Violent Shit: The Movie

*note: since IMDb marks the word in the title as prohibited, this particular word is replaced with "beep" in the review...

In case you've never heard of Andreas Schnaas, you're most likely a smart person and probably also have very good taste in cinema! Schnaas is an extremely untalented and lousy German trash-director who made a dozen of low-budget horror movies in a span of more than twenty years, and yet newest movies are still just as worthless as the oldest ones. By all written and unwritten rules of cinema, that pretty much means that Mr. Schnaas doesn't develop. His most (undeservedly) infamous work is an unendurably amateurish gore trilogy with the 200% accurate titles "Violent Beep" parts I, II and III. These poor excuses for motion pictures basically just feature a lot of sickening gore that is poorly accomplished, overlong and incredibly stupid dialogs, miserable acting performances from people that are probably just Schnaas' friends and painfully uninspired camera-work + editing. I struggled myself through part II, couldn't bring myself to finish parts I and III, and I promised myself I would never even attempt to watch another sequel if there ever came one. Yet here I am reviewing a sequel (or remake or whatever they want to call it), but – in my own defense – I had a handful of good reasons to check it out. "Violent Beep: the Movie" is primarily an Italian production and, being a big fan of the Italian horror industry, I was triggered by all the legendary (by cult standards, at least) names that are linked to this production! For instance, the actor receiving top billing is none other than Giovanni Lombardo Radice, and everybody who has seen the titles "Cannibal Ferox", "City of the Living Dead" or "Cannibal Apocalypse" knows that his presence pretty much guarantees gory death sequences! Furthermore there are guest appearances of the awesome horror directors Enzo G. Castellari ("The Last Jaws", "Inglorious Bastards") and Luigi Cozzi ("Contamination", "The Killer Must Kill Again") and the soundtrack is delivered by the almighty Claudio Simonetti from Goblin! Genuine horror/euro-exploitation fanatics don't need any more arguments to see a film, agreed?

And yet, this sadly remains a completely nonsensical piece of pure rubbish that is almost impossible to sit through… Director/co-writer Luigi Pastore comes up with a series of repulsive images, like close up amputations and disembowelment, but there isn't the slightest bit of structure, logic or continuity in the script. What the heck am I writing; there probably wasn't even a script! A maniacal killer, known as Karl the Butcher, roams the streets of Rome 15 years after he was last active in Berlin. German investigator Hans Ebert teams up with his Italian colleague Aristide D'Amato and via a lot of insufferably dumb and tedious conversations, they somehow establish there's a link between Karl the Butcher and the mysteriously eccentric Professor Vassago. Indeed, the latter enjoys resurrecting Karl the Butcher and controlling him like a sock-puppet, but I absolutely don't have a clue how or for what purpose he does so. Just like his "big example" Andreas Schnaas, Luigi Pastore doesn't have any knowledge about how to narrate a story, build up tension or insert character development. The film is a spitfire of badly angled camera viewpoints, horrendous dialogs and pointless padding footage. I probably don't have to add that the players are miserable amateurs and their English language skills are simultaneously laughable and pitiable. Even experienced actors, like Giovanni Lombardo Radice, adapt themselves to the bottom-of-the-barrel standards of this production. He looks somewhat like a retarded version of Max Shreck in "Nosferatu" and shouts a whole lot of things that don't make any sense. Quite a few scenes balance on the edge of being pornographic and the blood & splatter – although plentiful – couldn't upset a small child. Simonetti's music is great, but I refuse to give an extra point for this, as this film deserves a rating 1/10 more than any movie I've ever seen.

I mostly agree with other reviewers. It is not that great. Well, yeah, its pretty bad. I disagree that the directing is horrible, but I do think it has one fatal flaw: The frame is always too close. The acting is sub par. Some actors are OK, but it is hard to see past the extreme close-up on everyone. Not sure if we are trying to show the audience how good the format is showing every pore and stubble, but it is not working for me.

You really have to dig deep to see that there is actually a decent horror concept and screenplay here. I even think the script might be OK. It is hard to tell. Between acting and directing I kept getting so distracted that I just could not suspend disbelief.

