No Reason

No Reason is a film that lives up to its title - not in a clever, ironic way, but in the sense that there seems to be no reason for most of what happens on screen. Directed by Olaf Ittenbach, this German horror film leans hard into gore, surrealism, and shock value, but forgets to bring along a coherent plot, engaging characters, or meaningful purpose.

Clocking in at 75 minutes, the film feels much longer, dragged down by endless sequences of over-the-top, stomach-churning body horror that lacks emotional weight or context. The protagonist, Jennifer, wanders through grotesque hellscapes, encountering increasingly bizarre and disturbing scenes, but without a narrative thread strong enough to justify the journey.

The visuals are clearly where the budget and effort went - practical effects fans might find moments of interest - but without a strong story or characters to invest in, the gore becomes numbing rather than effective. Dialogue is minimal and often stilted, performances are wooden, and the philosophical themes the film seems to hint at are buried under piles of meaningless carnage.

In the end, No Reason feels more like an art school horror experiment than a satisfying film. Disturbing for the sake of being disturbing, it lacks the substance, structure, or subtlety needed to make any of its horror land with impact.

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.

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.

If you watched this movie for a plot shame on you. If you came to cringe and be grossed out, this is the film for you. Part German Sheisbe film, part pointless graphic murders, all blood, gore and guts. If you could watch the scissor scene and chomp scene without a butt clench and a giant squirm in your seat, you're more a man than I'll ever be. The ending is kind of anticlimactic after blood fueled trip the director took us through. A slow walk through Hell , when I wanted to run as fast as I could.

Ittenbach's latest diabolical mind-bender of the colorful kind may bemuse you as well as shrink your dink.

If I tried explaining the story to you, or even – I'm losing patience just thinking about it – discussing what it all means, I'd probably come across dumber than I sound right now. So, with that said, let's give it a shot! Ya got a girl who's visited by a tentacle bearded demon guy that is trying to teach her the truth of her ways by bringing her to different layers of some type of afterlife realm…or some sh!t like that. Hey ya know, that wasn't that bad of a summary. What's most important is knowing if Olaf's flick was able to deliver while his cast of characters did their thing. The answer is sure.

Pretty early on you get the picture that the story is a take it or leave it type of thing. I personally thought it stunk, but if you dig heady, weirdo German type story-telling then I guess you'll dig it…at least a little bit. But again, we know better. Ittenbach fans know better than to expect an average tale. We hope for one, but we don't expect. What we do expect is blood. So we sit there with our bibs on, waiting for that first splash.

It doesn't take long.

What No Reason does have going for it is that it's possibly one of the goriest films of the past couple years. Besides some lighting techniques that may have cut corners around how realistic the gore should look, the film still delivers on the blood front. There's a sequence, a hellish sequence you would say, where we stroll along through a torture dungeon of sorts that is basically just non-stop atrocities. Some creative stuff is going down too. Graphic is an understatement, as we peep peeing girls, some skin tearing, a bound to be classic penile mutilation, and of course, lots of blood spurting. It's the highlight of the film.

There are other scenes of OTT violence, and our leading lady is one hundred percent naked I'd say 80% of the movie - nice bum, small boobs, camel toe in your face. So as you see, there is enough here to keep your eyes glued to the screen. At a little over 70 minutes the film does feel longer because of Olaf's talky tale of colors, but I'd say it's definitely worth any gorehounds time as well as a must see for fans of Olaf, and, without a doubt, a definite for feminist gorehounds.

An average output for Olaf by my standards, but still, gore is gore, ass is ass, and how much more can you ask for when Ittenbach is in the big boy chair?