No Reason

This movie wastes no time getting into gear exposing full frontal female nudity and excessive gore. This movie reminded me of some great horror films of 2010 such as The Farmhouse, Blood River and Devil but unfortunately for this German export, it didn't live up to its potential. The problem with this film is that it is too confusing and convoluted for the average gore fan. The acting is tenuous at best and the ending seems a little rushed although i did like the conclusion. Other negatives to this film were the special effects and the audio. Some effects were so bad and obviously fake that it took a bit of the gore authenticity away from the proceedings. The audio sounded like it came from another film at times and was badly recorded into this picture. It's not all doom and gloom for this picture, the pacing is good and moves along at a very crisp pace and for the budget I think the heart of this film was in right place. It also had a grimy '70's grind house feel reminiscent of great 1970's exploitation sleaze such as Malabimba and one of my all time favourite's Alucarda. So for those of you that love grisly gore and nudity running amok...proceed, the rest of you stay far far away.....

After being placed in a strange afterlife, a woman finds herself continuously forced to watch the torment of those around her to help determine the true value of a cruel lesson about herself, and the longer she stays in the tormented scenario the more her mind and body break which hinders her quest even further.

This was a generally solid but somewhat trouling genre effort. When this one works, it's due to the solid atmosphere that emerges from the setup that serves to unleash stomach-churning gore at every opportunity. Given the presentation offering up simple excuses for her to encounter the people from her life in a series of intense, brutal and well-choreographed torture sequences offering demonic creatures taking BDSM tools and other nefarious tools to graphically rip victims apart in unrelenting sequences, the film works rather nicely. Mangling parts and splitting open their body to generate spectacular gore-gags with oceans of bloodshed during the scene, these scenes stay in the mind rather nicely with the impressive nature of the setups including the scenes in various lighting arrangements that add an extra layer of psychological torment to the proceedings. This psychological approach carries over rather nicely into the general plotline involving her quest to uncover the truth about her tormented state and constant torture. The addition of the color-coded levels that are supposed to signal the separate points of her psyche that needs to be uncovered is a fantastic aspect introduced here as there's a lot of fun to be had with how this takes on the running storyline involving her surviving the torture to determine the point of the experience and purpose of her life. Regardless of the effectiveness this storyline aspect brings into the film, there's a lot of impressive work here that gives this a rather surprising and unforeseen final half which adds a lot to like with this one. That said, there are a few problems to be had with this one. The main issue is the generally confusing and nonsensical storyline that wraps all this surreal imagery and gore together which doesn't make any sense. Not only is there no excuse for a film like this that barely tops out at an hour to feature useless padding such as the visit from the mailman destroying the bathroom or the shopping trip picking up supplies that don't mean anything to the end result of the film but it tends to take up time that could've been spent spelling out what's going on. There's very little mentioned here about why she's going through this process to begin with since the beginning stages involving her everyday life don't signal this and to then put everything into this coded mystery involving the meaning of various colors and the connection to her own spiritual journey becomes quite confusing and disorienting.

Rated Unrated/NC-17: Continuous Full Male and Female Nudity, Extreme Graphic Violence, Extreme Graphic Language, perverse sexual actions and children-in-jeopardy.

Stay away from this movie,please. Everything is bad. GARBAGE

German underground horror (basically raw or extreme) director Olaf Ittenbach first came onto my radar with Premutos: The Fallen Angel. The gore was excellent but the rest really lack luster. This brings us to No Reason (2010), which was only recently released outside the festival scene). Again the gore was spectacular, and I mean almost on par with Marian Dora, spectacular. The cinematography and editing worked well with the Hellraiser meets Raw atmosphere. Irene Holzfurtner delivered an extremely strong performance. This brings us to the story, which with Ittenbach we do not expect to be there at all. Ironically there is a bit of a story and it is rather cleverly conveyed, mostly through the prologue and references to the book Holzfurtner's character is forced to read. A better script and tighter directing would have made it a really good film.

Six minutes wasted right off the bat, more than were needed to serve as contrast for what is to come. One scene of stark violence; two minutes of dubious editing and dialogue; 14 minutes of exposition. Even as some of the preceding moments are woven into the narrative thereafter, it's not until one-third of the runtime has passed that it seems like the movie begins in earnest. The concept sounds promising, and surely grotesque; the execution is distinctly uneven and wanting, sometimes needlessly obscene, and less than convincing. Whatever you think you're going to get out of 'No reason,' there's at best a 50-50 chance that you're right. For my part, I'm at best unsure this was worth my time.

Credit where it's due: the blood and gore looks good, and the effects generally. The violence and otherwise ghastly imagery is emphatically extreme, graphic, explicit, and excessive, including genital mutilation amidst near-constant nudity. Yet the crimson and viscera are also the bread and butter of the film, with any sense of plot being little more than an excuse for the visuals, so by that measure one would certainly hope this element is executed well. To that point, the makeup, prosthetics, and costume design mostly look pretty great, and mostly equally wretched. The exception is the cephalopod being, whose mask especially betrays the pointedly low-budget nature of the production, and the voice effects for whom are downright tawdry. I appreciate the set design and decoration, especially in the more gnarly scenes, and if a little on the nose, the use of lighting is pretty swell.

All this is well and good. On the other hand, the acting generally leaves much to be desired. The editing is wildly overzealous - presumably trying to compensate for weak material - including disjointed sequencing that adjoins poor writing. Individual scenes are mostly fine in theory (and do come off well in the bloodiest of instances); dialogue is laughably bad, and never more so than when there's any attempt at profundity (including the ending). Characters are a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas, as seemingly unfinished in concept as the story. No feature can survive poor writing. There are good ideas here, and the root premise of an ultra-violent journey through one's personal hell is a fantastic idea for a horror film. Yet the plot feels meagerly plastered together, barely attaining cohesiveness, and it's flimsy all the while. Again, it's clear the blood and gore were the top priority, but that's "no reason" for shortchanging the glue that holds a picture together. Olaf Ittenbach needed to spend more time developing his screenplay and less time imagining different ways to spill blood.

If all you want out of a horror film are a few scenes that arguably make it seem like the Cenobites exercise restraint, then you might get a kick out of 'No reason' as long as you fast-forward through about a collective half of the runtime otherwise. If you need more out of your genre flicks than simple, brutal violence, you've altogether come to the wrong place. I had high hopes, and they were dashed: it's a notion I'd like to see explored more earnestly, but this isn't the movie for any major degree of thoughtful storytelling or mindful film-making.