This movie is about an Eastern European sex gulag, where sweaty long-haired bearded men in leather jackets and lots of necklaces smoke all day in dark and dirty offices, abducting women from Balkan streets and pressing them into prostitution catering to weary soldiers.
The head pimp, named Viktor (because of course he is), takes a liking to a deaf girl and gives her the job of feeding and bathing his sordid bordello and getting them addicted to junk. She befriends a girl there when she discovers the girl speaks sign language. So she visits her room after lights-out and smuggles her candy… because in this fucked up fuck dungeon the heroin is part of daily rations but candy is contraband. I hate this place already.
What’s not to hate? Seriously, what kinda dude would WANT to go there to do the dirty? Let’s just take the “basic human compassion” element out of the equation, I can’t imagine touching anything in this place without gloves, I absolutely don’t want to take my pants off in there! I don’t want to lay on lice-ridden sheets and at no point in my most desperate days would I have looked at a bruised-up terrified opium prisoner in a sex gulag and say “Man, now THAT’S what gets my mojo flowing!” It’s a gross place with gross people, and I’m sure it smells of farts and cat piss all the time. Hot!
So anyway, life travels along at its normal humdrum pace of abject misery until one of Viktor’s regulars has some homicidal hate sex with the deaf girl’s favorite inmate and breaks her up pretty badly, so deaf girl (her name is Angel, by the way) decides “Enough is enough, time to fuck some shit up!” Rape-revenge in a warzone, risky as Hell but so very gratifying, and with copious amounts of grue!
…that IS the root form of “gruesome,” right? “Grue?” I’m sticking to my guns on this one.
The movie is set in an unnamed Balkan state around 1996. Anyone who knows the history of that time remembers the war crimes and other seemingly-unstoppable atrocities that were happening in that region. It gives this movie a certain plausibility that can’t be denied. Rotten Tomatoes gives “The Seasoning House” a 21% favorability rating. I find this suspect, considering “Be My Cat” has an 88% rating on the same website, and that movie was 88% crap. “The Seasoning House” is grimy and unsettling, it’s also socially-relevant and pretty well put-together. The horrors committed in this movie are pretty extreme, but the same horrors probably happened this afternoon in… well put your finger anywhere on a globe, these days. 21%… whatever!
