Garden of Love

I have had the pleasure of seeing this film at a horror festival in Edinburgh. Garden of Love does not have a serious bone in its sick low-budget body. There is lots and lots of blood and gore, starting with the opening credits. The plot is extremely silly like everything else in this film. In fact you might say this film is a pastiche of gory films. At first this film seemed really bad, but it was so entertaining that the director must have been doing something right. Garden of Love definitely needs to be enjoyed in company (with like-minded people!).

A lot of people were laughing at the quality of the acting, but to be so funny throughout the film it had to be deliberately bad - SURELY?. The character playing Munster was my definite favourite and I would see the film just for his extremely camp performance. I am not sure that many actors could have made the awful lines quite so funny.

You may have gathered that Garden of Love won't be everyone's cup of tea but if you have a soft spot for bad taste gory films then see it, because it's wonderfully awful.

The cover shots on the DVD looked very good and the director Olaf Ittenbach has quite a good reputation, so we decided to check this one out. Plus, the main character, German punk rock drummer and singer Bela B., is a very charismatic person and has shown a lot of good taste in horror movies and comics before, so I was very curious about that one.

First point, Bela B. is only in it for a few scenes and has nothing to do except for staring around. OK, he's playing an undead, they stare around and usually do no real acting, but he had shown that he can actually do good acting before, it would have been more interesting to see him in a "real" leading role . So it looked to me that his name was placed on the cover merely to promote the movie.

The other actors are absolutely ridiculous. Why do they all pretend that the story is set in Britain? The landscape, the interiors, everything is so German. Why not simply set the movie in Germany? Everything would be just fine, the story would have worked as well, and we wouldn't have wet our pants every time they tried to act "british". What took away a lot of the atmosphere.

The gore scenes are only a few, most of the time the movie spins around the investigation on Verlaine's murder. That'd be OK, if it only would have been a little bit more suspenseful.

The gory scenes are all set in darkness, so you cannot really see what's going on, you hear a lot of "painful" sounds instead. The make up of the zombies despite of that is very good, haven't seen that good looking dead people so far.

Overall, this movie is boring as hell, the acting is bad, the story is lame and a chilling atmosphere does not come up. Better stay away from that one and check out Ittenbach's "Beyond The Limits". I've seen that one before "Garden Of Love" and was very impressed about the great way of storytelling, the very good professional actors and the really really good atmosphere and setting.

Let's face it...most people do not know the name Olaf Ittenbach. And to an extent, for good reason. While I'm a fan of his, I find it hard to watch a lot of his earlier stuff and even his newer stuff can be hard to find. But if you're a gorehound (I would not say that about myself, but I do love a good splatter movie now and again), then a healthy Ittenbach collection is a must. It would be very hard to make an argument that anyone currently working in special effects (let alone directing) has the talent he has for making a head go pop or letting loose an almost hilariously unnecessary amount of blood at one time.

With that said, Ittenbach's movies seem to have a bit of a formula to them. They'll usually assault you virtually in the opening credits, drag along for a little while, give you a pretty intense amount of non-stop gore, fade away for a bit longer, and then hit you with a blood soaked climax. The trick is to make it through the parts that are boring to get to the good stuff. "Rebecca Verlaine" is a prime example of this. Mass murder within the first 5 minutes, then a pretty unimpressive story for 20-30 minutes, a big dose of people getting their faces ripped in two and/or their limbs torn off, more boring crap for awhile, and then a nice finale so Ittenbach can let you know who's boss. That...and his trademark disregard for accents. I swear, if there's 4 people in a scene at least 2 of them will have different accents from the others. And there's no rhyme or reason. Sometimes one brother has a German accent and the other British...Olaf doesn't care.

In the hands of a less capable special effects man, this easily would be nearly unwatchable. But as it stands it's quite watchable, especially for the aforementioned gorehounds. A 7 may be a bit of a stretch, but what can I say...I'm a tad biased towards the man's movies. Now if it could just have been as cool as "House Of Blood"...

If you are a gore fanatic this is a must see! If you are one of those who likes to see why films have been banned then also watch this as it borders those boundaries too! I normally enjoy spooky films but this was a crossover between spooky – which would hook me straight into it, and zombie ripping gore – which I have to look through closed fingers to vaguely see what is going on…still I had to watch it as the eyes of those deceased and the way they stood out within the scary surroundings still kept Basically a girl (Rebecca) returns to the place of a massacre which she survived as a child, but having lost her memory, is none the wiser as to what has happened…all will make sense…or will it….not really sure … I loved the look of the dead people, especially their eyes, and the setting in which they are filmed (not just the house – but the background behind them when they talk to Rebecca in what looks like the light half way between heaven and hell, with creative particles of dust passing each body), but music was a bit naff I didn't really 'feel' for any of the characters which is normally the whole point of a film…so that was disappointing..no budding actors/actresses for the future in this one I am afraid If you like excessive violence then this is the one for you – if you want something 'moving' or 'spooky' don't' bother

Olaf Ittenbach is absolutely, a master of brutal makeup FX and an artist who doesn't thrive on entertaining the whole family (children) to complete a film. Considering his budgets, Olaf performs wonders ("Beyond The Limits") not to mention write, direct and probably a thousand other tasks to get his films off the ground. Garden of Love is definitely not for the Hollywood film fan, looking for mega-stars with cute, comedic, predictable, punch-lines but rather an original and creepy ghost story with amazing and gory visual FX. If you want cute, comedy/horror or comedy/every other genre, buy/rent something else. If you need comedy/happy endings in your movies beware, you may be offended by their absence. I can only imagine what his collaboration with Buttgereit ("Nekromantik") will bring. Fantastic and refreshing work Olaf, I can't wait to see more.