Yes, i've watched some Russian TV series before (and i think The Gogol
Trilogy are TV movies, but maybe shown also in cinemas?) as
"Sparta" on Netflix and "Detective Anna" on Youtube,
the first a school thriller and the latter a 19th century detective
murder mystery.
But This The Gogol trilogy ROCKS in comparison, as Detective Anna can
be a bit boring sometimes, just a little, but still ...
The Gogol Viy Trilogy uses the fact that legendary writer
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born in Ukraine in 1809 and that he wrote
the
horror novel "The Viy" (which was made into a famous film
in 1967) and has made Nikolaj Gogol into a writer combined investigator
of
crimes, and often supernatural such. At the beginning of the trilogy
he lives in Saint Petersburg and works as an assistant clerk to the
great inspector Yakov Petrovich (Oleg Menchikov) and when Yakov P. is
called to the village of Dikanka in the Poltava region to solve
a couple of murders of young women, then Nikolai (Alexander Petrov)
goes along too.
The films is loosely based on Gogol's story collection "Evenings
on a Farm near Dikanka".
Gogol suffers from seizures where he gets to see visions
of crimes and supernatural stuff from the other realm (yeah, somewhat
like what
regularly happens to Aleksandra Nikiforova's Anna in the Detective Anna
series) painful, but it comes in handy when solving crimes.
A dark rider has been seen at the murder scenes, The Horseman or The
Slayer says the villagers.
Yakov Petrovich, Nikolai Gogol and the local police investigator Mr.
Alexander Kristoforos Binkh (Yevgeni Stychkin) sleuths around,
and Gogol falls in love with a married countess, Lisa Danishevskaya
(Taisiya Vilkova). He also meets the dead girl Oksana (Yuliya
Dzutseva) who lives in the lake as a Rusalka, the russian type of mermaid,
and she falls in love with him.
The films consists of 2 chapters each (in total 6) and
were made for Russian TV but also shown in the Cinemas, and this GREAT
series
with a GREAT Alexander Petrov was met with a lot of praise and also
received awards. Made for the Horror and Fantasy crowd it has
a lot more pizzazz with gore and nudity than the more family orientated
"Detective Anna".
The film takes place in 1829 when Gogol was 20 years old (and Alexander
Petrov was in his upper 20's when shooting this) and when the
author wasn't very proud of the quality of his early writings, but that
was about to change as we all know, being proud of his works.
In the second and third film Nikolai Gogol and Mr. Binkh
continues the investigation after more people have been murdered, and
when
Yakov Petrovich has died in a battle with the slayer horseman. Oksana
the Rusalka continues to court Gogol, but he's in love with a
living woman, Countess Lisa. Gogol also meets an exorcist and tries
to stop a witch from performing rites in the church and invoking Viy.
This is a nod to the 1967 horror classic
Viy (written by Gogol but otherwise nothing
to do with the Slayer Horseman story).
Who could the Slayer Horseman be ? A
murder mystery this is but also a fantasy horror, and I loved it (who
normally don't like TV
series very much and rarely watches them). This series was very atmospherical
and was beautifully shot and with an exceptional
performance from Alexander Petrov as Nikolai Gogol. Highly
Recommended it is !
The film on this DVD or DVD-R is presented
in widescreen and with russian audio with english subtitles, no extras,
region All.
Please note that the Subtitles were pretty crappy on disc 1 and 3, but
fine on disc 2. But you get the story anyway. This is an
alternative market DVD with subs added from i don't know, some fan i
guess?
