In short: Corsage (2022)

Quite a few filmmakers approaching their material the same way as Marie Kreutzer does in this art house darling concerning a highly fictionalized version of the last year in the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, or as anyone in a German language country who has seen a certain 50s film trilogy will know her by, “Sissy”, would end up with a film that seems rather too in love with its own eccentricity.

Kreutzer is a much too controlled director for her to let things slip out of her hands that easily, so her flights of fancy, the conscious use of anachronistic elements – sometimes in genuinely funny ways – her sardonic humour as well as the film’s genuine humanity and care for its characters feel rather more of a piece than you’d expect when reading up on the film. In fact, even though it doesn’t at first appear so, this is an absolute masterpiece of directorial control over spiky and complicated material. Thus, Kreutzer – helped by a riveting central performance by Vicky Krieps – can take all her film’s seemingly disparate elements – the commentary on star cult, on the treatment of aging women, loneliness sexual, emotional and intellectual in a world where a woman is supposed to repress the first, not show the middle, and lack the last, depression, the satire of KuK clichés and so on – and turn them into a movie that is absolutely of one piece. In fact, as Kreutzer uses them, all these elements and directions turn out to be not so disparate at all but absolutely necessary parts in talking about her complex interests.

That Corsage is also often wickedly funny, or sad, and staged with enormous power is one result of this approach.

Three Films Make A Post: It’s a Cop-Out!

Meurtres à domicile (1982): I’m not quite sure how “great comics writer Jean Van Hamme and director Marc Lobet adapt a story by great Belgian writer of the fantastique Thomas Owen” turned into this often very farcical end product, but if you enjoy your mysteries on the less than serious side, this one’s probably worth seeking out beyond the very different film I initially hoped for. Lobet is certainly good with putting his inspector (Anny Duperey) through many an encounter with her highly peculiar neighbours, and also hits some of the expected moments of anti-bourgeois humour you expect from French comedy of this style rather nicely, so there’s quite a bit of fun to be had here.

Focus on Infinity (2014): Joerg Burger’s documentary concerns the scientific search for the outer ranges of the cosmos and our existence in it, demonstrating individual perspectives, places, and devices through an awed eye. There’s a lot of room for scepticism towards the whole endeavour – though I’m not completely sure the film chooses the best arguments for it – but also for a deep exploration of the very different perspective very different people can and will bring to the Big Questions of the universe and our place in it.

Visually, Burger has a particular affinity for showing the places where science is done emptied of people, in marked contrast to the the very close and personal way his interviews with various scientists, a scientist-priest and an ex-scientist turned depressed writers work. It’s often genuinely thought-provoking, though I wouldn’t have given the last word to the last one of these interviewees, even in my role as a depressed pessimist.

The Cherry Tree With Gray Blossoms (1977): I have already lavished rather a lot of praise on Sumiko Haneda’s Poem of Hayachine Valley. As far as I’ve been able to read up on it, this short documentary was her first truly independently produced piece of work. It is a focussed, highly poetic and personal in the kind of way that also can become universal, exploration of an ancient cherry tree, the people living around and with it. Haneda uses this to explore personal grief, the idea of – for us humans – great spans of time, and how we as human beings can and do relate to these spans of time in the natural world. She does so rather brilliantly.

Three Films Make A Post: You're in for a shock.

Blood Red Sky (2021): If you want to play cliché bingo with this German Netflix “Die Hard on an airplane with a vampire lady standing in for Bruce Willis” movie, be advised that doing the drinking version might actually kill you. And this abomination directed by Peter Thorwarth (who also co-“wrote”, if that’s the word to use for cribbing this egregious, with German TV veteran Stefan Holtz) really isn’t worth your life. This is the sort of copyist filmmaking that simply can’t get up even an ounce of creative energy, cribbing left and right in the most soulless and joyless manner, ripping off superior movies without the tiniest bit of fun, charm or intelligence but a whole lot of stupidity. Indeed, it’s a movie so stupid, it believes Dominic Purcell is a good casting choice for Die Hard’s John Rickman character, and that it’s tedious repetition of well-worn tropes should scratch on the two hour runtime mark.

