Reviews

"Where's Wanda" begs the question: Could those who wrote and directed this stuff actually believe that they were creating something worthwhile? Or were they like "The worm must taste good to the fish and not to the angler", because that's the spirit this show smells of. Conceit and contempt. Movie people would never watch the TV goo they produce for the masses.

The humor: cringe. The acting: too often abysmal. The plot: ridiculous. The ending: as predictable as with any low effort time waster. Yes, there is some originality, and it's bad. When the authors of a show are exhausted and come up with a silly, laughable, extreme idea, it might be called "jumping the shark". That already happened in "Where's Wanda", and it's a tiger in a German forest that is doing the jumping.

It is easy to explain, why professional critics have praised this show: Because it checks all the required boxes, tows the uniparty line, doesn't wake anybody up. Everybody who knows the rigid rules - and by now, who doesn't? - will recognize immediately who is good, who is bad, who will hook up with whom. There is a German word for that: linientreu (Lee-Nee-An-Troy). People who are linientreu will like "Where's Wanda". It should be a safe and satisfying experience for them. For a more sophisticated audience this should be a hard pass.

The most obvious problem with the "Die Hamburger Krankheit" (The Hamburg disease) is the anarchy -- in the minds of the three scriptwriters. They couldn't deliver a coherent story or atmosphere, interesting characters or ideas, couldn't actually do their job. They just created random scenes with occasional on-topic moments and with basic informations missing. Case in point: The nature of the disease and its transmission route remain unknown. There are no symptoms, the sick behave unusually for a bit, fall down and die. Sometimes they just fall down and die. Some people are dominated by hysteria, some move in crowds, as if everything were normal. There are no rules, no consistencies, nothing really matters. Even though some things do ring true, this is not a serious movie about a pandemic. It's also not a thriller, no genre film. And it's not a low-budget film, so lack of money is not the excuse here. This is just another tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, told by lazy smug authors.

"Die Hamburger Krankheit" is above all about people trying to get away from quarantine zones, from government measures, moving southwards. Characters disappear and magically reappear hundreds of kilometers later. Most characters are unremarkable or unlikeable. The actual lead role is Ottokar, played by the Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, and he is plainly annoying. Wikipedia describes Arrabal's theatre as "wild, brutal, cacophonous, and joyously provocative". That's a neat characterization of Ottokar, the pesky anarchist.

In the beginning the gerontologist Sebastian (Helmut Griem) rambles a lot about life, disease and death. A theme seems to emerge: There are too many people, especially too many old people, and the disease is nature's way of taking care of that. Everything considered, this might be the actual worldview, the message of the authors. They show quite a number of very ancient folks. Singing old songs, walking around, the horror. Guys wearing traditional costumes, acting viciously. Some rich people talking about their malicious economic interests. Old politicians sending out their uniformed tools, who are the main villains from the beginning to the end, when the police is hunting down the unvaccinated.

Few hits, many misses. The only redeeming qualities of "Die Hamburger Krankheit" can be found in the scenes with an unique strangeness: The gerontology congress, an alpine farmer yodeling, the stunts of Fritz (Tilo Prückner), the schemes of Heribert (Ulrich Wildgruber), a nude scene with Romy Haag, who was around that time in a relationship with David Bowie. This might be a good film to make fun of, watching it in the company of like-minded friends. "Die Hamburger Krankheit" is boring, but strange, so very strange. ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 27)

This is not a B-movie and it's not a parody of a B-movie. There are themes from B-movies, but they fell in barrels of radioactiv waste and mutated. It starts with a Jekyll/Hyde variant. Detective Nils Lovelorn (Misel Maticevic) can turn into a completely different person, Bébé (Eva Haßmann), with different clothes. Why? Because his heart was broken. How is this an explanation? Because the author said so.

This guy, Jürgen Michel, was obviously given complete creative control. As long as it was somewhat different and original, he could write whatever. And he did. Arbitrariness rules supreme, unimpeded by logic, rules, probability. The result is - hardly surprising - amateurish and tiring. The storyline is just silly, the dialogues are embarrassing. Time passes slowly, when things that are supposed to be hilarious are just tedious, nonsensical and cringe.

