Yay! I’m back with some content! I actually have a few reviews done but man this week was rough for ol’ pantsman. Food poisoning or something, but let’s just say if my stomach wasn’t doing backflips on me then I didn’t feel natural at all this week. However, I’m here with a review for a film I’ve wanted to get something written about for a long time. Olaf Ittenbach is one of those directors who gets so little press it’s a crime. All gorehounds should know the man’s name and hopefully I can contribute to that. Check out the review, and if you’re into this sort of stuff, check out the man’s work!
Also, keep on the lookout here at VC, my good friend Jon Jung who often contributes came up with the idea of a little collaborative reviewing effort for the two of us to do for some fun. The first project will be the classic Shinya Tsukamoto effort Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Should be a blast and hopefully pretty entertaining!
The Review: For a split second in time, somewhere in the midst of the nineties, Germany became one of the foremost leaders in splatter cinema. With Italy no longer having the massive film industry that they once had, Germany and a league of young men with inexpensive film equipment decided to change the horror world forever. There are three big names that come to mind when I think of this “scene”. There’s Jorg Buttergeit who took the arthouse route into becoming a horror legend with films such as Nekromantic 1, 2 and Schraam. Then there was Andreas Schnaas who took the gore auteur title to ridiculous new lengths as he crafted the brainless Violent Shit series and has made his career out of making rather silly but extremely gory horrors. The least known of these three names (although horror afficianados should know him very well by now) that comes to mind however is also one of the best; Olaf Ittenbach. Ittenbach won’t win any academy awards, much like Schnaas his films may not feature the most dynamic of performances ever put to celluloid but he sure knows how to deliver the violence. Where Schnaas tends to leave his films in tongue-in-cheek territory at all times, Ittenbach has a surge of seriousness to his films that I like. It makes his films seem more earnest at times and actually implements some of the “horror” back into the genre. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still some humor to be found in films like The Burning Moon or Premutos, but Ittenbach’s primary intention is to horrify, and that he does, especially in the final sequences of The Burning Moon as he takes us on a tour of hell itself.
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