Wednesday | March 31, 2004 6:00 pm

The Kingdom II
(Riget II)

Screening on Film

Directed by Lars von Trier and Morten Arnfred.
With Ernst-Hugo Järegard, Peter Mygind, Kirsten Rolffes.
France/Italy/Germany/Denmark/Sweden/Norway, 1997, 35mm, color, 286 min.
Danish and Swedish with English subtitles.

As the story picks up in the second installment of von Trier's mock-schlock-horror soap-opera opus, the pompous Swedish neurosurgeon (played by the wonderfully loathsome Järegard) has returned to Copenhagen from Haiti with a zombie potion designed to dispatch the pesky young doctor determined to expose his medical negligence. Meanwhile, the young intern has given bloody birth to a gargantuan half-demon baby, sibling of the ghostly girl who haunts the hospital's halls. Other narrative threads—variously involving tumors, excrement, cost-cutting medical administrators, and secret societies—keep the high-camp comedy cranked up and the plotting jam-packed.