To Do EVIL, You Must Pay EVIL a Ton of Euro. “La Petit Mort 2: Nasty Tapes” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on May 13, 2023

Step Back into La Maison de “La Petit Mort” for a Sequel that’s Hard to Stomach!

La Maison de la Petit Mort’s doors remain open under new management, continuing to serve the dark web public interest with a wide variety of snuff services. For the right price, a fantasy-driven in-person torture show can be arranged for your liking, and one can be an commanding observer or one can get their hands dirty in participatory play where anything goes and pleasures are on-demand. The German snuff house expands their reach to a global level with live webcam shows that can be directed by the high price paying patron and the leather-cladded vixen staff carry out their illicit instructions exactly. A robust menu of dark pleasures, displayed on a new showreel of select gruesome services, are available at the simple transfer of a money wire or cash in hand for the depraved to make their fantasies a reality.

In 2009, German born director Marcel Walz helmed a linear, three-act narrative of tourists laid over in the big city winding up at patronizing a dark and dingy dive bar, La Maison de la Petit Mort, only to be abducted as inventoried stock for the rich to exploit in a slew of murder perversions. Five years later in 2014, Walz returns for a sequel, “La Petit Mort 2: Nasty Tapes,” with reprising principal actress Annika Strauss co-writing the film alongside Walz as well as stepping back into the sadistic black platform shoes of Dominique, one of the two lovely ladies with a lecherous and violent vocation. The direct sequel that follows a day-in-a-life of the snuff house’s employees making an advert showreel does not follow suit in the way the first film was structured. Instead of a linear, chronological narrative, “Nasty Tapes” evolves into an anthology of different kill archetypes for the marketing video. Walz’s Matador Films serves the production oversight with Harald Schmalz (“Collar”) coproducing the anthological torture porn feature.

“La Petit Mort 2: Nasty Tapes” doesn’t seen a whole lot of return on the original cast. The tourists were all mangled, mutilated, and murdered, the original Monique bit the dust in an escape attempt, and the first Maman rode off into the sunset rich with blood money. Instead, and among other things, “Nasty Tapes” folds a new treatment of terror with the same old eggs and flour by reinventing itself into an anthology type, introducing a new, blonde Monique (Yvonne Wölke, “Bad End”) into the batter, and disclosing the new owner of the freaky, fetish club, a feminine man by the name Monsieur Matheo Maxime (Mika Metz, “The Curse of Doctor Wolffenstein”). Annika Strauss is the only original cast member to reprise her original role of Dominique, the brunette to Monique’s blonde and who showed slight inkling of hesitation before being summoned to torture and murder. Strauss doesn’t buck the character trend as Dominque still displays disgust on her face when slicing a man’s facial features in a Picasso style portrait. Yet, Dominique remains loyal to the Monsieur and to the La Maison de la Petit Mort by committing the atrocities without question, unlike the regular administrative bookkeeping and housecleaning she regularly remains vocal in opposition in what’s a slither of dark humor contrast between her gruesome work compared to mundane work. Unlike Cyanide Savior singer Manoush, who was a very convincing merciless club owner Maman, Mike Metz plays a very different, more layered proprietor portrayed as someone who sees the work as a paycheck to fund his deepest desire – to be a beautiful woman just like his wife Jade Maxime (Micaela Schäfer, “Sky Sharks”). That’s about the gist of complexity the sequel has to offer with much of the thinly laid foundation is bricked up by a compilation of back-to-back kill scenarios that involve some extreme genre directors as special guests, such as Uwe Boll (“House of the Dead”), Dustin Mills (“Bath Salt Zombies”), Mike Mendez (“Big Ass Spider!”), and the late Ryan Nicholson (“Gutterballs”), taking part in the clandestine, underground activities in-person or on the web. The film fills out the cast with victims and victimizers in Armin Barwich (“The Terror Stalkers”), Bea La Bea, Babriela Wirbel (“Plastic”), Nichol Neukirch, Marc Rohnstock (“Necronos”), Thomas Pill (“Moor-Monster!”), Kai Plaumann, Markus Hettich (“No Reason”) and the twins, Barbara and Patrizia Zuchowski.

