Aftermath (1994)

A heart beating. A woman screaming. Blood.

Such ends the life of a young woman. A young woman we shall get to know well.

There's no dialogue - not just hardly any dialogue, as in Trouble Every Day, but literally no dialogue whatsoever. No single word is uttered throughout the whole movie. Blessed silence, leaving us to Sound and Sight... and Imagination.




Suffice it to say, this is not a movie for the faint of heart. If you like sick underground flicks like that, prepare for a mercilessly beautiful movie - achingly beautiful in its simplicity and exposé. If you don't like "sick" movies... I suggest you find something else to watch together with your bunch of friends on your birthday party.




Aftermath is a brilliant movie that deserves to be seen by a wider audience. Granted, today's audience is made up of kids who would screetch around... but still. I totally approve of this movie. One of my favourites.







11/10 pieces of cloth used for brain tissue.

Bleeders aka Hemoglobin (1997)

Ah... H.P. Lovecraft.

I admit it, I am easy to please in some regards. Movies based on stories by HPL are one such thing. No matter how abysmally bad it is, I will see it and to some degree enjoy it. Bleeders aka Hemoglobin is based on the story "The Lurking Fear"... and indeed, it's not entirely off the mark.




The movie explains to us that there was a Dutch countess, Eva van Dam, who was of such a narcissistic nature that she only wished to make love to herself. Failing to be able to do that, she settled for the closest other thing: Her twin brother. And so, a love-story, fairy-tale and horrific dystopia began, lasting for hundreds of years...

Hemoglobin wants us to say hello to our main protagonist: John Strauss (as played by Roy Dupuis). He is pale, has lips that are a little bit too red, his eyes are of two different colours, he can't stand the sun for too long, he can't eat most foods, is always tired during the day, suffers from spontaneous nosebleeds and seizures as well as cramps, spasms and blackouts. It's clear from the beginning that he's not a healthy man.




Thing is, John Strauss is suffering from something that appears to be an incredibly rare genetic disease. John and his wife are traveling to an island from which John's ancestors possibly came from. There, they find some Dr. Marlowe (Rutger Hauer!)... and Dr. Marlowe doesn't come as the bearer of good news. Whilst he is examining the strange young man, the inhabitants of the island are exhuming coffins in the local burial ground - something there seems to be wrong with the ground, and they want to preserve the dead.

John and his wife (can't bother to look up the name right now) get a room at the local hotel. John has it bad - he can't stomach food, and even the mild light of dusk is too bright for his eyes. Walking around, they (well, mostly she) ask about the Strauss family - but to no avail. The people in this village aren't really willing to talk to people from outside the island.

[Insert sub-plot about necklace and burial and grave-robbery here]

Whilst John is falling asleep, his wife is visiting Dr. Marlowe, asking him if he thinks that what John has is hereditary. Dr. Marlowe mentions the Van Dams and their inbreeding habits - and shows her one of the Van Dam children.

Yes, that's formaldehyde.

Meanwhile, John is having flashbacks to... something. Somewhen. Disturbing images.

And he's hungry...

...it's night outside. And the gravedigger's daughter is out. Out in the graveyard...

It's a bit hard to type with that buzzing rhythm pulsing uncomfortably in my right side, so please bear with me. They travel to the Van Dam estate - it is empty now, as the last Van Dams died in a fire 75 years ago. An old woman is supposed to live up there, a nurse who might know more about John's disease.

Meanwhile, Dr. Marlowe is trying to make sense of John's test results, as he gets interrupted - by someone carrying the mauled body of a ...humanoid creature with him. Examining it further, the good Doctor ascertains that it appears to be human, but a hermaphrodite - a fully functional hermaphrodite, capable of replicating with itself.

Cut to John Strauss. He and his wife are surprised by an old woman who seems to recognise John. Further identification ensues, and the old woman tells him that he was the only surviving member of the Van Dam family, saved from the fire. When the talk turns to the desires and Cravings he feels, and he admit that he suffers from them but does not know what they are about, the old woman retreats fearfully, threatening both him and his wife and driving them away. Reluctantly, they leave.




In the meantime, we get one (1) child dragged into the ground through a hole.

Returning in fury, John demands of the old woman to know the truth - she couldn't have saved him from the fire because he wasn't 75 years old. It was his right to know the truth.

