Rating: **
Starring: Karina Fallenstein, Susanne Bredehöft, Artur Albrecht
It's hard to enjoy a movie that spends a good hour and something talking their way through scares, gore and nightmarish atmosphere, and you don't understand shit. (And, no, this isn't due to language barrier. Keep reading.)
The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990) is a satirical art film following a group of insane, white trash family of butchers hunting down those who crosses the border a few days after Germany's Reunification. In this case, one Clara who, fresh from murdering (what I believe to be) her boyfriend, sets out to meet with another lover who just so happens to be living at the other side of the freshly fallen Berlin Wall. Inevitably, she gets tangled with the family's bizarre and chaotic lifestyle of turning people into bratwursts and commenting everything regarding the fall of the wall.
As interesting as it sounds, I find the movie hardly accessible if you're not aware of what exactly is all of this supposed to symbolize or poke fun at. It took me a lot of research to understand what the hell are these people on about, yet even then I still find it hard to fully enjoy the movie as a horror flick.
Too many random and unexplained scenes rear up and, while it does work in a sense that it brings out a bit of nightmare logic, where everything is beyond your control and understanding, the film's campy tone and overall strangeness just doesn't cut it. Plus, I never was and still isn't a man of politics and as much as possible, I want to avoid the subject, not because I'm sensitive about it, but because I find it extremely boring and I never really care much about. (What can I say? I'm a free spirit!) So, with the subject of the reunification (or unification) of Germany being the core satire of the movie, I can't help but feel a little confused and bored, so much that not even the film's gratuitous gore can enlighten me. (I'm not that shallow)
The German Chainsaw Massacre simply fails to feel like an actual movie, but more of a jumbled collection of random scares, gore and surreal moments done with a budget that looks pretty mediocre and acting that's really distracting. Still, the piece does cook up a fair feast to feed horror hounds; the bloodshed is anything but tame and since the film borrows elements from the first two Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, its weirdness is off its rockers (Even more than those two films combined) and it will certainly find fans from those who love weird underground cinema.
As for me, I do have my share of favorite "Art films"; the hypnosis-inducing Anguish (Spain, 1987) and the Grand Guingol-esque Troma title Beg (1994) being my favorites under the slasher sub-genre, and too David Lynch's infamous Eraserhead and Takashi Miike's Audition in general horror. The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990) makes a close cut to being an acceptable bunch with its story of a grue-happy family of murderers and butchers on a mission to turn people into meat by-products, but with it being too convoluted for enjoyment and harboring a hidden subject that I never really care for, it falls a tad short.
Perhaps I'm being really bias with this, but when I watch a splatter film, I'm the kind of guy who does it cuz he spends a whole day working and just wanted to relax with a fun and messy horror movie the moment he gets home. Not be force-fed with another history lesson. Am I a little ignorant? Maybe, but I'm positive The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990) has, and will have, its fans. I'm just not one of them.
1 dog found slaughtered
1 male had his throat cut with kitchen knife
1 male seen murdered
1 female disemboweled with chainsaw
1 male beaten with steel pipe, head sliced with chainsaw
1 female knifed to the arse
1 male beheaded with chainsaw
1 male seen murdered
1 female ran over and split in half by a car, left for dead
Total: 9
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