The Last Tape

F**ked-up lovers on the run, Marie and Leonard (Isabelle Fitzgerald and Tim Rabenstein), become the final victims of William (Johannes Kluger), a lonely weirdo obsessed with capturing the purity of death on video.

The team behind German indie flick The Last Tape pitched their movie to me as 'a psychedelic horrordrama with road-movie influences', which I interpreted as 'best experienced while under the influence of mind-altering substances'. Employing an excess of random imagery, erratic zooms, seemingly clumsy editing and crude visual effects to tell their bizarre, non-linear plot, these young film-makers certainly risk finding their film labelled as pretentious and amateurish pseudo-art-house nonsense; however, despite its 'challenging' aesthetic style and unique narrative, I actually found myself begrudgingly admiring this 72 minute exercise in experimental horror.

Rather than toe the line, The Last Tape takes chances: it doesn't wallow in gory excess like many a German underground movie, it doesn't exploit unnecessarily taboo subject matter to get attention, and brave choices have been made with both the visuals and music (not always wise choices, but definitely brave), making the 72 minutes pass fairly painlessly. A scene in which William eats, drinks and reads surrounded by neatly arranged stacks of video tapes (presumably the fruits of his earlier labours) proves subtly unsettling and almost poetic, while a simple overhead shot of a camera on a tripod, the inexplicable smashing of a giant Chupa Chups lolly(?), and a fortune teller-turned-zombie (post end-credits) make for memorably bizarre images.