The Bitter Taste – review

Director: Guido Tölke

Release date: 2024

Contains spoilers

Horror, vampires and pentathlon – it seems a strange mix and yet here we are. I say vampires, in truth we are really in the bailiwick of Erzsébet Báthory, but the filmmakers changed the name to Badesky – why is not too clear and they kept the basic outline of her story. It has an interesting lore idea in it but several stumbling blocks as we will see.

It starts with a woman emerging from a lake, she has a gun but drops the bullets from it… Elsewhere there is a hunting party looking for stag. Marcia Lorenz (Julia Dordel) is acting as a hunting guide to Matheus King (John Keogh). She is an ex-pentathlete, though I am not sure she ever says that outright, it just becomes evident, and is injured, causing a limp. He takes a shot at a stag, feels pain in his arm (recoil you might assume, but no) and falls over a tree stump.

Julia Dordel as Marcia

She helps him up, but he has dropped an envelope that is wax sealed. She picks it up and he snatches it back – extolling the fact that it is worth a small fortune. They continue and he spots a doe, he takes aim and she pushes his rifle as it is not doe season. As it is, he wings it and she says to follow – he rejects the idea as the adrenalin will spoil the meat (we return to that idea later). He gives her a revolver but refuses to come. She finds the doe but another guide gives it a mercy killing and asks what she has done – getting back to the hunting lodge, King has had a heart attack whilst on his own and, having been found by another guide, has been taken to hospital.

narrow escape

Marcia is sacked without pay for leaving her client – she needed the pay to put towards an operation to fix her leg. She steals King’s abandoned jacket – with the envelope – and leaves. Whilst driving on a road through the forest, a woman (the one from the lake) runs into the road and Marcia hits her – but the woman is alive and urges her to drive them away. Suddenly a bad (and when I say bad, I’m sorry, but the best descriptor is “piss poor”) cgi creature chases them and is able to catch the car. Marcia breaks, throwing it off, lightning strikes a tree that falls across the road/creature, she reverses and crashes. The woman is pulled from the car (wearing King’s jacket) and then Marcia is attacked. She eventually loses the creature by jumping across the path of a steam train, that hits it.

the castle

She gets the cops, who come in the form of George Balough (Anne Alexander-Sieder), and she doesn’t believe Marcia's story (or maybe George is covering events up). The axel is broken and she ends up selling her car for the money for a train ticket (a train that drops off two women in sports training gear) but ends up not leaving and then she is in and out of peril, finds the first woman on a meathook, meets Josh (Nicolo Pasetti, The Last Voyage of the Demeter) a handsome hunting lodge caretaker/eel fisherman and is embroiled in a supernatural tale…

lore book

So, roughly, what is going on? Countess Badesky and her four acolytes become vampires but were trapped on the land by the church and a curse. The curse was enacted by being tricked into signing compacts and coincidentally the envelope Marcia stole just so happens to contain those compacts, which they need to escape. Bathory discovered that human flesh, stressed and then eaten, extends life and bathing in/drinking blood restores youth. As there are no military conflicts round the property to cause the flesh of victims to be stressed, they sponsor and then invite pentathletes and hunt them. The pentathlete aspect was odd, but I liked the different properties of flesh and blood for the vampires.

the countess

Beyond the bad cgi – some of the practical effects are good, but the cgi, oh brother… - there are more issues with the film, and the biggest one was unlikely coincidence… King happens to have stolen the compacts, and happens to have them on him whilst hunting, and happens to have a heart attack, and Marcia happens to steal them (unaware of what they are), and happens to have an accident on the Badesky’s land, and happens to become embroiled, and happens to be a pentathlete, and happens to be able to find Badesky’s sigil online having seen it in a dimly lit cellar for seconds, and King’s driver happens to be the woman Marcia accidentally injured in training (King and she come into it again later on, and though there is a flimsy reasoning to how he found Marcia, it didn’t add up). It is really unbelievable as a string of coincidence.

blood spattered

The dialogue is a little hokey – though the actors try their best with it – but the length of the film (over 2-hours) outstays its welcome and could do with some generous pruning. The vampires are truly immortal, it would seem, and we end up getting some The Thing-like body horror towards the end. The twist, which revealed the Countess’ fourth acolyte, was broadcast early on and came as no surprise. An interesting idea around the vampirism, and interesting to merge horror and pentathlon. But a victim of its own hubris. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.