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One of last month's Cult Film Friday selections wasDer Todesking by German director Jörg Buttgereit. But the director is best known for his earlier controversial film NEKRomantik, which found itself on banned lists around the world. In Britain it made its way onto the infamous Video Nasties list of the 1980s, and wasn't released uncut until 2014.
The film tells the story of a street cleaner, who works for a company that clears up dead bodies found in public. As part of his work he collects the corpse of a dead gardener, killed in a shooting accident and takes it home for his girlfriend. They are both necrophiliacs, and engage in all kinds of depraved acts with the human remains that litter the house. Eventually his girlfriend leaves him, to start a romantic relationship with the corpse. Despondent the man, tries to get over his loss by seeking out a prostitute, who he murders in a cemetery and has sex with the corpse. Discovered laying with the corpse by an old man, he cuts the man's head off with a shovel. |
This jolly little film ends with the infamous scene (as if some of the scenes aren't bad enough already), of him committing suicide by stabbing himself while ejaculating. And they wonder why it was banned.
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NEKRomantik is a nasty film. The subject matter is disturbing and it is presented in the most disgusting way possible. And that's the point. This is a horror film with arthouse pretensions. Buttgereit is purposely pushing the boundaries of shock film-making. There are more disturbing films, more gory films, more disgusting films. But there aren't many films that have been made that are genuinely something you can simply describe as being "nasty".
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