"Lovelorn" is not a comedy, not a thriller, not a horror, mystery, action or adventure movie. It's not among the side-effects of cocaine. It's nothing, so it must be art. Funnily enough that's what it's supposed to be. Anti-art, to be exact. Dada. Professor Svedenborg (Horst Buchholz) pontificates: "Dada was an idiotic art movement at the beginning of the last century. Dada stands for the end of all reason. For the end of all laws. For total human idiocy. And that is just the beginning. At the end there's the stupidification of all matter." In the context of Dada, that's a good thing, a mission statement of sorts. What happens when matter - in the given case a chair - gets stupider? If the answer surprises you, you are not yet Dada enough.

The funniest thing about Dada is that the anti-art works - most notoriously Marcel Duchamp's urinals - actually ended up in museums, where they were treated just like all the other works. At least this will not be the fate of "Lovelorn". The sadest thing about "Lovelorn" is the fate of Horst Buchholz. In his youth he was a real shining star. He seems confused how he could end up in something so "Plan-B"-y like this. ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 26)

It's near the end of the 13th, the last school year for a class at a classical language high school. Next autumn, nearly all of these nineteen-year-olds will be students at an university. Youths rebelling, feeling smart and acting stupid - that's normal. But it's 1968 and the new social trends coming from the USA have hit West Germany especially hard. Pupils and teachers are out of their depth. That's the story of this movie. It's made by the theater director Peter Zadek, and it shows. Many scenes look extremely contrived. Sometimes people act like robots, the boring ones. The most frequently used shot, a front view of the class, looks very fake. Zadek wanted to cram the pupils together as close as he could. The two girls in the front row both have to sit on the right side of the table, because the left side is off-camera. It's too much in-your-face to be ignored. It's badly staged.

In the beginning, this school looks like a military academy. The teachers speak in a military commanding tone. The pupils rise, when a teacher enters the classroom. Later on they talk back, smoke in class and demand pupil participation. With rebelling so close to the final exams, they have of course already answered the question, if they would use this power responsibly. Their teachers worry more about them trashing their future options than the pupils themselves. This is not the time to shout progressive slogans like "Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!" during a civics lession about the industrial revolution. They are shown doing more stupid things: reckless behavior on a small moped, having really awkward sex on a chair (with the guy later on yelling about it from a rooftop), playing "20 cops and 1 Indian", seven of them half nakedly climbing about in a tree.

What's the message of "Elefant"? Should youths like this, who really haven't figured out yet where to go, have a say in pointing out the direction? This movie makes it quite clear that this would be a terrible idea. None of the pupils comes even close to the grown-up, responsible and likable behavior of their teacher Dr. Nemitz (Heinz Baumann). But it's 1968, therefore the opposite is required to be true. So Zadek denies everything he told, and drops back to: The whole school system is fascist, it has to go. In the bigger picture the kids just have to be in the right.

Zadek ends his movie with playing "We", a hilarious anti-hippie-rebellion song, with lyrics like "Who also has long hair, only it's washed? We!" and "For there must be someone who not only destroys, who learns, who educates, who does his work to build tomorrow's world." It's funny, because it feels kind of true, especially today, with the schools and universities still in a progressive downward spiral. It sounds again like Dr. Nemitz' voice of reason. And in fact, Freddy Quinn, the singer, was another well-meaning adult, with an unconventional biography and a rebellious youth. This adventurous minded Austrian joined an actual circus, when he was 16 years old. Nonetheless, Zadek uses images from the Third Reich to illustrate Quinn's song. It looks as if he really didn't know, what he was doing.

"Elefant" is much too stylised to be a valuable contemporary document, because hardly anything appears to be genuine. It is too rigid to be entertaining, too confused to be interesting or to make a serious statement. In the end, it's time again to let Macbeth do his bit: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Zadek loved Shakespeare. ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 25)

On earth the star Algol is named "Daemon" or "Devil's Eye". The messenger from Algol, who calls himself Algol, too, appears from an abandoned mining tunnel called "Devil's Tunnel". He looks and acts like a demon. So yeah, he's the devil. Hell branched out into heaven.

