According to the Internet Movie Database’s mini-biography of him, Weisz is a “Renowned video and commercial director, Martin Weisz has shot music videos for such artists as Brandy, Puff Daddy, Korn, Live, Crazytown, Sisqo, Nickelback, Fuel, Mel B, JC Chasez and numerous others”… first off, I’d like to see each of those “talents” and their subsequent friends and family members shived in the asses with rusty lawn mower blades. Secondly, exactly what “renowned” commercials has the man done? I’m more interested in what these “renowned commercials” are than I am in these fuck awful “music” videos he seems to be creating from the Hellborne aborted fetuses and molesters of said fetuses! Anyway, commercials and MTV trash not withstanding, Weisz has a couple of prior feature directing credits to his name as well: a fairly interesting sounding movie called 60 Seconds and this movie, Rohtenburg… which I had just happened to have forwarded to me by a friend a month or so ago and was told to watch but never bothered to watch. If that friend is reading this (and I’m sure she is…), sorry I took so long getting around to it… oh yeah, and sorry I made you think you had AIDS...

One of the more eye-catching things you’ll notice being said about Rohtenburg is the fact that it was “BANNED IN GERMANY!”, but before you start reeling in terror at the idea of a movie so grotesque and controversial that it would be banned from viewing in a country notorious for hideous war crimes and the erotic consumption of each others’ excrement, settle your nerves with a shot (or six) of bourbon and read the review first, then I’ll explain the whole “banning” thing afterwards.

Based on the true story of the notorious “Rohtenburg Cannibal”, our tale is narrated by Katie Armstrong (Keri Russell): an American college student in Germany who’s writing her thesis in Criminal Psychology on the infamous internet man-eater named Oliver Hartwin (Thomas Kretschmann) and his very willing victim: Simon Grombeck (Thomas Huber). Their eventually meeting ended with Simon dead in Oliver’s freezer and Oliver with a very full stomach… full of Simon Grombeck of course… who apparently tasted like pork…

Katie’s less interested in the gore and glamour of the case than she is the emotional and psychological motivations of a man who wants to eat people and a man who wants to be eaten by people. While she goes over their stories and attempts to better understand why these guys ended up like they did, she’s also trying to find any possible leads on getting a copy of a videotape Oliver was said to have made during his time with Simon, which includes the mutilation and following consumption of the man while he was drugged up on pain medication and cheap booze. The tape in question has only been seen by police and the jury members present during Hartwin’s later trial (at which he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison) and it’s not likely Katie will be able to get her hands on a copy, but more of that later. Right now, it’s story time kids, so gather around your ol’ Uncle Anubis in a circle and keep those saucer sized peepers up here. The first one to interrupt me gets a belt sander across your ass and an hour in the Behavior Modification Vortex with this week’s guest disciplinarian: Vlad Tepes.

First we’ll focus on Simon, our victim. Simon Brombeck had an “unfortunate” childhood. When he was a young lad, his mom caught him playing “doctor” with another boy… and yes, they were literally playing doctor and not re-enacting lightsaber fights with their meat swords. As it happens though, Simon turns out to be a sword swallower of the penis variety later in life after all, so I guess he really wasn’t going for his Junior Medical License as I’d thought. Whatever the case, Mrs. Brombeck wasn’t happy to see her boy going gay on her, so she drove her car into a tree and killed herself, disturbing him for life. So, along with his meat-in-the-seat tendencies, Simon also carries this horrible guilt and feeling of abandonment resulting from his mother’s death. Some guys would simply repress those gay urges after something like that, but Simon just can’t resist the attractive and sensitive bartender named Felix who becomes his long time “life partner” and packer of Brombeck brand fudge treats. Felix (and Lil’ Felix) apparently aren’t enough to fill the gaping void (in no way a reference to his mangina) in Simon’s life though, so he discovers an affinity for more extreme underground underground sexual perversions when he starts flogging Flipper to internet images of crime scenes adorned with mutilated bodies and decomposed corpi. I knew a guy like that once. He was generally a nice guy, but he was exiled from his hometown when they caught his with his junk encased in chicken gizzards… that were still attached to the chicken. It’s not that he was a freak, he was just more or less a perverted version of Boo Radley…

From these web-wanking sessions, Simon somehow becomes obsessed with the idea of having his dick severed (there’s that guilt over his mom’s homophobic suicide again) and starts trolling the local butt pirate scene for a willing cabin-boy-of-sorts who will bite his one-eyed wonder worm off for him, referring to it the entire time as his “thing”, illustrating in a creepy tone just how arrested the man’s development is, referring to his dick with such an innocent childhood term. Oddly enough he has difficulty finding a guy in Germany willing to do this for him, so he looks to the internet to find his stud, seeing a posting on a cannibalism message board by a guy who just so happens to be in the market for a guy who’s willing to be carved up and consumed like Christmas goose. After corresponding with the message’s poster, Simon writes a will in which he leaves everything to his beloved Felix and hops a train to the nearby town of Rohtenburg…

