ROHTENBURG
(aka GRIMM LOVE)
(Review)

Katie Armstrong (Felicity herself, Keri Russell) is an American graduate student in Germany, whose chosen thesis subject is the case of Oliver Hartwin (Thomas Kretschmann, most widely known for his role as Captain Englehorn in Peter Jackson’s King Kong), who found a willing victim in Simon Grombeck (Thomas Huber, seen in the live action Aeon Flux), and ate him.
This is the chillingly gruesome premise of Martin Weisz’s first feature film, Rohtenburg (Grimm Love in the US, where it is currently on the festival circuit), a disturbing portrait of that dark territory where the positive, life-affirming traits of love, collide with the self-destructive tendencies of the disturbed and the deranged.
After establishing himself firmly in the commercial and music video worlds, Weisz delivers a solid and controversial debut, which ended up getting banned in Germany.

Relying largely on flashbacks, we accompany Katie on her journey of discovery as she travels the footpaths and backroads of Oliver’s and Simon’s lives, to perhaps better understand what led them to that place and time where one allowed the other to eat him, in order to consummate their love.
And with the largely chronological nature of the flashbacks, it quickly becomes apparent that the script by T.S. Faull is moving inexorably towards Katie’s viewing of the video Oliver shot of the death of Simon, an act that will perhaps allow her to fill the hole in her life left by some undisclosed loss. Katie believes that if she can somehow come to understand the truth behind that singular confluence where Oliver and Simon found each other, then perhaps she can come to grips with her own personal darkness.

With haunting music by Steven Gutheinz and the bleak, cold beauty of Jonathan Sela’s cinematography*, Rohtenburg is a riveting descent into the damaged lives of lonely, scarred individuals, who are only really yearning for that one particular other who can make them feel safe, and whole, who can understand them completely, who can look into their souls and not flinch from the abyss that waits there.
With strangely similar family backgrounds (estranged father, mentally unstable mother), Oliver and Simon seem like nothing so much as mirror selves, merely waiting for fate to allow them to see the other’s reflection, and to let them heal each other in the dark, ghoulish manner which they desire.

Kretschmann is hypnotic as the schizophrenic Oliver, who embraces the macabre urges that roil inside him, who, in his youth, only ever experienced giving—in his round-the-clock caring for his mother—can now really only take, to satisfy the child perpetually starved of affection. (His plea for more willing victims over the internet is simply the child in the candy shop, demanding more sweets.)
Huber meanwhile, is the sad and desperate picture of the secret victim, who tries to maintain a normal relationship with lover Felix (Marcus Lucas), while trawling the net in the early morning hours, visiting websites like the Cannibal Cantina, to sate his deviant hungers. And while Oliver’s need is to absorb, Simon’s is to be absorbed, to be completely subsumed—and more pointedly, consumed—by the act of love. (One of the most disturbing moments of the film—and there are many—is when Simon tells a male prostitute what he wants done to his penis.)
And as clearly warped and twisted as these psyches are, when they meet over the internet, there is a mutual, instinctual understanding that they have indeed found their other. It is one of Rohtenburg’s triumphs that the flurry of emails back and forth between Oliver and Simon is both a heartfelt exchange and a wildly disturbing taste of the extremes to which some people will go to find love.

And as witness to this bizarre relationship, Russell is effective as the audience’s proxy, also damaged and scarred by life (though perhaps not as much as either Oliver or Simon), trying to scry for the truth in the shadowed mirror of a love soured by death, of a union where eros and thanatos lay in each other’s arms, whispered sweet nothings into each other’s ears, then proceeded to sink their teeth into each other’s haunches.

Clearly, Rohtenburg is not to everyone’s tastes (pun most definitely intended). The material is decidedly dark and morbid.
But it is also imbued with a Gothic lyricism that never allows the film to become sordid and tawdry in the way other movies of the bizarre from last year—notably Terry Gilliam’s Tideland and Gyorgy Palfi’s Taxidermia—are.
While other films seem more content to repulse and revolt, Rohtenburg’s aim is to disturb and provoke. Where is the line that separates right from wrong where love is concerned? Consenting adults, after all. And these are the people their pathologies have made them into. This is their understanding of “love.” What right does society have to say otherwise?

Perhaps the saddest note in all this though, is the fact that Weisz went from horror with significant subtext to The Hills Have Eyes 2 (review in Archive: April 2007), exactly the sort of movie whose only real purpose is to repulse and revolt. Given what he achieved in Rohtenburg, I can only hope The Hills Have Eyes 2 was an aberration, and that his next film will have as much, ahem, to chew on, as Rohtenburg does.

