MINOTAUR

In an era when men feared the wrath of the Gods, on a small island lost in the Aegean Sea, the inhabitants of a shepherd's village live in terror, because every five months eight young people are taken and led to the king's palace, where they are fed to the Minotaur, a beast of divine origin kept in a labyrinth beneath the royal palace. The moment of sacrifice has arrived again and the young Theo, son of the village chief and therefore immune to the sacrifice, sneaks into the group of future victims in the hope of finding alive the woman he loves, thrown into the labyrinth months before. The myths of ancient Greece were often populated by monsters, bloodshed, unspeakable violence, and cruel creatures, all material that the world of horror could easily draw from without making the viewer miss various serial killers and oriental ghosts. This must have been thought by the guys at Lions Gate who decided to distribute "Minotaur", a fun and original horror film that takes inspiration from the ancient myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to bring to life an unusual and quite successful film. With abundant narrative liberties (Theseus becomes Theo; there is no Ariadne and her proverbial thread; no mention of Minos), Jonathan English (who is not the name of a character from a comedy film!) has brought to life a dignified action-horror that makes its flag the originality of the narrative source, carrying the story forward with the classic "Alien" structure in which humans are decimated one by one by a monstrous creature. This makes an unusual story for a horror film perfectly suit the needs of the genre, focusing a lot on the sense of claustrophobia given by the tunnels of the underground labyrinth and on the expectation of the various attacks of the beast. Unfortunately, this makes the central part of the film slightly repetitive; a flaw that, however, does not excessively affect the attention of the viewer and the overall success of the film. Despite the fact that for the realization of "Minotaur" there were not the millions of dollars that Petersen enjoyed for "Troy", the result has not suffered at all from the low budget, but it has been wisely chosen not to ostentate a magnificence of the scenographic construction by setting the film mostly in closed places (the royal palace and the labyrinth) and thus conserving the bulk of the budget for the realization of the special effects. The Minotaur is abundantly shown from the second part of the film and its realization is of very good level: in some cases the monster is created with a computer graphics perfectly integrated into the surrounding environment, in others it is a good mechanical puppet. Also the gore department, without conceding splatter excesses, is quite substantial, thus making happy also the blood-thirsty viewer. The cast is mainly composed of little-known actors, with the exception of two old glories of the genre cinema: Rutger Hauer ("Blade Runner"; "The Hitcher"), in the role of Theo's father and Tony Todd ("Candyman"; "Night of the Living Dead"), in the role of the perfidious sovereign. The dialogues are not always up to the situation and it often happens that the protagonists say things that make you smile if pronounced by young shepherds of the iron age, but all this does not affect the fun that the film can offer and the freshness (despite the centuries) of the subject. A pleasant film that would have easily benefited from a theatrical release.