Loft

I remember seeing and loving Eckhart Schmidt's "Trance" few years ago, after useful recommendation from Issei Sagawa. It was a surprisingly tasteful cannibal flick with Desiree Nosbusch butchering her object of affection and eating his tender flesh. "Loft" is even more anarchic and pessimistic. Murder imitates art. Art imitates murder. A young couple visits a gallery of strange pictures hosted by a group of eccentric punks. The world is rotting and it's time to capture a pair of loving birds. Let the torture show begins! Very bleak, hopeless and nihilistic film with highly distorted punkish soundtrack perfectly capturing the aura of creeping despair. The scenes of violence are sparse, albeit hard-hitting. This is an ugly cinema in the purest sense. A perfect example of degrading art. A jaw-dropping atrocity exhibition.

"John, why are you doing this to me?" "I don't know" He was quiet a long moment. "We thought it'd be fun, I guess" "Is it fun, hurting people?"

Mendal W. Johnson "Let's Go Play at the Adams"

In an apocalyptic future world a young upper class couple Raoul and Raphaela is visiting an exhibition of surrealistic paintings presented by a group of young anarchists in their loft flat.Soon they are trapped and tortured by eccentric punks.There is rape and humiliation accompanied by depressing and slightly noisy industrial soundtrack made by Eckhart Schmidt.There is also a bit of gore including particularly nasty moment when one of torturers is stabbed in his throat with a huge shard of glass.The reason behind humiliation galore is entirely clear:"You attended our exhibition,but not one of you paid any attention to our pictures.We are our pictures and they strike back when they're insulted." says Furio,one of the captors."Loft" is a depressing,ugly and anarchistic shocker with few extremely violent set-pieces which caused censorship problems in Germany during 80's.Highly recommended.

This is a really quite good , cheaply dubbed German film pitching a yuppie couple held against their wishes in an "art gallery" vs a bunch of hoodlums lower ranked in the social spectrum. Sort of a class war movie. It is really quite prescient. It is like a knock off of House on the Edge of the Park in some ways, but i wouldn't say its as nasty as that. There is no real harm done to the couple, the woman is molested by some of the hoodlums and they lock the man in a toilet for a while. Mostly they are verbally abused and pushed around a bit. Then the couple fight back. I liked the end line of one the villains as he slowly dies , blood gushing from his mouth after being skewered in the guts by one of the yuppies : "Damn it, you always win!". Its stuff like this that makes this film a minor gem. This film has good style and atmosphere too with a good looking cast, great lighting and setting. Recommended.

Raoul (Andreas Sportelli) and Raphaela (Rebecca Winter) visit an exhibition of modern paintings, but he ignores the pictures and really just wants to make love with her. When the exhibition is closed, the artists and their friends attack the young couple, and in a strangely surreal atmosphere, the aggression turns from provocative and playful into bloody and murderous...

When I watched this movie for the first time, i.e. when it was released in the 1980s on video tape, it was for Karl-Heinz von Liebezeit in the first place because I liked his performance in "Nacht der Wölfe" (1981) and here he plays Furio, the wildest one of the bad guys. "It's war, a ritual", he once explains what is the reason behind all the violence: "You attended our exhibition, but not one of you paid any attention to our pictures. We are our pictures, and they strike back when they're insulted." The whole movie was shot in one location, a gallery at Munich. The soundtrack is minimalistic, distorted, monotonous, disturbing, from a noisy background to the synthetic sounds of the 1980s which seem so cheap today - but it is extremely effective insofar as the audience feels uneasy.