KARMADONNA Review: Hell from Heaven 

Jelena, a middle-aged woman in her third trimester, sits on a park bench. Inexplicably, an unknown voice comes over her cell phone with a deadly mission and a dire warning: Kill the people on his hit list or her unborn child (conceived in vitro) will die. 

The talkative caller claims to be the god Siddhartha, the “Creator of Content,” and wants to “flush the toilet” of the world. With Jelena as his assassin, that means eradicating those he deems humanity’s worst offenders. But he’s not targeting mass murderers, corrupt politicians or child molesters. He wants to take down society’s dirty cops, sleazy internet influencers, religious hypocrites and reality-show phonies.

Such is the premise of Karmadonna, the directorial debut of confrontational screenwriter Aleksandar Radivojević. Radivojević previously co-wrote one of the most controversial pictures ever, A Serbian Film, which shook up the festival circuit in 2010. Karmadonna makes its American premiere this Saturday night at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival (tickets here), where the jury just awarded Radivojević a Best Screenplay award. (Catch him in person at this weekend’s showing with his producer, former FANGORIA scribe Heather Buckley.) Expect Karmadonna to follow in A Serbian Film’s divisive footsteps, though the imagery this time is even nastier and more grotesque. Love it or hate it, A Serbian Film did leave a few things to the imagination (thank Heaven!). Karmadonna is a gruesome free-for-all. But like A Serbian Film, the smartly-scripted