On the other side of the coin, we also get to know Oliver Hartwin. Oliver’s childhood mirrors what many kids wind up going through in today’s world of one-night stands and 50-60% divorce rates, when his dad leaves his mom (possibly for another man, it’s not exactly spelled out for us) and young Oliver’s forced to grow up in a one-parent household. The usual Norman Bates-ian/Ed Gein-ish psychological issues come up as Oliver is forced to spend every waking hour taking care of mother, never giving himself time to take an interest in women or work on his socializing skills. As a boy he meets another lad (who may or may not be a delusion of his fractures psyche) in school introduced him to the stable of Grimm fairy tales and convinces him that the only way to keep someone you love with you forever is to literally consume them, digest them, and make them part of you… I had an anecdote to go along with this guy too, but due to a pending court case in the state of Michigan, I’m not allowed to discuss it in any length. It was funny though, trust me on that.

Oliver first puts this theory into practice when he finds a fellow schoolmate who has the same socially dysfunctional issues he has (i.e. he’s bullied in school), so he lures the kid into a shed and proceeds to eat him… I think… though that might’ve been a hallucination too… maybe… I’m not sure. Anyway, Oliver gets older and mom gets sicker. He starts to take an interest in Faces of Death movies and his mom’s in-home care nurse, but the relationship that’s hinted at between the two either ends immediately following Mrs. Hartwin’s death or is simply never chronicled in the context of the movie. Speaking of Mrs. Hartwin’s death, Oliver comes home one day to find her face down in their flooded basement, giving him an unprepared for personal freedom that might explain why things take such a twisted turn for him from here on out…

On a brief side note, Katie’s investigation into Simon and Oliver’s lives parallels much of what’s being revealed to us in the story’s flashbacks, so when we watch Mrs. Hartwin’s demise in the basement, at the same time we see a scene of Katie investigating the same basement, falling through one of the old and rotted wooden steps as the door also happens to slam shut, leaving her terrified and alone in the unlit basement, turning to the flash on her camera as her sole means of illuminating her surroundings. This has no actual impact on the story itself, but the scene is visually inspiring as we see Katie freak out and only get brief glimpses of what’s happening thanks to the camera flash lighting. Sure, it’s pure form over substance, but I liked it. With that said, back to our “This is Your Life!” segment for Oliver Hartwin.

With mom dead and Oliver now free to do with his life as he pleases, he embraces his childhood ideal that consuming people means keeping them with you forever. With his corpsed up mother out of his life, Oliver’s left with a gaping hole in his life that needs to be filled, so the disturbed middle-aged man starts looking for someone tasty to fill that void… preferably of the penis swinging variety, less likely done out of any kind of homosexual tendencies than out of a need to fill in that lack-of-a-father-figure issue he’s been struggling with for the past few decades. Not willing to fuck around with the trials and tribulations of the local dating scene, Oliver gets with the times and hops onto the world wide wasteland to find his prey. After one disappointing poseur who wimps out and runs away crying like a bitch when Oliver gets him all chained up and ready to mutilate in his basement-cum-abattoir, our would-be flesh eater takes another stab at posting his want ad on the same cannibalism message board he used before, this time finding a more willing man who lives not 2 hours drive away and is desperate to fulfill his longtime dream of an oral circumcision…

And so the two meat meet, get to know each other and, after realizing that you couldn’t find a better fitting pair of people this side of crap like match.com or The Dating Game, get down to business with Oliver videotaping the proceedings. Speaking of which, back to Katie, she visits the same cannibal message board that brought these two beef eating soul mates together, posts her interest in finding a copy of Hartwin’s videotape. She soon gets a hit from a member of the board who just so happens to have a copy of the tape and would be glad to give it to her free of charge… all she needs to do is give him/her her address…

We already know what happens between Simon and Oliver thanks to the movie’s opening scenes, but does their emotional transaction go down smoothly, or are their speed bumps on the road to genital mutilation fantasy? What depressing (though semi-humorous) critique does Simon have for his last meal? Are the sad little man-boy’s last moments on Earth the inspiring thing of beauty he’d been hoping for all this time? How did the authorities find out about Oliver’s acts that would lead to his eventual persecution and incarceration? Will Katie’s desire to see the Hartwin video overshadow her common sense when it comes to giving out her home address to people who post on a message board about cannibals!? Whatever happens, I’ll say this much about the ending: I was half expecting some kind of Saw like, “sucker punch the viewer with something out of left field” finale involving Katie, but was happy to find it instead results in something very poignant… that I explain further down in the next few paragraphs.