There is no doubt that this is a religious tale. The authors had no interest at all in politics, economy or technics. The story being told affects the whole globe, but it could very well play in a village. Robert Herne (Emil Jannings), his girlfriend, his wife, his two kids and his rival Peter Hell (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) with a son who is played by the same actor - these are the only main characters. In some scenes there are hundreds of extras, this hasn't been a low-budget movie, but "Algol" is just a family drama.

Expecting any kind of science fiction will most certainly lead to frustration. The whole world starts using the energy supplied by Herne's Algol machine. The only reason for that could be that it is incomparably cheap. But au contraire, it seems to be even more expensive than coal. Logic is another thing that shouldn't be expected. The whole mindset of this movie is very disconcerting.

"Algol" is an important part of cinematic history (kind of). A fantastically restored version exists. An introduction "How to enjoy Algol" might be a great idea, would be very helpful. Not using the label "Science Fiction" is a good first step.

"The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time", in the year after 1984? That sounds intriguing. Too bad the title is completely disconnected from the content of this film. There are about ten segments, without a leitmotif, random and unrelated, mostly presented in a mockumentary style. The dialogues sometimes pretend to be deep, but it's a shallow depth. The segments are just fragments, they couldn't be shown individually as short films. It's more like somebody bored is zapping through (documentary) channels.

Armin Mueller-Stahl is quite good as a blind movie director, and he is an appropriate proxy for the director of this film, Alexander Kluge, who was unable to see that his without doubt highly intellectual concept didn't work out, at all. Why did he do it? Why did he start with a scene from an opera? Why the ridiculous interview about silly numerology? With every new segment the same question pops up: Why? There are no answers. Communication just doesn't seem to be his thing. Maybe somebody could make an interesting film about this failure, preferably in the style of Kluge. Nah, just joking.

One of the famous quotes from the novel "1984" is: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." That's the present assaulting the rest of time. Neither in the year 1984, nor in this film it was about redefining the past. Today, Kluge's slogan sounds much more apt and significant. He had used some other great, poetic titles. "In Danger and Dire Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death" (In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod, 1974; a beforehand rather unknown quote from a guy who died in 1655) -- in extreme situations extreme measures are an absolute necessity. "The Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed" (Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos, 1968) -- intellectuals who have deep insights into many things and no power to change anything, or to act accordingly. Great titles, great mantras! He should have made more of them. ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 24)

A Netflix bio pic about Julius Caesar would be like: Everything Caesar is famous for was actually done by his wife. When she was killed on the ides of March, a devastated Caesar also completely vanished from history.

In the Netflix series "Barbarians" it's not Arminius (also known as Hermann der Cherusker), who is the driving force, it's his wife Thusnelda. She ignites the first sparks of rebellion, she unites the Germanic tribes, she leads them to the legendary battle in the Teutoburg forest, in 9 AD, where she of course kills some Roman soldiers herself. This is an absurd fabrication. There is not much that's known about her actual life. Arminius met her in 14 AD, when she was maybe 25, more likely 15 years old. There was a severe conflict with her father, who later treacherously sold his daughter, heavily pregnant with the child of Arminius, to the Romans. Two years later, in 17 AD, Thusnelda and her child were displayed during a triumphal procession in Rome. Nothing else is known about her. Her claim to fame: She was used by the Romans for a petty, honorless revenge show.

Thusnelda did play no role at all during the period depicted during the first season of "Barbarians", it is all completely fake and ridiculous. Why bother at all with the historical accuracy of clothes, weapons and buildings, if the story you tell is just some childish imagination? The malicious falsification of history is a deadly sin. Such products are flawed beyond repair, worthless.

There is much more that's fake and wrong with "Barbarians". The pretense of authenticity: The Latin spoken by the Romans doesn't sound like a real language, but like pupils reciting some hard learned vocabulary. It is just a gimmick that gets old very quickly. The Germanic peoples speak, of course, modern German. The dialogues are terrible. The Cherusci don't live in big settlements, but in a few isolated huts in the woods. They travel through obviously modern, tidy and clean forests. The ancient woodland was very different. If the Romans see a single, random German in the woods, they capture and kill him. Why would they do that? Their cruelty isn't calculated, it's stupid, because making sure to be hated by everyone is not a sustainable way to run a gigantic empire. The professional relationship of Arminius and Varus is turned into an entirely incredible family story. Arminius is the most suspicious looking traitor, Varus the most gullible commander ever. The big finale of season 1, the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, doesn't make sense at all.- Everything feels wrong.

