Nekromantik 2 (1991)

... aka: Nekromantik 2: Die Rückkehr der liebenden Toten
... aka: Nekromantik 2: The Return of the Loving Dead

Directed by:
Jörg Buttgereit

Whether or not you actually enjoyed Nekromantik (1987), you've got to hand it to German director Buttgereit for making quite a lasting first impression. Working with a microscopic budget and utilizing grainy Super 8 black-and-white film stock, he managed to turn his feature debut into a successful cult hit by daring to be incredibly disgusting. The tale of necro sex (which was banned in certain countries and quite controversy upon release) has gone down in the history books as a must-see for shock cinema devotees. In other words, a sequel was in order. The major differences this time out is that there's a female lead, it's in color and it doesn't quite go the same gross-out route. It takes the proceedings pretty seriously and there's a somewhat arty approach to the material, pacing and camerawork. Things open with the memorably nasty suicide of the first film's protagonist Rob (Daktari Lorenz), which begins in black-and-white and then turns to color. Now he's about to get a taste of his own postmortem medicine when his rotting corpse becomes the sexual centerpiece of a disturbed female necrophile's dark desires.

Nurse Monika (Monika M.) shows up at a cemetery dressed in high heels, stockings, a polka dot blouse and a miniskirt and armed with a shovel and pick-axe. She digs up Rob's body, takes it home, strips it naked and indulges in a little bump n grind with the slimy, blue body (which ends up making her sick). She cleans the body up, tries to camouflage its bad odor with flowers, dresses it, poses for pictures with it and snuggles with it on the couch. But Rob isn't the only man in her life. She's also just started dating Mark (Mark Reeder), who works as a porn movie dub-over artist. After going on several dates, she starts to like him and begins fancying a normal relationship. And that means Rob has got to go. She puts the corpse in a bathtub and dismembers it with a hacksaw in loving detail while she sobs. Not able to completely part with it, she saves the head (which she keeps in a casket in her living room) and the penis (on a plate in her fridge) and takes the rest back to the graveyard.

Pretty soon, Monika and Mark start getting a little more serious, but he becomes perplexed by her odd behavior. She never wants him to move during sex and likes taking bizarre photos of him (like hanging upside down naked). He also discovers her little penis plate in the fridge, but doesn't say anything. Monika has a few of her girlfriends over (sort of a necro support group) to watch a video of a seal autopsy (?!) and Mark begins to think that something is seriously wrong with his new girlfriend. The gruesome finale proves he is correct in his assumption.

Not nearly as graphic or disturbing as the first movie (though it has its moments), this steers away from the grotesque gore for a more serious, though leisurely, look at necrophilia. Buttgereit takes his sweet time telling this simple story and many of the scenes seem to go on far longer than they needed to. Some of the camerawork is truly excellent, though, and the music score is consistently interesting. There's even a great fantasy musical number sequence in here. As far as the gore is concerned, it's mostly relegated to three scenes but Sammy Balkas' makeups (especially a very bloody decapitation) are very effective. Beatrice Manowski (star of the original Nekro) has an in-joke appearance and Florian Koerner von Gustorf (who starred in the director's follow-up Schramm [1993] along with Monika M.) has a small role as a drunk guy at a bar.

Nekromantik 2 began production in 1989 and has a copyright date of 1990. In 1991, shortly after its release, Munich police officers seized the film because they said it "glorified violence." It remained in their custody until someone made a successful case for it being art. Buttgereit (who can be seen here in a cameo viewing a ridiculous black-and-white art house film in a theater scene) also makes time to plug his obscure film Hot Love (1985).

★★1/2

Horror Heaven (1984)

... aka: J.B.'s Horror Heaven
... aka: Jörg Buttgereit's Horror Heaven

Directed by:
Jörg Buttgereit

German director Jörg Buttgereit would become pretty notorious in horror circles for such gritty, stomach-churning flicks as the necrophile shockers NEKROMANTIK (1987) and NEKROMANTIK 2 (1989), the poetic death documentary THE DEATH KING (1990) and SCHRAMM (1993), which was based on several real-life serial killers. Before any of those, he cut his teeth doing what many other directors do: making amateur shorts with his friends. This is a collection of some of those and all but one are light-hearted, goofy spoofs unlike the director's graphic and disturbing later feature films. It runs just 23 minutes and is dedicated to Boris Karloff. Buttgereit himself - sitting in a black room with candles, skulls and a black cat on his lap - opens things with an introduction, telling us "I have dug up a few major movie treats from my film archive." He also pops back in between all of the segments to introduce what we're about to see. First up is the very short black-and-white "Die Mumie" ("The Mummy"). A mummy awakens from a centuries-long slumber and is after the reincarnation of his lost love. He snatches up the girl, then gets into a fight with two guys wearing boxing gloves who call him a "stiff blockhead" and beat on him till he dies and dissolves into a skeleton. The end.