...and she shows him...

And the truth is... not all of the Van Dams are dead.

As a storm approaches mercilessly, the small island slowly descends into terror. John is sick and hardly able to move on his own; dark rain is cutting into the people's faces, thunder deafens human ears... and somewhere, something is crawling. Eating. Breeding. Feeding.




Dr. Marlowe discovers a group of... humanoids. Things. Mutated monstrosities of centuries of inbreeding... deformities feeding on corpses. It's the remaining family members of the Van Dams... apparently, they had been tunnelling underneath the cemetery for centuries since they disappeared from the eye of the public, feeding on corpses for generations - necrophagia and anthropophagia in general (but mostly necrophagia). Them lucky ghouls*.

Formulating an answer to John's problem in his mind, Marlowe talks to him and his wife, leaving a jar. With a Van Dam embryo in it. For John to feed on it.




After devouring the fetus, John is filled with vigour, life and power.

Then some other stuff happens. It involves a lot of screaming, hysterical people, deformed monstrosities, light, darkness, psychological terror, ...

...and then my favourite scene EVER.

EVER.

And no, I won't tell you about it (actually, it's two scenes, but what the heck).

Bleeders aka Hemoglobin is a very atmospheric movie; a friend of mine called it "dreamy", and I think that's a word that can be employed with a good conscience when talking about this movie. It has a dream-like quality - much more so than the short story "The Lurking Fear" upon which this movie was loosely based.

If you like Lovecraftian inbreeding stories, then you should enjoy Bleeders a lot. And if you like slightly weird, character-centered movies, you should give it a go as well. I would recommend it to the vampires-crowd, but Hemoglobin isn't pretty and shiny enough for that. And I'm perfectly fine with that. Ghouls have rights, too**.

Rutger Hauer's performance is not as great as it could have been, but then again, I compare each of his performances with The Hitcher... so he naturally pales in comparison to his old self. Roy Dupuis has some really fine moments in the second act of the movie - when the film starts, I sometimes wanted to bitchslap him for being artificial, but during the second act, everything he did became fluent and natural. I now wonder if I haven't been a bit too harsh, for maybe the artificiality of the character of John Strauss is not just an accident of bad acting but an intended characterisation of the persona being incorporated.




9/10 whole new sets of senses...

*You might be wondering why I classify this as a ghoul movie, but considering my personal definition of a ghoul, it fits.

**If I ever should find myself leader of a political party, that will be my motto.

Angst (1983)

Angst is an Austrian movie, made in the glorious year of my birth. We follow .... ....., a guy who has been living 14 years of his life in prison - first for attempted murder of his mother, then for a random old woman he killed. He narrates his story to us.

This movie is so essentially Austrian that I only want to mention it once. This movie breathes Austria.




Our protagonist informs us that he plans to kill again - and again and again. His plan consists of visiting the first café that's open to look for a human.




Camera, editing, sound and acting combine to create a tense atmosphere. Our protagonist - our killer - needs to act out his fantasies after 10 years in prison. After a failed attempt to kill a female taxi driver (she reminds him of his first girlfriend...), he gets out of the taxi, slightly disoriented, and runs through the wooden area. He does not know where he is, how long he was running or into which direction. Aimlessly, he walks on.

...until he chances upon an apparently empty, deserted house surrounded by a park with a small wood and a lake. Ideal - no neighbours anywhere, big, isolated... our protagonist breaks a window and enters the house.

He is full of nervous, greedy tension, and informs us that he cannot take it much longer without... without. He is afraid - in a state which ruled out any logic. He is afraid of himself. Thoughts of his grandmother and his early childhood fear of being alone in a dark room. Haunted and tense, he wanders through the house... and then he sees the white car approaching. The inhabitants.




His plan will work. This place is perfect.

What follows is the spiraling down of our protagonist's rational thought into disorder and fear, the events spiraling out of conscious control. His thoughts scatter, drift back to his childhoods. His mother tried to kill him. He explains it to us in the same way he explains to us that he hadn't been wanted by his mother, as she would have preferred a girl. Growing up with his grandmother, who was very religious, he was sent to a monastery. They also kept animals there, and he used to go there and cut one of the animals - a pig - until it bled and screamed. After that, he'd had to leave the monastery. His mother then told him that his family had to be afraid of him. Fear. Abuse had followed, in order to discipline him.




