SCHRAMM (1993)

[Update 03/08/2021: Need to redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

You would think a movie that features a hammer to the face, neck slitting, eyeball plucking and foreskin nailing would be exciting, but somehow Jorg Buttgereit found a way to make the 70 minutes to drag by.

The story is very unimportant. It's just about a wacko who lives in an apartment and has a hooker for a neighbor. He kills two people and poses their bodies in sexual positions. It never says how he gets rid of the bodies. The rest of the time he spends hallucinating, having sex with an inflatable sex toy, painting his walls, doing push-ups, putting lipstick on his pecker and then nailing his foreskin to a table. You know, just normal day stuff. I call that Tuesday.

Buttgereit's NEKROMANTIK is a cult masterpiece, but SCHRAMM sucks.

CORPSE FUCKING ART (1987)

Very interesting documentary about the making of NEKROMANTIK, NEKROMANTIK 2 and DER TODESKING. I'm using the term documentary very loosely since all this film actually is is an hour worth of outtakes and footage shot of the sets with audio commentary by Jorg Buttgereit.

My favorite part was the stuff about the original NEKROMANTIK cause that film really did change my life when I saw it for the first time as a teenager. Did you know the cat intestines were actually scrambled eggs painted red?! That's pretty wild. They also used honey in the corpse fucking scene.

Then you got some stuff about DER TODESKING which was just alright. They also showed how they made the time lapse rotting corpse and the dick chopping scene. But the most interesting part, to me, was they actually had even more stories they were going to include in the film, but just didn't, including one about a sad guy who fantasizes about how beautiful and perfect his funeral will be, so he kills himself and only two people show up at his funeral then the gravediggers piss on his coffin. Haha.

Next up was some stuff about NEKROMANTIK 2 and it wasn't very interesting cause I didn't care for the movie much, plus the shitty old VHS tape started fucking up so I couldn't really see what was happening too well.

If you're a fan of Buttgereit or NEKROMANTIK I say it's definitely worth a watch if you can find a copy. I damn sure wouldn't spend much money on it though.

DER TODESKING (1989)

I really dug NEKROMANTIK, but this film made me sleepy. The movie tells the separate stories of a number of people either killing themselves or killing others. Between the stories is a long boring shot of a corpse rotting. That sounds exciting, but it's not.

First off you got a lonely guy doing shit around his apartment for a long time. Then he gets in the bathtub, takes a bunch of stuff and dies. Exciting!

Then (in the highlight of the movie) there's a dude who goes to the video store and rents ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS, except it's not ILSA instead it's a really low budget film about some Nazi's who cut a dude's penis off (on screen!!!) and then smear a swastika on his chest in his own blood. The guy's girlfriend comes home while he's watching the movie and he immediately shoots her in the head splattering her brains all over the wall. He puts a empty picture frame on the wall around her brain particles then hangs himself. OK?

Next there's a lonely guy sitting on a bench. A woman sits down and the dude starts whining like a bitch about his life. The woman pulls out a gun, the dude takes it and shoots himself in the head. Yawn.

Long slow shot of a bridge with subtitles of people's names. WTF?

Woman looking out the window of her apartment sees two lovers below. She stops watching and eats some candy instead then falls asleep and dreams of a child (her?) watching people hump. We then see the two lovers from earlier in bed covered in blood. Uhh?

Woman with gun kills people at a concert. Somebody kills her. I don't give a shit.

Man bangs his head into a wall a bunch. I know the feeling.

Other than curiosity, there is absolutely no reason to watch this film. I like Buttgereit's style of film making, but you must have a story. I know he was going for something, but instead of having seven unfocused stories it would have been better off if he'd concentrated on say like three strong stories instead. That's my two cents.

Watch it if you want, I don't give a shit if you want to waste your time, but don't come bitching at me when you get bored. Skip it.

NEKROMANTIK (1987)

NEKROMANTIK is a justifiably infamous film and even though it's 30+ years old it's still pretty messed up. Younger, first-time viewers though (jaded from all the fucked-up shit on the internet), will probably find the whole thing cheesy, cheap-looking, slow and nowhere as violent as they had expected.  Dated or not, I actually liked the film and honestly think that it deserves, at least, a footnote in The History of Cinema.

Our hero, Rob, is a pathetic loser who's employed cleaning up accidents and crime scenes. Being a deviant freak, he pockets small odds and ends of humans (eyeballs, fingers, etc.) and takes them home to his disgusting apartment and his horrible girlfriend.  She doesn't seem to like Rob, but instead uses him to feed her sick desires of bathing in blood and humping random body parts. One day, Rob makes a huge score and brings home an entire dead body! The two of them, happy as pigs in shit, start making out and fucking the putrefied corpse.

Things take a turn for the worse at his job and he's fired. So now that her supply has dried up, his girlfriend shows her true colours and runs off with the corpse! Dumped for a dried-up corpse, that's gotta hurt. Rob's depressed over the whole thing so [SPOILERS!!!] he kills a cat, bathes in its entrails, watches a shitty slasher movie then kills a few people and fucks a corpse before he stabs himself while popping a boner and shooting a geyser of jizz and blood all over the joint. [END OF SPOILERS!!!]

Interesting film and one of the highlights of 80's cult cinema. Worth at least one viewing.  You might recognize some of the audio since it was used in the Nine Inch Nails song "Reptile".

NSFW images

Part 2 - Nekromantik 2 (1991)