I've been reviewing movies for only 20 years and in that time, I've written a lot of reviews. In that time, I've learned something which you may find surprising -- reviewing good movies is hard. When you like, or less often love, a movie, it can be difficult to put that into words, especially if the film has connected with you on an emotional level. It can be somewhat easy to discuss good acting or nice camerawork, but when a movie hits you in the gut, that often makes for a short review. Bad movies are much, much easier to review as all that you have to do is list the movie's problems. Sometimes I simply stop listing the issues because I get tired of writing. Morituris is going to be an easy movie to review.

So, here's the story in Morituris: Five people, three men and two women (Andrea De Bruyn, Valentina D'Andrea, Desiree Giorgetti, Giuseppe Nitti, and Simone Ripanti) are traveling at night in a car. Through their conversation, we learn that the women met the men at a club and that the men are Italian and that the women are Romanian. They talk about music and soccer. They also mention that they are going to a rave. After driving for a long time, they park and begin to walk through the woods. As it turns out, there is no rave. The men simply lured the women there to rape them. This goes on for quite some time and then the group is attacked by group of dusty ancient warriors who behead and crucify the men and women. And then the movie ends. Oh, I should have mentioned that while all of this is going on, the movie occasionally cuts to a man in an apartment who is apparently acting out American Psycho.

As we've discussed in the past, the history of Italian horror cinema is built on movies which don't make much sense. So, when you go into an Italian horror movie, you expect to suspend your disbelief and prepare yourself to be OK with it when things suddenly happen. But, within these shenanigans, there was typically a story...sometimes too much story. This combination of shoddy logic and anything goes story-telling is what gave these movies their charm and made them popular amongst so many fans.

So what does this lack of story mean for the viewer? It means that the movie is incredibly boring. For the longest time, nothing happens -- trust me, the dialogue isn't very scintillating. Then, something does happen, but it’s certainly nothing which makes for good cinema. Then, Morituris becomes an actual horror movie, as the warriors stalk the characters, but by this point, we don’t care about what is happening. The tedious nature of the movie is superseded only by the tasteless and mean-spirited air of the movie. The rape scenes seemingly go on and on and while they aren’t explicitly graphic (although one of the women is nude for the remainder of her on-screen time), the overly-descriptive dialogue leaves nothing to the imagination. As for the crucifixion scene, that is fairly graphic, and if the movie had any point, it would have been shocking.

Morituris decreased my desire to visit Italy on Blu-ray Disc courtesy of Synapse Films. The film has been letterboxed at 1.85:1 and the Disc contains an AVC 1080p HD transfer which runs at an average of 28 Mbps. The image is sharp and clear, showing a slight amount of grain and no defects from the source materials. The colors look good, but the image is a bit dark in some shots, not distractingly so, but enough to obscure some details. The level of detail is good, as we can make out the textures on objects and the depth is impressive. The Disc carries a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track which runs at 48 kHz and an average of 4.0 Mbps. The track provides clear dialogue and sound effects. One the action moves to the forest, we get some nicely placed stereo and surround sound effects, a few of which shoe good detail. The subwoofer is mild, but comes into play when the warriors appear.

The lone extra on the Morituris Blu-ray Disc is a TRAILER for the film.