I've always said that the truest form of love was a love you could share with a person your entire lives... and beyond. A lot of people would think this beyond abnormal and more than a little deranged. Hey, when you've know a love this powerful, then come back and see if you're still preaching! Then again, there are those sick fucks out there who just like to have freaky sex with random corpses... it's not exactly the same thing... no, really, what I do is beautiful and devoted, what these people do is nauseating and wrong... right? Anyway, such is the life of the necrophiliac, or in this case, the Nekromantik. Yes, it's that infamous German film from weirdo director (who was also the writer, producer, actor, special FX artist, editor, set decorator, casting director, caterer, key grip, gaffer, assistant to the director, assistant to the caterer, assistant to the assistant's caterer, fluffer for the producer, best boy's assistant's assistant, etc.) Jörg Buttgereit. As you may have seen or heard, this film is not for the weak of heart, nor the queasy of stomach, because there's some muy sicko shite on display. Of course, I had no problem sitting through the perversion and corpse molestation (though the eyeball sucking scene made me blink a few times and shout "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!"). My only problem was sitting through the watered down story. I'd just like to say that if anyone ever refers to Nekromantik as "plot heavy", you have my legal permission to punch them in the balls/ovaries and gouge off their nose with a plastic spork.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes shock value is all a film needs, but in this case, well, that wasn't the case. Sure, sex with dead bodies (especially one as gruesome as the one the FX team made here) is a disturbing thing, but once you get past the initial twist in your gut and remember that these are just foam latex bodies, artificial slime, plastic eyes and watered down ketchup (or "catsup" for you fruity Southern types), you realize there's no real story here and the time seems to drag. As we open, a crabby couple is headed to a party of some kind. Who these people are and where it is they're going isn't important though, because they die in a horrible car accident just moments after being introduced. Already I have to bitch about this film, all because of this fucking couple. First, the woman greets us to their part of the story by dropping her panties (which look like the kind of underwear a 5 year old girl would wear) and watering the side of the road. I hate chicks who have the bladders of infants and have to piss in public. As for her male partner, the guy obviously fished his driver's license from the bottom of a box of Fuhr'r Krunch ("Now vit Krunchun Berries!") cereal, because he's the most incompetent motorist I've ever seen... and my driver's ed class was 80% female... The guy's first "what the fuck are you doing you schnitzel sucking goon?!" mistake is trying to read a map while he's driving. Normally this could be excused, except the map is in his woman's lap and he's apparently so damn near sighted that he has to bury his face in her lap to look at the friggin' thing! And when he looks up, he suddenly notices the large, red, flashing lights of a roadblock warning of some kind of construction, sending the doomed duo off road and to a violent orgy of twisted metal. As if the map thing wasn't proof enough this guy was blind, you're telling me he couldn't see those bright red lights flashing in the pitch darkness from a mile off?! Maybe Germans are just utter retards... that would explain a lot though... like the last century.
Anyway, as I said, the couple die and rightfully so. The next morning, Joe's Streetcleaning Agency is called in to do the dirty work and cut the corpses free of their twisted metal coffin. You'd think there'd be a team of investigators around making a report on the incident, but logic is thrown out the window and instead the boys from Joe's take care of all that shit. One streetcleaner named Robert Schmadtke decides to steal from the company pocket, as he yanks a stray eyeball from the guy corpse, slips it into his pocket and heads merrily home after work. At home, he plops the occular orb into a jar of formaldehyde and adds it to his collection. Yes, it seems Mr. Schmadtke has been dipping into the corporate reserves, only unlike most people who are content with stealing pens, paper clips and vibrating artificial vaginas, Rob's swiping vital organs, hands and even an unborn fetus... you'd think someone would notice stuff like that missing from bodies. Then again, since Joe's employees don't even bother to utilize breathing masks or gloves when doing their job, I imagine they wouldn't be too picky on collecting complete cadavers, would they. If Rob wasn't weird enough for you, we have his girlfriend Betty with whom he lives and plays. Betty's fairly attractive for a German woman (who usually have Adam's Apples that would put my balls to shame as a form of masculine physicality), but it's the little pet peeves that get me, just like any woman. The only things is, where as your average woman will pick her nose or bitch about the people she works with or fart during sex, Betty likes to bathe in bloody water while watching documentaries on necrophiliacs and wearing sunglasses... yes, I said SUNGLASSES!