* Jonathan Sela’s excellent cinematography can also be seen in John Moore‘s remake of The Omen, and in the upcoming film adaptation of Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train.

Parting shot: Rohtenburg earned Wiesz the Best Director nod at the 39th Sitges International Film Festival (Europe’s biggest fantasy-horror fest). It also snagged the Best Actor award, shared between Kretschmann and Huber, and Best Cinematography for Sela.

Parting shot 2: Rohtenburg is inspired by the real life case of the Metzgermeister (“Master Butcher”), Armin Meiwes. It was Meiwes’ complaint that his “personality rights” had been violated that resulted in the German ban.

(Rohtenburg and Grimm Love OS’s courtesy of impawards com; film image courtesy of bilder.filmstarts.de.)

THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 (Review)

It’s some two years after the events of Alexandre Aja’s remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and it seems that the military have been conducting sweeps of Sector 16 apparently without finding any of the cannibalistic mutants that roam the area. They’ve just recently wired the place with surveillance and monitoring equipment, and a detachment of National Guard trainees are sent in on a delivery run, routine grunt work that turns deadly when the blood starts to flow.

Directed by Martin Weisz (Rohtenburg) and written by original Hills writer/director Wes Craven, and his son Jonathan, this sequel feels like nothing so much as a quickie cash cow, slapped together to rake in the dough. Populated by a bunch of dull ciphers, the film strides nonchalantly towards the climactic gorefest with nary a spike of excitement or tension to break the tedium.
I may not by the biggest fan of Aja’s Hills, but at the very least, that had this palpable sense of bleak desperation, where you could almost feel the heat and the grit and the sand. Wiesz’s Hills 2 is a pedestrian entry in the annals of modern horror cinema, the sort of shocker that really has no proper context in which to view the onscreen bloodletting. All we have here is a gruesome exercise in the torture and maiming of characters as we watch dully while they’re picked off one by one.
There’s a half-hearted attempt to humanize one Guard, Missy Martinez (One Tree Hill’s Daniella Alonso), but that doesn’t really hold water, so ultimately, all we have here is meat, pure and simple, waiting to be stalked and gutted. (And in the case of Flex Alexander’s Sarge, you’re almost praying for it.)
We’re not even treated to the demise of recognizable TV stars like the usual horror movie of today (the House of Wax remake alone had alumni from 24, Gilmore Girls, and One Tree Hill, with Paris Hilton thrown in for good measure). The ultimate anonymity of these soon-to-be-dead-and-defiled Guards (and by extension, this film) is assured.

Writer Ed Gorman once described Craven’s original The Hills Have Eyes as “… an existentialist’s notion of a Saturday matinee,” while film critic Steven H. Scheuer considered it “… a serious attempt at social criticism within the horror genre.”
I haven’t seen the movie in ages (viewed in an after-school screening at a friend’s house during the glorious age of the Betamax), but I do recall my reaction: it was a riveting experience, and ultimately unpleasant, a bleak, nihilistic film that got under one’s skin, or like desert sand into the creases and crevices of one’s body. (Of course, at the time, I had no idea what the word “nihilistic” meant; I just knew it wasn’t a “fun” horror movie.)
And though it was the sort of movie that I wasn’t particularly eager to view repeatedly, it left a mark. It was potent low-budget cinema, that, like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre before it, looked and felt awfully real, like some hellish documentary directed by an Inquisition torturer.
Thus, though Aja’s remake was certainly a passable example of today’s brand of extreme horror, it still felt fake compared to the original.
Weisz’s sequel feels even less genuine, mostly because it doesn’t really sink its claws into the audience. It just kind of presents the situation without placing us in the middle of the action. The experience is like watching Top Chef, or Hell’s Kitchen; you can see the food, but you can’t taste it. You just have to take the judges’ word for its edibility.

So how do I know The Hills Have Eyes 2 is a good horror movie? Because Martin Weisz and Wes Craven told me so.

Parting shot: Incidentally enough, I was also disappointed by Craven’s own sequel, 1985‘s The Hills Have Eyes Part II. Weisz’s version, though co-written by Craven, tells a different story, as this one spins off from Aja’s Hills, which made the idea that the cannibals were mutated by atomic testing—only implied in Craven’s original—explicit, by setting the action in Sector 16.

(Original The Hills Have Eyes 2 OS rejected by the MPAA, courtesy of eatmybrains.com.)