On the positive side, it does teach that watching people in vampire makeup running through an airplane does get boring pretty fast.

Jolt (2021): Over at Amazon, Kate Beckinsale is cast as Jason Statham with breasts in a crime action fantasy about a woman so irascible she develops super powers and needs electric jolts to calm herself down hunting down the killers of her prospective boyfriend. It’s also very clichéd, but has a fun, snarky sense of humour and shows some imagination in the way it puts its clichés together. Some scenes show that director Tanya Wexler doesn’t have much experience staging action scenes, but there are just as many that are good bread and butter action fun. It’s a good time right now if you want to see some skulls cracked and balls kicked by a woman (and when wouldn’t you?). I don’t think I exactly need the sequel a surprise Susan Sarandon apparently wants to sell me, but I’d certainly not be set against it completely.

The Scary House aka Das schaurige Haus (2020): Back again at Netflix, we have this Austrian family friendly bit of horror cinema for the YA crowd directed by Daniel Prochaska. You know the drill: after the death of a parent, the rest of the family moves far away into a house in the sticks and encounters ghostly shenanigans caused by a dark secret of the (near) past. The haunting gets resolved, the kids acquire some friends, and some evildoers are punished while the rest of the cast learns a valuable lesson. The film doesn’t treat its material with more originality than the other two flicks in this entry, but Prochaska is pretty good at creating a sense of place for the Austrian village right on the border to Slovenia this takes place in and does deliver some pleasant kid friendly spooks, as well as a couple of effective suspense sequences.

While plot and structure are well-worn, the film takes care to present them with enough conviction they still have weight, so the result is a nice afternoon’s entertainment that features a surprisingly unpleasant backstory – as befits a haunting but isn’t exactly what you’d expect in a movie for the kids these days.

Past Misdeeds: Das finstere Tal (2014)

aka The Dark Valley

Some time in the 19th century. A stranger calling himself Greider (Sam Riley) rides into an isolated mountain valley in the Alps harbouring a small village. The man says he wants to stay for the winter that is soon to come when the snow will make it impossible to leave the valley. He pays for his stay in American gold coins and buys a bit of goodwill with the early photography equipment he carries.

The rulers of the town, the nearly confined to his bed Brenner (Hans-Michael Rehberg) and his sons (Tobias Moretti, Helmuth Häusler, Martin Leutgeb, Johannes Nikolussi, Clemens Schick and Florian Brückner), send Greider to live with a widow and her daughter, Luzi (Paula Beer). Even if the two women wanted, there’s clearly no way to say no to the things Brenner demands, if one wants to stay alive, particularly as a woman. Fortunately, despite a great deal of reserve in his manner, Greider’s a mostly pleasant guest.

Luzi is to marry her boyfriend Lukas (Thomas Schubert) soon, but what would be cause for happiness for most loving couples (and there’s no question these two are very much in love), is cause for a good deal of terror in this place. For Brenner and his boys have invented their own special version of the droit du seigneur (something which probably didn’t even actually exist during the middle ages, as far as I understand), only that it’s more the right of gang raping women until they get pregnant in their case. People who revolt against the Brenners’ ways don’t tend to live long, and after all, parts of the silence of the villagers insinuate, aren’t they keeping the place safe and prosperous?

However, this winter, during which Luzi and Lukas are to be married, things just might change. Two of the Brenners die of peculiar accidents. The surviving brothers quickly realize the stranger in their midst must be responsible for the deaths in some way. Why, might he be the child of the proverbial one that got away coming back for vengeance?

As regular readers might have noticed, I have regularly expressed my frustration with the near total absence of quality (or for the most part really any) genre movies from contemporary German language cinema, and particularly the German parts of it. It’s a sad state of affairs caused at least in part by the German bourgeoisie still hanging onto idiotic concepts of “high” and “low” culture, and a curious coalition of cultural conservatives and a just-as-conservative when it comes to culture left owning the purse strings of film subsidy and TV alike. The only exception to the genre rule have been crap comedies, but I don’t dare speculate why that is so. It’s a situation that makes the situation in, for example, the UK look like a paradise for filmmakers in comparison. During the last decade or so, things have changed a little, and a slowly increasing number of films has drifted into the cinemas nobody would have financed just ten years ago.

