a jaded viewer reviews the world of horror, splatter, gore, cult, grindhouse, trash, b-movie, erotica, indie, asian and exploitation films
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Unrated (Trailer)
I'd have to say my college years represented the golden era of when I watched horror movies religiously. I would scour the interweb looking for the most fucked up goriest horror movies ever made.
So it's pretty fitting that I'd came across German goremeister Andreas Schnaas' Violent Shit trilogy and got hooked by the amounts of gore and splatter a little indie movie could hold.
Schnaas has made a few others, most notably Nikos the Impaler and his newest horror opus Don't Wake the Dead.
But in his new movie he joins with a new German horror auteur Timo Rose to co-direct a splatter film the likes we've all haven't seen before.
So what happens when these 2 join forces?
We get Unrated.
From the looks of the trailer, we're going to get some fucked up slashers as well as supple amounts of gratuitous nudity. Good times.
Slashers with names like "Death Trooper", "Templar", "Succubus", "HellHound", "Melting Man", "Fat Zombie", "Slice Face" and "Ragnator".
I can't wait for this. Kudos for the heads up and trailer from Fangoria.
Before Uwe Boll made the words German + Director + Movie = an untouchable, horrible combination, there were a few awesome German directors that revolutionized the gore/splatter films of the 80s and 90s.
The trio of Jorg Buttgereit, Andreas Schnaas and Olaf Ittenbach were the masters of German horror.
Buttgereit is now irrelevant, Schnaas is still around having teamed with Troma for Nikos the Impaler but it's Olaf Ittenbach who has made the straight to DVD gorefest his playground. Call it gore-emax.
Since Ittenbach's gore masterpiece Premutos, he's regurgitated some awesome gore-a-paloozas but always with bad acting, a stupid plot and horrible editing and sound mixing. Mind you he's been the special effects guy for most of Boll's films so if he's been getting advice from Uwe, it's been SARS like. So infectious that it makes most of Ittenbach's films almost unwatchable.
I said almost.
Because you can't discount the gore factor. I've said it before, just like nudity, gore alone can't save a movie, no matter how good the splatter is.
Gratuitous nudity, splatter and gore and plot/acting/ending all have to be in sync for a good horror movie. 1 out of 3 ain't gonna cut it.
Boring Plot-O-Matic
What started with a routine divorce between Natalie Stein and her husband Tim, will soon take a turn into the unexpected and evolve into scenes of torture, bloodshed and slaughter.
Awesome Review-O-Matic
If you said to me what if Olaf Ittenbach made a torture porn movie I would have been fuckin excited. The torture and gore would be over the top and unbelievably bloody and realistic.
The only problem with Ittenbach doing torture porn is there is no plot in torture porn. The fact Ittenbach writes horrible scripts makes it more aggravating. He also casts people who can't act. I mean really can't act. I think he puts in his FX crew as actors. I'm serious.
C'mon Olaf, there's gotta be Nazi gold money to hire some real actors.
Natalie (played by Olaf's wife, Martina) is our main goody two shoes. Her German accent is so thick, one can barely understand the Germ-glish that she's trying to dialogue out. Why narrate a movie when we can barely understand it. It sounded like a McD's drive thru.
Ittenbach's plot is all over the place. It tries to be all Rashomon with some Pulp Fiction thrown in regarding some missing cocaine and a million dollars. But really, this is torture porn so let's just descrube the gore/splatter torture scenes.
1.) Pimp Hitman vs Natalie
Highlights include:
-Repeated punches to the face -Finger slicing -Toe slicing -Glass shrapnel dicing
Flashback highlights include:
-Chainsaw child-a-cide (extra awesomeness!)
2.) Daniel vs Natalie
Highlights include:
-Daniel goes full frontal and dismembers a body -Head decaps -Arms and Legs decaps -Torso decaps -Ankle decaps -Head decaps (via torture) -Ocular trauma -Hammer arm trauma -Needle in the eye trauma -Multiple OJ like stabbings
Flashback highlights include:
-Gunshot blast to the head (extra awesomeness!) -Knife in the mouth -Knife stabbings (x100) -Meat cleaver to the neck -Throat slicing -Meat pounder to the face -Intenstines gushing
That flashback is one of the best scenes in the movie, so check it out below.
You good? Is that enough? No need for a gore-ipedia for this review. Towards the end, the backround music got really loud and actually fucked up the dialogue that you could barely hear whats the actors were saying.
Seriously Olaf, WHAT THE FUCK??? The twist ending was outright predictable as we get a full reveal of whose pulling the strings but the fucked up sound editing made it so you couldn't even listen to whats being said.
The shitty plot, the horrible acting were bad enough. But fucked up sound editing? That's where I draw the fuckin line.
You can't argue with the gore. But you can argue with everything else. For your career Olaf, stop listening to Uwe Boll. And stop writing your own shit. And get some actors. Is that too much to ask?
Did all the Fulci disciple horror directors move to France?
It seems like it as the French delivered another splatter-ific, gore-hound's dream, nightmare-phobia world in Frontiere(s).
Just like Inside, this movie is filled with buckets of intense gore and bloodshed. And because of that, I'll forgive the mish mash of American horror genres they put into this mess.
Let me start off by saying, the world thinks America is filled with gun toting, inbred rednecks (with some pockets of KKK and Neo-Nazi-ish pieces of shit in there too).
