Extreme: Nekromantik (1989)

Er... hmm... a real oddity this one - described by its director Jorg Buttgereit as "corpse fucking art" and shot using an 8mm camera. The film is nothing short of cheap, pretentious, and, in all honesty, boring. Despite what you may have heard about this, the subject matter is treated with delicacy, so that when the necrophilia scene finally arrives it resembles some arty student flick, with mellow piano music and over the top strobe work. It's a real head fuck actually! The story concerns a couple that get sexually aroused over dead body parts and bathing in blood. The male half of the couple works for a clean up crew. Then, one day, he decides to bring back the decomposed corpse of a shooting accident (the accident in question is hilariously funny, but you'll have to see the film to know what I mean) so that he and his girlfriend can partake in a kinky threesome! When our hero loses his job, however, his other half takes off with the corpse, which promptly drives him insane! Firstly, he batters a cat to death (not a real cat) after feeding it a human heart. Then he goes to watch a movie featuring a woman being chased around by a maniac (complete with pinched sound effects from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Fulci's Zombie - notify the copyright police someone!). Following this he kills a hooker, bonks her on a gravestone and then decapitates the cemetery caretaker who finds them. This is the gore highlight with the head severed below the nose and a totally inept mannequin dummy flapping its legs about! There are a couple of dream sequences too (you can virtually hear Buttgereit chanting "Ooooooooh arty!") and the ending features a laughably prosthetic penis and, literally, a waterfall of semen and blood spitting out of it while our fucked up friend disembowels himself. It is, clearly, supposed to be shocking, but it is actually vaguely amusing. The effect is too phoney to be convincing, and the film - as a whole - too preposterous to be anything but laughable (check out the scene where the ‘hero’ jumps around a park playing with intestines to a synthesiser score). Overall then, Nekromantik is a movie that copes only mildly well with its tiny budget, but it is a real chore to sit through, even despite the short 70 minute running time. There is at least one nasty scene (just so you are warned) where Buttgereit takes his camcorder along to a rabbit farm and films the skinning of a bunny (which is worked into the plot at the end). It was at least going to happen anyway so there can be no Cannibal Holocaust -type of accusations aimed at the director, but, just like the turtle flaying in Deodato's movie, it is still horrible to sit through. For a supposed ‘hardcore’ horror film, this is the only problematic scene in amongst the lousy prosthetics and laughable philosophising (not even worthy of high school philosophy student who has just discovered the Sisters of Mercy). This movie, if you’ll pardon the slightly predictable terminology, sucks!

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