Bloody Mallory is a 2002

2002 in film

The year 2002 in film involved some significant events. The first significant releases of sequels took place between The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Men in Black II, Analyze That, Spy Kids 2: The Island of...

 French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 film directed by Julien Magnat

Julien Magnat

Julien Magnat is a film and television screenwriter and director. He is best known for Bloody Mallory and Faces In The Crowd .- Life and career :Magnat was born in Ardèche, France...

 and written by Magnat and Stéphane Kazandjian. The film stars Olivia Bonamy

Olivia Bonamy

Olivia Bonamy is a French actress best known for her appearances in the films Jefferson in Paris, Jacques Audiard's Read my lips, the thriller Ils and Le ciel, les oiseaux et ta mère.-Biography:...

, Adrià Collado, Jeffrey Ribier, Laurent Spielvogel, Valentina Vargas

Valentina Vargas

Valentina Vargas is a Chilean-born actress. She developed most of her career in France, where she was raised.-Biography:...

, Julien Boisselier

Julien Boisselier

- Biography :Boisselier was born and raised in Nantes before moving to Paris to study comedy at Le Cours Florent. He dated acclaimed French actress Mélanie Laurent, though the two ended their relationship in February 2009...

, and Thylda Barès. The film's score was composed by Kenji Kawai

Kenji Kawai

, born April 23, 1957 in Shinagawa, Tokyo, is a Japanese music composer, for motion pictures, anime movies, video games and televised programs. He has contributed to the musical scores for numerous films from Japan and other countries in Asia, working in film genres as diverse as anime, horror,...

.

The film itself is a mix of horror

Horror film

Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...

, action

Action film

Action film is a film genre where one or more heroes is thrust into a series of challenges that require physical feats, extended fights and frenetic chases...

, and comedy

Comedy

Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...

 in a style highly reminiscent of American television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess.

Plot

Mallory (Bonamy) is the head of an elite government-run strike force dedicated to combating the supernatural

Supernatural

The supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...

. Her team includes the drag queen

Drag queen

A drag queen is a man who dresses, and usually acts, like a caricature woman often for the purpose of entertaining. There are many kinds of drag artists and they vary greatly, from professionals who have starred in films to people who just try it once. Drag queens also vary by class and culture and...

 Vena Cava (Ribier), an explosives expert; a mute

Speech disorder

Speech disorders or speech impediments are a type of communication disorders where 'normal' speech is disrupted. This can mean stuttering, lisps, etc. Someone who is unable to speak due to a speech disorder is considered mute.-Classification:...

, pre-teen telepath

Telepathy

Telepathy , is the induction of mental states from one mind to another. The term was coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Fredric W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, and has remained more popular than the more-correct expression thought-transference...

 capable of possessing

Spiritual possession

Spirit possession is a paranormal or supernatural event in which it is said that spirits, gods, demons, animas, extraterrestrials, or other disincarnate or extraterrestrial entities take control of a human body, resulting in noticeable changes in health and behaviour...

 others named Talking Tina (Barès); and an armed governmental agent named Durand (Perkins-Lyautey). They are dispatched to protect a convent

Convent

A convent is either a community of priests, religious brothers, religious sisters, or nuns, or the building used by the community, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion...

 from an assault by a pack of undead

Undead

Undead is a collective name for fictional, mythological, or legendary beings that are deceased and yet behave as if alive. Undead may be incorporeal, such as ghosts, or corporeal, such as vampires and zombies...

 monsters when they are attacked by an unknown assailant. The battle leaves Durand dead, Vena Cava injured, and Tina in a coma

Coma

In medicine, a coma is a state of unconsciousness, lasting more than 6 hours in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light or sound, lacks a normal sleep-wake cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions. A person in a state of coma is described as...

. Simultaneously, the newly-elected pope

Pope

The Pope is the Bishop of Rome, a position that makes him the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church . In the Catholic Church, the Pope is regarded as the successor of Saint Peter, the Apostle...

 (Spielvogel) is kidnapped by strange, masked attackers who resist the bullets of the pope's bodyguards. Mallory is approached to rescue the pope, a job she reluctantly accepts when she realizes there may be a connection between her team's assailant and the pope's kidnappers.

Tracking the kidnappers to a pocket dimension containing an entire village that had vanished off the map several years earlier, Mallory and her team are joined by Père Carras (Collado), a priest trained in the martial arts and one of the bodyguards present at the time of the pope's kidnapping. Their search for the pope eventually leads to Lady Valentine (Vargas), a centuries-old vampire

Vampire

Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person...

 who survived being beheaded during the French Revolution, and her mission to summon Abaddon, a fallen angel

Fallen angel

Fallen angel is a concept developed in Jewish mythology from interpretation of the Book of Enoch. The actual term fallen angel is not found in either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. Christians adopted the concept of fallen angels mainly based on their interpretations of the Book of...

 that will cover the world in darkness.

Casting

According to interviews present on the Region 1 DVD, Valentina Vargas was reluctant to appear in the film, but strong campaigning by director Magnat convinced her to sign on.

Influence and references

Magnat has admitted to being highly influenced by the visual style and hyper-reality of anime

Anime

is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....

 and manga

Manga

Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...

. This influence is most apparent during the final scenes of the first battle of the film between Mallory and the undead attacking the church.

Mallory's appearance, especially her bright red hair and revealing uniform, is highly reminiscent of the main character in the film Run Lola Run

Run Lola Run

Run Lola Run is a 1998 German crime thriller film written and directed by Tom Tykwer and starring Franka Potente as Lola and Moritz Bleibtreu as Manni. The story follows a woman who needs to obtain 100,000 German marks in 20 minutes to save her boyfriend's life...

.

The Necronomicon

Necronomicon

The Necronomicon is a fictional grimoire appearing in the stories by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his followers. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft's 1924 short story "The Hound", written in 1922, though its purported author, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in...

, a work featured in the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....

, is referenced several times as if it were a legal document, including the citing of paragraphs and sub-sections relating to the conditions of summoning a demon.

A vindictive living doll from a 1963 episode of the Twilight Zone

Living Doll (The Twilight Zone)

"Living Doll" is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.-Synopsis:Little Christie's mother, Annabelle, buys her a new doll, trying to make up for her new stepfather's indifference. As they pull into the driveway, Annabelle instructs Christie to run upstairs with...

is called Talky Tina.