Hamburg, 1990. Strange military experiments with poison gas have awakened hordes of hungry zombies. Emerging from the thicket of gassed forests, the dead reach, with their characteristic slowness, population centers, beginning the total slaughter. Two brave doctors, improvised Teutonic "Rambos," will attempt to drive the putrid creatures back to hell. To no avail.
Andreas Schnaas is a legend and in the amateur underground his name is always accompanied by smug buckets of (fake) blood. Being among the founders of the "ultragore" genre (never was a more apt name!) as well as of the independent German video amateur movement together with his colleague Buttgereit (Nekromantik), in his films he seems to be interested exclusively in the extreme splatter side of the scenes, leaving out everything else, but really everything.
One could divide the evaluation of the film into two: on the one hand the purely technical side, and on the other the aspects of make-up, special effects, and gore oozing from every pore.
Let's talk about the technical side, in objective terms (as much as possible). This film really sucks. The shots are shaky and sometimes out of focus, the acting of the characters is pitiful, they have not the slightest expressiveness, and, last but not least, the story is totally nonsensical and boils down to the simple juxtaposition of revolting scenes. If there is some dialogue in the first part of the film, chaos reigns in the second part, in a succession of violence for its own sake. Schnaas offers us useless passages such as the interminable dream that the doctor has towards the end, illogical scenes, very slow and negligible sequences almost giving the impression that he wants to "lengthen the broth" of his film. The editing, then, would horrify any professional, and the lighting does nothing but create confusion, alternating sharp scenes with very dark sequences in which nothing stands out.
This motivates the such a low grade I felt it appropriate to give to the film in question.
Instead, we come to the fun side. The special effects, curated by Schnaas himself, are what is most homemade. We witness the dismemberment of a baby doll, which is supposed to represent a real child, the amputation of a breast that is clearly plastic, not to mention the guts present in almost every scene, made from yards of sausage. The beauty of it all is the stubbornness of the director who, even though he knows that doll will never be mistaken for a baby, he puts it in anyway, and may the critics die! For all this purity the film would deserve well above a ten.
However, don't think that Schnaas is a poor mind, some effects are really well done, such as when a zombie armed with a chainsaw (yes, zombies can use objects) cuts an unfortunate bystander in two
This is the right spirit of the amateur. If "great cinema" sets the rules for a good film, the underground has a duty to stand at the opposite end of these dictates, to take them apart and reinterpret them without being afraid to question itself. Cheekiness and extreme taste for the macabre are the two main ingredients of the work in question, which, while worth absolutely nothing as a film, nevertheless remains a rare gem in the genre, as only the timeless Andreas Schnaas can produce.
Launch phrase: "The ultimate Gore-Film"
Review by Varg
