- Joined
- May 22, 2025
I watched Der Todesking (1990) by Jörg Buttgereit.
Never watched a Buttgereit film before despite him being a pretty well-known horror/gore shlock director from my hometown, international audiences might now him from his very controversial film Nekromantik. This film, i imagine, is equally as controversial, as its main theme is suicide. There is no real plot and very scant dialogue, it's shot in an episodic fashion, one episode for each day of the week.
First off, no basically zero budget movie has the right to have a soundtrack this good, it's a real standout OST. Secondly, i ended up really liking this film, which i am still kind of surprised by. It got recommended to me as a bleak, depressing and disturbing film but instead of making me go "Oh, how sad/gross" it made me go "Wow, this was really interesting". Buttgereit's cinematographer does some real neat tricks with his camera work and there's two shots in it that really impressed me, especially taking the "no budget" thing into consideration. The acting is, of course, dogshit but it does not matter much.
The best episodes to me were Thursday, which is just a kind of explorative shot of a bridge in Bavaria which is completely without dialogue and instead is subtitled with the names, ages and occupations of people who supposedly jumped from it,
The second pictures' view is used in the movie in a great tracking shot
and Saturday, which starts of with a woman reading out loud from what i assume is a psychology textbook about what supposedly motivates a spree killer to commit crime. The scene shifts to her apartment where she straps on a harness and basically the grandfather of all GoPros and ends with a montage of her going on a rampage that is shot from her perspective where she kills people at a concert and gets shot herself in the end. That whole vignette made me go "No fucking way did Buttgereit come up with this shit in 1990!", it's the same exact shit modern spree killers like Tarrant or that Buffallo super market killer did. That one really blew me away because of its concept.
The episodes are also interspersed with a time lapse shot of a male corpse slowly decaying and while it's an obvious prop it's still a very well made effect.
While i watched this in a h265 encoded version i grabbed from 1337x the full film is also on YT and virtually looks the same quality-wise, thanks to it being shot on a shoestring budget. It's a quick watch, clocking in at just 74 minutes. It's more of an experimental film than pure horror or gore/splatter, despite it having some graphic scenes.
Never watched a Buttgereit film before despite him being a pretty well-known horror/gore shlock director from my hometown, international audiences might now him from his very controversial film Nekromantik. This film, i imagine, is equally as controversial, as its main theme is suicide. There is no real plot and very scant dialogue, it's shot in an episodic fashion, one episode for each day of the week.
First off, no basically zero budget movie has the right to have a soundtrack this good, it's a real standout OST. Secondly, i ended up really liking this film, which i am still kind of surprised by. It got recommended to me as a bleak, depressing and disturbing film but instead of making me go "Oh, how sad/gross" it made me go "Wow, this was really interesting". Buttgereit's cinematographer does some real neat tricks with his camera work and there's two shots in it that really impressed me, especially taking the "no budget" thing into consideration. The acting is, of course, dogshit but it does not matter much.
The best episodes to me were Thursday, which is just a kind of explorative shot of a bridge in Bavaria which is completely without dialogue and instead is subtitled with the names, ages and occupations of people who supposedly jumped from it,
The second pictures' view is used in the movie in a great tracking shot
and Saturday, which starts of with a woman reading out loud from what i assume is a psychology textbook about what supposedly motivates a spree killer to commit crime. The scene shifts to her apartment where she straps on a harness and basically the grandfather of all GoPros and ends with a montage of her going on a rampage that is shot from her perspective where she kills people at a concert and gets shot herself in the end. That whole vignette made me go "No fucking way did Buttgereit come up with this shit in 1990!", it's the same exact shit modern spree killers like Tarrant or that Buffallo super market killer did. That one really blew me away because of its concept.
While i watched this in a h265 encoded version i grabbed from 1337x the full film is also on YT and virtually looks the same quality-wise, thanks to it being shot on a shoestring budget. It's a quick watch, clocking in at just 74 minutes. It's more of an experimental film than pure horror or gore/splatter, despite it having some graphic scenes.