Speaking of that documentary, I guess it's important to actually listen to it as the couple watch on separate TVs. If anything we hear is an indication (not to mention the flashbacks that Robert has), both our young necrophiliacs experienced some kind of death related trauma in their lives, which not only desensitized them to the dark hereafter, but left them with a boner-fied fetish for it... and I wish they'd stop looking at me like that, I'm not into the whole couples thing... unless they're a couple of lesbians of course. Not restricted solely to the bedroom and the bathtub, our couple's also gone the Ed Gein route, the Martha Stewarts of the demised and the morbid as they create decorative furniture and paper weights from some of the leftovers Robert brings home from the office. Elsewhere, we get another fine example of how retarded the German people are, when we witness a lumpy lummox of a man jammin' out to Nazi marching band music and playing with his little rifle. When a bird flies over head and the guys pops a few caps at the winged rodent, he accidentally shoots his fruity neighbor in the neck, who happens to be up in an apple tree harvesting nature's goodness at the time. The man monster collapses, tangled up in his own step ladder, and winds up dead in his yard. So, what does the lumpy fellow do? He gathers the big goon up in a wheelbarrow and carts his big ass down to the street corner... I wonder if the krauts really are ALL this stupid, or if the moronic ones just happened to wander into this movie. Oh well, I guess only the lawn gnome knows the real truth...
Back to our happy couple, Rob's next "corporate acquisition" is the big one, when he manages to sneak home an entire drown victim... who must've been dead in that pond for a few years given how decayed and nasty looking the poor schlub is! His flesh is a dark grey, he's missing an eye, his large intestines are exposed courtesy of a large tear in his abdomen, and he's thin to the point of "extra in an Italian zombie movie", complete with a healthy layer of slime... that's the topper folks, have intercourse with the dead is bad enough, but this guy comes pre-lubricated! Gah! Despite all these "positive" points, Mr. Drown Victim (who I shall now refer to as Hans Von Drownenheimer) lacks one major ingredient for a sexual partner: functioning genitalia... make that genitalia of ANY kind. To help remedy this misfortune though, Rob and Betty saw off a chair leg, slip on a condom, and lodge that pseudo-boner into Hans's abdomen. Now Hans has wood (in a literal sense) and the problem's solved... and our problem is just beginning. As you can probably (and most likely in gut wrenching terror) guess, Rob and Betty have a manage a trois with their new moldy, discolored pile o' guts and flesh, which includes licking the slime that glistens on his, slipping their tongues around behind his decayed teeth (he lacks lips by now), Betty impaling herself on the chair leg (that's gotta hoit) and the sucking of Hans's loose eyeball... welcome to flavor country children, only today's flavor is very old, very spoiled and very inedible... Speaking of inedible, you have to wonder the health risks that these two are taking my licking a festering corpse and sucking it's eyeball. Somehow I doubt Hans is exactly sterilized in terms of germs and disease.
The next day, Rob goes to work all bright-eyed and bushy balled, as his sex life has pretty much reached it's peak (though the real climax is later). The only problem is, when he does go to work, he shows up late, which is the last straw for his supervisor, who wasn't too pleased to come into work and find Rob's clean up clothes unwashed and spawning fungus in his locker, left there over the weekend. When the supervisor complains to the boss, poor necrophucking Rob loses his dream job. Meanwhile, all Betty does is sit home all day, molesting the corpse, wrapping her legs around it's decaying cranium and reading it trashy romance novels with German Fabios on the covers. Of course, when Rob returns home with the news of his new full time job as an unemployed slouch, Betty goes off on him and bitches him out for losing such a sweet gig. No surprise, instead of offering to get a job herself and pull some of her fucking dead ass weight for once, the bitch instead tongue lashes Robert about how she could go out and find another man with real money to support her and keep her in the finest high class corpses for the rest of her life... and in Germany, I don't doubt that claim for a second. This is of course depresses me, as it illustrates once again what women really look for and reminds me that I'm poor and therefore shall forever be a very lonely Death God... then again, having the head of a jackal probably doesn't help me... maybe it's time for me to move to Germany.
In order to try and win his beloved necromantic back, Robert goes out and goes for the old reliable: buy the bitch a cat. Then again, anyone whose seen Trainspotting knows what happens why you try to win a woman with a cat. By the time he gets back home it's already too late, as our not-so-dynamic hero finds his very own Dear Jörg letter (get it? you know how it's supposed to be a Dear John letter, but since it's German, I changed John to Jörg... remember that sitcom "Dear John"? Yeah, neither do I...) and notices a big greasy stain on his wall where Hans used to hang. That's right, not only did Betty leave him, but the bitch also took the body with her! Man, if Krissy ever left me and took our harem of slave girls with her, I'd be pretty damn pissed that's for sure. How Betty managed to drag the rotting Hans out of their apartment during her sudden annexation unnoticed and without incident is a mystery, but the real story is how much it must suck to be Robert and have your woman leave you for a stiff... whose actually pretty squishy come to think of it. As for Rob, he does what every heart broken guy does when his best girl dumps him: he burns all his pictures of her and throws the cat he bought for her into a pillow case and smashes it all over the walls, then cuts it open and slathers the guts all over himself in the bathtub. We've all been there, right guys? After his little "alone time" tub scene, Mr. Schmadtke goes out for a night of exploitation slasher cinema to sooth his troubled brow. Here we learn another reason why tourists bother with Germany: at the theater you can buy popcorn, candy bars and BEER in the lobby! Well, I'm not sure about the popcorn and candy bars, but they've got BEER for sale right there in the lobby! After all, nothing heightens a night out at Fuhrer Disney's latest animated family flop for dad than a couple of cold longnecks! Germans aren't all bad... except for that whole Holocaust thing, but we won't get into that in this review.
