By Nia Edwards-Behi
Damned on Earth begins with a scene in which a woman runs through a wooded area as a lumbering, anonymous man chases after. She falls over a bit. Then she dies. The only narrative twist to this is that this isn’t a precursor to a bog-standard would-be slasher classic, but instead it kicks off a German comedy about the eons-long battle between heaven and hell. In that regard, Damned on Earth deserves some credit – an evidently very low-budget film, this is at least lesser-trodden ground than what could have been, I don’t know, a found-footage zombie film, or something.
That’s essentially where my admiration of the film stops, though, as Damned on Earth is a boring, unfunny mess of a film. The film follows Amon, a demon in a human host body, as he is tasked by Luzifer with returning the rogue Belial to the fiery pits of hell, but finds himself caught up in the outbreak of all-out war between the legions of heaven and hell after the peace treaty between them is broken when Belial kills an angel. Along for the ride are various angels, demons and other Biblical characters, including Amon’s sidekick, Samsaveel, who is a massive sex offender and the worst thing in the whole sorry mess of a film.
With my apologies to long-time readers for being predictable, but yes, this film’s depiction of women and, in particular, the character of Samsaveel (who, at various points in the film, is both a man and a woman), pissed me off enough that if there were any other redeeming qualities to the film, I sure couldn’t see them. All the women are victims, sex objects or bitches, and while it’s fair to say that none of the male characters are particularly well-developed, this was just something that irritated me from the get-go. Meanwhile, Samsaveel is a walking rape joke, so to say that I found him, the main source of humour in the film, really unfunny, is a bit of an understatement. When it becomes apparent that Samsaveel must embody a human woman, I briefly hoped that maybe this would lead to an interesting development of the character but instead the rape joke just kept walking on.
I say that Samsaveel is the main source of humour in the film, but in all honesty, it’s hard to tell. I don’t want to be so unkind as to say that ‘what did I expect from a German comedy’, but I can’t say that I laughed at all while watching the film. Maybe I really was just missing the jokes. Each character is introduced with on-screen text about them (in Comic-Sans, even!) which I think is meant to be amusing…but the humour really fell flat with me. This is true of the rest of the film, where all the interactions with the demons and angels are filled with swear-words and underdeveloped grotesqueries, such as the drunk and disorderly Jesus or the Sharon-Stone-in-Fatal-Attraction Lilith. If the film was aiming to make some sort of comment on modern religion or the state of the church then it’s as mishandled as the humour. The one joke about priests and paedophilia is so strained that its impact is completely lost. When your character pointedly states “Know how many priests went to hell last year?” there is absolutely no need to follow it up with what might be the laziest punchline in the whole film – “Paedophilia and so on.” The film’s heavy-handed attempts at humour aren’t helped much by the really rather clumsy performances from the majority of the cast. They’re not all terrible, but hardly any of them are any good – Noah Hunter as Luzifer isn’t half bad, and Julia Jütte brings an effective sense of sleeze to her otherwise over-the-top performance as Samsaveel. The cast isn’t really given much to work with in the script, and the costuming is so uninspired that I can imagine the best of actors struggling to get into their role fully.
The war which unfolds between the legions of heaven and hell is, ultimately, a bunch of people dicking about in a field with some sub-David Muñoz gore effects and a standard computer effects package. In and of itself that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t make for very entertaining viewing when coupled with such a misguided sense of humour. Personally, I found there to be little in the film to really recommend it, despite the fairly unusual concept.
Damned on Earth is available to view on demand now at Vimeo.
Damned On Earth from Spontitotalfilm on Vimeo.