When going into a German gore film, such as “La Petit Mort 2: Nasty Tapes,” you have to go into It having an affinity for, or at least an understanding of, complete shameless representation of torture and killing of another human being for the simple and pure joy of the act. In other words, you have to be somewhat sick in the head. For me, personally, the sickness is rooted out of admiration for special effects and how the F/X artist(s) can create a realistic depiction of an unofficial autopsied anatomy. Filmmaker Ryan Nicholson, who passed away in 2019 of brain cancer, not only had a role in the Marcel Walz sequel, but was also the special effects artist, following in the footsteps of one of the notable German underground special effects artists, Olaf Ittenbach (“Premutos: The Fallen Angel”) who had done the graphic gags on the first film with head turning results. Nicholson, with a credit list that has a foot in independent productions and more mainstream, Hollywood productions, such as “Final Destination” and the remake of “Blair Witch” from 2016, doesn’t disappoint and keeps the blood, guts, and stringy sinew seamless in a gruesome pageantry of death that rivals and continues Olaf’s original stamp. Beyond the glossy surface of a blood glaze, “Nasty Tapes” is nothing more than a kill-after-kill anthology with no concrete premise for either of the individual slaughter vignettes. Title cards setup the kill moments with basic victim descriptors, such as married status, age, and how much their life has been paid for, but doesn’t humanize them in the least, creating zero compassion for the unsuspecting abductee fated for something far worse than death. Instead, Walz flips the script with more background on the clients with ipre-and-post interviews of their most intimate time at La Petit Mort. This structure can be monotonous as there’s nothing else to look forward to or to absorb empathetically as a viewer in an anthology that simply glorifies the leisure time of an undisturbed murder.

As a nail-pulling, nose-cutting, drill-holing, lip-stitching, dick-scissoring, gut-stabbing anthology, “La Petit Mort 2: Nasty Tapes” is a gory, good time and is even better now in high-definition with a 1080p Blu-ray release from Unearthed Films The AVC encoded BD25 looks as good as can expected for a shaky cam, hectically edited, and filthy dark German gore film presented in a 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio. Details are oleaginous wet with blood and tissue that incongruently with the Roland Freitag’s gloomy yet suppressed cinematography and Kai E. Bogatzki discordance and chaotic editing technique that is supposed to elicit extreme shock but consequently results in a loss of the intended grisliness. Unearthed Films‘ release exhibits no issues with compression, but the hues and tones appear to fuse in the near eliminate of some contours where there should be some. The German-English DTS-HD 5.1 mix can be score heavy, especially a hard and energized Tekkno title credits from composer Klaus Pfreundner that’s distinctive German, but “Nasty Tapes” has profound focus on its core selling point – torture. The very few scenes of intercut dialogue shots spliced into the client’s sociopathic session are well understood and do have prominence over the score, as well as the ambient milieu of screams and the integrated flesh destroying Foley, despite the cam-esque quality of the pseudo-testimonials. The burned-in English subtitles under the German Language only are synced well without error and with consistently good pacing. Disc extras include a behind-the-scenes making of cut out from the main camera, an alternate torture scene, a behind-the-scenes still gallery, a short advert of a naked woman strung up by her arms and being stapled with signs, and Unearthed Films trailers. The Blu-ray physical features don’t stray to far from normal Unearthed Films releases with a standard Blu-ray snapper case with grisly cover art of a marred victim’s plucked out eye and a Jade Maxime holding a bone saw and wearing ripped fishnet stockings and black lingerie. The pressed disc art has the rehashes the back cover image of Monsieur Maxime wearing a venetian mask. The Blu-ray comes unrated, region A locked, and has a manageably sufficing runtime of 83 minutes to not overkill the overkilling. Transparent in its surreptitious atrocities, “La Petit Mort II: Nasty Tapes” subsists as Marcel Walz charnel house of horrors with a new revamped anthology approach to razzmatazz special effects wetwork without any due remorse.

