Monday, 4 September 2023

Nekromantik 2 (1991)



The crowning work of morbidity merchant Jorg Buttgereit's controversial film career and, for me at least, one of the most brutally effective movies in the realm of extreme cinema, "Nekromantik 2" is a warped masterpiece that takes the baton from its much-reviled predecessor and sprints into a whole new arena of twistedness.

As artful as it is repugnant, the movie follows necrophiliac Monika (Monika M.), a female nurse who tries to build a relationship with a very much alive man while harbouring an intense sexual attraction to corpses. Said attraction isn't just hinted at either; the movie opens with her retrieval of "Nekromantik" leading man Rob's green, gooey corpse from his grave, before quickly moving on to a grinding session that ends with her rushing to the toilet to throw up after getting some of Rob's blood in her mouth. Soon enough she's cutting the body into segments and storing Rob's decaying penis on a paper plate in her fridge (which her boyfriend later finds, in one of the movie's more hilarious scenes). Sounds gross, doesn't it? Well it is, and the movie only gets darker as Monika and new boyfriend Mark (Mark Reeder) become more entangled, culminating with a violent finale that feels note-perfect and inspired for the kind of sick movie "Nekromantik 2" surely is.

To say this movie isn't for everybody would be to put it mildly. Like the original "Nekromantik", it has been banned and vilified and scoffed at and dismissed, yet it does exactly what it sets out to do and has a kind of raw power that most horror movies simply don't. It's that rare horror that made me sick to my stomach, had me laughing in gleeful disbelief, and kept me entertained throughout. It seems wild to give a movie like "Nekromantik 2" five stars, even though I love it so much, but to me it really is perfect.









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