By now, things have developed into a better direction so much, Andreas Prochaska’s brilliant Das finstere Tal even was co-financed by two TV channels - the German ZDF and the Austrian ORF – and has basically been drowned in German Film Awards, something that gives me hope for a continuing renaissance in genre film for filmmakers who can’t make their films on crowd-funding money.

Apart from these politics, like quite a few of the examples of new German language genre films I have encountered, Prochaska’s film is just very, very good, the sort of film I can’t imagine could have been created without some actual passion for genre movies on the side of the filmmakers. One might even think part of the film’s and its companion movies’ passion is a consequence of the sheer joy of being able to make this sort of thing, long repressed energies asserting themselves. But then, one tends to get overexcited about these things.

Fact is – at least as much as there are facts when looking at art – that Prochaska takes age-old Western clichés, transplants them into a place closer to his own experiences and his purse strings, and brings them to life. Again, we have arrived at one of my regular talking points, namely that using the local and the specific for your film when you can’t – and perhaps even shouldn’t – fight Hollywood on its own terms brings with it enormous artistic opportunities, and a certain freshness and personality you couldn’t buy by filming your movies in LA or the places Hollywood films tend to be filmed. There’s a reason why even Luc Besson tends to set his films in Europe. In Das finstere Tal, the impressive landscapes of the snow-bound Alps and the things people do to one another in them are a perfect fit, nature mirroring humanity in the clearest way possible without the film turning into a display of too obvious metaphor.

Of course, you can make use of the local and the specific and your film can still turn out not worth mentioning or watching if you can’t handle the more archetypal elements of your film well. Prochaska has no problems here, knowing the archetypes of the stranger coming to town, the cowering townsfolk, and the power-mad villains of the piece by heart and not feeling the need to change more about them as the Austrian accents, and the Alps automatically change about them. It would be easy to criticize the film for a lack of originality, but Prochaska’s visual language and the strong acting really do make the old feel quite new, even if a viewer is less convinced than I am that showing age-old stories in front of a different background already changes them enough.

And it’s not as if the specific paths of the Western genre (as far away from Winnetou as one can imagine), paths close to those of certain of the more political Spaghetti Westerns with Corbucci’s equally snow-bound Il Grande Silenzio an obvious yet too bitter example as well as to US Westerns like High Plains Drifter, Das finstere Tal explores aren’t still worth the travel time. Particularly in a film that is as good at building mood as this one is, be it in its treatment of the gothic horror tones of the village’s darkest side (and it really doesn’t get quite darker than this), the horror the film gets you to feel at the size of Greider’s anger even though it – and probably you-the-audience – does share it, or the tense climactic violence. The only flaw I find in Prochaska’s direction is one utterly horrible moment of bad pop song insertion in the worst possible moment of the film’s big shoot-out. It’s a sure-fire way to drag anyone out of one of the film’s tensest scenes. If you have experience with German TV, where Prochaska has been working for most of his career, you’ll recognize the cack-handedness of the moment. In the context of a film this well-composed and calmly atmospheric, it’s a truly puzzling moment that defies taste in a film that manages to even treat the whole gang rape wedding stuff comparatively tasteful.


There is, of course, also a strong political undercurrent to the film, a real anger at power (perhaps even power as a philosophical concept?) and the way it is used, as well as a real sadness for what power does to its victims, particularly women; utter hopelessness, on the other hand, the film leaves to the nihilists where it belongs.

Past Misdeeds: Blutgletscher (2013)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

aka Blood Glacier

aka The Station

The team, such as it is, of a small science station researching climate change and its ecological consequences high up in the Alps make a rather exciting – as well as disquieting - discovery. A glacier in their surroundings has melted into a strange, reddish biological mass, as if the glacier had turned to blood. The scientists find that it’s actually a whole layer of a strange microorganism until now unknown to science. That’s quite sensational news, but our protagonists soon have rather bigger problems. For something is not at all right with the local fauna, and what at first looked like the attack of a rabid fox on long-time station mainstay Janek’s (Gerhard Liebmann) dog Tinnitus (Santos) turns out to be caused by something quite a bit different as well as decidedly more dangerous. And there are even more dangerous things around still.

