Chain Reaction

When the movie started, I was pleasantly surprised about some rather nice camera work. This pleasure lasted exactly until one of the actors started to speak.

This movie proves that basic technical skills do not make good directing: Apart from moving the camera in the right way, a director also has to make decisions concerning things that do or don't work. Ittenbach's movie fails miserably in the attempt to get some acting out of the amateur cast.

I sometimes enjoy amateur actors, but here we have a disastrous collision between the lack of acting skills and the inane things the poor people are supposed to say. The plot revolves around some convicts stranded in a forest hut with a family that obviously lived secluded from civilization for some centuries. When these people speak, they use what writers Ittenbach and Thomas Reitmair assume to be an ancient English dialect. This idea may have looked nice on paper, but the result is absolutely hilarious. Because the writers believe that old English simply consists of attaching a "th" to every verb, everybody is phonetically challenged and has to speak very slowly. When the doctor asks the protagonist girl (horrifically played by Ittenbach's wife Martina) whether she has some hot water, her unwieldy reply is "Aye, haveth I". (For the reader: What do you think is the translation of "no" into old English? Right: "Nay, haveth I not".) Almost as funny as this is the grandiose overacting by Dan van Husen, who tries to play the chief convict. If somebody told him that he is not Anthony Hopkins, would he believe it? Inexplicably, Jürgen Prochnow also has a small part, unfortunately a talking role. He's as terrible as in all of his English speaking roles. I thought his career had hit rock bottom when he appeared in "House of the Dead", but it's strange how things can always get worse.

The only thing that Ittenbach is known to do really well is over-the-top splatter and gore effects. The movie is rather tame in this respect, even compared to Ittenbach's work in Uwe Boll's "BloodRayne" (where the two formed an unholy alliance). The effects did a lot to make this the first of Boll's movies that was comparatively bearable. As a director, however, Olaf Ittenbach is a much more terrible than Boll and would deserve an appropriate level of notoriety.

On my TV, the film begins with two criminals getting out of a bus with pink jumpsuits, not the traditional orange.This is a gore flick which should appeal to the young, over 10 and less than 25. Got to love gore. There is little true acting. I feel like yelling "Road trip!" Carnage in the forest. Typical plot. The movie is very unpredictable. However, if you are a blood and gore fan, this movie is for you. The movie could have been 15 minutes shorter, which might have helped it. The movie has lackluster plot, contains lackluster actors, lackluster acting, and is just a highly predictable, minimally entertaining movie. But you gotta love it for what it is -- just late night entertainment.

A very professional movie from the former "ultra-gore" auteur (Premutos ,The burning moon)Olaf Ittenbach. Chain Reaction (aka House of Blood) is a professional, good looking 35 mm film, with car crashing, great makeup and gore FX but it lacks in entertainment value. I mean, its very boring and confusing. The plot is very hard to follow and the action scenes comes only in bits (when they come are cool with gore and blood, but its a very talkie movie, and the dialogs sucks. Premutos was a great low budget movie. Then Ittembach entered more mainstream. The "fromdusktilldawnesque" Legion of the Dead was pretty cool and entertaining, but stuff like this or Riverplay make me think if i will watch a new Ittembach movie. 4/10 for the good productions values only.

Olaf is Germany's sfx-wonder. And he is an amateur in making movies. He started with video-home-movie-horror-events with incredible sfx which looks like the best days of Lucio Fulcio or the Hellraiser movies. But script, directing actors and dialogs are not his profession. I know that he is thinking that directing is his profession, but that is not true...look his movies. This movie is also a small-big-budget-amateur-movie with on a high trash-level and a lot of unmeant comedy. But there is a lot of splatter and gore sfx on a high level. Jürgen Prochnow has a small part in this movie and the only reason for it is, that he want to give this movie a chance because of his name. The story and setting is always the same in a Ittenbach movie: the hell, the dead, maniacs, zombies, rednecks and some stupid heroes with some lame Tarantiono-dialogs.

With his early, (very) low-budget splatter films, Olaf Ittenbach proved that he could make a well constructed horror movie, despite technical limitations and a cast that obviously needed a few more acting lessons. Therefore, since it had a larger budget, I was hoping that Chain Reaction would be a leap forward in terms of overall quality for the German master of gore. But apart from a some flashy CGI credits, a few crashes, and the presence of a 'real' actor (Jurgen Prochnow), not a lot has changed. In fact, to be honest, the acting is actually worse than usual, and the script... well, it maketh me laugh!

A dead crow drops from a tree to the ground and dislodges a rock, which hits a car (belonging to a doctor), that crashes into a bus-load of violent criminals, who escape into the woods (taking the doctor hostage) and eventually wind up in a house occupied by weird religious folk (who speaketh in ye olde dialect), who then transform into flesh-eating demons. Phew!

To be fair, I like the initial premise—that something as insignificant as a dead bird falling from a tree can set off a series of dreadful events—but unfortunately, so does Ittenbach. A lot. So much so, that he uses the idea three times within his film! After his captors are all killed, the good doctor escapes, only to run into the arms of the law, who suspect him of foul play and decide to keep him under lock and key whilst they investigate.

The doctor is put on a DOC bus to be transferred to jail, and, guess what happens..... that's right—a dead crow drops from a tree to the ground and dislodges a rock, which hits a car, that crashes into the bus-load of violent criminals... and so on.

And when a third dead crow causes even more trouble later on, one wonders whether it might be wise just to cut down all of the trees along this stretch of road, to bring down the accident rate.

As always with an Ittenbach film, there is plenty of gruesome gore on display (with some very nasty crushed heads being the most sickening of these), but with quite a long running time, there are also periods in which the film is just too 'dry'. Some of these moments offer some (presumably) unintentional laughs (the aforementioned olde English spoken by the demon people is hilarious), but other parts are just plain dull. Jurgen Prochnow is given nothing much to do, there is lots of mundane chit-chat, and the whole 'deja-vu' angle quickly starts to irritate.

Ittenbach is a director who has shown a lot of promise in the past; he certainly knows how to put together a decent gore scene. Perhaps, in future, if he gets a reasonable amount of dosh to spend, he should invest in a decent scriptwriter and get a better cast. I'm sure he has a horror 'classic' somewhere up his sleeve, however, on the strength of this effort, it's hard to believe.