The next segment is "Frankenstein," also black-and-white, where Dr. Frankenstein and his hunchback servant Fritz get to work reviving their creature with electricity. It chases a woman, strangles Fritz, demands the doctor create him a mate and then blows up the castle because his bride is too ugly. Next up is "Die rache der Mumie" ("The Revenge of the Mummy"), which is basically just the mummy beating up a guy wearing boxing gloves. "Captain Berlin gegen Hyxar" ("Captain Berlin versus Hyxar") is a color super hero spoof with the hero going up against a bounty hunter alien wrapped in aluminum foil. He sprays whipped cream on it and then stuffs it in a box. The next short is a GODZILLA spoof "Gazorra die bestie aus dem erdinnern" ("Gazorra: The Beast from the Depths of the Earth"). At a nuclear power plant creating a toxic chemical called "hydroxynometaline," a toy giant lizard monster rises from the Earth and faces off against the military. After destroying some toy tanks and part of a toy town, the Commander (played by the director) sends out his top secret weapon, a giant toy "combat robot" to defeat the monster. When all else fails they just drop an atomic bomb.

"Cannibal Girl" concludes things and is more along the lines of what the director would later be doing. A punk sex-offender named Bruno drags a girl back to his apartment, shows her the stitches on his hairy ass (which makes her puke), puts on a leather mask and then whips out his dick (which is clearly just a hot dog) and tries to force her to give him a blow job. Instead, she bites it off and pukes again. The end.

Basically, Horror Heaven is just a collection of the director's home movies and it will be of interest only to his diehard fans; and even many of them might not even be interested in watching this. The GODZILLA spoof, which features some very crude stop-motion animation and some knowing winks at those movies, is easily the best of the lot. No slight on Buttgereit, though. He's very talented and his other movies are worth watching (granted you have a strong stomach).

★1/2

Nekromantik (1987)

Directed by:

Jörg Buttgereit

Even though there are hundreds of more graphic movies on the market, Nekromantik is still going to be very strong stuff to the majority of casual horror fans. The big difference between this one and the others is its availability. While most 'extreme' titles will forever remain in obscurity, only to be traded around between sick-movie devotees on dupe tapes and bootleg DVD-R's, this one has actually had several official releases on video and DVD. This not only makes it one of the sickest genre films widely available, but also ensures it a strong cult following and a reputation as one of the ultimate gross-out films. There's no doubting that by conventional standards this is about as repulsive and perverse as it gets. There's ample reason to condemn this film, yet at the same there's reason to defend it because it's effective, visually interesting and achieves exactly what it sets out to achieve. My mixed feelings aside, I'm giving it a positive score because on its own sick terms its a success. Rob (Daktari Lorenz) works days cleaning dead bodies up from fatal car crashes on the Autobahn, develops a sick fascination with death and collects body parts and internal organs which he stores in mason jars back at his cramped apartment. In order to spice up a rocky relationship with his equally disturbed necro girlfriend (Beatrice M), he brings home a rotten corpse for a ménage-a-trois, which backfires when she decides she prefers the, uh, stiff to him!

The grainy, low-budget photography adds to the oppressive, suffocating atmosphere and there is certainly enough depravity to go around, including one of the most twisted and memorable endings in horror history. Plus, a real rabbit is killed and skinned, a cat is fake killed (at least I hope it's fake), there are some mildly interesting arty indulgences and loads of full (often unappealing) nudity from both sexes. Film Threat was the first to release a subtitled and unrated (would certainly be X) version here in America and also handled distribution of the 1991 sequel; with both titles eventually being distributed on DVD by Barrel Entertainment. A documentary about this film's production called Corpse Fucking Art was also released.

★★1/2