Ever wonder what a movie like “The Bad Seed” crossed with “The Belles of St Trinians” and seasoned with more than a heaping helping of “Psycho” just might be like if it were done with an all Russian cast? Well wonder no more…. From the land of Borsht and Vodka comes “Yulenka: Deadly Lessons”. Neko’s been aware of this one for some time now, but it’s taken me a while to hunt down some decent English subtitles…. until now.
The simple synopsis goes: “Professor Andriy Belov moves to a small town from the capital, and from his university to a woman’s high school, so that his wife can get the treatment and air she needs. After a short time a the school, he begins to notice strange things happening to his students. The students in the fifth class don’t play with dolls, they delight in making a toy of human lives.
One day he finds a note reading ‘Save Us,’ and he begins to take action. As he investigates, his life degenerates into a nightmare, and his only hope is a lone little girl, Yulenka….. or does something evil hide behind her innocent eyes?”
This is another of those odd little films for which your Favorite Catgirl ends up spending her odd hours searching high and low for subtitles when the original DVD lacks them. Sometimes I find them right away… other times it take a while… sometime it takes an excruciatingly looonnggg time. These ones required me to delve into some fairly odd places in the former Soviet Union, but my perseverance has finally paid off, and so now…. with some fairly accurate fan-translated subtitles in hand and a copy of the Region 5 DVD…. “Yulenka” is finally mine!!
Was it worth all my silly efforts (not to mention a fair amount of Bablefish translation of Cyrillic Russian)? Guess you’ll have to “Read On” to find out!!
It’s amazing what you can get from Thailand…. their own DVD’s these days are almost completely without English subtitles for reasons and logic that just escapes this lil’ Catgirl.