Step Back into La Maison de “La Petit Mort” for a Sequel that’s Hard to Stomach!

Never Tour Mistakenly into an EVIL Murder Bar! “La Petite Mort” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on January 10, 2023

“La Petite Mort” is Orgasmically Gory and on Blu-ray!

Vacationing to Mallorca should have been a relaxing getaway for Simon, his blind girlfriend Nina, and their longtime friend, Dodo, but their flight layover in Frankfurt leaves down idle town to explore the city that’s only a mere two hours from home. Tension between them begin to bubble to the surface when uncertain emotional steps to take relationships to the next level arise and they become inadvertently scammed by a local grifter. Exhaustion sets in and forces them to take refuge in a local dive bar with a specialty for S&M play. The bar is actually a front for the Maison de la Petite Mort, an underground snuff house owned a sadistic woman named Maman who livestreams kink-murders and sells hapless victims to wealthy businessmen with whimsical and perverse deviancies. The flight to Mallorca will be indefinitely delayed as the three friends are now a part of the bloody basement decor awaiting the horrors before them.

“La Petite Mort,” translated from French as literally the little death, is also known as the post-orgasmic sensation, such as a weakness or loss of conscious, that serves as an analogy to death. The phrase is also the title of the 2009 torture-gore film written-and-directed by the German-born Marcel Walz more than a decade before the formation of his now Neon Noir production company. Walz, who later in his career went on to remake the Herschel Gordon Lewis 1963 film, “Blood Feast,” blossoms as a torture porn filmmaker as Walz’s directorial catalogue contains more blood than a blood bank and often stretches the subgenre range of plot machinations from cannibals to dark web to snuff. Made on a few thousand-dollar budget and shot in a real sex club in Mannheim, Germany, “La Petite Mort” touches upon all three plot devices to create a dungeon of splatter and sadism using elements of an unsolved true crime case of a couple gruesomely murdered in an underground murder house as the narrative base. Before Neon Noir, Walz and filmmaker Michael Effenberger, director of “Tortua,” formed Matador Films that became the company behind “La Petite Mort” with Thomas Buresch (“Unrated: The Movie”) and feature actor and director of photography, Andreas Pape (“Toxic Lullaby”) producing.

Films like “La Petite Mort” is a special breed not because of the torture and gore-porn element, which can be an acquired taste for consumers with dark thoughts, fantasies, and morbid curiosities (I fall into the latter category if you’re wondering), but rather the story caters to no singular principal lead nor does is the focus on an ensemble cast. “La Petite Mort” transitions from one group, the naïve backpacking travelers, to the S&M snuff-makers in a flip-flop of point of view and storytelling. All the relationship complexities between the out of concern love from Simon (Andreas Pape) to his even keeled blind girlfriend, Nina (Inés Zahmoul, “La Isla”) as well as the insignificant tiffs and spats between Simon and friend Dodo (Anna Habeck, “Popular”) to see who is in Nina’s favor are quickly swept aside when the trio is trapped and tethered to the S&M spider web of Maman’s Maison de la Petite Mort. While the three travelers produce a mild interest spun out of frivolous dramatics to the like of the normal human population and very much up played by Walz for that very purpose to produce stark contrast against what’s normal for sadomastic pleasure-seekers, Maman, the orchestrator of pain and profit, is the most earnest of principals with a crone-like presence, played inexorably and ruthless by French punk-goth singer Manoush. The certified gypsy and former bodybuilder has made a name for herself in a plethora of extreme, Germanic horror pictures over the last decade, but “La Petite Mort” came early in Manoush’s career and is exhibits why she’s so good at horror, especially at the sadism brand. Maman’s schadenfreude business employs two lesbian dominatrixes, Dominique and Angélique, with strong-stomachs and a healthy bloodthirst. The beautiful femme fatales serve Maman’s unquestionably, almost mindlessly, that only glimpses into possibilities of how the two women became betrothed to do Maman’s bidding. Annika Strauss, who’s been in the screen queen business about as long as and has starred alongside with Manoush on a number of films, is also a Marcel Walz regular casted actress who fits and transforms into just about every character under the black sun of ghoulish and macabre material thrown her way. As Dominique, Strauss is provided more depth to why and how the brunette basket case has come under Maman’s greedy and depraved thumb as the actress shows some slither of concern for the captives while explaining she had no choice just they like them and exhibiting more reserve than her blonde counterpart Angélique (Magdalèna Kalley, “Violent Shit 4”) when the cameras are rolling. Conversations rooted into provocative thought, sympathy, or reason are often few and far in between the constant pleas for help and the screaming matches of pelting threats. “La Petite Mort” finalizes the cast with Martin Hentschel (“Zombie Reanimation”), Tanja Karius (“Necronos”), and Thomas Kercmar (“Space Wolf”) as Klaus der Kobold, a Napoleon-sized elitist wealthy enough to buy people’s lives and enjoy seeing them horrifically mutilated.

