Now here's a name we don't seem to hear very much of these days: Jorg Buttgereit. Back in ye olde days of The Scala and videotape, JB was pushing the envelope of German shock cinema in uncomfortable and unpleasant ways: bleak, humourless, miserable films devoid of gloss or slickness. Nekromantik (which I won on VHS in a raffle at the Scala) is unflinching, remorselessly glum and as thoroughly life-draining a way of spending a wet Thursday evening as you'll find. Nekromantik 2: more of the same, yet somehow less. Schramm followed in 1993 and was no lighter. At the time, none of these went anywhere near the BBFC for painfully obvious reasons and were relegated to imported VHS tapes, club cinemas and underground film festivals.
Somewhere in the midst of this was Der Todesking (The King Of Death or The Death King): a 75-minute meditation on death in the form of an anthology of seven largely unconnected vignettes in which people either kill themselves or get killed, interspersed with time-lapse footage of a rotting corpse. A man with a fish fixation makes meticulous preparations for the end of his life, then commits suicide in the bath. Another man tells a stranger on a park bench about his marital problems and then shoots himself. (Hey, these are the jokes, folks.) The most eye-catching scene has another man rent a Nazisploitation video of the Ilsa: She Wolf Of The SS variety (in which the director himself cameos as the victim of death camp atrocities culminating in the loss of his bratwurst with garden shears) and then shoots his girlfriend in the head. The most baffling is a long wander around a traffic bridge while names, ages and occupations flash up: it turns out these are the names of people who threw themselves to their deaths there. The sole point of interesting nerdery seems to be that the video shop in Story #2 has several UK releases, complete with BBFC 18 symbols, on the shelves (including Day Of The Dead which was heavily cut in Germany at the time.)
It's a whole bunch of no laughs: a stone-cold wallow in death that seems deliberately designed to be as offputting as possible, as though they're daring you to walk out or switch off. Mission not accomplished: I did make it to the end. But I kind of wish I hadn't. I'm really not sure what the point is: it's not like any of the segments (one would struggle to call them stories, and it's stretching to think of them even as anecdotes) have a gleefully dark twist in the tale, and there's no entertainment value whatsoever to be had from it. If, and it's a massive if, there's anything else of worth or interest in there, I didn't find it.
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