Unexpectedly, the second season is much less annoying. Serious efforts for improvement have been made. Thusnelda is reduced to human size. Arminius is now the undisputed protagonist. The dialogues are less silly, the Latin sounds less fake. There are some new, ridiculous flaws (the Netflix tribute), but most of the time it is a normal TV show, nothing special, somewhat entertaining, not too boring, no longer disturbingly fake. 5/10.- Got greenlit for things that are terrible, got cancelled for things that are good.

"Actually, I've got real problems!" "Seriously? I wish I had some." - With this dialogue the movie ends and it kind of sums up what's wrong with it. Some people love the idea of making movies. Not because they have something to tell or a talent for telling other people's stories. No, they just love the idea of being a storyteller, a "filmmaker", they love the image, the prestige.

Pia Frankenberg (script, direction, production and leading role) didn't have anything to tell, had no ideas, so she made this movie about a filmmaker (herself), who has no ideas either. There is no real story, just some strange scenes with a bit of (self-) irony. Sometimes the sound is so bad that even Germans need subtitles. The film is maudlin and has an old-fashioned sixties vibe. And there is "humor" like this: (Someone pointing at a cracked egg): 'What's the white stuff?' - 'Stringhalt.' - 'Abortion!' -- That's not funny - at all. Is it surrealismus? Deconstructionism? Pia-nism? Why would anybody crack a joke like this, why would anybody make a film like this? If it cant't be anything else, it must be some kind of art.

In 1981, Pia Frankenberg joint the "Hamburger Filmbüro", a film subsidy organisation with lots of yummy government dough to share for projects that were too non-commercial for the free market. Two of its most important men, Dieter Kosslick and Hark Bohm, have small parts in this movie. She wanted it, she had the opportunity, she did it. "Nicht nichts ohne dich" (Not nothing without you) is a prime example for the rule that if you absolutely WANT to and if you CAN make a movie, but you have nothing to say, you should do it in an art film context.

Pia Frankenberg was successful: Even though "Nicht nichts ohne dich" is a proud exercise in nothingness, it was shown on film festivals, even on the big one in Venice. There is nothing new, funny or just interesting about this movie, but she had become a legit filmmaker. This is an inspirational story for many. ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 23)

The bad reputation of this movie is well deserved. There are two reasons why people might still consider to watch it: David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich. Here, Bowie doesn't have the aura of a rock star. He is a broody, nerdy, wimpy kid. He isn't charming, entertaining, brazen, doesn't have the physical presence a gigolo needs. When Marlene, the madam of the gigolo brothel, asks him some questions to see, if he could do the job, he doesn't answer at all, he just stands there like an timid school boy. This awkward monologue is her big scene in "Gigolo". She wouldn't go to Berlin and was filmed sitting in Paris. But why couldn't Bowie go to Paris, to turn this thing into an actual meeting, into something memorable? Getting us to see some interaction between Bowie and Marlene was after all the big promise of "Gigolo". The real job interview would have been a chance for Bowie to show that his character Paul was worthy of being a gigolo. David Bowie could have tried to charm, to seduce Marlene Dietrich. Marlene - 77 at that time and with her legs already failing her - looks great, but this scene, that could have been the film's saving grace, is its biggest disappointment. Marlene has only one other scene, singing the title song "Just a Gigolo". All in all, she's got about four minutes of screen time.

When something is really bad, people start calling it a parody. A parody of what, exactly, should "Gigolo" be? "Gigolo" is not funny, but it is definitely not a serious movie. It is rife with insane ideas.

Paul (Bowie) arrives at the front at the very end of World War I. After more than four years of war and with him having a military background, he still doesn't have the faintest clue about the brutal reality of the trench war. That's a ridiculous idea. The scene feels nearly Pythonesque, the whole WWI-prelude is alarmingly absurd.