All the while, he is pacing around frantically through the house, searching for his victims. He needs to find them. Needs to kill them. Both of the still living victims are incapacitated in some way... so it's not that difficult to find them. But still, nothing went as he had imagined it. He wanted it to be ...more dramatic.

The plan goes haywire. One of the victims, the old woman, appears to be unconscious, and he needs her to be conscious. He wants to see her suffer. Semi-freeing the daughter, he crawls off with her to the kitchen to find the medication for the old woman. Indiscriminately, he feeds her pills, for she still needs to whimper and cry before him - she cannot die just like that. But she's dead.

Rage.

And then... cold again. Now, only the girl is left.

But this death also doesn't go as planned, and frustration consumes him - his urges are still unfulfilled. No torture. No pain. Everything went too fast, had been too much out of his control.

And then... well, then things spiral even more out of control.




The camera is always well done - nothing special, a bit minimalistic, but good at capturing the mood of an Austrian city and Austrian, uhm, woods. Some of the shots are more than just good and help to add a frantic, surreal atmosphere to the movie, as befits a flick about a serial killer spiraling out of control. There is no logic to his psychotic needs anymore - where before there was cold planning, there now is hectic, frantic, impulsive rage and delusion.

Killer-wise, we get treated to some light necrophilia (if we can call it that) and the spectrum of manic episodes in a disordered serial killer after his first kills in 10 years.

I congratulate Erwin Leder for his portrayal of the psychopath. It's a good performance that shows us one of the myriad faces of mental disease. He really is perfect for the role - whilst watching Angst, you can literally see Leder grow into the role more and more the more demented our protagonist becomes.




He is, as an actor, delving into the midst of psychotic, fragmented thought - the thought-pattern that has come to dominate our killer's psyche. Wide shots accompany him as he hurries to the car, showing us the bleak Austrian landscape of autumn. That specific Austrian feeling. Funny Games (the original, not the remake) had some of that atmosphere as well, but nowhere near as completely and markedly as Kargl's Angst.




Déja vù.

A brilliant movie. I personally can only recommend it.



10/10 unstable serial killers who never experienced their mother's love.

Lucker the Necrophagous [Director's Cut] (1986)

John Lucker is a murderer, rapist and necrophiliac. Eight years ago, he went on a rampage, during which he killed eight girls with whom he had... uhm... sexual intercourse afterwards (like, two weeks afterwards). He was caught, and transferred to a mental asylum after he tried to kill himself. Due to practically nonexistant security, he manages to flee the asylum. When he finds out that one of his victims of eight years ago managed to survive, he is determined to find her and finish the job. He spirals out of control, as his urges and violent needs become more intense... on a mission.

I don't know what to say, as I have a distinct set of ambivalent feelings when it comes to this movie - mixed, even. Let me tell you why.



First of all, I want to say a word (or maybe a few) about the dialogues. Why the dialogues, cyn, and not the camerawork, or the terrible VHS to DVD transfer? Because, my dear reader, it's the first thing you will notice.

Seriously: It makes you go insane. It's not just that they are abysmally bad, at the same time, they are like some sort of drill that mercilessly works its way into your mind, never ceasing with the pain, never ceasing to make it hurt in new ways.

Insane. Luckily, there isn't a lot of it - most of the people who actually do the talking are not Lucker (more on that later), usually A) nurse (singular), B) nurses (plural), C) radio, D) random living person, possibly to be killed throughout the course of the movie (the probability to be killed in this movie rises if the person in question is female). Lucker? Oh, right. Lucker. Yeah, he does talk. Once or twice. And no, I won't give away what he's going to say, because it's actually sort of...important... to the ...plot. Note my hesitation there. The one before "plot".

You see, the thing with the plot is this:

Originally, the film was much longer, but due to the negatives being destroyed, it has been difficult for director Johan Vandewoestijne to scrounge together the original for a release. Before, the plot was different, with a journalist investigating the main character, John Lucker, before his rampage in the current release. The journalist becomes intrigued by Lucker, and seeks to take up his mantle. Lucker discovers this, kills the journalist, and continues his rampage.

