For so many reasons, it’s not a film you’d want to watch for fun and if you’re offended by it, that’s exactly what Buttgereit wanted.
Nekromantik 1987 ending full#
Nekromantik is not a pleasant film, full of indelible images that you probably won’t like one bit, but it was never meant to be. We later get a nasty – though faked – scene involving a cat which serves more of a narrative purpose, but the rabbit skinning seems superfluous, just another provocation in a film already overflowing with them. It’s a confrontational enough film already without it.
The latter feels like a cheap ploy, a moment of opportunism – Buttgereit was able to film a rabbit farmer performing the deed – that Nekromantik didn’t really need. Even at just 70 minutes, there’s a lot of padding between the audacious, deliberately provocative set-pieces – the scene with a man accidentally shooting his neighbour and disposing of the body drags on and on – and be warned that there’s a real, very graphic, next to impossible to watch and impossible to justify scene where a real rabbit is killed and skinned. There are flaws, some more serious than others. Whether he succeeded is up to you, but you have to admire that he tried. It’s clear that Buttgereit was doing everything he could to make a decent film. There’s none of that “it’ll do” attitude you all too often get with ultra-low-budget films. Compare and contrast it with the glut of shot on video monstrosities that trailed in its wake, a cottage industry of German extreme gore films like Andreas Schnaas’ Violent Shit (1989) and its sequels and the films of Olaf Ittenbach ( Black Past (1989), The Burning Moon (1992), Premutos: The Fallen Angel (1997) et al) which had very little going for them except a plethora of cheap make-up effects.īuttgereit doesn’t treat the film for cheap laughs.
Nekromantik 1987 ending movie#
Though essentially a home movie (it was shot, like Buttgereit’s earlier short films, on 8mm stock), Buttgereit treats it like a “proper” film, Resources were thin on the ground, but he still tries to get the most out of them. After failing to perform with a prostitute, he kills her and returns home for one last act of perversion, taking his own life in the bloodiest fashion imaginable while masturbating. In a fit of depression, he bathes in the blood of a cat, visits a cinema showing a horror film and tries to take an overdose. But when Rob is fired for always being late, Betty leaves him, taking the corpse with her.
Fashioning an erect penis out of a length of steel pipe and fitting it with a condom, the couple have sex with the corpse, hanging their “partner” up on the wall when they’ve finished with him. Elsewhere, a drunken man accidentally shoots a gardener and dumps the body – which Rob finds and returns home with as an aid to pep up his sex life with Betty. Betty is no less perverse, bathing in blood-stained water. It suits him, as he’s a secret necrophile and gets off on taking body parts home to the flat he shares with his wife Betty (Beatrice M.), pickling them in jars. Rob Schmadtke (Daktari Lorenz) works for Joe’s Cleaning Agency as part of a team that turns up and scrapes the body parts off the road after traffic accidents. A dark, uncomfortable intelligence to be sure, but it’s a more interesting film than might at first meet the eye. And it retains much of its power to shock and offend all these years later for, despite its technical shortcomings and some terrible acting, there’s an intelligence at work here. Jörg Buttgereit’s debut feature Nekromantik was quite the cause celebre among horror fans in the late 1980s and early 1990s, initially traded on often impenetrable bootleg tapes, it reputation for being fiercely transgressive preceding it wherever it went.
0 kommentar(er)