Hermann Kraft (played by the director David Hemmings) lives in the underground, literally. He lives in a parked subway wagon down in the subway system. Is this supposed to be funny? Yes.

The story is told over a period of 10 years, and time flies by: "Winter 1921", "Winter 1923", "Winter 1925", "Winter 1928". Still everything and everyone stays exactly the same. Paul's father, a colonel, is - or pretends to be - in a state of shock since the end of the war. He just sits in his chair, motionsless, his eyes wide open, he doesn't even blink. That's a slapstick idea.

Paul is a complete nobody, just a gigolo. In all those years he didn't manage to get himself a more honorable job. He doesn't do anything of importance. Still Hermann Kraft insists on calling him "one in a million". The movie can't decide if it is about some random guy or about someone secretly very special.

Everything is nonsensical, everything is a joke. But nothing is actually funny. David Hemmings admitted that he directed the movie with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. "Just a Gigolo" is a failed comedy. Maybe nobody laughed while watching it in a cinema, but later that evening, while talking about it in a pub, it became hilarious. The original ideas might have been funny, the movie itself is a paramount example of the incompetence of the writers and the director. Hemmings didn't know how to tell a joke, he tried it anyway and he failed miserably. Now the joke is on him: "Just a Gigolo" is a legendary bad movie.

With all that out of the way, there are a few things to enjoy. There are some nice scenes from 1920s Berlin. Bowie carrying a small pig. All the actors that had been persuaded by the name Marlene Dietrich to join the cast: Sydne Rome, Kim Novak, Curd Jürgens, Maria Schell ... Most of the time, Bowie looks pleasantly enough, he is a doll, slender frame, nice face - though at that time he still had unphotogenic teeth. Thankfully, he doesn't show them too often, playing the silent, brooding type. And he is a great walker. Watched with the appropriate mindset, "Just a Gigolo" isn't a total waste of time.

In 1980 "Die Reinheit des Herzens" was quite successful. It was an ironic play on stereotypes of the tired "New German Cinema", a period that lasted from 1962 until - approximately - 1982. Cinemas were filled with laughter, it was actually considered to be a great comedy. In 2003 it returned to the cinema, with one special screening during the Berlin International Film Festival. The occasion was the honoring of film score composer Peer Raben with a lifetime achievement award. He was present, in a wheel chair, accompanied by the director Robert van Ackeren and the female lead Elisabeth Trissenaar, who delivered the laudatory speech.

The start of the movie was greeted with anticipatory applause. During the screening, the audience stayed completely quiet. It was the intense silence of boredom. The story was soapy, the characters lame, the irony unrecognisable. And the music? Somebody got a synthesizer and did some basic, uninspired stuff with it. There was no final applause, though it's kind of obligatory at events like this. The audience just left, tired and silently.

Raben, van Ackeren and Trissenaar, who had followed the screening from some kind of loge, had been turned into pillars of salt. Hardly anything can intensify emotions better than an actual community experience in a cinema. The message could not have been more obvious. Their work was dead, they had outlived their child. They had come for a celebration and had to stay at a funeral. This highly emotional, highly significant moment is long lost in time, too.

Protip: Don't start your movie with a scene that exposes your protagonist as a complete jerk. It might very well shoo away your audience. "Toni Erdmann" does exactly that. The central character pranks a mailman with an act that involves suspicous talk about parcel bombs. This scene is a fair warning, it's the whole movie in a nutshell: sad, unfunny, pointless, embarrassing, a bit mean.

It will not get any better. There is no story, no real insights into the mechanisms of society or father-daughter relations, no character development, no humor that is actually funny and not just as an abysmal failure.

The amount of international awards and nominations "Toni Erdmann" has received is frightening, because it has all the signs of a weak made-for-television film. The photography is bland. The editors should have done A LOT more of cutting. There was a script? Many things seem to be just improvised. The two main characters are caught in the rigid roles they play. The sad father Winfried Conradi hides behind the mask of an obsessive prankster, Toni Erdmann, his daughter behind that of a cut-throat company cog, leaving not much room for the actors to excel. The runtime is a gigantic 162 minutes, and the director sure found a way to make every single one of them seem to be much longer. Calling "Toni Erdmann" the year's best in any category reveals the sorry state of the movie business itself.

