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In general, Sonja (Vida Zukauskas) is a very level-headed college
student with little interest in the occult ... but when her roommate
Ashley (Sarag Swerid) shows her an over 400 year old videotape - which she
knows is technically impossible of course - of unhinged black magician Var
(Shawn Van Every), she gets a queasy feeling, which is not at all helped
by the fact that she starts to have nightmares that are linked to Var and
that feel more like visions, really. And then things start to fall apart,
Ashley kills herself before Sonja's very eyes, a friend she turns to for
help (Madison Graves) is brutally killed by her boyfriend (Matthew
Sears) because of it, and when she turns to her boyfriend (Stephen
Ingram), he knocks her out, cuffs her and lets the local pervert (Mark
Brombacher) have his way with her. And somehow it turns out her watching
the tape has brought Var, who's some sort of demon, back to earth, and
he's bound to do evil. Now Sonja has one thing to her benefit, she has a
photographic memory, and having read a book with spells to bind Var, she
knows them all - she just doesn't know exactly what these spells are doing
... Now there are no two ways about it, The Kingdom of Var
is not the technically most accomplished movie - actually the film looks
and sounds very much like an S.O.V. film from the 1990s rather than
anything current, and frankly, also not all the acting is up to par. But
what's the real saving grace of this movie is the love that right
obviously went into this and that's really palpable: It's very apparent
that writer/director Nicholas Kleban and his crew really love the
horror genre, and horror fans will easily pick up references to Lovecraft,
Argento and the like, not only story-wise but also in terms of atmosphere.
And the yarn this movie spins is well thought through and well constructed
and should please genre fans, especially thanks to its often nightmarish
logic. Not a masterpiece, but Nicholas Kleban is definitely a talent to
look out for!
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