To make the situation more complicated, Austria’s minister for environmental affairs (Brigitte Kren) and a small entourage are coming for a visit the next day, possibly waltzing directly into danger. More personally troubling for Janek, who spends half of his time drunk, the other half obnoxious, his ex-girlfriend Tanja (Edita Malovcic), the reason he has been staying at the station for years now, is part of said entourage. Well, and then there’s the little fact that Janek, normally the man you’d vote mostly likely to lose his shit in a dangerous situation, is actually the only one of the science team who actually has his shit together when push comes to shove, and monsters attack.

I’m regularly bitching and moaning about the state of German language horror film, a tiny segment of cinema dominated by bland and dull attempts at imitating US mainstream horror and – generally -painfully amateurish and charmless independent gore films that quickly grow tiresome in their desperate attempts to break taboos, but in the last few years, there has been a small but interesting group of very different productions coming from Austria, Switzerland and Germany with higher ambitions than the latter and more personality than the former, films like Andreas Marschall’s Masks or Huan Vu’s Lovecraft adaptation Die Farbe. The Austrian Blutgletscher, directed by Marvin Kren - who already made the very good short-ish zombie film Rammbock a few years ago, - certainly belongs to this wonderful group of films.

Blutgletscher is a true genre film at heart, if you understand genre as a conversation held between films via the variation and personalization of conventions. As such, this is a film that doesn’t win hearts with its basic ideas, which a genre-savvy audience will generally know from other films (and books and so on), but with the little twists it gives them, and its ability to turn already established genre ideas into slightly different directions. Kren’s film is really incredibly good at this, taking elements we know and love from John Carpenter’s version of The Thing and other related films and making them its very own. One thing I found particularly fun (and wickedly funny) in this regard is the basic nature of the film’s monsters, which I don’t really want or need to explain here more closely. Let’s just say you will probably never look at the proud, dignified species of alpine animals that Heimatfilm and nature documentaries alike so very much like the idolize the same way again. There’s a nasty side to nature (just ask Werner Herzog about chicken), particularly when it is provoked into changes. On the other hand, the film genuinely seems to like animals; it just doesn’t have illusions about what they are actually about.

Speaking of Blutgletscher’s monsters, there’s a real joy in watching these particular creations of pleasantly grotesque imagination, realized in a fine – if not exactly naturalistically convincing – combination of digital and practical effects. The way Kren directs it, there’s always enough of the monsters to see to satisfy but seldom so much the seams in the – probably not very high – budget available start to show. It’s the best of both monster movie worlds, really.

The film’s pacing is quite flawless, too, with exactly the right amount of time lying between tension and release and the return and escalation of that tension. Benjamin Hessler’s script also does some rather clever and effective things with the parallels between Janek’s and Tanja’s relationship and the horrible things going on around them, adding thematic resonance where you least expect it. The script also does the old monster movie and SyFy Channel stand-by of treating monster attacks as the best way to get a separated couple back together again; it just does it well and with a twist belonging to the film’s pleasantly strange and clever ending that rather suggests decisions taken under the sort of pressure the characters find themselves in might not always be healthy, while at the same time also suggesting highly unpleasant things about the necessities of humanity’s biological survival in the film’s world.

If I had to find flaws in Blutgletscher – the sort of thing people who watch movies looking for “plot holes” excepted because I only seldom find that  relevant to the quality of a movie or important to my enjoyment at all – I’d probably go for its at times somewhat stilted dialogue, but then, that’s a problem so typical of German language films of all types and genres, I can hardly blame a film for it that does so much else differently and better.


Blutgletscher is, after all, such a very enjoyable film full of what German language horror seems to be lacking for my tastes the most – personality. It is, apart from that, also as good as any monster movie style horror film made in the last decade or so you’d care to mention.

Three Films Make A Post: SEE!...The nightmares that fill the world of the psycho!

