"Warning: Some of this film may be seen as 'grossly' offensive and should not be shown to minors!!!" This is the on-screen disclaimer that precedes German writer/director Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantik.
Honestly, this is the one movie on this list I was not looking forward to watching. I added this to my collection several years ago when it was a rare, out-of-print dvd of some value. (It has since been rereleased, I'm pretty sure.) I watched it once, then tucked it deep into the dark recesses of the dvd closet. And now, it returns to the screen to melt the eyes right out of my head again.
With Nekromantik, European cinema (see also The Human Centipede. Or better yet, don't) once again takes us to places that we just don't go in America. I won't get into all of the details of what goes on in the movie, but the title is a "dead" giveaway.
Lead character Rob can only feel "alive" in the company of the dead. When his like-minded girlfriend, Betty, leaves him and takes their "special friend" (a souvenir from his work at a human remains disposal company) with her, Rob turns to murder to drag himself out of the doldrums.
In the end, even this isn't enough for Rob. In despair over what his life has become, he commits the most hideous of suicides, simultaneously fulfilling his deepest desire for death and symbolically repaying and returning life to the people he had murdered and defiled. So there.
Nekromantik is pretty rough. There is all manner of upsetting imagery played out to the sounds of a sparse, repetitive, Casio soundtrack and even sparser dialogue. It's not a super-gory, torturous movie like Hostel or its kin (in fact, many of the gore effects are laughably amateurish - though the main corpse is very well-done), but it is full of distressing, controversial subject matter that is often pretty hard to watch.
Some critics have read some pretty weighty meaning into the disgusting stuff in Nekromantik. That may be warranted (it does have that "artsy" feel), but mostly it's a horror movie in the truest sense of the word. This is not a movie for the casual or inexperienced horror fan. Only very open-minded hard-core horror freaks need apply. And even at that... I would recommend you think twice before checking it out.
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