One scene overwhelms the diagnostic side of my brain and that is why Maman is torturing Dodo with needles as Manoush delivers a surprising genuine villainous monologue about sadomasochists being judged by normal people and how her character has a liberated, uninhibited sexuality in a moment that is a powerful argument in favor for sadomasochism to exist without shame. Thinking about this, I’m not aware of any publicized S&M clubs, especially those that aren’t criticized for being deviant, perverse, and secular. After that one moment of vulnerability, “La Petite Mort” turns into a choke-down bloodbath with some great and some not-so-great special effects by one of Germany’s gore film greats, Olaf Ittenbach, director and F/X artist of “Premutos: The Fallen Angel” and “Legion of the Dead.” Ittenbach brings me to another overwhelming scene, one that churns the contents of your stomach, involving a meat grinder, a hand, and a chalice. “La Petite Mort” has other notable grisly moments of scalping, castrating, eye-plucking, and disemboweling, all of which are in great gooey-gory detail. What takes away from the gore scenes is Walz fluttering effect or grindhouse-esque edited framed overlay that, in my wildest guess, is supposed to enhance the extreme acts of violence, torture, and death in conjunction with composer Michael Donner’s industrial rumble and pulsing synth score. Instead, the effect becomes nothing more than a cinematic nuisance, an eyesore that dilutes Ittenbach’s best handywork because that scalping scene is the chef’s kiss of tactual realism. Based on a true story that I can’t seem to find any record of, “La Petite Mort,” for a brief few minutes, becomes a promulgating champion for alternate sexualities and is also a showcase for Olaf Ittenbach to shock and disgust but for what the feature is worth, “La Petite Mort” offers only emptiness in both character conviction and story narrative.

A fitting entry into the shockingly weird and grotesque “Unearthed Films'” independent film catalogue, “La Petite Mort” arrives onto a high definition, 1080p Blu-ray home video. Presented in a 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio, Walz bookends his callous-cladded cult film with a yellowish-tan tint while the girth of the story is laced with more gel coloring under no hinderance of tint. Low lighting with low contrast markers, mixed with tropical-warm gel coloring and strobe flashing fabricates the sunless and dank murder basement but any exterior shots, even the bookend act one and act three are rendered with poor resolution for digital recording. Only a single audio track is available with a German LPCM 2.0 with burned-in English subtitles and what’s rendered is likely the best quality to get from the masters from the lossy format. Dialogue is often unrefined, and the levels vary, but for the most part clean and free from obstruction. The track has limited ambience and harps heavily on the gory moments while Michael Donner’s dark industrial score takes the brunt of the overall soundtrack. Subtitle synchronization varies as well with millisecond flashes of translations that are impossible to read or even pause perfectly on, but the translations appear flawless and consolidated from the dialect for easy reading. The Unearthed Films’ bonus content is aplenty with a new commentary and interview with director Marcel Walz. Also included is a feature-length making of “La Petite Mort” with raw handheld camcorder footage, shot by The Bad Boy character in the film, behind-the-scenes footage, and even some 16mm footage that go reel deep into the effects and life of independent filmmakers. An archived interview with special effects artist Olaf Ittenbach, deleted scenes, photo gallery, teaser trailer, official trailer, “La Petite Mort 2” trailer, and the VHS intro that’s essentially a Marcel Walz introduction of the VHS home video release round out the bonus content. The physical attributes are a clear, Blu-ray snapper case with reversible cover art with the inside sleeve containing a more graphic torture not suited for retail shelves. The region A encoded, 77-minute feature is not rated. If invested for the kills, “La Petite Mort” pleases to overindulge the desire and is a solid first torture-porn effort from a then young Marcel Walz who continues to rise in the niche market.

“La Petite Mort” is Orgasmically Gory and on Blu-ray!

EVIL Has Layers. Colorful, Beautiful, Red Dripping Layers. “No Reason” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / Digital Screener)

Posted by Steven Lewis on July 6, 2021

On the verge of moving from her quaint apartment, Jennifer begins her morning caring for her son, Nico. Throughout the morning, her complex neighbors come knocking at her doorstep with unusual behaviors, even so with the mailman who apathetically leaves her bathroom a mess after requesting an urgent need to use the toilet. After leaving Nico with an elderly woman in an adjacent unit to do some light shopping, Jennifer comes home her son and neighbor not answering the door and figures they went out for a while. As time passes and her anxiety builds, Jennifer decides to soak in a relaxing bath but when she falls asleep, she awakes amongst a pile of dismembered bodies, subjected to ultra-violent video recordings of the neighbors who she saw earlier, and a masked maestro of anguish to help Jennifer regain life purity through pain. Through the layers of suffering, the ugliness Jennifer has to endure to survive and find her son might be an awakening she will forever regret.

From the violence saturated mind of German auteur Olaf Ittenbach comes a battle of conscious, a gore waterlogged vision, in his 2010 blood-shedding shocker, “No Reason.” Now, I may be over a decade late to the party on this title, but Unearthed Films has brought a newly remastered, fully uncut Blu-ray to physical and virtual retail shelves, reviving the “Legion of the Dead” and “The Burning Moon” filmmaker’s title from the North American grave as the Intergroove Media DVD has been out of print for a long time, and kicking my ass into high gear with diving into the surreal expressionism, splayed into every nook and cranny, of deviated behaviors and splintered thoughts. “No Reason” is a production of Ittenbach’s IMAS Filmproduktion studios and co-produced by German SOV splatter film connoisseurs, Michael Nezik and Ingo Trendelbernd.

Like Alice traversing a macabre-cladded hell on Earth wonderland is Irene Holzfurtner as the confused lost soul Jennifer More or less fully naked and bloodied half the story, crossing through portals of layered perdition in order to find her son and saving grace, Holzfurtner has insurmountable perplexity hung across her character’s face in the midst of being plopped into bedlam, taking the character on a journey pain, torment, and enlightenment bare ass naked and covered in blood in a metaphorical rebirth. Overseeing Jennifer’s trial and tribulations into being brought back reborn as it were is a sadist donning a crude Cthulhu mask and strapped tightly into a medieval BDSM attire who speaks in riddles and verse to sermonize his cathartic guidance. Markus Hettich towers a monolithic man of pain and pleather, calmly exercising his shrouded authority a healthy amount of sadism, masochism, and sadomasochism in order to undress the falsehood of Jennifer’s split spirit. Hettich pins an ideal Devil-like antagonist, rupturing through the connective tissues of the psyche with a lingering omnipresence that delivers shivers down the spine. Mathias Engel, Alexander Gamnitzer, Andreas Pape, Annika Strauss, Ralph Willmann, and Hildegard Kocian make up the supporting cast who are most cooperative being exploited by the violence and nudity that accompany their ill-fated roles of humiliation, torture, and inevitable gruesome death.

Ittenbach obviously brings the gore but the controversial director, who has sparked backlash for glorifying violence, brings a beaming arthouse allure to his “No Reason’s” gargantuan bloodletting. Layered with multi-colored conjectures point to the unhinged state of a mind, Jennifer endures unspeakable anguish in layers encoded with red, green, and blue, each specifically engineered by the masked man to trigger a response when testing Jennifer’s will; a will to what end is something you’ll need to watch the film to understand. What I can tell you is that each color stage bares a horrific theme – red is simply the spilling of innocent blood, green is feminine dominance symbolized by BDS&M (a running motif throughout) where uninhibited women urinate on men (explicitly shown), castrate by oral sex, and divulge themselves with lots of male body disfiguration through whips, chains, and other large dominatrix toys, and blue is filled with mutants who are just as ugly on the inside as they are on the out. Completing each stage costs Jennifer bodily harm as a reparation for staying on the path of enlightenment, the white layer. With a little money behind the project, Ittenbach’s able to accomplish some fantastically brutal scenes with fleshy prosthetics and I, personally found the intro credits to be insanely power in it’s composition despite the simplicity of it. Where “No Reason” buckles is the crux of Ittenbach’s artistry with the parable that borders nonsensical guff. I’m not going to lie, “No Reason” is difficult to follow from the pre-opening credit epilogue home movie montage of Jennifer and her parents frolicking on the grass, praising Jennifer’s smarts at such a young age, to the post-opening credit opening of a naked and bloody Jennifer holding a detective hostage, to the surreal cerebral journey through a timeless purgatory horror house Jennifer finds herself trapped, the segues, if any, often feel omitted and we’re left to assume the rest.

The brisk 76 minute runtime perfectly balances the right amount of abstract story and gore and, now, “No Reason” has a better reason for your attention with Unearthed Films’ new scan of an uncut Blu-ray release! The May release is presented in a high definition, 1080p, widescreen 1.76:1 aspect ratio. I can’t comment too much on the audio and visuals as a digital screener was only provided, which means there were no extras accompanied with the screener as well. “No Reason” is the first collaboration between Ittenbach and director of photography, Axel Rubbel. The pair went on to work on Ittenbach’s “Savage Love” two years later, but Rubbel has more of an imprint with Ittenbach’s candy-coated eye-popper gorefest with a kaleidoscope of blushes a tinged aberrant from the normal blacks, reds, and browns that blotted onto gore and shock films. The release will include two German language audio track options, a 5.1 surround sound and a stereo 2.0. Both should include English subtitles and, if the Blu-ray is anything like the digital screener, the subtitles are synched well with the dialogue and, from what I can tell, are grammatically error free. My abnormal brain can choke down the free-for-all soul-damaging ultra-violence and gore charcuterie board and Olaf Ittenbach’s “No Reason” fits that bill with a wide berth of exhibited atrocities while also coming up for air by attaching a misdirection substance behind the graphically lurid details of skin ripping from the muscular tissue and flesh lacerated to shreds by a cat-o-nine tails to ease us into the tumultuous mind of a psycho’s path.

“No Reason” available on Uncut Blu-ray!