It's just embarrassing people doing embarrassing things. Every hope that something worth watching could happen will slowly die. When it ends - and it ends as tritely as it lived - viewers will feel an enormous relief and a proud sense of achievement. Seriously, everybody who makes it to the closing credits deserves at least a participation medal. ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 22)

Hellraiser (1987) is the most famous work by Clive Barker. It is an exceptional movie, it's not a great one. It is memorable, with a lot of highly original visual ideas, but it is not especially entertaining. It is directed by Clive Barker himself, his directorial debut, and it shows. Barker was obsessed with flesh and blood, especially blood. His most famous books are the six "Books of Blood" (1984-1985). There is a lot of blood in Hellraiser, bloody bodies, magical blood. That was probably the reason for Barker to insist on directing: to make sure that the blood was appreciated. And he was right, there is less blood in the sequels. This is the bloody original.

The biggest weakness is the missing motivation of the occultist Frank for using the magical, hellraising box. Why did he do it? Pinhead, the leader of a new kind of demons, the Cenobites, that are summoned by that box, says: "We have such sights to show you!", something that later turned into his catchphrase. But he never does. All the Cenobites ever do is ripping the flesh apart, torturing, killing. Yes, the line between pleasure and pain can't be measured by means of the brain, but this is ridiculous. After his first encounter with the Cenobites, Frank's main objective is to get away from them. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Hellraiser features two remarkable inventions: The puzzle box with an unique and fascinating design that opens a door to another dimension (aka hell) and the Cenobite Pinhead (Doug Bradley). These are the defining elements of the Hellraiser franchise, the only ones present in all of the seven sequels until "Hellraiser VIII: Hellworld" (2005).

The first rule of this franchise is: There are no rules. Every installment is quite different. Don't expect consistency in hell. The original stories of parts 6, 7, 8 and - maybe - 5 had been rewritten to turn them into Hellraiser stories and movies. That's actually a good way to avoid already travelled Hellraiser paths. These are not just variations on a theme, they are new melodies with some recurrent motives.

Hellraiser II is the only real sequel. A very cryptic scene at the end of part I that features a mattress and looks like a huge continuity error turns out to be the most important connection between the two movies. That's annoying, but hell is not supposed to be pleasant. In II four humans walk through a hell that looks like an endless, empty sewer system. They say "Boring as hell!" for a reason.

III: In the beginning it looks like a great reboot. Features the origin story of Pinhead. IV: The history of the puzzle box, from the 18th century in France to a futuristic space ship. The director used the pseudonym "Alan Smithee", meaning he was very much ashamed of this movie. V: A well done detective story. VI: A very different mystery story with a really surprising ending. VII: A death cult in Budapest stalks the Cenobites. VIII: A fan convention party for the online game "Hellworld" turns into the setting of a slasher movie. Very meta. Last appearance of Doug Bradley as Pinhead. A fitting end of this era.- In aggregate, the sequels are nearly half good. As stand-alone movies they might be quite useless, but as part of the series they are interesting enough to be watchable. None of them is more of a sight to see than Hellraiser (1987).

First of all, the talking CGI-kangaroo is only a gimmick. It is named "Kangaroo" and voiced by the author Marc-Uwe Kling. No explanation is given, it's just there. It doesn't do anything important a human actor couldn't have done, and everybody treats it as something entirely normal. It's not from some kind of alien kangaroo culture, it talks and acts just like some average young guy. It looks different, that's the whole point. And it is female, because - News Flash for Mr. Kling! - male kangaroos don't have a pouch.

The story: Marc-Uwe, the housemate of Kangaroo, loves Maria, the single mother next door. After another date went wrong, he manages to get her to accept a bet. If he wins there will be a last try for a romantic date - in Paris. To win that prize, he has to destroy Maria's mother's believe in conspiracy theories. Which one? All of them, everything ever labeled as a conspiracy theory. There is no differentiation in this movie, it's just one big conspiracy blob. Then the father of the child reappears, who had been a political prisoner in North Korea. He is welcomed by Maria and the bet should be off, the film should end. Everything else would be creepy - and it is: Marc-Uwe still wants to have his prize, still wants to get into her pants.

There are a lot of gratuitous filler scenes in this movie, a lot of cringe worthy dialogues, there is much hate and precious little that's fun or funny. At its core is the proudly ignorant depiction of "conspiracy theorists" as braindead, fanatic, violent sectarians, whose thoroughly baseless ideas invariably turn them into right wing extremists. Maybe the script was written by a 14-year-old pupil after watching some YT- or PBS-rants, who was mainly concerned with not writing anything that could be interpreted as any kind of sympathy or understanding or even some kind of humanization of the "conspiracy theorists", because that would surely anger his teacher. The "discussions" are just buzz words and slogans. It's a borefest, "Reefer Madness"-level of propaganda. Mind you, that movie from 1936 became a campy cult classic 40 years later, so there might be hope for this one.

Already, in May 2023, some of the things in this movie really didn't age well. The salute of the "conspiracy theorists" is "Stay woke!" - while doing the All Seeing Eye hand sign. Lol. In one endless filler scene, Marc-Uwe lectures a soldier about the evilness of his profession. As an obvious supporter of the Green Party, due to the war in the Ukraine, he would now sing a very different tune. Talk about the "deindustrialisation of Germany" is one of the examples given for the utter insanity of the errant truth seekers. Today the collapse of the energy supply and the deindustrialisation of Germany are hot topics and parts of mainstream discussions. Double lol! The times have been a-changing.

The mindset of this movie - believe everything the authorities tell you or we'll call you a nazi - is dangerous. The escalating war against "fake news", "disinformation", "conspiracy theories" and so forth is an actual threat to democracy, because it is led by people who could actually end it, and there is ONE fundamental freedom without that all the others will erode and disappear. On the other hand, the millions of kooks, simpletons, esoterics, potheads and what have you that believe in all kinds of preposterous things are mostly marginalised and completely harmless. It is absolutely fine to make fun of them, but "The Kangaroo Conspiracy" demonizes them, declares open season on them, unrestrainedly punching down. Therefore it is a blessing that this movie is that bad. ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 20)

16 sketches reimagining historical figures and moments, with an average length of five minutes, featuring among others Neanderthals, Egyptians, Columbus, Michelangelo, the Titanic and Al Capone. The main joke is that everybody has the attitudes and uses the language of our contemporaries. There is a "Rock Concert" at Athens with the oldtimer group "Socrates, Plato & Aristotle", there are the Vikings doing affirmative action and there are some suffragettes throwing a wild bachelorette party in World War I.

In the most notable sketch we see Max Giermann very convincingly playing Jesus Christ as Klaus Kinski. That sounds very promising. In 1971 Kinski tried to start a new career as a reciter of the New Testament, but his very first appearance ended with a spectaclular scandal. Some hecklers offended him and he answered with uninhibited rage and bile. He was more into the whipping than into the loving part of his new role. The clips from that outbursts are legendary, extremely hilarious. This sketch channels the rage, not the fun part. We just see a permanently enraged, swearing KK/JC, who - as a PR stunt - wants to fake his crucifixion and turn himself into a martyr. The sketch ends with the narrator spreading some hate against Christianity. The author obviously had some rage problems himself.

Hate is the biggest problem of this failed comedy. Again and again they insert some hate against mankind in general and Western civilization in particular. It ends with the end of mankind and an euphoric song praising that destruction. Some people should have never evolved from single-cell organisms. Actually, that's the first - animated - sketch: a disco, where single-cell organisms discuss the "problematic" aspects of evolving.

The most blatant deficiency is the humor. The sketches are annoying, embarrassing, silly or simply pointless and lame. Laughing out loud moments? None. There are some "Well, yeah, that's kind of funny, I suppose"-ideas. The original concepts of the Athens and the Al Capone sketches have some potential, but their realization falls flat. What's worse than a comedy that's not funny? (One that's also hateful, of course.)

While all the sketches feel like episodes of TV shows, some of them look very expensive - like the (especially repulsive) one praising the use of the guillotine during the French revolution. It is utterly ridiculous, how much money, effort and real talent, how much potentially valuable resources were wasted with such abject results. This is a bad movie and its lavish production makes it even more hateable. ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 19)

... the urge to just walk away will be that strong. It's really tough to get through the first 10 minutes and it won't get better. I promise.

