fitzharraldo

It seems that with considerable effort German film-makers are nowadays able to produce ... bad American horror movies. In the era of the silent pictures films appeared in Germany that were the vanguard of horror movies. Films like Murnau's "Nosferatu", von Galeen's "Der Student von Prag" or the ground-breaking "Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari" helped to define the genre plot-wise and aesthetically. During the Nazi-Era and after WWII real Horror movies became very scarce in the German film output. It seems that German people had already witnessed too many real horrors and preferred lighter genres. After some feeble attempts in the Sixties and Seventies the genre died in that country, apart from the work of non-mainstream directors like Jörg Buttgereit. And then came "Anatomie". The first big German horror film for a long, long time. And what a disappointment it is! It borrows unashamedly from American "Scream"-like slasher-movies and becomes overly formulaic without adding new twists. If you think this film is scary, then chances are that you have never seen any horror flick before. Otherwise you are bound to be bored by situations you have seen in countless other films. While the production values are unexpectedly high, the screenplay is an awful mess. The plot was apparently constructed by following the usual American guides for writing screenplays. This is not unusual for recent German movies. By looking at your watch you are able to detect where the plot points are. But the problem is that all the rules won't help if the plot is underdeveloped. About one hour in the film we are informed that the female lead is in some way connected with the organization behind the gruesome murders. She wants to find out, but comes too late, because the person possessing the solution dies. Later on, nothing is made of this plotline in favour of a supenseless chase with the bad guys. While "Scream" cleverly imitated the earlier slasher pics of the Seventies and Eighties by making fun of the self-referential character of the film, "Anatomie" only imitates well-known horror clichés.

Maybe I'm biased. I have to confess that I have severe problems to like homegrown movies (especially those German films they used to call "comedies"). But with Helmut Dietl directing I thought it at least possible that "Late Night" could prove to be an interesting film. It didn't. So what went wrong? I expected a biting satire about all those idiotic television programs that continue to overflow our everyday life and the people that "create" them. Obviously, there are great possibilities in that concept. Dietl tried to make this kind of satire, but he tried too hard. "Late Night" is a satire without laughs. The screenplay contains too many things that won't work (most of all the plot). As usual with German comedies, the film is mainly dialogue-driven, while visual gags do not exist or are clumsily executed. Only two or three gags really work. The directing is not up to Dietls usual standard. But the biggest problem is that this is a comedy about television, that was co-produced by a television station, that is cast with popular show masters and that looks most of the time like a TV-movie. I wonder what the people involved in this production wanted to say about television - that everybody makes **** instead of them? After viewing this movie, I am afraid that this is not true.

Now this is a real turkey by the overrated director Franco, who gave us such classics as "Las Vampiras/Vampyros Lesbos". Yes, I think that bad films can be great fun. I adore the hilarious howlers of Doris Wishman, Dwain Esper and Ed Wood jr., but this one proved to be too much for me. It is the first film I rated 1. Where should I start? The screenplay is idiotic to the utmost. The dialogue is unbelievably bad. The directing seems to be nonexistent. The best music cue (used repeatedly in this film) was taken directly from the movie "Der Hexer" (1964). And it's BORING! Poor Shirley Eaton and George Sanders! In one shot Sanders reads a Popeye comic while his henchman torture a girl (this aspect is probably the intellectual highlight of this movie). The only thing that baffled me was that Franco promptly showed female nudity whenever I thought the movie would gain from it - this is real directing skill! Still, I'm afraid that a movie in which actors pretend to shoot with machine guns by shaking them is not really worthwhile.