Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse (DVD)

If you haven’t seen the first Crimson Rivers movie, you needn’t fret: Crimson Rivers II is a standalone film and in fact, it’s not very similar to its predecessor at all. Still, I liked them both.

Jean Reno reprises the role of Inspector Pierre Niemans from the first film — he’s still the gruff detective with a sly sense of humor and a talent for dodging bullets, but this time he is teamed up with a different young cop (Reda, played by Benoit Magimel).

The film opens with Niemans investigating a series of ritual murders in which the victims were cruelly crucified. He soon teams up with officer Reda, who gets involved after a hooded monk tries to kill a man who calls himself Jesus (Augustin Legrand), and the two men take another into their fold — a third police officer with a Ph. D in theology named Marie (Camille Natta) — and an unholy trinity / task force is formed. Then there’s Christopher Lee as an evil former Nazi with his eyes on the prize of looted World War II treasure that originated centuries before in the Vatican.

While Crimson Rivers II is more suspense and action (who knew monks were so freaking agile?) than horror, there is still a taste of blood for you gore-hounds. The crucifixion murders are pretty grisly, and there are some severed body parts floating around here and there.

With a screenplay by the genre-savvy Luc Besson, and a sure directing hand from Olivier Dahan, Crimson Rivers II moves right along at breakneck speed, keeping story and plot just about even with the action sequences. The look of the film is arty/gothic yet modern-day gritty, thanks to top notch cinematography and lighting. Even the music is good: You’ve gotta love a fist-fight scene set to The Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog.

The DVD lets you choose between French (the original language in which the film was shot) and an English dubbed track. Normally, I prefer to listen in a movie’s native lingo and read subtitles, but in this case the dialogue makes more sense in the dub than it does on the captions — if you have both on for awhile, it’s amusing to see how different they are! (For example: one character describes his brother as being the prodigal son; the captions read, “He was a child prodigy.”) The English dubbed version has both Reno and Lee doing their own lines.

There is a lot of additional release material. The “Making of” documentary is exactly what it says it is: Showing the filmmakers shooting various scenes. Not very exciting. Then there are several mini docs, each one covering a specific thing: the weaponry, the fake corpses, the cinematography, etc. I found the one on “Corpses” to be the most interesting — the detail the artists go into, down to each hand-sewn nose-hair, is astonishing. There’s also one deleted scene that’s mostly dialogue, but it is set in a strip club so for those of you who felt boob-robbed throughout the film, you can have your way.

Overall, I recommend Crimson Rivers II for anyone — whether you’re a fan of the first or not, it doesn’t matter. This is a solid suspense thriller with just enough murderous intrigue and gore to keep any horror fan happy.

Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson