Cheap Begotten (DVD) (Brian Salzberg, Donna Dempsey) (E. Elias Merhige) Price

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Customer Reviews of Begotten

Hit-and-Miss-Begotten
It's unique, yes, and sometimes (esp. during the first half hour and the final few minutes) stunning, really hitting the viewer (this viewer, anyway) on some primitive gut level. I'm glad it was made, and I'm glad I saw it. Even the director's cryptic opening message, while a bit pretentious, carries a nightmarish weight. HOWEVER...I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, or even a near-masterpiece; it's got problems, and they're serious. The whole presentation of Mother Earth -- pacing slowly, head up, silly mask, sometimes holding her breasts -- evokes all the worst cliches about "performance art" and feels jarringly out of step with what's come before it. And much of the business with the ragged creatures dragging Mother and Son around seems tedious to no particular end, to the extent that the film's amazing non-narrative elements (that final shot of the trees makes me feel chilly all over, for reasons I can't explain) are sabotaged by the dragginess of its narrative. The whole thing needed to be either more concise or more abstract. Or both. As a student film, it's probably one of the best ever made. As a film, period, it's a masterpiece only sporadically.

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Five Stars For the Weirdness of the Whole Thing
Is it compelling? Very. Is it arty? Often. Is it atmospheric? Indubitably. Is it entertaining? Rarely, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. "Begotten," a wildly inventive low budget film imagined and subsequently lensed by E. Elias Merhige will leave a lasting scar on anyone who watches his nightmarish vision. The celluloid equivalent of a bad dream best forgotten, Merhige's pet project continues to mark its viewers; I occasionally hear people discussing this movie even though it came out over ten years ago. No matter what you come away with after watching "Begotten," you will remember it for ages to come. Nothing approaches its visceral power, its unshakable commitment to weirdness, and its disgustingly haunting imagery. Yes, "Begotten" is all of these things to some and much less to many. I have seen it and still cannot define exactly what I saw or successfully integrate the various scenes into a coherent whole. Perhaps subsequent viewings will uncover a few more details, but I somehow rather doubt that it will. I hope it will be enough to cryptically smile and nod sagely in lieu of explaining the plot the next time someone I know mentions this film. If I ever have to explicate on Merhige's monster to save my life, I could be in a heap of trouble.

What is "Begotten"? It is roughly eighty minutes of a black and white movie showing scenes of mutilation, madness, and murder. The whole thing deals with a sort of primordial or futuristic creation/death ritual carried out between the gods and mankind, or at least I think it does from the few articles I have read about the movie. Probably the easiest scenes to discern are the opening ones, where the camera reveals a twitching creature with a substance disturbingly comparable to blood pouring out of its mouth. With some sort of razor, the being cuts open its own abdomen (in chunky detail) in order to give birth to a new life form. This new goddess and a weird creation coughing up what looks like a piece of meat go forth to encounter shambling primitives who eventually beat these creatures to death. The whole film moves at a snail's pace, with many of the later scenes nearly impenetrable to the eye even on a DVD transfer.

Far from being filmed in glaring color reminiscent of an episode of the Brady Bunch, "Begotten" uses a complicated technique to create a type of black and white picture rarely if ever seen by this viewer. The film employs deliberate scratches on the negative and some sort of treatment that makes the unearthly images contained within glow with a sickly light. There isn't a whit of discernable dialogue in the whole movie, with the only sounds being a discordant drone punctuated by occasional rattles, labored breathing, chimes, and the sounds of water. The sun rises and sets with alarming regularity, but this hint at the passage of time provides no respite for the viewer as the nightmare unfolds onscreen. I could so easily dismiss "Begotten" as utter garbage except for one niggling concern: I could rarely take my eyes off the television screen. What IS going on here? Who knows, but it carries an appeal similar to a car accident on the freeway.

Merhige should receive a compliment for at least trying to accomplish something different with this movie. I'm not surprised in the least to learn that Marilyn Manson retained his services to direct one of his music videos, either. In short, if "Begotten" isn't the strangest, eeriest thing you will ever watch, you have explored bleaker vistas than I. I should conclude with an apology for speaking about this film by using so many superlatives, but watch it and see why I did so.

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Ontological archtype!!
Karl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and G.W.F. Hegel obviously didn't tell us all that they knew. This film strips being down from the societal bigoted elaboration into collective subconscience. Anyone who says this film is boring or pretentious isn't in touch with the zeitgeist of the universal weltangschunng!