Golden Glove

Loved it excellent film grim and grotesque... don't listen to bad ratings they don't have the stomach

Set in the lowest of low crusts of West German society in the 1970ies the film is hardly bearable. It is basically the story of a hard core alcoholic killing and dismembering his victims, mostly prostitutes way beyond their prime. You need a schnapps just to get through it and you have to switch off every time a family member enters the room. This being said, the atmosphere is nicely detailed and well set. The title refers to the meeting point of the main characters, a pub of last resort in the Hamburg harbor area.

After witnessing the consequences you want to give up on cigarettes and alcohol for good. So, watch it.

One must wonder what director Fatih Akin was thinking in bringing to life the story of German serial killer Fritz Honka, famous for several murders of prostitutes in the early 1970's. Akin's previous film "In the Fade" was a powerful dramatic effort that seemed a lot more of a real story than this insanely bizarre film. If the idea behind "The Golden Glove" was to conceive the most disgusting and unappealing film ever made, to depict the art of grotesque and how crazed some people and some lives are, then he made a glorious film. But I'm not condemning the film; in fact, I've find it very good though explicitly graphic and twisted as I haven't seen in ages. The director has some good cards to make his game and the trick works because he's anchored with great subtle technique that makes the experience interesting and the excellent performance of Jonas Dassler, a brave young man who undress himself from vanity and fear to create one of the most frightening, sickening, ugliest characters to ever live. The make-up department did an outstanding job in turning the handsome Dassler into the bizarre-looking Honka; the rest is up to Dassler to imitate his speech pattern due to a speech impediment the real Honka had. Here's a chamaleonic star we will be seeing a lot in more films.

It seemed at the beginning of this review I'd be detracting the movie but nope. Warning for possible future viewers: this isn't a nice experience (it's not supposed to, anyway) but it's definitely one of those films where you'll be walking out in disgust, or criticizing it harshly without looking objectively or just pointing that it's a pointless film. The very first scene is a clear indicative of that with a long shot, no cuts, of Honka killing his first victim. Sickening!

To me, like similarly themed one such as "Angst" or "Henry: Portrait of a Killer" it's a way to have a deep look inside criminal minds, their acts and behaviors, and on an ultimate case, to see what the media doesn't show to you. There's a strange sense of curiosity as well in seeing how film directors approach brutal subjects: if they're just making psycho-analytical films with a sense of making the audience think or if it's just gory exploitation that doesn't develop to anything. "The Golden Glove" almost falls into the second trap but Mr. Akin gives us little moments in between gruesome murders to explore the personality of Honka, his pathetic miserable life which seems to present a "reasoning" behind his murders - another case of a man with a turbulent childhood and psychological problems came along. It's a sheer reality, it doesn't go easy nor should be.

However, the bumps along the way also makes the film strange to see it. The bar from the title is there to put some relief on audiences, a place where Honka is a regular meeting another sort of odd characters, heavy drinkers as he is but inside there it's all about awkward/dark comic situations - and the film is full of that. Nervous laughters for some; distractive for others. To me, it was a plot point to connect beginning and ending; just like the pretty blonde girl Honka fantasizes about from time to time while he's having his strange sexual encounters with old, fat prostitutes, later his victims. Outside of the fantasy inside his head, the girl appears three times; other than that, it's all a perverted wet-dream of a sick man. A little question of absurd: he's a bad Quasimodo of all sorts but since he's the one who favors paying for sex why is he always chasing old hookers?

Demanding sex-workers back then, but really, we don't have such a scene to explore more of Honka's failures as a man and we're barely told that he was married twice.

And as for accuracies, the film jumps facts and events or place them in the wrong period (1970-1974 was the years of Fritz crimes but we get the impression one or two years has passed).

And we get back to wondering about the real aim of the picture. It'll possibly looked as just another nasty story made by an insane mind; or that quality over substance again is overshadowed (at times it feels that - the long takes, camera angles and movements, the real feeling of being part of 1970's Germany) but there isn't enough material to make us stunned. If we look the film as a the tragic horror story with real people, the aim of making audiences terrified, nervous, nauseated, Mr. Akin delivers a spetacle of which I cannot feel unimpressed with mixed thoughts about how such individual as Honka could ever exist. The power of imagination must never be lost, and by that I mean that it's not just going back in time to get a true feeling of things that the film works, but many times I kept imagining the scents and the stench of Honka's tiny apartment, always unclean, smelly due to the corpses left. Akin puts those settings - there and the bar - where you are in awe with everything, it's like 90% of excrutiating moments for the remaining 10% of curiosity is what makes some of us keep going to see what's gonna happen next. I can't think of a current director who can do that with a material such as this. Or anything else, really.

