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Timo Rose
Yet another German underground splatter director that emerged within the circle of Schnaas, Bethmann and Ittenbach. Delivers straightforward gore in the form of extreme violence and action without the creativity of Ittenbach or the nastiness of the others. Seems to have a special liking for gory facial abuse. Reviewed until 2016. A surprisingly not-bad horror movie from Timo Rose that actually manages to create some dark atmosphere. Some people with memory loss find themselves on a strange mountain populated by some bizarre people and evil supernatural powers, raising the undead, ghosts and tentacled demons. After much confusion and dialogue, they find themselves fighting for their lives as they are possessed by demons with tentacles erupting out of their bodies, and are trapped with zombies. Much gore finally ensues in the last third of the movie, with the tentacles causing very messy mayhem, zombies getting shot amidst much splatter, and less luckier victims getting carved to pieces with a saw. Good atmosphere, ideas and gore, acceptable acting, weak plot developments, bad supporting actors and a choppy editing that either adds to the supernatural disorientation or confuses. An elixir designed by Nazis (complete with pseudo-historical-documentary on the development of this weapon) designed to turn people into super-humans pops up and at first creates rivalry between criminals, then deteriorates into chaos, zombies and a splatterfest when one of the criminals takes the potion and starts mutating with gory results including exploding heads and disemboweling. The good: a story with a larger scope than usual and some creative cinematography lending the movie some style. The bad: extremely confusing mess of a plot-line, no proper characters to speak of, bad computer effects for some blood splatter scenes. Rose collects an international cast and goes for mostly English-language dialogue in a bid for mainstream horror. This is a werewolf movie that starts with a vicious, chaotic and splattery werewolf attack, then, in the most entertaining part of the movie, it sets up the characters for about 45 minutes with amusing banter between werewolf hunters, a girl and her brother who came back from Europe all broody after an animal killed his girlfriend, and a pair of Bonnie and Clyde hoodlums, all finding themselves together in a confusing hostage scenario with werewolves. The final battle is too silly and amateurish to be fun, with hunters that ignore a few dozen chances to simply shoot the werewolf with their silver bullets just so that they can have more banter, chase and fight scenes, and cheesy 'tough' one-liners. I also expected more gore, the effects feeling relatively minimal for a Timo Rose movie. Rose's take on the Wrong Turn/backwoods horror genre with various groups of people in the forest served up as gore-meat for the wild psychos while another trio of youngsters battle it out. The splatter killing set-pieces are plentiful, featuring a variety of ways to take apart the human body in graphic detail, but the genre is cliched, the plot is empty, the acting is bad, the editing messy and the sound is terrible. Rose still trying to appeal to the mainstream here, snatching Debbie Rochon for his latest outing about paranormal killings. A dead woman haunts her sister into investigating her death in Germany, where she teams up with some paranormal investigators and bashes heads with some locals who seem to be involved somehow. The plot thickens but makes no sense, forcing twists into the story without actually creating a cohesive story. Rose keeps experimenting with flashy cinematography, but the CGI effects are horrendous and there are only three splatter scenes involving a ghost slicing up bodies. Instantly forgettable. Well, Timo is certainly coming along as a special-effects splatter-movie maker, and he even hired some good actresses this time around who are most definitely up to the intense roles of rape & torture victims, and tough girl, but the film itself is utter crap. It is nothing but a skeleton on which to hang 90 minutes of nasty splatter, torture and sadism with no interesting characters or any plot, intelligence or development to speak of. Three scream-queens go to Germany and are promptly hijacked by a psycho, and taken to his basement, which is where the majority of the movie takes place, since it is only interested in basement sadism. Various body parts are sliced open in gruesome and realistic detail, there's a Freudian breast-feeding scene that comes out of nowhere, a psycho-girlfriend who laughably chews the scenery with bad dialog, random rapes, and one nasty revenge-rape with a sharp weapon.
Karl the Butcher vs Axe
See Andreas Schnaas.
