Featuring a rotting corpse grasping firmly onto the bare breast of a voluptuous woman, Nekromantik is certainly a film I’ve been waiting to see ever since I first gained internet access and was able to type the phrase “horror movies” into Yahoo. I was around 14 years old and the internet provided me with two very important things: Hardcore pornography and volumes of information about horror movies that I wasn’t going to be finding at the local Blockbuster Video.

I had to wait. My mother certainly wasn’t going to provide me $30 to pay some shady online site to hand over a tenth-generation PAL-to-NTSC-converted VHS tape of a German corpse-fucking movie that didn’t even include English subtitles. Thankfully everything home theater related has evolved in the past 10 years and we have DVD technology. We now have dedicated companies who are interested in distributing films of dubious content in the highest quality possible. Most importantly, we have Netflix, which allows us to rent films like Nekromantik without shame. Sorry, mom.

Robert Schmadtke is a member of Joe’s Street Cleaning Team, a little business that helps get rid of human road kill. While the job alone might suggest Rob is a little bit funny in the head, the movie quickly establishes this fact by introducing Robert’s home life, which consists of putting his roadside souvenirs into jars. While this sounds like a rather lonely life, we’re introduced to Betty, Robert’s girlfriend, who thankfully shares his morbid interests. Betty passes the time by literally bathing in a pool of blood while Robert experiences a hallucinatory dream/flashback sequence featuring the skinning of a rabbit and home autopsy. (Note: This is real, so if you have an aversion to live animal death, stay away.)

One day, Rob hits pay dirt and manages to nab a full rotting corpse out of a pond. With the help of a few trash bags (thank God for Der Gläd Bagen!), he hauls the body back home and presents it to Betty like a Christmas present. Overcome with erotic joy, the two create a makeshift penis using a broom handle and proceed to go to town on the corpse, Playboy After Dark-style.

Things start going downhill as Betty starts spending more and more time with the corpse and starts becoming emotionally attached to the body. It all comes to a head when Rob loses his job at the cleanup service. Rob tries to get back into Betty’s heart with a (living) kitten; but Betty, being fed up with Rob’s incompetence, ditches the poor guy. To add insult to injury, she even takes the corpse with her. Rob deals with his grief like any normal man would; by burning pictures of Betty, bathing in the innards of his ex’s dead cat, and going to the movies alone to see cheap gore flicks. Things turn for the worst as Rob hires and kills a prostitute for his own pleasure. Unable to deal with his guilt and loneliness, Rob turns to the one thing he knows best to cope with his problem.

If it doesn’t sound like there’s much to this movie, I can easily confirm this fact; but don’t let that suggest this film isn’t without its positives. Director Jörg Buttgereit manages to infuse a sense of silliness to the whole event, and what comes off as sickening in theory, is pulled off on screen with absolute glee. I certainly laughed uproariously at the ménage a trois, featuring a scene where Robert lovingly sucks out the dangling eyeball of the corpse only to spit it back into its socket.

Image
The film is presented in its original full-frame aspect ratio. Sure, it’s marred with grain, dust, black specks and occasional hair, but given its Super-8 roots, it’s still impressive that it managed to come out as sub-par as it did. When talking about the technical qualities of a film like Nekromantik, you can’t help but be praiseful about its mediocrity. It’s the “it could have been a whole lot worse,” way of thinking. But if you want to convince yourself that the film print is of better quality than what would be expected, check out the overly dark, muggy trailer.

Sound
The audio comes along in a no-frills mono. It’s inconsistent at best due to the fact that some scenes had to be overdubbed. When it’s live audio, it can come across as hollow and low at times, while anything overdubbed is abnormally clear and loud. You don’t have to reach for the remote to change the volume from scene to scene, at least.

Extras  
Barrel Entertainment lovingly slaps together an excellent package of extras. We start off with a commentary by co-writer Franz Rodenkirchen and co-writer/director Jörg Buttgereit. Both are well aware of the kind of movie they’ve made, and with their heavy accents which sounds vaguely of Muppet descent, they tear into their own movie. Probably even more critical than any review they’ve received, they’re both quite fond of what they did and are willing to spill any information they have.

Under Bonus Footage, you’ll find Jörg Buttgereit’s hysterical 20 minute horror anthology Horror Heaven. The most interesting aspect to Horror Heaven is that it works like a history of horror films in general, starting off with retellings of The Mummy and Frankenstein, it shifts to superhero-against-monster movie (Captain Berlin Against Hyxar), to Godzilla-esque stop motion animation (Gazorra), and finally to exploitations and gore (Cannibal Girl). It’s as low-rent as you can get (sound effects are achieved through vocalization) and it’s just as good, if not better than Nekromantik itself. Horror Heaven also features a solo commentary by Jörg Buttgereit.

Also under Bonus Footage is The Making of Nekromantik, which is apparently a re-edit of the documentary Corpse Fucking Art. The original Corpse Fucking Art was an hour-long retrospective that covered many of the director’s films, but this twelve-minute excerpt of behind-the-scenes footage (accompanied by either a German radio interview sadly without subtitles, or an English commentary) represents only the Nekromantik footage. There is also another Featurette (presented in German with English subtitles). A recent retrospective, it covers some of the same ground that The Making of Nekromantik covered, but is worth the look. Rounding out the section are trailers for Nekromantik, Der Todesking, Nekromantik 2 and Schramm, which show off that, while the director never strayed from grotesque subjects, his filmmaking skills certainly improved.

There is also another section of extras. Labeled “Extras,” this section features a photo gallery of around 100 pictures, “Odds and Ends,” which documents unfinished comic book adaptations of Nekromantik, a comprehensive Director’s filmography and a section for special thanks.

Overall
Nekromantik is a loose satire of the everyday life of psychotics punctuated by repeated corpse-reamings. If you have any interest in the film, by all means see it. Even if you have a weak stomach, the scenes of necrophilia are presented in such a ludicrous way that it removes all shock value and, thankfully, all that’s left is gallows humor. The extras help round out an already perfectly acceptable disc with some truly entertaining short films and behind-the-scenes footage, which also helps soften the blow of the slightly high retail price. I can’t help but feel kind of icky about the rabbit, though.