Joerg Buttgereit's films have their own unique place in horror movie history. Few directors have even come close to producing anything as beautifully depraved as "Schramm", "Der Todeskoenig" or his signature film "Nekromantik". The latter film is a superbly original romantic comedy about an unusual love triangle between a woman, her lover and a rotting corpse. It comes as something of a surprise that the sequel is content to re-hash the original - only without the sardonic humour or the perverted sense of romance. Nekromantik 2 is a strangely dour affair; the film is slow, affected and a little bit too clever for its own good. Thankfully, Buttgereit plucks enough grim and gross ideas from his wonderfully sick mind to make the film a worthy, if somewhat disappointing, sequel to a true genre classic.
Nekromantik 2 picks up where the original film finished - with Robert pleasuring himself while violently committing suicide with a kitchen knife. The brutal imagery of Robert ejaculating blood while stabbing himself has lost none of its bite. After such an eye opening beginning, the film quickly takes on a more solemn tone. Monika, a nurse with a taste for necrophilia, rescues Robert from his grave and takes him home. The painstakingly detailed depiction of erotic corpse cleaning is textbook Buttgereit. From this point on, the film loses momentum - mostly due to the fact that nothing really happens apart from Monika meeting Mark at the movies and beginning a relationship with him. The courtship between Mark and Monika is painfully boring to watch and incredibly drawn out. There are tedious close-ups of them on a ferris wheel, an unnecessary dating montage and an uncharacteristically dull sex scene.
The film only begins to show signs of life when Monika starts asking Mark to play dead during sex and shows him a family photo album full of dead relatives. It soon becomes clear that Monika is finding it difficult to choose between the decomposing object of her desire and her living boyfriend. In an excruciating scene Monika appears to choose Mark and cuts Robert into pieces with a handsaw. This sequence is wonderfully grotesque but incredibly long. Buttgereit appears intent on testing not only the viewer's ability to hold down their dinner, but also their patience. Despite chopping him into small pieces, Monika can't seem to part with Robert completely, so she keeps his head and his penis in the fridge. Strangely, Mark doesn't take finding a decomposing penis in his girlfriend's icebox as an indication that he should look for a new woman. The film falls into another slump until the gory conclusion, with the exception of a particularly unsavoury and lengthy clip of a baby seal being dissected. Thankfully, the conclusion is premium Buttgereit as Monika finds a way to enjoy the company of both Mark and Robert simultaneously.
Buttgereit's excruciatingly long and detailed depictions of corpse cutting, animal dissection and dating rituals do not make for great viewing but the parallels that these sequences draw and the clinical detachment with which Buttgereit draws them, are intellectually stimulating - if clumsy and pretentious. That is not to say that the film is entirely without humour. The film within a film about ornithology is very amusing and a clear swipe at "art-house" filmmakers. The irony is that Nekromantik 2 is 10 minutes of necrophiliac sex and extreme gore away from being art-house fodder itself. Those 10 minutes make up for a lot of the film's posing. The make-up and gore effects are typically gross despite the extremely plastic looking corpses. The seal dissection looks like it has been stolen from the Greenpeace archives as it appears to be authentic.
The acting and general production values are still rather amateur in nature. This is easy to disregard when you are being swept along with Buttgereit's gory magic as with the original "Nekromantik". However, these flaws are far more obvious at the snail's pace with which this film proceeds. Monika M puts in the best performance and makes an appealing lead with her clear blue eyes and Germanic disinterest. Buttgereit's direction and script remain as idiosyncratic as ever. I'm convinced that Buttgereit is a genius but this film only shows rare glimpses of what he is capable of. Nevertheless, Nekromantik 2 does give us something to think about while we wait patiently for his next dose of cinematic perversion.
