La petite mort

Are you looking for an intriguing story, originality, crackling dialogue, great characters, cleverness, and/or tension? Then GO AWAY! I'm sure there's an audience for La Petite Mort, namely hardcore gore-hounds, but man oh man, a little effort could be made in other areas creatively. To the writer/director's credit, he openly admits his sole focus was to create as-gruesome-as-possible special effects, and everything else kind of falls by the wayside. Also, goes so far to say he primarily makes "torture porn," straight-up. Of which this movie absolutely qualifies.

Ok, I'll point out the good first. The setting. Perfect setting for (most of) a grimy, disgusting torture porn flick, where, well, insert key plot of Hostel right about here. The primary three characters are traveling for vacation, get sidetracked in Frankfurt, Germany, where they inexplicably stumble into a dank and filthy REAL German (presumably) fetish sex club/dungeon (cue entire bar to stop what they're doing to stare at their newly-arrived guests). Also, they roped goremeister Olaf Ittenbach in to handle special effects. So, they are effectively graphic, disgusting, and OTT. Let me tell you, have a gander at the 50-minute behind the scenes extra. Not only am I always surprised how light the atmosphere is on a production like this is, but I have to give kudos to the male "victim"/actor (Andreas Pape) who gets his eye gouged out, amongst other things. On a no-budget ($5000) German gore flick, I wouldn't go anywhere near that knife to the eye gag. None of it! Just to hazard a guess, this actor got between $100 and NOTHING for his performance in the film. The knife effects, along with the gushes of blood, look uncomfortable, AND scary as s#!t! Admittedly, the results are spectacular in the completed film. I dunno, the daughters of the owner show up in hot fetish outfits? That's all I got.

Ugh, alright, what remains is literally nothing. Right away, this dialogue took me right out of the movie. There's maybe a 20-minute set-up, and it doesn't get any better when baddie Madame Fabienne (Manoush), shows up to, er, chew the scenery? This movie does deliver on perverse, depraved graphic violence, but I generally like a little more meat on the bone, so to speak. An interesting character with half his face burned off (Thomas Kercmar) appears as a paying customer, but I was a bit sidelined by how on-the-nose this sequence was to Hostel.

The final 10 minutes (well, that includes credits) really threw me for a loop. First of all, how anyone could live through the positively brutal torture doled out is completely unrealistic, but on top of that, seemingly solely for plot contrivances' sake, an up-til-then unforeseen GUN is introduced! It all felt tacked on, and filmed at a later date. Like, by the time they had forgotten they actually killed off the final tourist.

Ah, the prologue... I'd be remiss if I didn't bring this up. From the tired book of horror tropes, La Petite Mort purports to be based on a true story, AND names have been changed to protect the innocent. Of course this information is followed by characters subjected to pure exploitation and graphic bloodshed. Like, why bother?

I have seen Marc Waltz Road Rip and it wasn't my thing, there wasn't any red stuff available. But here he got the help of Ittenbach, so you know it could contain some bloody stuff. Luckily for Marc it did. The other problem with German flicks is that they mostly are spoken in German and never have any subtitles. But this flick was also released outside Germany and that version did contain subs.

There are some famous German names in this flick like Manoush and Thomas Kercmar, sadly Thomas (Barricade, Angel Of Death 2) couldn't convince me and that's a bit sad, most of the acting is mediocre, you can see them watching were they have to say their line.

The story itself is okay but it's a bit of the same, youth walking around and making the wrong turn. Here they arrive in a city to take a plane for their holiday but they have all the day to visit the city because their plane leaves at evening and it's only morning. They decide not to go shopping but to walk around. By entering a club things go wrong.

But it's the gore that delivers and makes it watchable. Don't get me wrong, it isn't bad but it goes a bit slow sometimes. Nevertheless, there are some gory typical Ittenbach shots in it that makes it a worth hunt down for the gorehounds. It's not that easy to find a copy outside Germany, I found it at a German horror convention were a Swedish shop sold copies of it.

Gore 3/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 4/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 0/5