The Sadness

Screenwriting futility, directorial blackouts. The sole purpose of this film is to continuously serve us extreme gore that we won’t see anywhere else. And with a straight face. In the first half, the directing kind of attempts to use the social ills of contemporary society to make a point, but the second half is just drawn-out nothingness pulled out of the filmmaker’s ass. But the film’s splatter brutality and punk degeneracy are truly unique. For example, the sexual assault of the eye socket of a woman whose eye has been poked out with an umbrella, in a wheelchair, while she’s hooked up to a drip. And so on… (2022-10-23)

Gorefests like this are not exactly my favourite branch of the horror genre, mainly because they are rarely as well crafted as Taiwan's The Sadness. So if something like this comes along once every few years, who am I to complain, there really hasn't been much competition for this in recent times. A very brutal and bleak carnage for most of the runtime – for a part of the audience it will probably be many times beyond what they want to watch. I'm a little disappointed that it can't keep that hopeless, filthy, desperate feeling going completely throughout, there are scenes where the cheesy B-ness sticks out to remind you that this is ultimately just horror entertainment. Harsh, yet nothing but entertainment. (2022-04-08)

The Sadness – D-day. It has finally arrived for us, the "Chosen Ones". Robert Jabbaz shocks the world and the audience with his Tai Wan debut, just like Gareth Evans did a few years back with The Raid and Timo Tjahjanto with The Night Comes for Us. I want to see a film made by this trio sometime, it would make blood spurt from the TV into the living room! The Sadness is without a doubt the genre event of the decade and it will go down in history and later gain cult status like The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film, but The Sadness is far more ambitious than those two. After a quieter 20 minute introduction, it kicks off with the original viral infection (watch out not zombies, just infected, more like crazies) who will turn the streets upside down, and blood, guts and corpses will be lying everywhere for the next intense 60 minutes! If I thought that the bus scene in the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre couldn't be topped this year, the Metro scene at the 30 minute mark did it. It was such intense carnage that I almost shat myself! The Sadness takes a very extreme and shocking form, it crosses all cinematic boundaries and breaks all cinematic taboos (I'm sure in any other country in the world, they wouldn't get away with what the director got away with here). There are absolutely insane fucked up gore scenes that I almost started squinting with excitement and thrill! There was also necrophilia, rape (in a hole that had to be made first!), mass group sex (all covered in blood), unbelievable carnage, brain eating, gallons of blood (if in Macabre the whole house was covered in blood from roof to basement at the end, here the whole hospital is completely covered in dark red. There's some very disturbing music playing in all this carnage, and at the end a virologist even cleverly and intelligently explains how the infection works, which surprised me. You can even chuckle at the occasional madcap wisecrack. The make-up artists did an incredible job, the form clearly wins over the content and the purpose to shock with its perversity and extremity works perfectly, so without any hesitation I give it a full score. Heavy warning to others, this is definitely not a film for people with weaker stomachs, just for a hardened and very marginal audience. It's hardcore horror- gore-porn-extremity! There hasn’t been greater carnage since Macabre and the Evil Dead remake . Sheer delight and euphoria. My perverted appetites are once again satiated for a few days. Story 2/5, Action 5/5, Humor 3/5, Violence 5/5, Fun 5/5 Music 4/5, Visuals 3/5, Atmosphere 3/5, Suspense 3/5, Emotion 1/5, Actors 3/5. 9/10. (2022-04-07)

If we disregard the enthusiastic exclamations of gore-hounds and lovers of extremes (and the director’s friends on IMDB), The Sadness first and foremost elicits a feeling of deja vu. In The Sadness, the aesthetics and ethos of the 1990s wave of German amateur gore films are mixed with ambitious work with the genre clichés of Asian low-budget horror flicks from the same era. It is necessary to acknowledge that, unlike the self-indulgent and often unintentionally ridiculous video works of Andreas Schndaas, Olaf Ittenbach, Heiko Fipper and Uwe Boll, the Taiwan-based Canadian expat Robert Jabbaz has a significantly better background in terms of craftsmanship. Like those other filmmakers, however, he would also love for his exhibition of intensifying brutality to shake viewers and give them the impression of something more serious and deeply revealing. Unfortunately, aside from the flimsiness of Jabbaz’s essentially naïve half-truths about the dark sides of the human subconscious, his already unsteady work continually falls on its face due to the totally predictable screenplay and blatant exploitation of the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the ostentatiously disturbing scenes and the frantically luscious and creatively deviant scenes, the film rather elicits stand-offish amusement, crowned by a burst of laughter when it all ends with the mandatory onslaught of dark metal over the closing credits. (2022-01-08)

From the point of view of gorefest, the film can't be faulted, because we haven't had a bigger carnage so far and I don't remember a film that depicts killing newborns, raping corpses or vomiting into a human wound. Similarly, in terms of the idea, I'm glad they have replaced the classic zombie plague with a virus that affects the limbic system and suppresses the activity of the cerebral cortex so that a person's aggressive instincts become unavoidable. Actually, apart from a few minor things that don't allow me to give it a full score, I quite liked the film in the end and enjoyed it overall, even though I probably won't remember it after a month. Hand on heart, other than the gore there’s pretty much nothing else, but I guess we all kind of expected that, so it doesn't detract from the rating. 90% of the carnage is very well done, there's plenty of killing and brutality and it's done quite realistically, but it's the other 10% that's all the more disappointing, as it feels a bit ridiculous and degrades the overall feeling, e.g. litres of blood spraying out on the train, bones flying at the hospital when a leg is cut, if they had refrained from this, from going beyond the edge of believability and had kept more to the surface, I'd have been happier. Likewise, sometimes the characters behave very stupidly, but I guess it's unavoidable in this genre. All in all, it's quality carnage that will please the extreme viewers enough to make the weaker characters turn the film off after five minutes, and it's probably unrivalled in similarly-themed films, but even so, it shouldn’t be taken seriously, because it's not about anything more than pure murderous fun after all. (2022-04-11)