(1990)
Dir - Alain Robak
Overall: GOOD
Acting as sort of a French, female-centered answer to Frank Henenlotter's Brain Damage except more gory, Alain Robak's Baby Blood, (The Evil Within in the US), is surprisingly entertaining despite its occasionally disturbing subject matter. Revolving around a brutalized and raped, former circus performer who becomes manipulated to the point of tragedy, the movie sprinkles enough outrageous bits to cause genuine laughter. Robak does an admirable job of keeping said female lead, (Emmanuelle Escourrou), consistently on the sympathetic side even as the bloodshed revs up to both funny and uncomfortable degrees by her very hand. What the movie could be saying about the often harsh and unfair treatment of women or the connection between mother and fetus is distorted to a pretty outlandish extent, but the film decently balances its tone and remains interesting at the very least until its appropriately splatter-laced ending. A sequel would emerge a full eighteen years later, (though Robak would step down from the director's chair for it), but as is almost always the case, the story here is wrapped up in a fittingly and messy enough way to stand on its own.
(1992)
Dir - Aleksandr Rogozhkin
Overall: MEH
Whatever is to be made of the Russian Civil War film The Chekist rather depends on how harrowing of an experience one can endure. This is certainly similar to many other such movies that portray in unflinching detail the types of real life war atrocities that were committed in fairly recent memory. Which is to say that they are far, far from enjoyable filmgoing experiences. Aleksandr Rogozhkin makes a point of not letting up on showing the gratuitous amount of human life that was disposed of by the Cheka police force that systematically and ruthlessly eliminated upwards of many thousands during this time. The ones that are doing the killing either make light of it, fight amongst themselves, or become numb to the point of inevitable madness and the ones being killed likewise range from calmly excepting of their fate, to begging for their lives, to proudly snubbing their executioners up until the last minute. These scenes are relentless though to such a degree that hardly anything else transpires as the day to day butchering becomes increasingly monotonous. Is it all a disturbing look into one of the 20th centuries darkest military periods? Assuredly so, but that does not make it a remotely easy view. For sure that was intended so again, who is to say what to truly make of it?
(1993)
Dir - Jörg Buttgereit
Overall: MEH
Once again going above and beyond the call of making his audience feel as uncomfortable as possible, Jörg Buttgereit's Schramm can accurately be described as the opposite of fun. A guy repeatedly hammers nails into his own foreskin, gets his eyeball surgically removed, and fucks a plastic torso and then cleans his cum out of it. Plus there is like a weird, hairy vagina goblin or something that occasionally pops up. The film creates such a consistently disgusting mood that even a scenes where people are eating normal food in a normal restaurant or painting their walls in their underwear both come off as similarly repulsive. Coming from the man behind the NEKRomantik series, none of this should be the least bit surprising and there is a twisted kind of admiration one can have by Buttgereit's due diligence to bypass taboos and challenge the viewer. The film does have some eerie images and an interesting, hallucinogenic quality to it and there are plenty of other movies that unfortunately go much farther than Schramm in a much less artful way. On this note, it is not like it deserves to be banished from the face of humanity, (cough, A Serbian Film, cough). Still though, one would rather do almost anything than watch a serial killer be a disgusting pig for just over an hour.
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