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.
There are several reasons why this assumption is justified.
The film is called Possessed, and is unlikely to focus primarily on diseases of the flesh, especially considering the wealth of catholic paraphernalia thrust into every shot with an inch-wide gap, and plus there's the ominous music, composed by Martin Ronnow-Klarlund, which would be highly inappropriate in ER. Finally, there's no Dustin Hoffmen or Sean Connerys to be seen.
There's also a character who looks alarmingly like Jerry from Phoenix Nights running about. Every time he appears, you think, "Cool! It's Jerry from Phoenix Nights! I wonder if he's going to sing a song or tell a joke?"
But there's a twist, cause it's not Jerry at all, it's some other bloke who's all concerned about The Bible and Astrology and Satan and so on. He may or may not be a priest. He wears a collar, and dresses in black, but he also reads pornography and appears quite a shifty individual, all being told.
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