Stepan Shkurat Movies

This Russian film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's story was for a long time the only horror film made in the Soviet Union. Khoma (Leonid Kuravlev), a young novice, travels across the countryside and stays for a night in a barn that belongs to an ugly old woman. When she attacks him at night and takes him for a broom ride, the scared novice fatally wounds her, and before she dies, she turns into a beautiful young noblewoman (Natalya Varley). The latter leaves a will, according to which Khoma should pray for her for three nights in the chapel until her body is buried. At night, the witch rises from the coffin and tries to catch Khoma. She flies around but she can't reach him or see him because he stays inside the circle that he has drawn around himself. During the third and last night, the witch makes the last attempt to scare him out of the circle, and she calls all sorts of ugly creatures to help her... Gogol wrote several stories based on Ukrainian folklore, many of them dealing with the Devil and the supernatural. ~ Yuri German, Rovi

This engaging Soviet drama about a doomed love affair works in its gentle approach to the romance between Solomyi (Vera Donskoy) and her boyfriend, but is less effective in its political message about staying within one's own national borders. The time is the 1930s and Solomyi has been forced into a marriage of convenience for her family, but not for her. So she and her boyfriend run away with several other peasants to Bessarabia. That is their first mistake. The second is to take shelter within a band of "thieving" gypsies who are being hunted by the police. Sure enough, the police close in and the couple is caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

A Russian outpost in Eastern Siberia comes under threat of attack by the Japanese in this patriotic film from 1935. Aerograd is a new town with a strategically located airfield of vital interest to the government. Work on the new outpost is complicated when tensions develop between workers and a religious sect. The sect threatens to give their support to a band of marauding samurai warriors who battle for control of the region. Relations between the two countries are further strained in the days before World War II, dating back to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. In this feature, the Russians are victorious as airplanes throughout the country come to the aid of the beleaguered new town. Director Alexander Dovzhenko, long considered a giant in Russian classic cinema, also wrote the screenplay for this feature. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

This film, based on the memoirs of commissar Dmitri Furmanov and obviously commissioned by the Soviet state, is devoted to the heroic exploits of Red Army general Vasily Chapayev during the Civil War in post-revolutionary Russia. Boris Babochkin's portrayal of the title character deftly blends old-guard heroism with Communist-dictated pragmatism; Chapayev may have a mind of his own, but he's willing to defer to the new-regime wisdom of his local commissar. A big hit in its native country, Chapayev won several state prizes, and furthered the already lofty reputations of director/siblings Georgi Vasilyev and Sergei Vasilyev. ~ Rovi

Earth (AKA Zemlya) is the third of Soviet director Alexander Dovzhenko's "Ukraine tetralogy" (Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1929), and Ivan (1932) are the other films in the series). The story tells of a group of farmers in a Ukrainian village, who unite to purchase a tractor. The leader of the peasants is later killed by a kulak, or landowner, who dislikes any form of united front that might pose a threat to his long-established authority. The events fade into memory, but the long-ranging effects of the peasant "revolt"--like the Earth itself--last forever. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi