The German Chainsaw Massacre - The First Hour of the Reunification (1990)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief

Cast: Alfred Edel as Alfred; Karina Fallenstein as Klara; Artur Albrecht as Ihr Liebhaber; Susanne Bredehöft as Ihr Mann / Margit; Brigitte Kausch as Brigitte; Volker Spengler as Henk; Dietrich Kuhlbrodt as Dietrich; Reinald Schnell as Kurti; Udo Kier as Jonny

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #266 / An Abstract Candidate

 

Kebab on the road!

That title is not a cash-in for Tobe Hooper's legendary The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). This is aware of that film, alongside the irony of West German/German laws that kept that film banned from the country, as with its sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986). Its director Christoph Schlingensief became aware of them, likely through bootlegged versions due to their lack of availability, and wrote this film in mind of them only after watching the official celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate in 1990 when the Berlin Wall came down.

It is not an insult to the late Christoph Schlingensief, as much as a reinterpretation of Tobe Hooper's films as a provocateur looking at his homeland in this time of reunification, that he was as much being a shit-stirrer who suggests that, just after the reunification of West and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that unification would not lead to the country instantly becoming a better place. This is not an empty concern to make either in context, as set during and shot after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this imagines the GDR (East Germans), when they are able to leave through the opened borders, being picked off by a family of West German cannibals within a wasteland of general chaos left from the mechanics of the country having been separated into two, or even as one in the early 20th Century.

This is emphasised by real footage of the celebration of the unification, with the TV coverage of the state ceremony for the re-unification of Germany at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and a speech by the then German president, Richard von Weizsäcker. His speech of reconnection is contrasted by the awkward pauses, apt in mind to a country that, for at least the 20th Century alone, has been a nation thrown into turbulence, and Christoph Schlingensief through his career both for cinema and controversial public performances has never escaped its own problems.

In this world, an East German woman Klara (Karina Fallenstein) kills her boyfriend and flees by car across the border to West German. Said border is a phantom world, shot in rundown industrial wasteland, of unemployed custom officers who have lost their minds, and many figures in the phantom zone including the cannibalistic family, picking off stray drivers to make into sausages, a more perverse choice rather than just meat knowing sausages are a cultural stereotype (and cultural product) for Germany. At first, The German Chainsaw Massacre as an explicit horror film in tone feels unique for Schlingensief. Set around a woman, who in her really violent and unexplained decision, moves for a new life, the limbo she enters is atmospheric. The rundown industrial environments and wasteland is contrasted with a tone creepy just from the soundtrack, and it is set up that the film is going to be extremely violent, such as foreshadowing a character being alive despite having no bottom half. His satirical tone, a grotesque one, I have become acclimatised to seeing his films for the first time looks like it is going to be filtered through this different mood.

The German Chainsaw Massacre however shifts quickly to his trademark, a hyper extreme and exaggerated tone which is in bad taste and very broad, meant to be very sickly humorous but in itself really serrated and confrontational as a result. His cinema, in hindsight, was always going to have an issue to sell to outside Germany because it is so ingrained in concerns about Germany's cultural and political aspects, with so many nuisances for all his chaotic mass of screaming caricature I myself would have no idea about¹. It is cinema, for a cult audience, that you can "sell" for how extreme and weird he can be, but his cinema really requires some context to get the most from its satire. He also, in deliberately being offensive to middlebrow ideals in his homeland, as was the case in United Trash (1996), has moments which have not aged well at all here one of the cannibalistic family a predatory lesbian.

It is however also more closer to the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre than you would presume, no way near as precise and menacing, but with Tobe Hooper's film having a lot of strangely twisted humour, a lot of bizarre characters, and with Christoph Schlingensief's movie riffing on the set-up and, in an escape through a vehicle at the end, even visual motifs. Hopper's sequel, much to the bemusement of his financers Cannon Group who wanted a straight-laced horror film, is especially a clear influence here, as alongside being such an underrated film in itself, Hooper was arguably playing to this same twisted and grotesque humour in his own country's context, of  his cannibal family becoming businessmen in eighties America, and Bill Moseley being a mad Vietnam War veteran screaming about setting up "Nam Land" as a public attraction.

The German Chainsaw Massacre is a film where most of the cast, even the female lead, are not defendable. Artur the boyfriend, who somehow manages to stay alive despite looking like grounded mince eventually with his guts only kept inside by a sliver of skin, is introduced being a near rapist, whilst our cannibal family, with a tendency of putting old man masks on their victims to kill them ritually, are a strange assortment of oddballs and even products of incest. The grandfather from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre here replaced by one clearly dead, revealed to be a skeleton in a German war outfit, the male head is doing bad ventriloquism from which everyone believes whilst one of the other members explicitly wears a winged German helmet evoking the country's warring past. And then there is Udo Kier, who sadly is not as prevalent here as in other Schlingensief films, playing a strange mad younger man on the side posing as a police officer just to grope a female friend. In terms of commitment to the performance, he at one point whilst wearing a wig sets it on fire for real, which is a something different to say the least and just evokes, with the exception of his Lars von Trier and Guy Maddin roles, how little I truly got to see from him as an actor just from the more well known genre films he made.

It is a film that, like the other Christoph Schlingensief films I have seen, if much more difficult to digest as it continues, his films of the nineties period at least being openly broad. His style is fascinating and memorable - the most obvious mannequin stunt possible, when one is thrown at a car, feels on purpose - but it is also a very acquired taste especially as in terms of the genre he is working in, horror, it becomes intentionally derailed by his provocative broadness. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre never had someone's testicles ripped off, and considering what he did with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, Tobe Hooper himself realised the comedic potential of his own premise and made a film that was broad and over-the-top comedy for the sequel, matching the tone of The German Chainsaw Massacre more even if Schlingensief's film is still, even an hour long, a much more challenging film in terms of his world's exaggerated acting, broad comedy and icky shock value to provoke and annoy his country.

Schlingensief's film is fascinating, rewarding if you appreciate Christoph Schlingensief as a provocateur. It is a film in hindsight I would wonder how a regular horror viewer would react to it, as Schlingensief's films really do have their own idiosyncratic tone which, honestly, is more difficult to chew on in that he has political ideas visually upfront. It is, in truth too, not necessarily provocative in a profound way only what he did, but a really nihilistic equivalent of chewing with your mouth open with his work as much for me as an outsider, the dirty laundry of Germany's complicated historical past and present in his career being scrutinised not through the cold eye of a figure like Austria's Michael Haneke. As a Haneke looked at Europe's failings in his chilling cerebral nature, Christoph Schlingensief instead has a gregarious and deliberately offensive tone, "gregarious" apt as, even if you may never find this film funny at all, and the location choices are actively chosen to be grimy, he plays all of this with a broad farcical tone than takes the horror tropes seriously, something comparable to when The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 transgressed the first film's seriousness by being ridiculous upfront.

More so now having seen the film, I wished to have seen this on a cinema screen with an audience presuming it was a horror film with just political content than what you get with a Christoph Schlingensief film. I know this film was screened at the Showroom in Sheffield², an independent cinema in England which has been in the past the closest for me to see, in a blue moon, non-mainstream Hollywood films on a cinema screen. Baring one I have seen onscreen there, Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers (2009), which is for another review for another day, it would have been fascinating to see how people would have reacted to a film like The German Chainsaw Massacre, especially a British audience not having grown up in a country that went through unification, like this. Knowing in 2021, renamed Blackest Heart, a terrible title, this has ended up on Amazon Prime in the United Kingdom, is fittingly hilarious with my own sick sense of humour. The one film from Christoph Schlingensief not made available on MUBI, their streaming platform allowing me to see his cinema and in a context, this in itself is a perverse yet perfect way to sell this film as many baffle people, expecting a generic horror film like others on that site, will find Christoph Schlingensief's offensive production mocking the change of a united Germany there facing them. Even when it is taken off, as always happens with streaming sites with interesting films, it may appear in another unexpected place, waving with its twisted series of gore scenes and broad acting performances, to baffle more people, and I pray that continues so forth.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

 

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1) This one article, by Dr Sarah Pogoda, a Senior Lecturer in German Studies and German Literature for various organisations such as the University of Sheffield, has helped me considerably gain more from The German Chainsaw Massacre and admire the film greatly.

2) Screened in 2014, as is documented here, I saw this on the marquee outside and now more than ever wished I could have gone to the screening.