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Andreas Bethmann
An amateur amongst underground amateurs slowly improving his exploitation skills, and a more modern and extreme German version of Joe D'Amato. Bethmann directs pornography but usually mixes it with splatter, violent perversions, exploitation and other extreme favorites of underground cinema. He also directs some tamer exploitation and women-in-prison flicks. His favorite theme seems to be the exploitation, torture, stabbing and abuse of women. He doesn't try to disguise shock and exploitation cinema as art or fancy celluloid, but goes all-out for the sleaze and gore, catering exclusively and repetitively to this niche. Often releases his movie in two versions, a tamer version and a hardcore version. Reviewed until 2016. For once, Bethmann tries to develop something other than dull & grimy splatter and porn, and directs a haunted-house movie, taking his time with the setup leading to some spooky atmosphere and scares. Granted, there is nothing original here, and some elements or scenes were copied from Grudge and Evil Dead, but at least it develops a story. He also makes the serious mistake of having his actress narrate all of her thoughts, intentions, what we see with our own eyes and even the ghost's intentions, thus both insulting the audience and ruining the potential atmosphere in several scenes. The story involves a paraplegic girl drawn to a haunted house while researching country-folk, a Nazi-related history, and, eventually, two thieves that try to hide in the same house (one of them a deranged pervert). There are only a couple of splatter scenes, with an extended nasty eye-gouging courtesy of Ittenbach. Bethmann commits the ultimate nepotism, casting himself as the boyfriend just so he can boink the actress, and only manages to get in the way of the slightly more competent actors this time. Just barely of interest, but it's a step in the right direction. Classified as splatter-porn but the porn isn't hardcore enough, the sex isn't interesting enough to be erotic, the splatter effects are sparse and mediocre, and the plot is paper thin. Thugs and a dominatrix are running around kidnapping women, forcing them into prostitution, selling, raping, torturing and killing them. One model (actually a porn star whose acting talents involve grinning while getting raped) gets raped and seeks bloody revenge on everyone she encounters. This is enough to fill two and half hours with things like blowing heads off, punching through a man's guts, biting off a penis, and sex with a decapitated head. A sequel in name only. Bethmann does the cliched Women in Prison genre but with porn, gore, bad acting and cheesy action. A girl is raped, then imprisoned unfairly in an island prison ruled by a sadistic warden and guards, etc etc. Her father hires a group of mercenaries to bring the institution down. Nudity, escapes, lots of lesbian sex, sadism, forests, traps, spiders. There are only two very extreme splatter scenes courtesy of Ittenbach, one involving penis pliers, teeth pulling, and scalping. I'd like to say he delivers on the porn but most of it is lesbian and he also throws in gay porn and ugly nudity. For hungry fans of WIP only. Actually a sequel to the previous "Island of the Demons" which plunged new depths of boredom and lack of gore. This time we are treated to a confusing mess of perverted Hentai-like porn and amateurish splatter effects. Various groups of people are attacked by demonic forces which rape them with tentacles, trap them on a magical island, use a power-drill to make holes in various body organs, tear flesh, spit acid in their face, and possess them with bad dentures. Messy editing, gritty filming, endless splatter and gore that gets boring quickly, and non-existent acting by people that never heard of the concept of running away. Relatively an improvement for Bethmann. A woman who was kidnapped, raped and abused a few years back finds herself in a worse situation, kidnapped by a twisted Norman Bates with a taste for necrophilia, sadistic sexual games and nasty murder. The acting isn't painful this time, and a couple of scenes are actually effectively sadistic and twisted instead of being boring. Twisted hardcore (mostly lesbian) porn-splatter that should deliver to fans of the genre but doesn't offer anything beyond that. An idiotic horror sequel with more typical Bethmann bucket-loads of lesbian exploitation and sleaze, also released in a more hardcore version with the same running time. The sister, her lesbian lover and various other people visit the strangely popular Exitus house where all the nastiness occurred, and encounter various horrors involving dead people, necrophilia, sadistic wackos, and torture. Just another excuse to show lots of grungy lesbian erotica and one or two nasty gory games, with the plot and characterizations making no sense whatsoever. Bethmann's third full-length effort is raw, horribly amateurish and dull as dishwater. An evil spirit possesses first a pumpkin then other people, causing some gory deaths. In between we get to see some gratuitous women in underwear and long padded scenes where characters do nothing interesting until the next death. Even the deaths and gore are sparse and boring. Bethmann's first two full-length horror films are very rough-going, cheap and home-made efforts, but there is actually a bit of atmosphere going here in some scenes. There's an evil count from the 18th century who eats eyeballs and is a master of dark magic. A witch-hunter is sent after him to destroy and curse him. Two centuries later...you guessed it... some youngsters wake him up from the dead, he controls them with visions and nightmares, then kills and eats them. One man decides to fight back. Much of the movie is dull padding, the rest consists of amateur horror in the woods with violent deaths and some fights. The first film is tame on the gore, the second adds an army of the undead consisting of actors from the first film, and adds some splatter scenes as the characters put themselves in harm's way for stupid reasons, though the gore is nothing to write home about. One man's head is destroyed, shredded and decapitated from an explosion, there is some chainsaw splatter from evisceration and zombie gore, but it's all obvious home-made stuff. This is getting tiringly repetitive; Bethmann truly deserves to be D'Amato's successor. Another women in prison porn-splatter film by Bethmann with hardly any plot, featuring women on an island prison being abused for 2 hours featuring a sadistic female warden, a female doctor with a conscience, several sadistic male rapist guards and the victims. It's 3/4 hardcore grungy & warty porn, 1/4 torture, and one extremely nasty and over-the-top splatter scene towards the end, courtesy of Ittenbach, featuring some fat guy who goes on an endless stabbing spree on a girl's various body parts. Bethmann gets his hands on some money and puts all his favorite elements together for a very long splatter-porn movie with relatively good production values. A woman kills her cheating husband but learns even more hate for other women in prison while the female guards abuse and torture her. So after she is released she writes a Sadean diary about torture, sex, pain and death while ordering prostitutes to her house for some sex and very nasty murders. Features hardcore porn (almost all lesbian), nasty splatter like drilling genitalia, acid, electrocution, decapitation, etc. and lots of ugly people doing ugly things. Of course the people this kind of movie caters to will run to get this dull and ugly release anyways, but you've been warned. Two backpacking lesbians in shorts roam around in a remote forest full of horny blood-thirsty hunters. What could possibly go wrong? Turns out, a little more than you would think, since they have secrets between them. Surprisingly, this is mostly sleaze and almost no splatter, and the splatter is restricted to a handful of chainsaw scenes at the end, courtesy of Ittenbach. Otherwise, there's sex with dead animals, forced sex and water sports, and one really silly blowjob 'rape' scene. Unoriginal, uninspired sleaze. Trashy home-made splatter doesn't get more crappy and inept than this. Bethmann's first attempts at splatter combined into a full length movie, basically resulting in a sequence of kill-scenes that look a bunch of kids practicing for the real thing rather than any kind of movie. There's a killer that keeps coming back to life, several weapons, a random zombie, and a dozen victims, probably all of Bethmann's bored friends willing to go to the local woods to get 'massacred'. The kills involve lots of dismembering or carving up, often by a motorized hedge trimmer, as well as some scalping and a nail to the eye. But, as you can imagine, the effects are never remotely convincing and the slow-motion makes sure you see exactly how badly they act out their kills. |
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