Barrel Entertainment has knocked another one out of the ballpark with their loving release of the sequel to Jorg Buttgereit’s classic corpse porker. These guys never fail to impress. “Nekromantik 2” boasts a gorgeous film transfer, eye-popping packaging, loads of extra features and a wicked menu you’d be proud to have playing in the background at your next LSD club meeting. Barrel Entertainment doesn’t just release films on DVD; they pay tribute to them. They treat trash better than some of the studios treat their cash cows and their efforts are saluted.
Too bad the film isn’t all that great. I believe Homer Simpson would describe “Nekromantik 2” as “more arty, less farty” and he would be correct. Where Buttgereit threatens to gross out his audience to the max with the original “Nekromantik,” here he threatens to bore them to death with a vengeance.
Picking up right where the first film left off, the corpse of our necrophile hero, Rob, is dug up from its grave by a female necro, Monika, so that she can have her perverted way with it at her apartment. This involves some hot, steamy corpse sex, which eventually turns to butchery as she decides to ultimately keep a select part of Rob in her fridge, dumping the rest of him back into his grave.
Sick, right? Yeah, I know. But then enters Mark, a sort of uptight kick in the pants who earns a living by providing ADR for porn. Mark is sort of on the outs with his current girlfriend and that’s when he stumbles upon Monika at a movie theater. The attraction is instant and a relationship unfolds. Ladies and gentlemen, the movie has begun its nosedive.
The bulk of this film drags like a bag of hammers as it deals with the relationship between Monika and Mark, something disgusting happening every once in a long while just to make sure you’re still hanging in there, such as the actual skinning of a dead seal. But as this film drags, you kinda get the sense that perhaps Buttgereit is poking fun at pretentious arthouse films. Along with the courtship scenes between Mark and Monika that slow to a crawl, there’s a scene with a man and a woman eating eggs, in the nude, for what feels like a century, and then there’s the musical number with Monika howling like a dying hound with images of skulls and corpses floating about.
The running commentary by Buttgereit and crew on this disc reveals that indeed, this is all just a big joke. Buttgereit chuckles at the thought of horror fans coming to his movie with the expectations of a gore-a-thon, but instead wind up with a dull love story. Yes, very funny.
Still, hardcore lovers of the sick and twisted will endure the test of their patience for the few knockout gore sequences offered – and they never looked or sounded better than on this disc. Special features include running commentary, which I’ve already mentioned, by Buttgereit, writer Franz Rodenkirchen, and actors Monika M. and Mrk Reeder, as well as a 25-minute making-of featurette, music videos, short films and much more. These special features are far more entertaining than the actual movie and that’s why this review gets an extra star in its rating. Barrel Entertainment oughta be proud.
