Der Todesking

I read a small ad in some horror magazine in the early nineties about Liebe des Totes (the love of the dead) or something similar. This of course awoke my curiosity so I ordered Nekromantik 1 & 2 and Der Todesking (The Death King). The Nekromantik movies are Ok, even kind of interesting and unique in their approach to the subject Necrophilia (even if they obviously are horror-opera entries rather than intended to invoke fear in the viewers mind, they are actually quite funny.)

TODESKING, on the other hand is, in my opinion, one of the best films ever made. It consist of a series of scenes depicting the many facets of death. Death as an enemy; Death as a reliever, Death as the very fysical decomposition of the body. The film is a metaphor over life. It shows how fragile life is and how short our lives are. It reduces its viewers to the childs they (we) actually are. The fact that we cannot really understand the nature of Death, and hence neither the process of dying, is the core message of the film. This is a most realistic film. Never does Buttgereit try to hide death behind white roses or whatever. No matter what moral standards you set up, death is unevitable, and will sooner or later be not a fiction but YOUR reality. This applies to YOU, Dear Reader, like it applies to the viewers of the film. Some juvenile reviewers seem not to grasp this, which is fully excused, since they of course will live forever...

This is no exploitation movie. Why? Because death does not exploit us humans. It harvests us. We grow for seven days, then we are brought back to the schopenhauerian state of pre-birth, that is Death. Buttgereit gives us his version of the oldest of tales. Whether you choose to regard it as "optimistic" or "pessimistic" is up to you. At first glance it may seem very dark. Consider though, that in order for something to live, something else must die. "Who wants to live forever?"

I believe that when Buttgereit shows a body, that are being consumed by maggots, he shows not only decomposition, but GENERATION of new life. Is it not better to die and give life to maggots and then birds and eventually become soil, than to remain the living dead zombie that is one of the the favorite pets of the genre?

When you realize this, you see Der Todesking it its right context.

Sieben Tage hat die Woche, siebenmal letzte Stunden. Seven are the days of week (weak, mortal !), seven times the last hour.

Dont fear the Reaper, Buttgereit tells us, because the Reaper takes only what is ripe. And apples that are not plucked for food will rot!



Have a good life, fellow IMDB'ers !

(And watch this film, that compares only to Ingemar Bergmans "The Seventh Seal" in terms of depth and universality)

Between the graphic, transgressive shock horror of Nekromantiks 1 and 2, director Jörg Buttgereit gave fans of extreme underground cinema this experimental arthouse/exploitation study of the act of suicide, depicting seven examples of self-destruction over the course of one week. As a bonus, in between the suicides we get to see the body of a dead man decompose via time lapse photography. Cheery stuff then.

First to take his own life is a man (Hermann Kopp) obsessed with fish. He studies fish, has a fish poster on his wall, eats fish, keeps a pet goldfish, and has a little picture of a fish on his mailbox. Rather fittingly, he dies in a full bath-tub after taking an overdose washed down with wine. The standout scene is a prolonged rotating shot of his apartment, showing the passage of time, just the start of Jörg getting creative with his visuals.

Day two sees a guy (Heinrich Ebber) renting a Nazisploitation film (called Vera, Gestapo's Angel of Death) from his local video shop. He sits down and watches the movie, which contains the sickening sight of a man having his penis cut off with a pair of garden shears. His girlfriend arrives and interrupts his viewing, so he shoots her in the head and frames the resulting splatter on the wall. All of this turns out to be a film within Buttgereit's film, which makes the Nazisploitation movie a film within a film within a film.

On day three, a rainy Wednesday, a man on a park bench (Michael Krause) recounts to a pretty woman (Susanne Betz) how his relationship with his wife became strained when she got ill, after which he puts a gun in his mouth and decorates a park statue with his brain.

Thursday is simple in concept, yet extremely moving: artful shots of a bridge, with captions naming all of the people who have thrown themselves off the edge. Buttgereit's impressive photography of the bridge combined with the long list of names make this compelling yet depressing stuff.

Friday follows a lonely spinster who enviously spies on two seemingly happy lovers in a neighbouring apartment. The woman receives a suicide chain letter that says she must make copies of the letter and then take her own life, but she decides to eat chocolates instead. The camera then shifts to the other apartment where the lovers are in bed together, covered in blood, having killed themselves.