If anything of the tiny bits of qualities exposed here as why the picture works or if it's interesting don't convince you, at least you cannot deny that Dassler's creepy, violent and twisted performance is one in a lifetime. He is transformed not just physically but there are insightful moments where you can enter his mind, the inner abysm of Honka or at least the ideal the director makes of him. The sequence where he befriends a pretty woman on his job as a night guard is one of those surprising moments when he's all awkward near her, quite polite at the same time finding ways to be around her but it's played for a long time as a contrast to the brutality he treats the older women (one of them becomes his maid, practically, of whom he's very abusive). The subtle and little moments of change of him is what made me going. To see what comes next... 8/10.

Based on a true story. Keep that in mind when this movie sucks you down into the abyss of one of post war West-Germany's darkest rough places. It's a biopic, not a horror-movie. People say that this movie was all about shock value and grossly exaggerated, or a "wannabe Lars von Trier" flick ... but this is the movie Lars von Trier wishes he would have come up with. The settings are an exact 1:1 replica of the original sites. The bar "Der Goldene Handschuh" in Hamburg still exists to this day and frankly hasn't changed much since then. Fritz Honka's flat was carefully recreated, the storyline and characters pictured is authentic as close as it gets. This also means that it isn't very pleasant to the eye.

The story takes us to a journey to the alcoholic dark underclass scene of the 1970's in Hamburg's Reeperbahn, close the harbor, following one of Germanys most infamous serial killers, Fritz Honka speaking with a strong East-German dialect. Mind you, this is not a Hollywood picture and it's one of those movies that would never get an Academy Award even though cinematography, costumes, acting and set-design is beyond astonishing. It's just too real. More often than not the picture is layered behind a thick cigarette smoke layer inside nicotine yellowed walls. The soundtrack solely consists of contemporary German "Schlager"music, including Honka's favorite song "Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen" ("A tear goes on a journey") ... all those songs are just harmless contemporary witnesses but add so much to the dense atmosphere and convert them into the sickish part of the narration.

I'm a big fan of gritty movies but this movie showed me that I've seen nothing yet. Frankly I had to stop the movie about three times because it was just too HEAVY. It's graphic, it's gross, it's too much at times. And yet I consider it one of the best indie movies of the last decade. It is in lieu of Gaspar Noé's "Seul contre tous" (I stand alone) exept ... this really happened. As pictured.

This is a grotesque interpretation of a novel apparently inspired by a real-life 1970s serial killer. The film was hated by most critics, particularly in its festival debut, because it was considered too repellent and sensational. Conversely, I suspect mainstream horror fans won't like it because it's not crafted like a suspense film-the kills are presented in a depressing, banal rather than "exciting" way.

It's a tough movie to watch, but for reasons that I think are strengths: You rarely see this kind of bleak underside of life depicted accurately in movies. Even films like "Barfly" that purport to also be about alcoholic Skid Row types generally cast the most glamorous actors possible, and make their characters' poverty, self-destruction etc. look sort of "quirky" and "colorful." Here, even the (very few) attractive characters are presented in the worst 70s clothes and hairstyles (with terrible period German pop music in the background), while most of the figures here are old, ugly and conspicuously unhealthy. (It's kind of amazing afterward to look up the cast on IMBD afterward, and see all their nice, clean publicity photos-you'd swear they emptied out a homeless shelter for many of the roles, rather than using professional actors with long resumes.)

It's an incredibly bleak milieu that is its own answer to the question of why police didn't track down this killer sooner-he, and his victims (also drunks and/or prostitutes), were all people that German society had long ago given up on. No one cared about them, or whether they went missing.

You can fault the film for giving very limited "insight" into the protagonist or why he murdered. But he's clearly just a mentally deficient person just functional enough to support himself, so he did not fall into the hands of authorities that might have diagnosed and treated his considerable problems. The lead's performance is so convincingly repellent that I was stunned to see that he's actually a very handsome, young actor-here his age is indeterminate, and his physical acting/makeup is subtle enough that you really think you're watching a somewhat disabled and disfigured person rather than a clever performer's approximation of one.

Anyway, it's a thoroughly unpleasant movie whose characters are profane in the dumbest and crudest ways, whose sexual acts (when they can perform at all) are depicted with nasty vividness, who live in squalor and die in filth. Which, frankly, is probably a pretty accurate depiction of most serial killers' lives and activities. If watching that reality isn't exactly "entertaining," it's nonetheless pretty compelling if you can take it. I wouldn't want to watch a movie with this brutally misanthropic a vision like this very often, but once in a while, it acts as a sort of palate cleanser to remind you that most violence in real life is ugly and pathetic, not an exciting thrill ride.