Deemed by some as “simply a pervert flick for a sick target group” (people who should pray to their uptight Gods that they never come into contact with a Takashi Miike movie, lest their heads explode and their souls burn in an eternal pyre fueled by copies of “Hustler” and John Waters’ soiled bikini briefs), I found the movie to be a haunting (I need to buy a thesaurus) and tragic examination of loneliness and two people desperate to find the one thing in life that can bring them happiness… and you can’t spell “happiness” without p-e-n-i-s! All joking aside, I thought that Rohtenburg was a beautifully (yes, I said “beautifully” jerk-ass, so shut it) put together piece of cinema with strong performances (Kretschmann and Huber were both incredible), excellent use of dreary settings and camera work (Weisz has a great eye and I may actually have to see HHE2 now because of this movie), a very moody soundtrack (listen to it with earphones to get the full effect, it’s… uhm… something that means “haunting” without using the actual word), and a love story that, if it involved a man and a woman instead of two guys meeting on the internet, probably would’ve been accepted just fine by it’s numerous blatantly homophobic critics. I’m not saying you’re a fag bashing hate monger if you don’t like the movie, I’m just saying you’re a fag bashing hate monger is that’s your entire reason for disliking it, because everything else that you could like or dislike about the movie (not to be confused with what an individual can tolerate or not tolerate, mind you) are solely matters of opinion and as such are the only other feedback I’ll consider.

Back to the movie, despite being convinced that Katie’s entire purpose in the movie is to slip a b-list American TV actress into the cast to help sell the product (and to try and balance out the gay factor a little with shots of her in a bathing suit, a tube top and coming out of the shower), I actually started to accept her as an avatar for the audience, convincing us (as the “normal” people watching the events unfold as she narrates them) that this really was a sad and emotional thing happening between these two men and not just another case of Germans taking their fetishes too far. If you didn’t feel bad enough seeing Hartwin and Grombeck’s unhealthy relationship unfold, seeing Katie breaking down and being overwhelmed as she digs further into the story emphasizes those feelings and serves to bring us into a situation that, though most of us can relate to how both men are feeling, would otherwise turn some of us away because of the way these emotions are being presented to us. So yes, despite the fact that I wanted to hate Keri Russell and write her out of the movie entirely, I probably wouldn’t have been as invested in the events transpiring had she been getting gangbanged with links of bratwurst in a Berlin brothel as I’d originally intended for her. That’s right Miss Russell, your orifices will go without the stink of greasy tube meat in intestinal casings for a little bit longer.

Okay, so about that “BANNED IN GERMANY!” thing now. The characters depicted in Rohtenburg (or at least everyone but Felicity as far as I know) are based upon real-life people with their names changed “Dragnet” style. The people on which Hartwin and Grombeck are based did indeed have a “cannibal and meal” type of relationship that was born from an internet message board about cannibalism and those interested in the practice. The guy whom Hartwin is based on (real life cannibal Armin Meiwes) did indeed kill the guy whom Grombeck is based on (Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes) and he did indeed videotape their short but delicious relationship. The act was discovered and, despite the fact that the victim did all of this willingly, the killer was still arrested, tried, found guilty of murder and is currently serving a life sentence for his actions. Now, Germany’s problem with the movie doesn’t come from the subject matter, but from a court ruling saying that the film is damaging to Armin Weiwes’s “personality rights” and therefore cannot be shown in German theaters… the obvious head-slap irony being that a movie like this is somehow damaging to the public image of A MAN WHO KILLED AND CONSUMED ANOTHER MAN, THEN WAS FOUND GUILTY OF THE CRIME AND SENTENCED TO LIFE IN PRISON… what the fuck!? The weirdest part about this isn’t even so much that a movie based on a real person’s life was deemed as inappropriate material for a movie, but that Weisz actually turns the event into a twisted-yet-touching (and no, not in that way, ya perv) tragedy of two people trying to find meaning to their lives, and NOT the exploitation type of movies we always see about people like Ed Gein and Charles Manson! Is Meiwes pissed because he considers himself a heterosexual or asexual being and he doesn’t want to be seen in a gay light (likely shot through a purple or pink filter), or is he just pissed that he committed a crime and now someone else is trying to make money off of it? I don’t get it…

I think I’m going to make a movie about myself, then hire a lawyer to take me to court because said movie doesn’t portray me as I’d like it to, just so I can get a big “BANNED IN AMERICA!” banner plastered across the DVD packaging. Then I can sell a million copies in Europe and Asia and live the rest of my life sitting on my ass typing up more reviews for movies banned in other countries.