‘The Kingdom of Var’ (2019) Leans Hard Into Its Deadpan Delivery – Movie Review

Roughly 10 seconds into the trailer for The Kingdom of Var (2019), I figured I was getting ready to lose some IQ points. Man, was I wrong. By the end of the micro-budget indie horror feature, I felt like Stephen Hawking.

Internet chatter’s been building on The Kingdom of Var since it dropped on Amazon Prime Video last summer. And for once, the Internet’s right! This thing really IS as if Tommy Wiseau or Neil Breen directed a horror movie. Director Nicholas Kleban (The Dweeb 2018) could easily have a cult classic on his hands.

What we’ve got is a stilted, oddly-charming non-sequitur about a college student, Sonja (Vida Zukauskas: The Wall of Souls 2016), who finds a mysterious VHS tape in her basement from the year 1594.

That’s not a typo: The film’s key plot point is a nearly 430 year-old videocassette of an occult ritual.

Of course, watching the tape summons bad stuff, namely a 16th-century sorcerer named Var. Things just go to hell from there. Sonja bounces around from weird situation to weirdo and back.

You know what? I could explain the entire damn plot, and it’d still be worth watching for the WTF Factor. The Kingdom of Var is less a story and more a patchwork of unrelated, bizarre encounters with stilted acting, inscrutable dialogue, and mediocre practical effects.

Check out these dialogue gems:

“You wanna have sex or what?”

“He’s going to mutilate your vagina.”

“Why don’t we just go to a fancy restaurant, and come back here and make love?”

I also noticed the characters engaged in a lot of recreational drug and alcohol use, which may actually be necessary for certain viewers not used to this kind of movie. (I’m a veteran at this genre and sailed through it sober.)

It’s not all bad. Mark Brombacher (The Paperboy 2020) plays a delightfully skeezy campus “police” officer with disgusting teeth and venereal diseases. He fully understands what kind of movie he’s in and just lets go. The opening and closing credit sequences are also legit-looking.

Like most things I enjoy, The Kingdom of Var isn’t for everybody. But if you’ve got the beer and the open mind, give it a shot. It’s 2020; what the hell else are you gonna do?

“What the fuck was that supposed to be?” asks a character after viewing the infamous, ancient videotape.

Crack open a cold one and find out.