Title: Black Death
Starring: Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Carice van Houten
Director: Christopher Smith
Format: Blu-ray & DVD
Duration: 101 minutes
Certificate: 15
Released: 18th October 2010
The time is the mid 14th century. The 'black death' is killing people across every village in the land. Osmund, a young monk, agrees to lead Ulric, a knight, and his companions to a remote village – where the inhabitants have forsaken God and taken up occult practices – but have in doing so apparently escaped the plague. When they get there they realise that they must face a necromancer.
Sean Bean is good value, as ever, as a tough talking, tough fighting, knight. His supporting cast never really match him in acting ability but they don’t do too badly. There are several films of a similar nature all released this year such as Solomon Kane and Arn: Knight Templar, and if you liked those you’ll be happy enough with this. They are all pretty decent genre offerings.
Black Death takes a while to get going; pretty much the first two thirds of the film are taken up by the journey to the village, there is a witch to deal with and a member of Ulric’s group to put out of his plague-induced misery as well as a couple of skirmishes along the way. It’s nothing tremendously exciting, but when they get to face up to Langiva, the necromancer, things do liven up a bit – if you’ll forgive the pun. So it’s a film of two halves in that sense.
The direction and production values are high and Black Death looks good on Blu-ray, the image is clean and sharp and the colours although being restricted mostly to browns, greys and blacks are good. There are a fairly good spread of special features on this disc with a feature-length commentary with director Christopher Smith, a handful of deleted scenes (with optional commentary) as well as behind the scenes footage and a ‘bringing black death to life’ featurette. Also included are a theatrical trailer for the film, a photo gallery and interviews with cast & crew (including director Christopher Smith, producer Jens Meurer, producer Phil Robertson and star of the film Sean Bean.
