Easily the most offensive film since Pasolini's Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom. The gore for gore's sake crowd will love this one, but anyone looking for plot, characterization, or even a story will come away disappointed and probably nauseated.
Robert Schmadtke (Lorenz) has a job cleaning up bodies after car accidents. Great work if you can get it, especially if your a necrophile like Rob and his girlfriend Betty. Rob has been content with bringing home individual parts and preserving them in jars, but when the opportunity to acquire a seriously decomposed cadaver arises he can't resist. Betty is delighted at the surprise Rob has brought home, and the three embark upon the most twisted three way the screen has ever seen.
Such utopian relationships are doomed to failure, though. Rob is fired after showing up late for work once too often. Disgusted with Rob's failure (it's hard to believe ANYTHING could disgust these people), Betty leaves, taking the corpse with her.
What follows is a long, disjointed series of segments in which Rob seeks to satisfy his bizarre urges by himself. He feeds a human heart to a cat, then bathes in the cat's entrails. He murders and rapes a prostitute, in that order. All this culminates in a horribly disturbing and perverse climax which I guarantee will make the heartiest man cringe.
If a film is to be judged on how close it comes to its own aspirations, Nekromantik is a huge success. The idea is to shock, offend, and push the limits of good taste well beyond the breaking point. All else is secondary to these goals. In this respect Director Buttgereit has succeeded admirably.
On the other hand, this movie is extremely unpleasant to sit through. I came away feeling like I had been bashed in the face with a fencepost. The shock scenes might have been more acceptable (and for that matter, effective) had the story or characters been better fleshed out, but it seems like the only point here is to nauseate the viewer. Nekromanitik has become something of a legend in horror circles, so completists may want to give it a try, but everyone else should save themselves the agony.