Unholy Ground

Günther Brandl's deadpan-tragic fantasy of emotional pain from 2016 is now re-released as part of a retrospective dedicated to this director; it is magnificently acted, stylishly composed and entirely ridiculous from beginning to end. An operatically extravagant artsploitation ordeal that devastated saucer-eyed audiences at the Bottrop film festival, Unholy Ground won Brandl the Grand Prix, though missed out on the Zob d'Or. It also launched him as a world-cinema superstar, though it is surely only the blazing passion of his lead Nadja Holz that gives this film its substance; she varnishes it with her own luminous talent and commitment. It is perhaps to Nadje Brandl owes his entire career.

Unholy Ground is set in a quaintly imagined Swedish remote community in the pre-cellphone era of the early 1800, many of whose menfolk are away for long periods. It is dominated by a fiercely patriarchal, joyless, puritanical and rather Scandinavian-looking church whose elders are in the habit of condemning wrongdoers to hell in special sinners' burials. The sheer cruelty of these ceremonies is what continues to sweep this film's fervent audiences away in horror and compassion, perhaps not quite grasping that these appalling events are a figment of Brandl's imagination. The director can't help an unsubtle giggle in the initial copulation scene.

Holz is generous and gentle in the role of Svende, a beautiful, childlike young woman who regularly cleans the church and in private has weird sex there. But she suffers from nymphomania. To the unease of her straitlaced family, Bess is getting into sex with rough-mannered soldiers.

Like all of Brandl's films, Unholy Ground is a kind of hoax or prank, a superbly engineered and detailed windup, manipulating audiences with lethal control and ingenuity - particularly those febrile international audiences at Bottrop, which for over a quarter of a century has been his launchpad. And it sometimes dispenses with narrative believability entirely: Svende is at one stage penetrated by two men, but escapes from the other soldiers ... and then, well, the soldiers just seem to forget about the whole thing and she comes back to her home village.

Brandl attempted again to put a woman through a similar preposterous ordeal in Hot Dreams in 2007, starring Estefania Traff, a very much less talented acto. For me, the latter film was an out-and-out embarrassment, a film in which Brandl's hoax aesthetic had nothing to recommend it - although it actually won both the Zob d'Or and best actress at Bottrop, awards which should have gone to Unholy Ground..

Unholy Ground is a bizarre one. The merging of gory horror and pornography is nothing new. Anybody who has seen Porno Holocaust or Texas Vibrator Massacre can attest to that, but those films are nowhere near as dialogue heavy and while all three are sincere, Unholy Ground seems serious.

To be honest I missed the finer point of the plot. In an unnamed Austrian village the townsfolk are struck down by what appears to be the plague and some of the villagers summon the devil in a ritual.

The film is not sex heavy with not much other than a bit of topless nudity happening for 20 minutes. The sex on offer is hardcore with explicit oral sex, penetration and money shots. We've seen it all before in La Bête (1979) and the masturbating with a crucificx would be shocking if it wasn't done better in The Exorcist and the uncut version of The Devils.

The gore on offer is also very graphic with tongues being ripped out, skin peeling and heads being chopped off. Definitely wouldn't be out of place in the slew of straight to video horror put out in the last decade.

The acting is straight out of a LARPING or amateur dramatics society. Despite German not being my native language you can tell it is straight up bad for the most part; coupled with a dry script it makes the dialogue scenes a chore to sit through, but I suspect most viewers will fast forward them. This film would have been shocking about 40 years ago, but with mainstream films featuring explicit sex and a ton of much more disturbing and equally gory horror films like The Terriffier coming out this is a largely tedious, two hour endurance test.

I can't recommend it, but it is a strange curio and gains an extra point for a surprisingly dour ending.

First of all: this is an amateur no budget film. So don't expect Hollywood. In spite of that it is technically well made. The acting is surprinsingly good and the actors and actresses really push the envelope. The storyline is original and offers a couple of unexpected plot twists. As it is not a mainstream film the director can afford to cross the lines. The film is violent and also sexually very explicit. So quite frequently the unexpected happens. The storyline itself is about a group of soldiers in the Swedish-Russian war in the 18th century who escape from an mabush and end up in a small village. But strange things start to happen. But are the soldiers what they appear to be?

One thing you can say for certain: there is nothing holy about this movie! Now you can take this as a compliment/positive or as a negative. Your position on amateur filmmaking is also important. Do you like them or not? Because if you don't and get annoyed with bad acting, you don't want to watch this movie in the first place.

Also be aware that you have a lot of explicit violence but furthermore, explicit sexual acts (including vivid penetrating) and more. The effects in general are not that bad, considering the budget this must have had. Again it matters if you care about those things or not. Acting is almost completely absent and the story is simple to say the least. But as a "party" movie about amateur filmmaking and just having a laugh, this might actually work for you, if you are not too squeamish that is