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Marcel Walz
There is really nothing that can be said about this German film-maker of uninspired copy-cat horror from Bavaria. Most of his output is plain bad and forgettable, he often hops on horror bandwagons like torture-porn and found-footage, or tries his hand at some splatter-themed movies hiring gore specialists. But nothing stands out. Reviewed until 2016. Although it pays homage to the original in the opening, this is no remake, or else Walz saw a very different movie than I. The original played its over-the-top splatter for campy shocking fun and the story for silly cheesy amusement. Whereas this movie wants to be a serious horror movie, it plays its talky scenes as straight drama and delivers its nasty gore just to be brutal and nasty. Except it's a bad movie. The acting is stiff and poor, and the story lacks imagination. The plot is definitely based on the original though: A restaurant owner becomes obsessed with an evil Egyptian goddess-spirit and starts collecting people and their body parts for a great feast in her honor. Cue the (gratuitous) torture, carving of flesh and cannibalism. End of movie. German blend of the 'home invasion' and 'torture porn' sub-genres. A rich family is introduced in a long setup involving three sisters, one of them who has recently returned after disappearing from their lives, their father, a dead mother, which was the cause of the estrangement, and some internal family drama and tension some of which involves an inheritance. A sadistic man and woman invade the house and start playing games and torturing them with merciless sadism. Tongues and eyes are pierced with nails, hands sewn together, one of them is raped, others are gruesomely killed. Although the acting varies, the cinematography and general quality of the movie is surprisingly high, but the writing, the over-the-top queen-bitch performance, and the idiotic plot twist, are all tiresomely uninspired, and all simply for another excuse to show more sadism. By-the-numbers very low-budget German slasher. A group of young people go on a camping challenge called "Scary Camping". Lo and behold, much to everyone's surprise, an unkillable killer appears and starts chopping them up and eating them. Nothing is realistic and there is barely any movie here, it's just an excuse to film some friends running around in the woods acting scared, and for the director to practice on some disemboweling splatter effects. Pointless torture-porn coupled with typically boring underground German splatter film-making. A young man, his blind girlfriend (who never seems blind) and her friend, find themselves in a fetish club. Before you can say 'consensual S&M', they find themselves in separate rooms served as entertainment to video cameras and sadistic customers, while they are tortured in extremely gruesome ways and killed for the duration of the movie. They hired Ittenbach for the effects, so you know it's not going to be a picnic, and indeed, they are hammered to a bloody pulp, ground in a meat grinder, needled, scalped, and so on, all in graphic detail. Yawn. A sequel to a trashy movie that had absolutely nothing going for it in the first place? This one doesn't even hide its intentions, packaging its torture-porn the same way as porn, mixed with reality-show faux-back-stage banalities. Did the film-maker think something good would emerge from combining two obnoxious genres? The structure of this one is just episodic scenes of torture by clientele in a club, mixed with the clients and the staff talking about themselves, as well as one scene of one guy mutilating himself in order to become a transsexual. The grimy and nasty splatter, this time around, is by Ryan Nicholson, and they pulled out all the stops to try to make each torture scene different and nasty in its own way with graphic cannibalism, skinning, carving, eye-gouging, cutting off random body parts, etc etc. And since there is no plot, this is basically just a special-effects 'porn' movie by Nicholson. I think I'd almost enjoy seeing a movie about torture-porn enthusiasts being tortured for real, except that it would also be boring. Can you imagine what kind of director would pick up Uwe Boll leftovers? Not only that but Walz the copycat, for some reason, decided to convert the serial-killer original into a 'Hills Have Eyes' ripoff. The freaky family (that includes Seed the serial killer) is more about some nonsensical 'religious' plan than cannibalism though, and their random behaviour and attempts to shock the audience are much more laughable than disturbing, and made me wonder whether the writer was even conscious when he wrote the random dialogue and sequence of events. The completely random violence includes crucifixion, head-hammering, sucking on dismembered fingers, and gun-rape. And then there's the editing, feeling as if the director just watched a non-linear movie and decided he can do the same, and proceeded to randomize the sequence of scenes for no particular reason. In short, if he tried to make a worse movie on purpose, he wouldn't have succeeded. More extreme German splatter, this one about the good ol' done-to-death cannibal family that kidnaps some youths to play with and torture. With these amateur movies, you know automatically that once a cannibal family starts its carnage, it's not going to stop and deprive the special-effects person of his fun. We still have to watch some badly acted setup though, with some youths having some drama while night-clubbing only to be abducted and everything put back into perspective. The cannibals are laughably unconvincing, but the gore is nasty, explicit and brutal, involving arm-skinning, eye-gouging, finger barbecues, getting blood out of a nipple with a straw, and other similar social pleasantries. |
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