Boasting higher production values, Rose puts together a convoluted fantasy/horror flick about Jesus, his heart ripped out and used for evil purposes, Judas, some demons, Lilith, and various zombies and monsters, all battled by an ass-kicking hero who thinks he's God's second son. Rose plays it straight most of time which makes this come off as corny, the acting is mediocre and the makeup is silly. The splatter takes its time to arrive, most of it is nothing you haven't seen in a Hollywood flick, but the climax features some Hellraiser chains, resurrections, face ripping and limb shredding. Perhaps Rose is trying to go commercial? Early terrible movie by Rose about soldiers sent to investigate a town where people have disappeared. They find a town full of zombies/mutations and have to fight their way out, with a half-baked subplot about a mad doctor and the cause of the epidemic. That's about it for the plot, the movie consisting mostly of a lot of arguing and dialogue, sloppy and amateurish action scenes, and some poor mushy oatmeal gore and blood splatter during the fights with guns, machetes and other miscellaneous tools. A two-part sequel which was also re-edited and repackaged as Mutation: Annihilation. Rival gangs and people are out to locate the super-human elixir from part one. Tensions rise when a man who retrieved the potion makes new demands, who is then blasted to bits with a shotgun and revived with the potion. New, demonic, powerful, mutated humans start to spread and fight, causing more violence and mayhem. Most of the movies consist of Rose's typical gang arguments, fights and amateurish attempts at stylish violence with over-the-top blood. Ittenbach's gruesome splatter effects make an appearance in only one scene involving Hellraiser chains, hooks and ripping apart of bodies, and zombies go on a rampage in the chaotic part 3, but the dark lighting, chaotic writing, lack of pace, structure and terrible editing make this one a chore to sit through. The disturbing video diary of a psychotic killer. Or so it thinks it is. A bad actor and his friends talk, share their dumb thoughts and philosophies, perform, try to shoot themselves, abuse their victims in the basement and even sing to the video camera, accompanied by splatter footage of killings and self-mutilation. Color filters and cinematographic variations attempt to make this exercise more artsy but are only there to distract from the bad acting and unconvincing effects. Splatter scenes range from bad to acceptable, with highlights including cutting up a face with a paint scraper, eye-gouging and head-drilling. This starts off well and brutal with just enough camp to entertain, but then deteriorates to weak violence, bad acting and silly melodrama. A red herring virus falls into innocent hands, leading the criminals to believe they are hiding it. The rest of the movie is filled with torture scenes and arguments between various quirky and psychotic characters that get over-excited (or horny) over the chance to axe, butcher, slice and cut the face off their victims. A group of criminals gather together for aggression therapy in the forest and things soon deteriorate to arguments, fist fights, thievery, and stabbings. To make things even worse, a vicious space monster is running around slicing up the stray criminals with razor sharp claws. The ending is a predictable bloodbath but it takes a while to get there. Good gore and monster effects, but mostly uninteresting. Schnaas and Rose team up for this movie, and the result, surprisingly, is a silly comedy that is so lame and stupid, it has its own odd atmosphere. A gay film-maker takes a bundle of bimbos to a remote location in the woods to shoot a film without a script (much like this movie, and the director is acted by Rose hmm...). The bimbos whine, bicker and insult each other, all laced with in-jokes, the director masturbates to pictures on his cellphone, and runs away from the teasing big-breasted bimbos that beat him up, until a strange, evil book arrives. The book transports various demons and monsters, many of them from previous works of the directors, including Schnaas as Karl the Butcher, and a dominatrix that appears in a 5-minute sex-commercial for no good reason. The splatter involving extreme tearing apart of bodies and body parts and splattery gunshot wounds takes almost an hour to arrive, and by then our brains are all dumbed out, but the quality and amount is as over-the-top as you would expect from these two. Followed by an even weaker sequel that is a found-footage haunted-house movie with surprisingly minimal gore. |
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