First, I was way too young when I first saw Nekromantik. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but it must have been around when I was 13 and met this guy who had access to a weirdly huge variety of movies, considering it was 1990. Some he got through his parents, but I doubt even they would have let their kid see a movie like this that young. Then again, you never know.

Sure, there was a lot of different messed up movies floating around back then, but these are pretty next level. These are definitely transgressive just to be transgressive, although the director seems to have different views on this.

I was actually looking for Der Todesking for a while a few years ago, but I just couldn’t find it anywhere. Then, just yesterday (as I’m writing this), I saw a box called Love & Death. Turns out it has that very movie. Also, I did not realize it was the same director as the one who made Nekromantik.

This guy has been around for a long time, but I don’t think he has ever made a movie that has reached a consensus of being decent, in either sense of the word. I mean, his works are pretty fucked up. Sure, I’ve only seen these four films, but based on very casual reading on his works, it doesn’t seem to get better, in either sense of the word. They are still quite bad and still quite gruesome.

Yet, he does have fans. Now, to be clear, even though I am writing this, I wouldn’t consider myself a fan, exactly. I do appreciate the effort and there is something interesting in a person putting so much effort into being disgusting and transgressive. I mean, I have seen a lot of messed up movies, but these are very different from most like those weird Japanese body horror movies and the levels of pure disgust leave people like Peter Jackson way behind.

On the other hand, the box set includes materials with Buttregeit in them and he seems like a pretty jovial guy. You know, one of those people who doesn’t take his work very seriously. So, what are his movies? Just a cynical attempt at making money? If so, I don’t think it has worked. A philosophical statement? Maybe. Who knows? You could argue they are about censorship on a metalevel or something. You know, just make a movie that will get banned somewhere and you’ll get people discussing censorship.

If nothing else, at least his movies are short. Shortest one of these is only 63 minutes. There just isn’t much to these movies in the plot department, so this will be pretty short overall. The only movie of his here that would fulfill the requirements for a feature these days is Nekromantik 2 at one hour and 42 minutes. However, that does become boring at various points.

Also, his stars seem to have been aware enough to not let him use their full names. You know, keep your distance to his works and if you want to work in acting in the future, these might not be merits in your CV.

Nekromantik
Germany, 1988, dir. Jörg Buttgereit

A half-star review from Letterboxd: I always wonder when I watch these types of movies who it was meant for. Who would spend their time watching a sick movie like this? But then again I did so even though I’m definitely not the target audience, I’m still probably a little sick for sitting through this and similar

A Five-star review from Letterboxd: i am so normal and okay

We have a necrophiliac, Rob, who is having trouble. As one would, if that is your thing. He does work for a company that cleans up various scenes of fatal accidents, so that’s helpful. One day he decides to take a corpse found in a lake home. The corpse is in a very bad condition, but he and his girlfriend attach a makeshift phallus on it to have sex with it. When Rob is fired, his girlfriend leaves and takes the corpse with her.

Rob is very pathetic. After all, his girlfriend chooses a badly decomposed corpse over him. Of course, he also loses a job no-one wants and takes out his frustrations on a helpless animal. Nice hero you have there, Jörg.

This is a gruesome movie and does include violence towards animals, so even if you are fine with watching a couple have sex with a corpse, keep in mind that this is not the only cruelty within the movie. Although, I don’t think they actually hurt the cat. The rabbit, though…

Weirdly, what actually sticks out to me is the music. The sex scene with the corpse has a quite romantic score over it. It gives a different edge to the scene and does make the movie more interesting and worth discussion, even if it is a pretty simple trick.

Nekromantik 2
Germany, 1991, dir. Jörg Buttgereit

A half-star review from Letterboxd: I know that girls post nut clarity was insane

A Five-star review from Letterboxd: actually best sequel ever made

This was gender-swapped and I don’t remember anyone screaming ‘WOKE’ at the top of their lungs. Where are the conservatives when we need them? I’m also out of sequence here, as this came out after the next film I’m covering.

