Chino Moya

(On Cable TV, November 2022) If you accept that movies offer a vision, then the best that writer-director Chino Moya’s Undergods can manage is a fog. A dark, incoherent, deliberately off-putting Science Fiction anthology of very dark tales. But not tales with dark panache, no—rather the stories of a dying world moulded on Eastern Europe, perpetually shrouded in darkness and quotidian despair. Too grim to be comedy but too dull to be horror, Undergods settles for nothing much more than a blur of dark bland, as it barely manages to tell fourth-fifths of a story before blurting another lame and repetitive one. Much of the dour, unfocused nature of the film’s barely distinguishable episodes is made on purpose to trick reviewers into creating an interpretation of a film that doesn’t have much on its mind. But the stark bottom line is that Undergods is a mushy slurry of depressive mood without much in terms of narrative, character development or point. I can’t possibly imagine anyone recommending this film for any purpose.