THE PLAGUES OF BRESLAU / DIE ONTWAKING

SPOILERS / SPOILERS

One of the joys about the streaming services is that you never know what you're going to find beyond the Top Trending titles; as with movies in general it's often worth the dig beyond the main attractions. Of the two main suppliers, Amazon Prime and Netflix, the latter probably wins out simply because Prime has a far larger selection and it's far more difficult to wade through of an evening (and of the potentially interesting titles, many on Prime are of poor picture quality and a lot are even worse than that, so curating a decent watch-list on there is a full day's work). That's not to say that everything on Netflix is better - their big new release Coffee & Kareem is absolutely terrible - but they don't seem to pick up any old sludge the way Prime apparently do.

Of these two serial killer thrillers, The Plagues Of Breslau (Plagi Breslau) more rewarded the hunt, marred principally by Netflix automatically picking the English dub when I needed the subs on for captions and newspaper headlines, and inevitably the two didn't entirely match (it wasn't until afterwards that I found I could have watched it in Polish language). Beginning with the discovery of a fresh corpse in a cowhide that had shrunk in the sunlight and suffocated the occupant, it becomes apparent that someone is re-enacting Frederick The Great's week of purging the city of its degenerates, plunderers and oppressors back in the 18th century, using suitable and terrifically grisly medieval punishments....

It doesn't flinch from the gory details (it's lucky to have a 15 certificate) and maintains a dark, humourless tone throughout, with its abrasive, take-no-crap detective battered by personal demons (her fiance was killed by a drunk driver who dodged punishment) as much as professional ones. Surrounding characters are more cartoonish: the glamorous TV journalist openly filming the bloody carnage, the perpetually tipsy prosecutor. Halfway through the film reveals the killer's identity and switches, Se7en-like, from a whodunnit to a why, with a couple of nice plot twists and a satisfying motive.

It's a lot better than Die Ontwaking (which Googles as The Awakening although according to the IMDb it doesn't appear to be known by that title), a cheaper and less gruesome South African variation on the serial killer theme. This reveals its killer pretty much from the start: a creepy middle-aged shopkeeper specialising in African adornments and bric-a-brac (ritual masks and, bizarrely because they're not even remotely African, shrunken heads), but his motivation in removing his victims' tattoos remains unclear. I'm normally a sucker for African and Africa-based movies but this is fairly unremarkable and makes very little sense; the sole point of interest is that the sexist dickhead cop is played by one Gerard Rudolf, a familiar name to those of us who made it to the end of Adam Mason's much-walked-out-of Dust back at FrightFest in 2001...

***
**