Nekromantik

Nekromantik - 1987 - Germany - Horror/Shock/Art-House

Nekromantik is an infamous German video nasty from director Jorg Buttgereit.  Out of print for many years and infinitely hard to find on DVD or VHS without dropping a small fortune, it only built intrigue for years in the minds of those like myself who haven't seen it.

Rob, a morgue attendent, lives with his girlfriend Betty.  Right off the bat it becomes apparent that this couple is a little off, and might have a few screws loose.  Rob keeps jars of preserved body parts sitting on his shelves, and Betty is first shown taking a bath filled with blood.  It isn't long before these two are overtaken by their obsessions with death and succumb to more sinister urges.

It only becomes more apparent of Robs fascination with the macabre as he performs an autopsy.  Intertwined with this scene is stock footage of a real live rabbit being killed and skinned by a farmer, an uneasy scene to sit through particularly for an animal lover like myself.

The weirdness grows exponentially after Rob steals a corpse from his workplace to bring home to show his wife.  In no time a love affair between the rotting corpse, Rob and Betty starts.  Quickly they begin engaging in taboo acts of necrophilia.  These scenes, macabre and gross as they may be, aren't portrayed so in the film, as they are accompanied with a romantic piano score and are artistically shot.

I hesitate to call Nekromantik an art house film, but that's essentially what it is.  Rather than relying on plot points to tell the story, this film jumps from scene to scene rather sporadically and uses symbolism and metaphors to convey its message.

Essentially, Nekromantik is a film about not only accepting the prospect of death, but embracing it.  Embracing it to the point where one can gain sexual arousal from it.  Nekromatik, overall, is a happy film i think.  Despite the dark subject matter and all the blood and guts thrown in, we find our lead character liberated, and finally able to feel happiness through the prospect of dying and death, shown tenfold in the beautifully absurd ending.


Plot - 8/10
Acting - 7.5/10
Blood n' Guts - 7/10
Macabre - 9/10
Action - 4/10
OVERALL - 7.5/10



Rob examines one of his specimens

Dead guy in a wheelbarrow

Getting intimate with a corpse.

Taking a literal bloodbath.

Rob in a hallucinatory state.

Major headache!