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951): Charles Crichton’s very funny and fast comedy featuring Alec Guiness and Stanley Holloway is pretty typical of what I’ve seen of the comedic side of the output of British Ealing Studios, in that it is made with an off-handed classiness, still funny quite a few decades later, and not completely lacking in the subversiveness stakes (even though the films’ criminals always have to end up in the arms of the law). I’m pretty sure it is also the sort of thing that had young British filmmakers in the 60s raging as the French new wave raged against most of their elders. With distance, this sort of thing does become rather irrelevant, which leaves the viewer of today with more great films to watch.

Biest (2014): This is fine, relatively short Austrian horror movie recommends itself with some moody landscape photography, good acting by Paul Hassler and Stephanie Lexer even in those parts of the film that have nothing whatsoever to do with monsters, and expert pacing. Fine, small monster movies aren’t at all the kind of film you’d expect coming from any German language country nowadays, but director Stefan Müller does deliver enough traditional genre goods here, you might very well believe there still is an actual tradition for genre movies around the German speaking parts. In a somewhat disappointing move, the film goes with the old “monster fighting heals all relationship troubles” trope, but this is a pleasantly unassuming movie so not being terribly original might be seen as part of its considerable charm.

Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005): For my taste, director Mary Lambert never truly got her dues, so eventually her way lead her to directing TV movies and stuff like this direct to DVD sequel in name only (fortunately) to the Urban Legends franchise that often looks and feels like a cable TV movie too. It’s not a bad film, mind you. The script, co-written by Michael “Trick’R’Treat” Dougherty and his frequent writing partner Dan Harris, flows well enough and features some details that make it slightly less generic than your typical supernatural slasher, the kills suffer from pretty lame CGI but are conceptually fun, Kate Mara (in the mandatory horror role any actress has to have before hitting the big time, or the minor time for that matter) makes for a likeable heroine, and Lambert clearly doesn’t believe in filler.

The film probably won’t strike anyone as a hidden genre gem but it does provide an entertaining ninety minutes, which, given what it is, is more than you’d expect of it.

In short: Mister Dynamit – Morgen küßt euch der Tod (1967)

aka Die Slowly, You’ll Enjoy It More

A dastardly villain has somehow stolen a US nuclear bomb. For vague plot reasons, the CIA, despite having a spy among said villain’s men (excellently positioned as his chef), can’t take care of the situation themselves, so they do the most embarrassing thing and ask the German BND for help. The BND sends out its top agent, one Bob Urban (Lex Barker), also known – perhaps in the same way you call a big guy “Little” - as Mister Dynamite.

Bob’s investigation consists of the usual things Eurospy heroes get up to: sleep with every woman who can’t flee fast enough, walk into traps, get out of traps with his awesome powers of punching and ventriloquism (seriously), and shoot some people. Somewhere on the way, the CIA does send in one of their own, one Cliff (Brad Harris), also known as Cliff. Things don’t get terribly exciting.

Officially a German/Austrian/Italian/Spanish collaboration, this movie based on the popular series of German Men’s Adventure novels, is pretty German dominated behind the camera, which, despite its director Franz Josef Gottlieb usually being kind of okay when doing pulp action, does lead to exactly the result you’d fear, namely a curiously boring and anaemic film that lacks the feeling of crazy joy you can usually get out of Eurospy films. While there’s nothing about the film that exactly runs against the pleasurable parts of the genre’s formula, it all feels very bland and lifeless, with a few too many scenes of people in uniform sitting around in a grey room talking, and little excitement to be found around those scenes.

There are one or two pleasantly crazy moments, though: the film’s main villain is so much of a model railway nut his – tiny, unspectacular – lair is dominated by a model railway that if needed provides the usual monitors for henchpeople communications, as well as a lot of mysterious buttons. Oh, and for some reason, the guy likes to get drunk and roll himself up in a rug. Which is exactly the sort of nonsensical craziness I love in my Eurospy films, but is basically the only truly crazy thing about a film that seems to go out of its way not to provoke a heart attack – or even mild excitement – in anyone watching.

Most of the time, the film’s a series of scenes with Lex Barker being bland, Brad Harris being inexplicably bland and painfully underused, and bland blandness all around, with a veritable horde of German actors you’ll know from Rialto’s Edgar Wallace krimis popping up in tiny roles – with Joachim Fuchsberger as a random MP, and Eddi Arent as the BND Q, among others.

