NEKROMANTIK (1988)

 

 

The film centers on Rob, who works for "Joe's Cleaning Agency", a company that removes bodies from public areas. Rob’s job gives him the perfect chance fulfill his hobby of necrophilia. The next scene he returns home to his apartment and girlfriend, Betty. He watches TV while Betty takes a bath in bloody water. Their apartment is decorated with centerfolds featuring models, pictures of famed killers, and jars containing human body parts. As Rob watches TV he begins daydream of a young rabbit being caught on a farm and graphically slaughtered, it is implied, these are memories of his father killing a childhood pet. The following scene is a man drinking a beer and playing with his rifle. He accidentally kills a nearby gardener, and then discards the corpse in a pond. When Rob returns to work he pulls the corpse of the unnamed gardener from the pond. He quickly returns home to Betty. They cut a steel pipe and put a condom over it so Betty will be able to straddle during their ensuing “threesome”.

Next we find Betty and Rob eating and talking while watching the body hang on the wall. They seem to have left plates underneath to collect the fluids that drip out. Rob goes to work the next day to be confronted his foreman who bullies him up the stairs to see the big boss. Rob is fired on the spot. The film then jumps to back to Betty in the apartment, reading a love story to the corpse. She begins to straddle the face of the corpse. When Rob comes home, he tells Betty that he was fired. She in turn belittles him so he leaves. When comes home to find that Betty has left and has taken the corpse. Rob freaks out and kills the cat, he than bathes in its blood and entrails in the tub while the body hangs over the tub. He then goes to see a movie, where he is bullied by a fellow movie goer. He returns home and attempts suicide with pills and whiskey. He begins to drift into a dream where he and a woman in white who gives him a corpse's head begin to dance, tossing the head and entrails of a body back and forth.

Once he wakes up, he leaves his apartment and hires a prostitute. They go to a cemetery, he fails to perform and the prostitute mocks him. He then strangles her and has sex with her corpse. He wakes up beside the corpse with an old gardener standing over them. Rob grabs the man's shovel and chops his head off. The film closes with Rob's suicide, stabbing himself while ejaculating. In a final twist, we see Rob's gravestone than a woman starts digging him up.

 

In closing the film while made to disturb and disgust, most was not actually that bad. Some scene while may have been awe inspiring in the 1980s when the film was first released were actually not that bad. Though it does touch on the taboo subject of Necrophilia, other films in recent memory have done this as well, and in my opinion much more disturbingly. To me the more was almost tragic in sorts Rob our main character is deprived of his Manhood, his job, his girlfriend and his prize position (the gardener’s corpse).

When he turns to a prostitute for comfort he cannot rise to occasion and his again mocked and laughed at. He finally just snaps mentally and does what he knows which is killing and has sex with her corpse. In a final act in my opinion tasteless act by the director to spit in Rob’s face, it is implied that even in death he has no peace. Acting and cinematography the film is up good. For disturbing factor I would say it is less lackluster than recent films like Serbian Film or even Cannibal Holocaust. But for the sheer fact of the taboo of Necrophilia it is not for everyone. I give this warning.

Do not watch this film on the idea of proving your “Manhood” or “Machoism”. But if you do watch or have seen the film than I can say you may truly be a sick and twisted person and we could be friends.

Click on image to be taken to DiabolikDVD if your interested in owning this.

 

 

reviewed by Shawn