To the main detective guy actor and the nerdy German guy with the glasses, I kept thinking... these guys are almost there, but the camera is just too close.

I don't know how to fix this. Its a mess, but is not completely devoid of redeeming qualities. To you actors(resses) in this... don't give up!... well, at least some of you. Others, yes, please give up, and go back to school! In my earlier years I would have tacked another star on for the gratuitous nudity, but as I am not tacking, I do want to give a thumbs up to the short-haired brunette. Super body, and I thought the close-ups on the face when she was clothed and had lines just didn't capture her whole essence. Girl, you need to get with a better agent. Now that we know you have the naughty bits, hold out for a better speaking role with a better organization. You can do it! I am writing this while I watch. I am ending this at 1:11 out of 1:21. I have no idea what is going on any more. I don't care either.

Another violent sh*t movie and the weakest in my personal opinion. This film has a spectacular U.S. release by Reelgore which it really doesnt deserve. If you liked the previous films in the series for high body counts, cheesy gore and a story that has no plot then this film takes it and f*cks that up. First the body count is surprisingly low, compared to the other films in the series, from what I remember, those films all had higher body counts and could at least present a few excessive kills. If you're wondering if the filmmakers could make up for that with some unique kills, the answer is no. The kills are generally worse than the rest in the series and the closest we get to a unique kill is a guy getting is genitals cut off, which has been done before including on tv, ex: Sons of Anarchy. Maybe the film still has a loose plot where the butcher just kills people, nope. They try, and the important word is try to turn this film into a giallo, it went about as well as the time Jason Voorhees got turned into a slug in Jason goes to hell. Also the film tries to be story driven and tries to be a straight up giallo but it never works and there's no suspense in the entire film. Finally one of my biggest gripes is that the film seemed to have a larger budget than the rest of the films but the camera work is some of the worst I have ever seen. They try to incorporate the the bright color of giallo into the film with a green tone, it doesn't work since the film is super over exposed and everything is really bright or really dark. The camera work in the first one was better. Also seemingly unironically the camera man always has a close up of a characters face when their talking to the point all you see is their face, or the characters face is halfway out of frame, also not to mention a few dutch angles. The movies only saving grace is a few lines that aren't even meant to be funny but the delivery by the actors is so bad it makes you laugh and the soundtrack is really amazing. Only see this film if you're a completionist of the series and don't spend money on it if possible, unlike me, who is sadly a series completionist and likes to own a physical copy.

With VS: The Movie, director Luigi Pastore has done the seemingly impossible: he's made a film that makes Andreas Schnaas' Violent Sh*t Trilogy look good by comparison. Although Schnaas' films were excruciatingly bad in many ways, they at least compensated with loads of enthusiastic bargain basement gore; in contrast—barring one 3 minute sequence where serial killer Karl the Butcher goes crazy with a machete—VS: The Movie is relatively devoid of splatter, and with a terrible plot and painful performances, the film proves very difficult to endure.

Somehow (gun to the head, perhaps?), Pastore not only managed to cast Italian horror legend Giovanni Lombardo Radice in his crap-heap of a movie, but also convinced cult film-makers Enzo G. Castellari (The Inglorious Bastards) and Luigi Cozzi (Alien Contamination) to take on roles, AND got Claudio Simonetti's Goblin to provide the soundtrack. None of this counts for much, though: Radice is terrible, Castellari and Cozzi usually work BEHIND the camera for a reason, and Simonetti's score is forgettable.

With much of the film consisting of lengthy scenes of dialogue in English, mangled by a cast whose command of the language is only slightly better than my Italian (I can order a beer and ask where the toilets are), only hardened fans of z-grade crap will make it to the end, where they will be rewarded with some gratuitous female nudity (not worth the wait) and the aforementioned kill spree by Karl, which finally serves up the kind of gore that the film should have delivered throughout.

2/10, solely for the nasty castration, minus 1 point for naming characters after famous people in the horror industry (Fulci, D'Amato), an idea that is neither original nor clever.

Why someone would get the idea mixing giallo with VS is far beyond me. why, you ask? well because it simply doesn't work. followers of both ingredients will be put off, even those, like me, who value both - or maybe especially those. this movie might just be the result when a director sells away his signature work.