On ExB: Das finstere Tal (2014)

Being a German genre movie fan is often a bit of a frustrating experience, not just because Germany just loves to practice a form of censorship that likes to pretend it’s all about protecting the youth from nefarious things like blood squibs, but also because genre filmmaking of any kind hardly exists around here.

So it is rather exciting to encounter something like Andreas Prochaska’s Alpine Western Das finstere Tal, but you’ll have to click on through to ExB to learn why.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,austrian movies,reviews,other places,western,andreas prochaska,sam riley,paula beer,tobias moretti

On ExB: Blutgletscher (2013)

I’m very seldom happy with German language horror, but the last few years have given me hope for the genre here.

Case in point and one of the reasons for this horrifying positive feeling is the Austrian Blutgletscher. Follow this link to ExB to find out more.

Technorati-Markierungen: austrian movies,reviews,horror,marvin kren,gerhard liebmann,edita malovcic,brigitte kren,other places

In short: Die Schwarze Kobra (1963)

aka The Black Cobra

Truck driver Peter Kramer (Adrian Hoven) is having a bad week: his latest cargo turns out to be drugs oh so cleverly disguised as washing powder, the owner of the cargo, a gangster known as The Corse, makes a very rude front-seat passenger, and then a competing gang working for the Syndicate kills the Corse right in front of Peter's eyes to boot. Which of course makes poor Peter a risk for the gangsters.

Soon enough, Peter finds himself alternately fleeing the Syndicate, the former gang of the Corse, and the police. Because this is that kind of movie, what ensues is mostly a series of kidnappings and re-kidnappings of Peter's girlfriend Alexa (Ann Smyrner) by the various factions, while Klaus Kinski betrays one gang to the other so he can snort that sweet, sweet coke. Also an appearance make Klaus Löwitsch as "Boogie", the violent pumped-up coke fiend to Kinski's snivelling one, a mysterious police undercover agent, a mute thug named Goba (Michel Ujevic), a knife-throwing Herbert Fux, mildly eccentric policemen (Paul Dahlke and Peter Vogel, the latter doing a milder version of the traditional Eddi Arent bit), Peter's former box champion now roadside rest stop animal show owner friend Punkti (Ady Berber), and a cobra (well, for one scene).

Obviously, Rudolf Zehetgruber's Die Schwarze Kobra is another non-Edgar Wallace krimi attempting to catch a bit of the commercial fire of the Rialto movies. Despite being shot in Vienna and at least nominally being an Austrian film, Zehetgruber's film features many of the usual faces in the more or less usual roles. The German language genre film world wasn't big after all, and really, when you can hire Kinski to do some snivelling, you do hire Kinski to do some snivelling.

Stylistically, this is - of course - much less intricately styled than the Rialto films were, with some okay sets and locations but also a handful of rather impoverished looking ones. The visual influences of and parallels to noir and gothic are mostly rather minor; moodiness, it seems did not stand high on Zehetgruber's list of things to include. Instead, the director does his best to make up for a very silly and often inappropriately melodramatic script (so one quite typical of German as well as Austrian genre writing), by getting as energetic as genre films of its place and era got. He's not quite as elegant at it as Harald Reinl was in comparable Wallace movies but the resulting film still is pleasantly fast-paced and action-filled. Sure, the fight choreography and quality of the stunt work (such as it is), isn't anything intricate, but the film had no problems convincing me that watching two big, slow man ponderously and very visibly not hitting each other in a fight was a rather fun thing, soon to be followed by other fun things, which is really all I expect of pulp-y krimis.

After having seen Die Schwarze Kobra I'm not at all surprised Zehetgruber would go on to direct a few of the Komissar X movies. While not being quite as enjoyable and pop as the later films, Die Schwarze Kobra is clearly the product of exactly the sort of sensibility best suited to bringing to live that particular series of cult film fan favourites, and therefore a fine way to spend ninety minutes.

Technorati-Markierungen: austrian movies,in short,krimi,pulp,rudolf zehetgruber,adrian hoven,ann smyrner,klaus kinski,klaus löwitsch