Well I'm not going to say the US is a cookie cutter wonderland but Europe seems to be fucked up as well. That father from Austria comes to mind. And the French riots in 2005 shouldn't be overlooked as some major problems in France.
So it's good to know there are some inbred, cannibal neo-nazi families on the borderland of France.
Plot-O-Matic
A couple of French hipsters take off to the French frontiere aka border after their Reservoir Dogs heist in riot prone Paris. Yasmine, our pregnant femme and her tough guy boyfriend try to meet up with the other heisters and end up a hostel/inn that has that oh so fucked up family that's worse than your own during Thanksgiving
Influences
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Haute Tension, The Descent, Hostel, Saw
Rewind the Insanity
OK. It's not very original. Sometimes I think the up and coming French horror directors watch our American horror crap and do the remake thing in reverse.
Dear France,
We currently suck at horror. Don't copy us.
-the jaded viewer (USA)
That's not too say this flick isn't good. It's premise is CTRL-C from our best horror movies as you can see above. But the conventions are copied to a tee.
-Teenagers resting in a seemingly eerie "hostel"
-Oversexed males egos are stroked with some French eye candy "pleasure" with the hot looking sisters
-The patriarch is always some old, white haired, insane brutal killer looking for an heir
-There's the good son who obeys orders
-There's the bad son who does the dirty work
-The Leatherface guy
-The young daughter who's totally bonkers
Yup. Same horror conventions that we've all seen before. But those can be forgiven when all other horror cylinders are working well.
The visuals are clever and scary. The barn interiors and butcher-ish morgue only add to the decadent setting.
And now to the scenes of gore! gore! gore!
The movie is frenetically paced with the scenes of carnage. Each chase is filled with mouting tensions between each slaughter. The ending is done with editing insanity as Ripley-like Yasmine escapes from her captors. Without these scenes of terror and unrelenting gore, Frontiere(s) would be yet another After Dark Horrorfest flick thrown into the used DVD bin.
That's the best part of it. The prudish Hollywood system would never create a movie like this with its over the top gore and savage beating of the heroine.
Frontiere(s) is currently out in limited theatrical release and it comes out on DVD on 5/13. French horror has always been cutting edge and they go to the cliff on this one. Frontiere(s) splatter and extreme scenes of carnage makes it's American counterparts look Disney-ish in comparison.
I'm not going to say this made me all giddy like Inside did. But at leastthe gorehound in me was entertained from start to finish.
The inevitable sequel is always determined if its better than the original. In the case of Nekromantik, it kinda is.
Buttgereit (still in classic art house mode) wiggles in David Lynchian imagery, classical music and corpse fucking.
And he does it so damn well.
The movie begins with the ending of the 1st movie in all its climactic, volcano glory.
The story (or lack therof) introduces Monika, a Rob loving necro herself who digs up poor Rob (our sick and depraved hero from part 1) and lets it be known that all Germans are into this sort of stuff.
Mind you, you'd think that riggo mortus would be an issue but logistics be damned!
Monika (played by Monika M. how original!) takes a bath with Rob (sorta like Bert and Ernie in those rub a dub tub scenes and only if Ernie was a rotting corpse and we all know Bert is evil)
She cuts off Rob's penis and stuffs it into the fridge (you make the joke).
Then Monika meets Mark (who voices pornos) and he discovers Monika's hobbies are little offbeat. But Monika is determined to make things work in her twisted world and in the shocking ending, we see her devious plan come to fruition.
The ending alone is by far the most clever yet perverted sickest shit I've ever seen. And as you may or may not want to know, let's spoil it for you nevertheless.
How do you solve your corpse fucking problem and your love of alivey flesh?
Well...
As Monika's ruse unfolds, she and Mark get down and dirty but alas poor Mark has no idea what's in store. Monika hacksaws his head most grusomely and replaces it with Rob.
What better way to get best of both worlds. Alas her dilemma is solved and for the audience, gore and sexhounds rejoice.
Nekromantik 2 goes on a whole new direction this time. Buttgereit doesn't go for shock value (well yeah he does but in its in his nature you know?). This time around, Jorg goes for what the title is all about. NEKRO + ROMANTIK. Get it?
Monika's love for both the stiff corpse that is Rob and the satisfaction of sexual desire is perfectly molded into one during the climatic final scene.
So let's just get this straight here. It's one fucked up movie. Buttgereit dresses part 2 in his sick blood spurting, seal dissecting package but at the end of the day, its still a movie about fucking a corpse.
The FX are still top notch (for its day) and Rob's sickly, greenish vomit inducing corpse is the star. Buttgereit giddyups into territory nobody else goes to and his sequel delivers the goods.
Nekromantik 2 is splatter-necro-core at its best. And for Buttgereit, the fact that he single handidly created a new sub sub genre, deserves around a round of decomposing applause.
I'd have to say my college years represented the golden era of when I watched horror movies religiously. I would scour the interweb looking for the most fucked up goriest horror movies ever made.
The story (or lack therof) introduces Monika, a Rob loving necro herself who digs up poor Rob (our sick and depraved hero from part 1) and lets it be known that all Germans are into this sort of stuff.
As Monika's ruse unfolds, she and Mark get down and dirty but alas poor Mark has no idea what's in store. Monika hacksaws his head most grusomely and replaces it with Rob.
