– Director: Jörg Buttgereit
– Writers: Jörg Buttgereit, Franz Rodenkirchen
– Stars: Bernd Daktari Lorenz, Beatrice Manowski, Harald Lundt
– Run time: 1 Hour, 11 Minutes
– Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2LW367d
Synopsis
A couple are driving down the road and run into a train. We see their mutilated corpses as the Credits roll.
A crew of guys come and pick up the pieces and parts and stuff them into body bags. They work for “Joe’s Street-cleaning Agency,” and it’s their job to clear the corpses off the road. One of the men, Rob, steals an eyeball and a heart and takes them home for his collection of body parts. He has dozens of jars of “souvenirs” that he’s brought home in the past.
Rob watches a TV show about people facing their fears to cure phobias. Rob flashes back to a time when he watched someone graphically kill and skin a rabbit and then we see his own dissections in medical school. We switch back and forth between the rabbit and the medical cadaver several times as each one is cut apart.
We change scenes to a tall guy picking apples in his backyard and his neighbor playing with a gun. The neighbor shoots the gun, and the apple guy is dead. He puts the dead man in a wheelbarrow and calls Joe for pickup. By the time they get there, he’s not too much more than a skeleton.
Rob takes the body home with him. His wife, Betty, helps him unwrap the body. She likes that body. He saws off a metal rod and uses it to construct a… “penis” for it, and she promptly hops on top of it and makes passionate, sticky, slimy sex with it. No, wait, I spoke too soon. Rob soon gets involved, and they have a three-way. Later, Betty lays with the corpse and reads to it from a romance novel.
Meanwhile, back at Joe’s, they decide Rob isn’t working out and they fire him. Betty is mad, as their current corpse isn’t going to last forever. She leaves Rob and takes her “friend” with her. Rob buys a cat. He feeds the cat human organs and then kills it. He then cuts the cat open and rubs its guts all over himself.
Rob then goes out to a slasher movie and watches in boredom as the girl is raped and murdered onscreen. He leaves in the middle, since it disturbs him so much. He goes home, takes a pill, and dreams of a corpse playing catch with a severed head.
Not being able to handle it any more, Rob goes out and picks up a hooker. They drive to the cemetery and have sex on a tombstone in the fog. He can’t do it, and she laughs at him. He kills her. Ah, that’s better! Once she’s dead, he’s able to finish. He goes to sleep next to her body until the caretaker finds them the next morning. The caretaker gets half his head removed with a shovel.
He goes home, picks up a knife, and stabs himself. It’s the best sex he’s ever had. As he bleeds out, we see the rabbit scene from the beginning running in reverse as the skin and blood go back into the rabbit.
Time passes, and we get a closeup of Rob’s grave. Betty comes by with a shovel. She’s interested in him again…
Commentary
Well. That was something.
IMDB states that “Jörg Buttgereit said in an interview that he never intended to be a director and Nekromantik was just a film to rebel against the German film rating system, trying to shock as many people as possible.” You can see that here, as it goes from bad to worse in the “shock” department, with a little bit of a story going on between shocker scenes. There’s even mention in one of the TV shows that Rob watches of “Video Nasties,” of which this film is certainly included.
There are multiple shots of people peeing. No genitals, just streams of water going in the toilet. Someone out there thought that was entertaining.
The film quality and the shooting style constantly reminded me of 1980’s European music videos. It wouldn’t have surprised me at any time for the street-cleaners to have broken out in a song and dance number, but unfortunately, that never happened.
Lack of singing aside, the music in the film is quite good, with long shots of necrophilia and running through the countryside intertwined with some excellent music. There are long segments where Rob is alone, and obviously, dialogue is at a minimum, so the music is noticeable.
This film is hard to classify. It had good gore, and it was shocking. There was in fact a story, but most of it was just an excuse to show sexy dead things. Overall, I’m going with 6 out of 10 on this one.