The next segment concerns a young woman (Angelika Hoch) who commits 'amok suicide' by embarking a rampage shooting spree. Using a harness to mount a camera to her torso, the woman films the killings, which allows Buttgereit to show the action in first person shooter style, anticipating films like Doom and Hardcore Henry.

Last up is an extremely harrowing story of a tormented individual whose extreme anguish drives him to death. Buttgereit doesn't let on precisely what his character's personal demons are, but watching the poor fellow writhe and scream in agony (mental or physical?) is uncomfortable viewing, particularly when he begins to bash his head against a wall out of sheer desperation.

A bold experiment in film-making, exploring an uncomfortable subject in a visually and aurally interesting manner, Der Todesking is not for everyone, but then what art is?

7.5/10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb. For those looking for more low-budget, German, suicide-themed cinema, try Suicide (2001), which was surely inspired by Buttgereit's film.

A movie about suicide! Actually it's seven movies about suicide. We get to follow Buttgereit in to his strange world of death, it's not a fun trip, but I can guarantee you that it's not meant to be an enjoyable film. The film is divided into different short stories, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday... If you haven't seen any of Buttgereits earlier movies this one can be pretty hard to sit through cause it is pretty bizarre although not as graphic as his other movies, Nekromantik, Schramm. Needless to say; I love it, I love Buttgereit for making death into the blackness that it's doomed to be, he's not joking around. Another thing that needs to be praised is the soundtrack; beautiful. Buy this film, then buy his other movies.

"Der Todesking" is not exactly the type of film that makes you merry… Jörg Buttgereit's second cult monument in a row, which is actually a lot better than the infamous "Nekromantik", exists of seven short episodes – one for each day of the week – revolving on unrelated people's suicides. In between these already very disturbing episodes, Buttgereit inserts truly horrifying images of a severely decomposing male corpse. The episodes aren't all equally powerful but, as a wholesome, "Der Todesking" is ranked quite high on the list of all-time most depressing art-house films. Particularly the episodes on Wednesday, involving a man explaining his sexual frustrations to a total stranger in the park, and the one of Sunday, focusing on a younger man molesting himself to dead, are extremely intense and devastating to observe. The added value of this film, or any other shockumenary like it, is debatable and I'm not even sure whether or not Buttgereit had any type of message to communicate here. There's the vague mentioning of an eerie chain letter that encourages its readers to commit suicide but mostly we remain uninformed about these people's motivations to end their lives so dramatically. Entirely unlike I expected, "Der Todesking" isn't exploitative or repulsively graphic! On the contrary actually, I never could have hoped Buttgereit would be so subtle and thoughtful regarding the portrayal of pure human misery. The Thursday episode is a perfect example of this, as it stylishly shows different viewpoints of a famous German bridge while the names, ages and occupations of persons who jumped off appear on the screen. The production values are inescapably poor and the editing often lacks professionalism, but this isn't what really counts in this type of cinema. The subject matter is strong and forcing us to contemplate about the less cheerful – but also indispensable – aspects of life. GREAT use of tragic music, too!

Jörg Buttgereit goes a bit too far with his movies and themes at times, even for my taste but his movies are always something special and hard to classify. They are artistically made, with also often deeper meaning to its themes. This movie is a perfect example of his work.

It's also really hard to label this movie. It's not really a movie with a story to it, in a sense of having a beginning, middle and end in it. It also doesn't have a main character but instead focuses on 7 different suicides and killings, on 7 different days.

All different stories are being told with lots of class, though some of them are of course more 'interesting' and realistic than the others. They are not necessarily connected but yet together they still tell a story. The movie doesn't feel disjointed at all. All different stories have a different feel to it and Buttgereit tells the story without hardly using any words (also typical for his style) but instead lets the images and obvious sensible emotions of the characters tell the entire story. It helps to make this movie an effective one to watch.

Again, the production values all aren't too high and this might be something that might scare off some people. It however helps for this particular movie to set the right tone and atmosphere for the entire movie and its dark, disturbing and depressing themes.

A Buttgereit movie that I 'enjoyed' watching.

7/10

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