This is a direct continuation of the first film, so here’s a spoiler: Rob killed himself in the end. Here we revisit that scene before our new protagonist digs up the body and takes it into her apartment.

One of the main characters in the movie dubs porn movies. This is what they did back in the day before handheld cameras with good onboard mics. They would shoot the movie and then have other people record the sound, including the foley (for which they just kiss their hands and make whatever other noises are required by slapping themselves or something), in a studio separately. The scene is immediately followed by a sex scene with a corpse.

So, we have a very banal and mechanical scene about sex, where the two performers are pretty bored with the whole thing, immediately followed by a passionate scene with similarly passionate music (it appears they largely just used the same music as in the first film). An obvious juxtaposition there.

All in all, this does feel pretty unnecessary. It is very similar to the first one, except that it’s longer. Maybe you could argue that the first one is a bit of a trial run and this is more thoughtout version of that, but that is a hard claim to make.

Der Todesking (The Death King)
Germany, 1990, dir. Jörg Buttgereit

A half-star review from Letterboxd: Thank you for two seconds of Screen time from Bela
(Author’s note: Bela being Bela B. of Die Ärtze, a German punk band – or I know them as a punk band, but apparently they’ve evolved since I’ve last listened to them over 30 years ago)

A Five-star review from Letterboxd: Average week in Berlin.

How do I even explain this? Part of this is simple: It’s a week’s worth of vignettes about violent death, often suicide. However, each segment takes it’s time. There is no hurry. Despite being only 75 minutes or so, the movie feels free to just hang around and record things.

There is a kind of a narrative: The man who kills himself on Monday, sent letters before his death and the rest of the days someone is receiving them. That’s it. It’s about just reactions or lack thereof. There is variety here. Some deaths are more cold-blooded and imaginative then others, but this isn’t exactly Final Destination either, because they didn’t have those kinds of resources, so the inventiveness had to come from other places.

One weird thing that stuck in my mind was Tuesday, where the point-of-view character goes to a video store. I was just looking at the weird selection where there didn’t seem to be much of an order to the movies. I just noticed that I’ve seen quite a few of them. Weirdly, in a quite violent movie, I was thinking about why someone would think of watching My Dinner with Andre, but then changing that to a Nazisploitation movie instead. Then I realized that when I bought this box set this movie was in, I also bought All We Imagine as Light, a Malayalam (a minority language in India) language drama drama about two women trying to navigate the complications of modern life.

Schramm
Germany, 1993, dir. Jörg Buttgereit

A half-star review from Letterboxd: feels like Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession” after a lobotomy
(Author’s note: Wouldn’t some people see this as a positive?)

A Five-star review from Letterboxd: Genuinely great. Reminds me of when and why I got back into watching movies as my preferred pastime. Jörg Buttgereit is cemented in my mind as one of the best.

Schramm is dying in a pool of his own blood. He also happens to be a serial killer. We learn at the very beginning that he does die. The wonderful thing about the setup is that it’s just random. Schramm wasn’t defending himself against a victim or having a shootout with the cops, he was just repainting his walls due to blood splatter and fell. While in this state, his life is racing through his mind, although at least some parts are hallucinations and others are fantasies, so we can’t be sure what’s real and what’s not. Other things just happen even though there’s no reason to think Schramm could have witnessed them, so that’s probably his imagination as well, although it’s hard to say if the filmmakers saw it this way.

Schramm is very much in love with his neighbor, Marianne, who is a sex worker. Much of the plot revolves around this obsession and his lack of being able to approach the topic with her. He does hear her working in her apartment and that doesn’t have a good effect on him.

The whole serial killing thing is in the background. It doesn’t come up much. Mostly we are just following a pretty pathetic person who just really doesn’t have any control over his life. We don’t know where they come from, but he seems to have a lot of trauma which frequently pops it’s ugly head in various ways.

There is a sequel of sorts. It’s an eight minute short made in 2019. It’s about Schramm’s afterlife. You know, Hell.