Tod den Hippies - Es lebe der Punk!

--Tod den Hippies!! Es lebe der Punk! (Death to Hippies!! Long Live Punk!)--

This is not a punk movie, but just - after "Die Unberührbare" (2000) and "Quellen des Lebens" (2013) - the third effort of Roehler to get back at his long dead parents. The bizarre antics of their proxies, Gisela and Klaus, are at the center of this film, the rest is seriously random stuff. In his mind Roehler sees himself as a punk and his parents as hippies. But the obsessive blaming of the parents has always been a core part of hippiedom. Hippies might actually enjoy this movie, with all the sex & drugs and all the lazy drug-induced imagery they would quite likely mislabel as "surrealistic and artful".

Part 1: Punk Comic. Completely grotesque, insanely exaggerated characters. A school that looks like an university, with every hippie cliché personified. A "Nazi Punk" who drugs / narcotizes his hippie teacher and cuts off his long hair.

Part 2: Hippie Underground Comic. Roehler's alter ego, Robert Rother (Tom Schilling), moves to Berlin and starts working in a "peep show", a place that actually existed during the early 1980s. 15 booths surrounding a stage upon which a naked woman performs some kind of gymnastics. In "Tod den Hippies" all customers are superhumans, therefore RR has to clean the little windows in front of their faces all the time, because they get completely covered with white goo. Two underground rock stars arrive, Blixa Bargeld & Nick Cave. They are allowed to enter the backstage area, where they are given the full VIP-treatment by the overjoyed "models". This is seriously a hippie fantasy, straight from the pages of Gilbert Shelton.

Part 3: New Wave Posers. People sitting or standing around in a little, white painted bar, with Bargeld filling up some glasses from time to time. Really heavy, serious posing. So pathetic that once or twice it's actually funny.

Part 4: Old hippie blames his parents for his misery. A nearly sixty-year-old, still obsessed with his parents. So sad. The main part, not much to write about.

Epilogue: RR wants to move to the USA, but goes to Egypt instead, because someone told him he could get to the USA from Egypt for free. On a transportation van in the middle of a desert he meets his old boss from the peep show who is carrying a suitcase full of (unchilled) sausages with which he wants to open a snack stall in Egypt. RR tells him about the prohibition on the consumption of pork, the sharia, stonings. The end. Completely random stuff.

Roehler was the grand master of the auteur trash movie, but with "Tod den Hippies" he is only the grand master of "What the Heck?" ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 16)

This movie is all over the place with different characters crossing the way of our lead character (whom you might confuse at first with his best friend). Since it's "punk" there is no holding back on certain things (especially depicting sexuality or a knack on fighting power or anything that might be holding you down).

While that mess might be on purpose (I can't tell for sure), it's up to the viewer to decide if it's something worth watching. Spending your time with a character who's out looking for ... well what exactly is he looking for? Love for one thing, even though he might not know it himself and "growing up". Though the latter is more cutting ties - as if the parents are the ones holding you down ... is that what Punk is about?