Customer Reviews

The Green Butchers

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A thoroughly enjoyable romp into the gastronomical endeavors of two every enterprising (albeit sullen) butchers who market their "special" marinated chicky-chicken to the neighbors of their village.
And just how do you get the money to start your own butcher shop from scratch? Well it ain't cheap!
You turn off the life support system of your ailing twin-brother and collect on the insurance money that has been in limbo for the past 10 years while he has been withering away in a coma.
Finally armed with the moola to leave their lackluster jobs slaving away in their bosses butcher shop and not getting credit due for their incredible sausages and marinade, Svend and Bjarne launch their own shop.
Before they even open for their first day of business, a routine repair job goes sour, when Svend accidentally offs the freezer repairman by mistakenly locking him in. At least we know the freezer works now!
And if that weren't good enough, Svend hacks off the repairman's leg and sells it under pressure to produce a "special" meat that the finicky villagers will like. It is not until the Rotary Club dinner where the meal is a smashing success that they enjoy real success (all due to Svend and Bjarne's special chicky-chicken). Once the word is out the villagers have got to have more! And the pressure is on!
A great flick that you can laugh all the way through, non-stop shenanigans drawn out in that distinctly surreal European style. You are watching a sophisticated and gruesome black comedy that will make you want MORE. And yes....finally a horror movie with a happy ending.

This tale from the kingdom of Denmark is all about Svend and Bjarne, two butchers who find themselves fired, they then open their own little meat market and after a shaking start of business, Svend discovers that the customers has a very special taste for a very special kind of meat.

From here the tale takes us from laughter to nail biting horror as we get kicked into a world of morbidity and murder.

Svend is played by Mads Mikkelsen, whom you best know as Tristan of "King Arthur" and recently as Le Chiffre in the newest James Bond movie "Casino Royale".

Great entertainment for your money.

I love it when a skilled group of actors takes an absurdly funny situation and plays it absolutely straight and serious, without mugging for the camera, without pausing so you can laugh, and most certainly without a laugh track. Dark humor? I suppose, since it has murder and stuff. Svend and Bjarne open a butcher shop in this film, which the cover blurb calls "deceptively simple and wickedly funny." Yeah, that's what it is. It's Danish, the director has a strong Academy Award resume, and I don't care. I just know I enjoyed it immensely. It also features some very clever dialog, and you know I love word play.

I randomly picked this movie from the meager foreign selection in the local movie store. I did not expect much from it, but it turned out to be the best movie I have seen. It comments on the logic of what makes a person sane or insane - and how one arrives at that point (through watching loved ones die, through being abused, etc.)
It is also beatifully filmed. I love one particular part where the main character walks through a room full of plants and the camera passes by a magnifying glass just right. The closing shot is beautiful, too.

Having become obesessed with Mads Mikkelsen as Tristan(King

Arthur)I wanted to see what other movies the "sexiest man in Denmark" had on the market. Girls, if you are looking for that Danish pastry ,you won't find him this flick. You will find a dark comedy with a stellar preformance by Mads.I really had to watch this flick 3 times to really appreciate it. Ithink I was expecting a Tristan looking actor instead of the balding, middle aged insane butcher on the screen. I'm not quite sure if our American leading men,and Mads is the leading leading man in Denmark, would be even be offered a role such as this. Brad Pitt could never pull it off.
I have just ordered 4 more movies starring Mads Mikkelsen. I admit it, I'm smitten.

You could call "The Green Butchers" a cross between "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and an episode of "Three's Company" in that, as someone from the Old Country would say, this is a film built around a bloody misunderstanding. Going into it any further would, to pun, spoil the fun. "Butchers" doesn't exactly chart new territory -- "Eating Raoul," and later, "Delicatessen" took care of that (you could actually go farther back, to "Soylent Green," in which people as food is used to elicit horror, but one has only to recall how Heston's thrift store couch-inspired slacks were hiked nipple-high to view it in a humorous tint). Cannibal humor works so well as a vehicle for satire because it is the most rudimentary metaphor: Consumer consuming consumer. Here, given the ease with which a freezer is used to commit murder, and the butchers' quick shift from disgust to dismissal of their actions, the victims are mere props. "Butchers," however, is a departure from the form as a black comedy with a heart. It's foremost a buddy movie with redemption at its core. Two misfits berated day in and day out by their butcher boss take a huge risk to walk out and start up their own shop -- and find they have what it takes to become the toast of the town.

The Green Butchers (Anders Jensen, 2004)

What a wonderful little film this is. If you haven't seen it yet, you should.

A dark comedy in the tradition of (but in no way resembling) Delicatessen, The Green Butchers gives us Svend (Mads Mikkelsen) and Bjarne (Nikolaj Lee Kaas), two assistants to Holger (Ole Thestrup), the town butcher. They can't stand him, and Svend is burning to go into business for himself. They find an old butcher shop that'll cost them two million kroner to buy. Svend can get his half by mortgaging his house; Bjarne, on the other hand, has all of his money tied up in a trust related to his comatose brother Eigil (also played by Kaas), whom he hasn't seen in ten years. He asks the sanatorium to turn off the life support devices, gets the money, and the two go into business. Their first day is an unmitigated disaster, with their only customers Svend's girlfriend Tina (Bodil Jorgensen) and the electrician fixing the lights in their meat locker. At the end of the day, Svend locks up and leaves, only to find the next morning that he locked the electrician in the meat locker, and the man froze to death. When Holger comes in to get some meat to feed the town council, Svend panics and sells him the electrician's leg-- and when the town hears about Svend's secret recipe, everyone in town wants meat from Svend and Bjarne's place. Meanwhile, the doctors turn off Eigil's life support, and he wakes up...
The film is carried in no small part by Kaas' double-role as Bjarne and Eigil, whose relationship is as deep and complex as any I've seen in modern film. Svend, though the movie's main character, ends up playing straight man to the relationship of the brothers and Bjarne's hard-headed pragmatism, not to mention reluctance to sell the unsuspecting townsfolk human flesh in marinade and pass it off as chicken. And the rest of the movie has a great deal of emotional depth (not to mention excellent comic timing); there's not much at all wrong with the rest of it. (One coincidence does seem forced, which is unfortunate, as much of the movie's plot turns on it.) But it is Bjarne and Eigil who turn this from an amusing way to kill a couple of hours into a real tour-de-force. Highly recommended. ****

This is a very funny dark comedy. I kept laughing at things that I really shouldn't have been laughing at in the movie, but it was tooooooo darn funny!!! This was a superb original story, the acting and directing were excellent. I even bought several extra copies to give to my friends as gifts. I don't want to say anything about the story because it will ruin it for you when you watch it. It's great to see everything in the story unfold in its own time, and laugh your way through the film. Have fun!

Pretty entertaining dark comedy about two socially inept dudes who start up their own butcher shop, but things go wrong... really wrong. I don't want to get too into the plot because I don't want to spoil anything... but it's guaranteed to intrigue. It's one of those films where the situation the character's find themselves in gets progressively worse and the movie goes on, until things reach a breaking point.

It also has a slightly different tone from similar movies I've seen, maybe because it's from Scandinavia... but the overall feel and delivery of the plot just seemed very unique compared to most American dark comedies. I greatly enjoyed it, and recommend it if you're in the mood for something different and little darker. 4/5 stars.

I highly suggest this movie to people who find some sort of appreciation in macabre things/stories. I love this movie, I have yet to see a Danish film I didn't like.