Ostermontag (1991) by Heiko Fipper

A few months ago, I ventured back into German splatter cinema with Necronos Tower of Doom, which I thought was pretty well done. Tonight, I decided to tread on familiar ground, but take it back a few years with Heiko Fipper’s Ostermontag, which I'd seen on many people's “extreme” lists, so I had to track down a copy.

The alternative title to this is I Spit on Your Fucking Grave Bitch!, which not only automatically sparked my curiosity, but also set the stage for some big shoes to fill. When you play off the title of a more renouned movie, you're expected to live up to it, but more times than not, you get something much more inferior, and sometimes even down right laughable. I really wanted to be blown away by this film, and was hoping for a visual assault in the likes of A Serbian Film, but as many low budget features have used the bind and torture premise to titillate and desecrate, this one does a pretty poor job on most levels and I walked away in disappointment.









It wasn’t the fact that I couldn’t understand any of the dialog (it's in German with no subtitles), but the hype around it alone already had me jaded, and it was put on a pedestal it was never deservant of. While there are some decent gore and FX scenes, the rest is forgettable, and had it just been whittled down to a shorter movie of sheer visceral carnage, I would've walked away happy.

Some of the gore scenes are worth mentioning, but the extremely watered down blood stock that was used just made my eyes roll. Red paint or ketchup would have looked better than this crap, but the following scenes are the highlights (in no particular order):
1) the stairwell head-smash scene
2) death by vacuum suckage
3) lip bondage
4) knife in pants/bunghole violation
and
5) the last scene which involves extreme orifice torture and a spinal blowout.

Sure, this will easily offend those without an untrained eye, but once you realize it's a rubber mannequin, you might feel a little less dirty about what you just witnessed. I also feel it would've been more impactful had it not been so drawn out. Sure, a bunch of rowdy drunks would hoot and holler in approval at the sperm-drenched spinal tap scene, but sometimes you just gotta know when to cut the shot and move on.

Mr. Fipper is better known for his film, Das Komabrutale Duell (1999), which I reviewed back in 2008. Again, some of his gore antics can be applauded, but the very loose storytelling becomes cumbersome and the fast-forward button should be readily at-hand. While German splatter has really yet to hit the mainstream, Intervision Pictures has dug into their vaults and will release Olaf Ittenbach’s Burning Moon on Valentine’s Day, hoping to give Anchor Bay's The Dead, IFC's Human Centipede 2, and Image's Nude Nuns with Big Guns a run for their money.

If this review has left you a bit dumbfounded and wanting more, you can purchase Ostermontag over at Twisted Anger for around 10 bucks. No artwork is provided (I borrowed the picture above from an online source), but it does come with two other short movies and some behind-the-scenes stuff. The first short is what I like to call, "Our adventures in learning CGI," and the other I zoned out on after several minutes of watching people eating pizza and talking. Again, these are in German with no subtitles, but be sure to check out the other titles Twisted Anger has to offer, as his Deluxe Editions are superb! Where else can you find Psycho: The Snuff Reels, The Video Dead, and The Town that Dreaded Sundown at such great prices and quality?

And, even though I hated this film as a whole, I can't seem to get it out of my head. Maybe I'll revisit it in a few days if it's still lingering, but I've gotta hail Jörg Buttgereit as the king of German horror, and really wish he'd make another movie, but not that Captain Berlin vs. Hitler schlocky shit.