VIOLENT SHIT

Karl, a German boy of about 12 years old, one day meets the devil himself in his home. After this encounter, the boy will first kill his mother, then be imprisoned but will manage, a few years later and now an adult, to escape from the police van that is transporting him along with other prisoners. From that moment on, armed with his inseparable cleaver, Karl 'The Butcher' will wander restlessly through the woods and unleash a long and extremely bloody massacre, until reaching an incredible ending, a prelude to the second episode of the most 'gore' series of all time. It's 1987 and Andreas Schnaas undoubtedly starts the German gore-demolition genre. The film sharply divides the critics: there are those who consider it a breakthrough film, which opened the doors of worldwide independent horror distribution, and those who find it a terrible film, without narrative structure and with violence for its own sake. Objectively, the film is really very badly made: the shots (taken with a handheld camcorder, on tape) are too often shaky, the camera movements confused and repetitive (often they seem improvised and not studied) and moreover the director often uses an annoying 'strobe effect' that quickly tires the viewer; the screenplay is banal (except for a few ideas, which could have been used better, and which we will talk about later) and the editing is very rough. As for the technical side, the only thing salvageable and therefore worth mentioning is represented by some special effects, which hit the viewer like a punch in the stomach (above all a scene in which a lumberjack is cut in half with a brush cutter). The film is therefore obnoxiously made, but if it has had so much success in the international underground horror scene there must be a reason, and this is not limited to the fact that there is an inhuman concentration of blood, eviscerations and disembowelments. Some sequences of the film, in fact, are really worth noting, if not for the technical side, at least for some sick and perverse insights of the German director. In one of these scenes Karl the Butcher will find in the middle of the forest the crucified body of a man, dressed in white (an obvious reference to Jesus on the cross). Karl will tear open his belly, then lower himself inside his disemboweled body. In the final scene we will instead witness the extremely bloody 'birth' of the Butcher, in pure 'Splatters' style, by Peter Jackson. Small curiosity: it seems that Schnaas showed the footage to a producer and the latter enthusiastically replied: 'But this film is only 'violent shit'!'. Hence the original title of the film. A morbid, extremely violent and technically terrible film, to be seen only to realize what they dare to produce abroad, even if for lovers of extreme gore it is still... a mandatory appointment!