(Courtesy of imdb.com, as usual when I can make you fall into astonished silence with my insights and knowledge of the movies I watch...)

Now that's what I call a cast. "Girl in jogging"?

Now... VHS to DVD. The sound doesn't work out properly (it happens more than just once... or twice... or 14 times...), so you hear people screaming when they're already dead, or clearly see the lips of the actors moving out of sync to what they are actually saying.
Then there's the transfer of the movie. A lot of... black. The editing isn't too good (I am being kind here), and those annoying black screens will go on your nerves as well if you're anything like me. And trust me, I'm a PATIENT movie addict. Technical problems, a bad transfer, lousy sound... usually, those things don't take away my enjoyment of a movie. In the case of Lucker the Necrophagous, these things unfortunately do (take away my enjoyment of the flick I'm watching). It's just too much in order to be able to ignore it.

And then there's the soundtrack. Oh my Gods, the soundtrack.

I watched this together with TF, and we both came to the same conclusion: Someone had gotten a CASIO home piano for christmas, happened to be a friend of the director and desperately wanted to try out his awesome new fun piano. I swear, you can hear it. I had one of those things (and a bigger one a few years later), and I know how addicting it can be to try out those fascinating special effects and sounds. I was there, man, I was there...

Now, the stuff I've said as of yet doesn't make this movie out to be more than a cheap, dirty flick. But it is. Oh yes, it is more than just a cheap, dirty flick. It provides endless amusement to people who like gory, realistic nasty movies (think of the infamous Video Nasties) and are not bothered by icky stuff, slimy stuff (I've said it once, I'll say it again - movies need more slimy stuff), sex with corpses, violence or misogyny. Then again, people who STILL read my reviews probably don't have a problem with that, although their mileage may vary. I know people who have no problem watching a zombie devour someone alive, and those same people will react with disgust when they see a long drawn-out death scene in a movie about... a necrophiliac serial killer.

I approve of the death scenes. They are awesome. Long, slow, painful to watch and hear (for the victim, or people who are less desensitised to violence than me). I like that.

I also like the grimy feeling of the movie. Here, there's nothing pretty. This movie doesn't need pretty. All it cares for is delivering Lucker's way to us, the viewers.

One scene that I especially liked was the actual necrophilia scene. Delicious. He fucks a hooker four (!) weeks after he killed her. Man, that girl is one juicy bit. Full decomposition. Maggots are crawling underneath her foul skin, she's more liquid than solid (I just say "licking scene" - you'll know what I mean when you see it) - I fully approve. I also fully approve of said licking scene. Lucker, Lucker, Lucker... you're not just one lucky motherfucker (see what I did there?!) to have a dame like this to mount, you're also so going down the path to becoming a ghoul*...

Okay, I'm going to skip forward now. It does not become a lady of my age and social stature to... watch this particular scene all too often (and on a sidenote - I could have done with less man-beef and more corpse).

Back to the main protagonist: Lucker.
Brilliant dialogues. "Uh", "Ah", "Oh", "Uuuuuh", sometimes I even detect the hint of an "Ugh". He speaks one or two times throughout the whole movie. But this does not deter from what I like to call his charme and him being full of win. Because, to make a really long story short: Lucker is cool. I like Lucker. I mean, how can you NOT find a necrophiliac, psychotic serial killer with serious communication problems likeable?

After 45 minutes, the movie really clocks in and we get more. More of what, you ask? Well, more of everything. Coolness, mostly. And some light torture and psychological terror (but only light - then again, my definition of "light" may be a tad different from yours).

Enjoyable flick. If you're looking for some movie about necrophilia - I personally prefer Lucker to Nekromantik (1 and 2). Or maybe I just like watching helpless women scream and moan and beg, who knows. *shrugs*

You're warned: Not light fare. But adorable. The only way this could have become more enjoyable would have been a skullfuck. But alas, you can't have everything.


7/10 decomposed heads being forced into the face of a screaming, tied up woman.


P.S.: The final piece of dialogue will either melt your brain, or make you laugh out loud. Just a hint:


...and I invite you to play the game of "Come Up With A Different, Witty Ending Dialogue To Lucker the Necrophagous" as well. Trust me. You will anyways. It's impossible not to do it.



* Leichengifte!