Draugasaga (1987)

I’ve been a movie collector for quite a lot of years right now, and there’s always been three titles that someone seen on television and want to see again: Sekmisja, Månguden and Det Spökar i TV-huset. All three was shown on Swedish television and forever imprinted in the minds of Swedish kids. The first one is of course a famous Polish sci-fi comedy, the second one was long gone, but released on DVD in Sweden in 2010. The last one, Draugasaga, a TV-movie from Iceland by Viðar Víkingsson has been a holy grail for some people, including me. I saw it as a kid, and maybe 15 years ago I saw a shoddy bootleg-VHS at a friends place and then it was gone again. Until now.

Everything is set in the TV-house, the public service television of Iceland. A new kid is hired to be a night watchman. The old watchman is going to quit, and is very afraid of the ghost that haunts the place, a red-haired woman who is very dangerous, especially if she have a big sledgehammer in her hands… Our hero is getting more and more obsessed by the ghost-legend, and his relationship with his girlfriend – who works at the TV-house – is getting more strained. At the same time, a red-haired ghost is getting more active with her sledge hammer…




Most of them who saw the movie when it first aired on Swedish television probably only remember the more visual part, the woman with the hair in front of her face, the sledge hammer outside the elevator, the attack outside on the street. Strong visuals, eerie atmosphere and something that was new to most of us. Draugasaga is much more than so, a weird relation-drama, maybe a form of satire over television, a dream-like story about the past meeting the future. I appreciate all of this, but especially when it mixed with some excellent and creepy horror images.

It clearly has a TV-feeling, that special quality that you will recognize from BBC or Scandinavian TV from the same time. This seems to be shot on film though, and has some very nice cinematography and slow but effective editing. The pace is slow, but there is not one boring second in the movie. One bizarre thing leads to something other weird, and goes to horror and then some kitchen-sink drama. A very unique approach to a ghost-movie I would say.

Viðar Víkingsson has crafted a pearl of a movie, something that will grow on the viewer. For some of us it created nightmares for years after, it became a legend – and well deserved so. But does it still hold up? Yes, it does. Very well indeed, and if you are used to TV-productions from the seventies and eighties this is the movie for you – if you can find it of course...

Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009)

You know, I really wanted to say that Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre was a movie I could recommend with whole my heart. But no, I can't. Watch it or buy it (cheap), but there's really something that's missing. Storywise it's nothing to brag about, though it has a couple of funny ideas. Here we have a bunch of tourists (which is a good excuse for making a big part of the movie English language) going out on a whale watching safari on Iceland. Gunnar "Leatherface" Hansen is their captain, but of course there's danger ahead. An inbred family of ex-whale hunters, surviving by selling home-made whale-souvenirs wants to take revenge on all of those that prefer watching whales than killing them. When an accident happens aboard the whale watching ship, the family takes their chance and starts killing the tourists off, one after one!

So, this sounds quite fun. And it's quite fun. Not amazingly fun. Or crazy wild fun. It's quite fun.The main problem is of course that even if the filmmakers try to make the movie as local and exotic as possible, the story behind everything is so generic that you almost predict everything thats happening. Movies like the crappy Rovdyr is worse, much worse, but if this one didn't have some fun characters and good actors it would almost be in the same league. The family is great. Sleazy and wacky characters that somehow comes out as real, and all of them are sadists of the worst kind. The tourists are very uneven, but the most boring characters are being killed off quite early and we're left with the excellent Terence Anderson as Leon (a character that has traces of Ben in Night of the Living Dead) and Japanese actress Nae as the cold-hearted and slightly disturbed Endo. Both do their best, and are both great actors. These are the two characters where the screenwriter seem to have invested some time, because the rest of the tourists are just meat.

Talking about meat, the gore... Well, I rather see a bad gore effect than nothing at all (if it's not an Andreas Schnaas-movie, because a badly shot gore-effect it worse than nothing at all) and here the director seemed to thing that this is a SERIOUS SCARY movie, and decided to just shoot most of the deaths off screen. Not all, but often we just see the aftermath or some blood spurting on peoples faces. This is of course not a serious or scary movie, it's a cheesy movie that took most of the story from one thousand other movies, but just gave it the Iceland-twist... so, it really needed some more gore. Oh, it's not completely goreless. There's a quite fun decapitation, some stabbings and a cool fire-stunt. But feels quite dry, even if we see a lot of blood on the walls and floors.

I would say, watch the movie for Terence Anderson and Nae, and the fun twists their characters do. Gunnar Hansen is also great, but has way to little to do. It also has great locations and fine cinematography. And a marvelous title. But that's it really. What a pity.