"Bedtime Stories from Hell"

German splatter films are certainly not for everyone. Most of them are shot on video with a miniscule budget, amateur acting, weak plots, and bad lighting. But you don’t watch German splatter for its production value or character development. You watch it for one thing, and one thing only – the extreme gore (and maybe the unintentional laughs provided by the bad acting and often horrendous dubbing or subtitling). Of course, with the ultra-low budgets the gore can sometimes come out looking like a Herschell Gordon Lewis film; but that’s not a bad thing in my opinion.

BURNING MOON was directed by Olaf Ittenbach, a major player in the German splatter scene, having directed 11 films. His most acclaimed and well known film is PREMUTOS. Unfortunately, his first attempt at international recognition was LEGION OF THE DEAD, which was completely butchered to secure a watered-down R-rating. BURNING MOON was Ittenbach’s second film, following BLACK PAST in 1989. Shot on video in 1992, BURNING MOON is an omnibus film, consisting of two individual stories and a wrap-around story. The wrap-around story begins with a depressed delinquent and heroin junkie (played by Ittenbach), trying to find a job, unsuccessfully. He returns home where he attacks his mom for questioning his behavior and cusses out his dad for making him babysit his little sister that night. Then he retires to his room to shoot up, after which he walks out on his balcony to gaze at the moon, which eventually bursts into flame (in his heroin-fueled mind, anyways). He then wanders to his little sister’s room and begins telling her horrific bedtime stories, sure to induce nightmares. These two stories are what make up the rest of the film.

The first story is called “Julia’s Love”, and it’s about a psychopath who escapes from an institution and ends up meeting a girl named Julia. She discovers his identity and manages to escape, but accidentally leaves her purse in his car. He uses her I.D. to track down her address, and then proceeds to slaughter her family in various gory ways, including machete dismemberment, decapitation, and one particularly brutal stabbing scene. He’s got a thing for Julia; and he’s a real charmer too, “Julia, I want to have kids with you. I want to penetrate you. I want you to absorb all my love juice.” The psychopath’s mannerisms, way of speaking, and even his looks to some degree, remind me of the killers in Michael Haneke’s FUNNY GAMES. There’s a cool “splatter gag” in this segment that would make Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento proud. The killer asks Julia, “Does your mother know what’s deep inside of you?”, as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out her mother’s gouged-out eyeball, “Swallow this!”. There’s a POV shot from inside her mouth as the eyeball is shoved in, and then a POV from the eyeball as it slides down her throat. Awesome!

Now we move to the next story, and my favorite, entitled “The Purity”. It concerns a mild mannered-looking parish priest named Frank, who’s not a priest at all. Well, not a priest for Jesus, anyway. He’s a soldier in Satan’s Army. He’s sending souls to Hell by raping, killing, and sacrificing them to the Devil in order to reach a level of dark “purity” within himself. There’s some cool visuals in this segment too. In one scene Frank has a flashback to when he was a child. He’s praying in front of a large crucifix, and he has a vision of Jesus’ mummified corpse hanging on the cross, before it bursts into flame. Then a black-robed demon emerges from the fog and hands him a diabolical-looking book. Now keep in mind this is a German splatter film, shot on an extremely low budget, so these visuals are not full of great cinematography or production design. It’s just cheesy, theatrical satanic imagery; but still cool none the less. There’s also some of that unintentionally hilarious dialog I mentioned earlier. In one scene, while Frank is in the middle of raping someone and spouting off dialog, the subtitles state, “The fruits loops your body and now you are wandering through the darkness.” Say what? Fruit loops? What in the name of Toucan Sam is he talking about? Earlier in the segment, the priest asks someone if they know what happens to sinners in Hell, he says, “You can’t imagine it. It’s so horrific to imagine it.” But don’t worry gore fiends, you won’t have to imagine it, as Ittenbach shows it to us in very graphic detail. He saves the best for last, as this final scene showing the tortures of the damned in Hell is, by far, the best and most ambitious splatter scene in the whole film.

7/10