–Morbus is this weekend’s pick. Every Saturday or Sunday, Celluloid Dimension selects a film to spotlight for your weekend viewing. We like to champion underrated gems and forgotten titles that deserve a wider audience. Dive in and enjoy the ride. –
Directed by Ignasi P. Ferré
Written by Isabel Coixet
Starring:
- Ramon Ferré as Juan (credited as Mon Ferré)
- Carmen Serret as Anna (credited as Carla Day)
- Joan Borràs as Farmacèutic
- Víctor Israel as Shiu Shi
- Sony Young as Magda (credited as Sony)
- Montserrat Calvo (credited as Montse)
Rating: 
The Catalan S-rated answer to genre cinema at large, determined to top its lurid traditions by loading a living-dead storyline with hookers, Satanists, scientists, and intellectuals. Ignasi P. Ferré’s baffling Morbus first resembles a lo-fi Re-Animator before Re-Animator even existed, before spiraling into wall-to-wall female nudity, devil orgies, and a depraved Afghan servant.
Zombies emerge intermittently, justified only by the presence of a mad scientist resurrecting the dead through chemical experimentation, while the story’s emotional axis rests on a writer who, for reasons left unspoken, encounters a naked girl in the forest. The editing fractures the rhythm, and the film’s temperament swings between cartoonish levity and heavy-handed, eroticized melodrama. It is an epic accumulation of random spectacle, possibly intentionally sleazy or simply irredeemably trashy, unified by a commitment to European exploitation clichés delivered without irony. The charm of Morbus lies in its shameless willingness to exhibit the pleasures of B cinema without remorse, sacrificing narrative clarity in favor of an unambiguous desire to show rather than tell.
Morbus flows with a restless and strangely exciting inner instability, turning the shift from morgue sex to crystallomantic ritual into comedy not through storytelling logic but through the naked absurdity of the gesture itself. The crosscutting between fireplace intimacy and scenes of torture porn—performed with malicious theatrical flourish by the Afghan servant embodied by Victor Israel—functions as a quiet proclamation of love to the unruly spirit of transgressive cinema, the particular brand of celluloid trash I am powerless to resist loving.
