Now, this is one of those films that I have been after for a long time. I first heard of it on a horror forum. The topic of discussion was gore. After realizing I wasn’t going to find it on DVD I bid on a VHS copy on Ebay and won. It was a bargain at 12 bucks. This is a German film from the early nineties - I didn’t know what to expect, hopefully great gore.

The film is about a teenaged drug addict underachiever that is left home alone with his kid sister. He shoots up and decides to tell her two of the most violent and disturbing bedtime stories ever told. The first is about an escaped mental patient that stalks this young girl. The lunatic probably got that way when his grandfather slaughtered his entire family while he watched as a boy. So the crazy guy escapes and somehow ends up on a first date with Julia. During a break where he goes off to buy cigarettes she hears the news on the radio and flees. But she leaves her wallet with her ID inside the guy’s car. The whacko hunts her down and kills her family in gruesome ways. The blood and gore effects in this first story are average.

In the second story, a devil worshipper who is a priest by day goes around raping and killing young girls in the neighborhood. The town folk place all the blame on an autistic farmer, who has nothing to do with it. They beat him up and threaten to kill him. They finally pay a local hitman to do the dirty work. The brutal murder is one of the sweetest kills I have seen in a while. The sheer brutality has to be seen to be believed. The hitman just walks up to him and slams him over the head with a mallet several times. The blood pours out profusely. He then crouches over him and bashes his head into the pavement as the poor man suffers in pain. The soundtrack adds to the creepiness. Finally he grabs a pitch fork, beats him with it and thrusts the sharp end into the dead man.

Then we have the satanic/priest guy kill another person and then shoot his own brains out. The next scene is what this film is best known for. The nightmare of hell. The hitman lies down and has a gruesome nightmare where he is tortured in hell. Ittenbach’s (director & special effects) vision of hell is really fucking cool. There are bloody people everywhere. Barefoot guys walking over intestine lined floors. There are open chest cavities strewn about and people in small cages. It’s truly wild and gets wilder. We see the hitman tied down to a table and two demons ready to torture him. They poke his eye out with a corkscrew and cut open his chest and pull the intestines out. Then for the grand finale they pull apart his legs so far that he tears in half. I have never seen a film attempt this and show all of it on camera, without flinching. The result was marvelous. Pure madness.

The film ends with the druggy brother killing his sister and then committing suicide himself. What a happy ending?! This movie may have had bad acting and mediocre directing but the final gore scene stands out as truly great. This is not a great film, it’s a bad film with very good gore. But the more I think about it the more endearing this German treat becomes. I watch bad films all the time. I must admit the film, being foreign, had an awkward flow compared to American films. But this is really an above average bad film with excellent gore. It may be an acquired taste for most of you. I highly recommend!

- Jorge Antonio Lopez