The abysmal Nekromantik was finally released on blu-ray a couple weeks ago. This is not something the world needed.
There are numerous horror films that tread
that fine line between art and exploitation, sometimes finding a middle ground
while other examples tend to spill over into extremes. Jörg Buttgereit’s 1987 homemade Super 8
shocker and necrophilia love story Nekromantik
finds itself in the latter category and not necessarily for the
better. Banned outright in many
countries around the world, the controversial and scandalous German grindhouse
sensation came under fire in its native homeland for defying censorship
standards of West Germany.
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| "She keeps saying things are dead in the bedroom. Now I know why." |
Around the
time its sequel Nekromantik 2 was
making waves amid German authorities, mail orders of Nekromantik were temporarily banned and the film went out of print
for quite some time. Only recently did
Cult Epics make the much sought after transgressor a remastered collector’s
edition Blu-Ray, limited to 10,000 units.
Now, the question is, was it worth all the dialogue caused by its
inception?
The film tells the story of Rob, who works
for a company which cleans up after deceased remains from accidents or
murders. In Rob’s spare time, he brings
home body parts and practices necrophilia with his girlfriend Betty. One day on the job, he retrieves a unique
romantic present for himself and Betty: a fully intact decomposing human
corpse. Soon with the help of a metallic
pipe for a phallus, the couple engages in a threesome with the body as
writer-director Buttgereit lingers over the sordid sexuality on display and it’s
unclear whether or not the death obsessed duo also practices cannibalism.
During these scenes, a lovely piano concerto,
composed by the actor portraying Rob, fills the soundtrack that modern viewers
will likely associate with the sick irony of internet shock videos like 2 Girls 1 Cup. Spliced in between are scenes of a rabbit being
murdered and skinned by a professional rabbit breeder on the job, heaping
animal cruelty onto the steadily rising pile of atrocities. After being fired and dumped by Betty, who
takes the corpse with her, Rob loses it and kills Betty’s cat before bathing
himself in its entrails. Soon Rob
murders a prostitute and rapes her body before eventually disemboweling himself
in the moment of sexual climax, replete with an over the top ejaculation scene
of semen and blood that would make Lars Von Trier blush.
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| "I really hate the dentist." |
And that’s really it. Beyond some dream sequences suggesting Rob’s
twisted thoughts and a loose connection between sex and death as transcendence,
Nekromantik is dull and flat. There’s really nothing to these characters
whose sole existence is to perform aberrant sex in front of the camera amid a
prosthetic corpse. The plot, if you can
call it such, merely meanders with these underwritten saps’ foray into murder
and self-destruction. If Buttgereit has
an underlying point, it is to create a scandal to make a name for himself. As short as Nekromantik’s running time runs, the film feels torpid and padded
out. Loose links to Nazi fascist
symbolism are drawn by the insignia printed on the cleanup company vans, and
there’s an underlying notion of unspeakable acts taking place within the closed
walls of bunkers.
Still, it’s a complete
stretch of a thinly veiled attempt to intellectualize mere grotesquerie
ultimately created for our shock value.
When esteemed BBC film critic Mark Kermode presented his condemnation of
Srđan Spasojević's A
Serbian Film, understandable immediate comparisons to Buttgereit were
drawn. I myself, however, would like to
believe A Serbian Film is better at
being A Serbian Film than Nekromantik is at being a movie.
-Andrew Kotwicki