Sadly it soon becomes VERY apparent as to why the Germans sell alcohol at their theaters: their movies SUCK! As if Zombie '90 wasn't proof enough, the slasher flick Rob goes to see makes The House on the Edge of the Park look like The Silence of the Lambs! Obviously disturbed by such a terrible waste of time and money, Rob goes home, pops some pills and washes them down with a bottle of German booze. I understand completely, I had to do the same thing after watching The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. After hallucinating a while, Robert realizes he's horny and has to get his rocks off, so to ease the transition into single life, he goes out and picks up a warm, loving, good natured German whore. Taking her to a graveyard, he finds himself impotent at a most inopportune time and gets laughed at for his flacid Bratwurst, sending him into a temporary madness and strangling her to death, to which she can only offer a pathetic bout of resistance. Now that's she's no longer breathing, Rob gets over that temporary lapse in his performance and bangs away on the body, unloading in her and leaving PLENTY of DNA evidence for whoever finds her. Death, the new Viagra.
The next morning when he wakes up next to his victim, Rob is filled with regret and sorrow... when he realizes that he's still at the scene of the crime and the cemetery's groundskeeper has just stumbled upon the whole situation! That's easily remedied though, as Rob uses the guy's shovel to lob off the geyser's head from the top row of teeth up, making for one clean cut with what must be a shovel that's been grounded down to a surgical scalpel's edge. Hmmmm, guess the groundskeeper had a mad on for that stubborn, hard to break up top soil. Unless he's got Cemetery Man problems.
It's at this point that Rob seems to elate in some kind of life revelation that exposes him to the miracle of existence in it's truest and most beautiful form, which inspires him enough that he goes home and jerks off, then stabs himself in the stomach upon climax and dies in a flood of white and red. As if it wasn't unbelievable enough that Rob could shoot THAT MUCH man milk on impact, though I could almost understand it, considering he gets off on death, so logically his own would be a huge thrill for him, but where's the blood coming from?! How does a man shoot blood from his prick after stabbing himself in the stomach?! Wouldn't he need to impale his kidneys or his testicles for that kind of effect?! Not being one to dwell on shit like this (for fear of my head exploding Scanners style), I'll move on and let you know that the movie ends appropriately enough as a babe in high heels plants a shovel in Rob's grave, with ominous intents in store. What happens next? That's for Nekromantik 2 to decide.
As far as Nekromantik goes, well, beyond the lack of real story and the disturbing (yet at the same time annoying as fuck, including whiny little Robert who lets everyone step all over him) characters, there were a couple positive aspects. If nothing else, the film's minimal score is actually pretty damn amusing! Very upbeat at times, so as to make you want to put a little spring in your step! Other times it's an almost haunting piano piece, yet without losing the very basic approach. Also, I have to hype the FX guys. In a film where I have to watch a German couple engage in a three-way with a corpse, it's nice to know that the corpse is very putridly done, in a good sense. So disgusting that it gets the desired effect: complete disgust. As for Rob's synthetic penis and it's geyser of blood and semen, I think the FX crew was a little, shall we say, "generous", and leave it at that. As for Buttgereit's direction, it all seems pretty standard, with the occasional psychopathic dream sequence. In addition to the sequel, Buttgereit also went on to direct an episode of the Sci-Fi Channel original series "Lexx", but since I don't watch the show I couldn't tell you if it was any good. However, if you combine a show about an intergalactic sex toy and a director notorious for making films about death and necrophilia, then you can probably use your imagination and come up with something that shouldn't be on anything outside of Showtime late night... REALLY late night. In a final summary, if watching people get carnal with corpses is your sexual mantra, then this movie's got it all! On the other hand, if you're looking for story, logic and something a little less, oh, I don't know, glorified German freak fuck fetish psycho necro porn, well, Nekromantik should be far from your list of "Holy shit! That's definitely something I gotta see!" movies... not that I imagine you could find this flick at Blockbuster... or most adult video outlets come to think of it... heh heh, "come".
The Moral of the Story: When your girlfriend leaves you for a guy who can't even breathe, suicide's your only hope... though it doesn't mean you can't enjoy yourself on the way out.
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
- Though some of your friends may be able to stomach
Nekromantik, it's still too grotesque to chance for a gathering. Besides, you don't wanna risk your basement/attic/apartment stinking of regurgitated burritos and corn chips all week, do you?!
Sequels: Nekromantik 2
If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: Aftermath or Dead Mate
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