The Duke De Mondo On "Possessed"

You may recall a few years back there was this thing that was getting folks all upset and anxious and generally deranged. It was called The Millennium, and had something to do with Prince and Jesus.

Most saw this as an excuse to drink themselves blind and spend extortionate amounts on souvenir T-Shirts, but others fretted about whether or not their computers would explode and they would lose all the porn, or if planes might fall out of the sky and their fridges would refuse to cool, even though yoghurt would almost certainly go sour and lumpy if it wasn't kept in the correct temperature.

But it turns out damn all happened.

Of course, now, with the benefit of hindsight and so forth, we can see this ridiculous frenzy for what it was - A ridiculous frenzy. But there was a genuine fear in the air back in those crazy days of sinister turmoil, sometime around December 15th 1999.

And, as ever, the world of Filmic Affairs was on the ball, tapping into this pre-millennial tension and throwing a load more boiling water onto our already bubbling terror-glands. We had Brad Pitt and Edward Norton getting all homo-erotic in Fight Club, we had Arnold Schwarzenegger as a crying drunk fighting The Devil in End Of Days, and over in Denmark, where things are rotten so I'm told, Anders Ronnow-Klarlund was throwing together Berat, a tale of diabolical no-goodery bouncing around Germany, Romania and various other lovely European locations.

Berat, or Possessed as it's known to us English speaking types, concerns a young virologist and his pretty student / partner, as they attempt to find out what the hell was wrong with this bloke that died covered in boils and ghastly flesh-holes. The Ebola Virus is mentioned a few times, just so we get nice mental images of bleeding orifices and such, since it saves on the SFX budget, and also to throw us off course, to make us think there's some medical shenanigans going on, when really, when it comes down to it, we're fairly sure there might be, well, possession involved.

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