a world that was familiar and strange at once as she struggled with dementia. It is a difficult quest indeed to love somebody through that kind of a transformation but it is the kind of love that matters most.

It is clear that the film wants you to understand Brexit as the social extension of that struggle. There is a lot in this film that reminds me of 70s British serials and film which I was fortunate enough to get into when I was young thanks to a very early Nickoldeon relying on importing shows like Children Of The Stones to its broadcast schedule. That said Penda's Fen is probably the most obvious influence on this count. American viewers unfamiliar with King Penda should definitely do a bit of research here as understanding the historical nature of that Pagan King's Imperium brings into sharp contrast the fascist tendencies that England has struggled with since the 70s and the historical reality that under King Penda was practically cosmopolitan Isle.

I don't want to give away too many of the various references in this film as I think there is a significant amount of joy to be found in peeling back the layers of this film for oneself. That said at a minimum I would recommend reading up on Cunning Murell, a mythic figure from real life and not as long ago as one might think who was know as The Devil's Master. The class implications of the kind of folk magic the cunning folk practiced as well as similar themes found in Charles Godfrey Leland's Gospel Of The Witches are also important to really groking this film and indeed to groking the complex forces involved in Brexit.

While the film is extremely British that specificity does transcend itself. Similarly the heavy subject matter of the film is lightened in some clever ways. For example the antagonist of the film, The Bone King, is portrayed as a skeletal pantomime horse. While the pantomime horse has a very unique place UK culture, the astute viewer who is not from the UK might recognize the idea of the pantomime horse from a Monty Python sketch from the Flying Circus episode Blood, Devastation, Death, War and Horror. I have no idea if this was intentional or not but it's fitting in a variety of ways given the climax of the film.

I'm not sure what else there is to say that wouldn't risk giving too much of the film away, so I'll just reiterate that this film is not only worth seeing but worth watching multiple times. A challenging film to be sure, but worth the work to find the grail hidden within the film.