Gory Evil Experiments With Life and Limbs! “The Curse of Doctor Wolffenstein” review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on November 18, 2016

All Doctor Victor Wolffenstein wanted to accomplish is to invent an occult practiced serum that would permit eternal life, but his pure genius was corrupted by an egomaniacal drive during his time of research in a small village of 1930’s Germany. When Dr. Wolffenstein began gruesomely experimenting with the body parts of the resident dead, local inhabitants labeled him an abomination against humanity and God and sought to expunge him from life by cutting out his tongue and burying him alive in a wooden coffin. Before his ultimate fate, Wolffenstein injects himself with his latest serum batch and curses the villagers prior to his damnation. His serum works, giving the malevolent doctor decades to perform his vital experiments for the next 80 years, but portions of his body start to decay and rot. To keep his tissue viable, this time he steals body parts from the living!

Director Marc Rohnstock’s German gore film “The Curse of Doctor Wolffenstein” finds residence on a callously displayed Blu-ray/DVD combo set courtesy of the blood aficionados over at Reel Gore Releasing. While the premise sounds like nothing more than one deranged doctor’s thirst to slice and dice at his little black heart’s whims, running parallel to Wolffenstein’s monstrosity narrative done in the dank dull light of a mad scientist’s bloodstained lab is the declining story of five young partygoers living life to the fullest travel to a rave festival and when their car breaks down in an eerie and isolated village, beginning the Rube Goldberg process of landing on the front door step of Doctor Victor Wolffenstein’s castle home. The two stories are structured almost purposefully divisive to distinguish on one hand the relationship ups and down of Mike, David, Tina, Jenny, and Emily and while on the other hand, the good doctor straps victims to his cold metal slab, performing invasive experiments on them, and finishing them off by slashing right into the thick of the noggin with a machete, solidifying a hard motif that eventually becomes a the doctor’s MO.

A big part of the Rohnstock 2015 gore film is Wolffenstein’s numerous machetes to the cranium kill that explodes a geyser of dark red blood all over the place. The special effects and makeup by Oliver Müller literally had the blood rushing to brain, splitting the skull to unleash the blood splatter, and Müller does offer a bit more than sustaining as a one trick pony. Realistic arm dismemberments and reattachments, decapitations, exploratory surgical openings, and much, much more are a part of this gore-God’s repertoire. So much gore is present that gore itself becomes a character. That’s saying something since Rohnstock exploits his short lived, ill-fated red shirt characters that roster many recognizable Germans such as porn star Lena Nitro and one of the great gore and shock directors Olaf Ittenbach!

Without a doubt, “The Curse of Doctor Wolffenstein” is a labor of love that subtly borrows from the films of the director’s fandom. There’s a bit of “Evil Dead,” a piece of “Night of the Creeps,” and a flair of Hammer Horror in a mix that defines Rohnstock’s writing and director perspective and style. As the co-founder of the film’s production company Infernal Films, Rohnstock and his Infernal Films team have free reign over the overall structure, style, and tone of this fantastic flesh filleting of a film. What Infernal Films couldn’t really control was the relatively young cast of Isabelle Aring, Robin Czerny, Roland Freitag, Stephanie Meisenzahl, and Julia Stenke whom are pitted against the dual role performance of Mika Metz, playing a miserable mechanic and Doctor Wolffenstein.

Reel Gore Releasing’s gorgeously slipcovered 2-disc Blu-ray and DVD combo release doesn’t hold back standing behind a flick that gallops in blood, bares it all with female nudity, and even has an orifice invading creature with enough ooze to lube it’s way down with ease. Video quality wise, the image is heavily showcased in a cyan hue that’s feels unnatural. The day or brighter scenes look good enough for hi-def in the widescreen presentation in a 16:9 aspect ratio. The German DTS-HD 5.1 option with optional English subtitles is flawless in all areas of the audible tracks. There is also a DTS-HD 2.0 with optional subtitles. Bonus features include a showcase reel in a behind-the-scenes featurette, a German only bloopers reel, “Trapped & Stabbed” short film by director Marc Rohnstock, the film’s trailer, and a still image slideshow. Gore films have always been a hit or miss with this review, but “The Curse of Doctor Wolffenstein” has reclaimed my faith in the intensity of content that’s not suitable for most viewership in one way or another.