"Hai-Alarm" is not about sharks. It is not just another parody on silly genre movies ending up being even more ridiculous and far less funny than they are. It is all about Friedrichshagen, a borough in the outskirts of Berlin, with a population of less than 20.000. That's where the author and director Leander Haußmann grew up. Except for the 20.000 it's hard to tell, what kind of audience this movie was supposed to attract. It is most likely the most provincial Berlin movie ever. It looks like it has been made by dilettantes, but it is actually an extra long insider joke, made by a bunch of well-known German artists from the higher echelons of the theater and movie world, who wanted to do something stupid and funny. Funny how?

Well, they are all into humoristic strangeness, into a very low-key, sometimes barely noticeable kind of humor. In some ways it feels like a homage to the 1990s:

• Frank Castorf (Frank Konopke). In the 90s he was the most critically acclaimed theater director in Germany. His meandering stagings often had a vibe quite similar to that of "Hai-Alarm". Henry Hübchen (the major) played the protagonist in many of them.

• Sven Regener (Co-author, co-director). From 1991 to 1994 he and his band Element of Crime released three marvelous, classic albums, with unobtrusive humorous lyrics. The songs he wrote for "Hai-Alarm" sound similar, but after a while they do get a bit on the annoying side.

• Detlev Buck (Polizist Müller). In the 90s he was famous for the very special, dry & laconic humour in the movies he wrote and directed. They were based country comedies - refreshingly different from the usual quirky urban comedies. Again, "Hai-Alarm" is probably the most provincial movie about Berlin ever.

It is possible to find things of cultural significance in "Hai-Alarm", it's possible to understand some of the more obscure references. It's possible to enjoy this movie, it'a just not very likely. Hell, it's even possible that some of the numerous gags will make you laugh.

One of the references hardly anybody will get: At a press conference the mayor is asked questions in English, French and Russian. He answers fluently in the same language. It's a long and pointless scene. "Hai-Alarm" is from 2013, in 2009 a guy from the BBC asked then German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, if he could ask in English and if the minister could please answer in English. Westerwelle rejected the request. Most people would consider this to be normal and trivial. Some very special Germans cried "Scandal! Provincial!", because of this refusal. But extensively mocking this nothingburger years later? That's really too special. Then the scene gets even more special: The whole hall starts to sing: "Friedrichshagen, you woman of ill repute". This box-office disaster most certainly did not better her reputation. ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 18)

The Good: Great production values! The producers had obviously a lot of money to spend, and they've spent it well. Kudos to the location scouts in Berlin - a good mix of well known and nice lesser known places. A few expensive German actors have been hired: Udo Kier (who became famous in 1973/1974 by impersonating Baron von Frankenstein AND Count Dracula in the two Andy Warhol horror movies) plays a crazy artist and father. Til Schweiger, arguably the biggest German movie star right now, appears in episode 3. Katharina Thalbach, the Grand Dame of the Berlin theatre, plays a ghoulish mix of Lotte Lenya (From Russia with Love), some character by Ingmar Bergman ("Sweden is in Germany, right?" - The screenwriters.) and a crazy old lady. Granted, only Udo Kier should be a part of this good news section. But this is a musical and the most important aspect is of course the musical quality. The music is well produced and nice. Unremarkable, but nice. Actually there should have been more of it.

The Strange: The casting! There are quite a few questionable and strange casting choices. I guess Adam Devine is an acquired taste, something I did not quite manage to achieve. He is the goofy normal guy and I respect the choice to make him the star of a show and not just the comic relief sidekick, but I'm sure he'll annoy a few people. Very annoying is the permanent grimacing of Flula Borg. He looks like he's got some severe mental problems. Whoever told him to act this way made a big mistake.- Some scenes are completely nonsensical, confusing strangeness with humor. A prime example for this is the appearance by Til Schweiger in a Youtube-2017-like sketch as Pickle Til. It is desperately unfunny, but there are layers upon layers of absurdities.

The Bad: The ignorance! The screenwriters didn't have the foggiest idea about Germany. They got everything wrong, and they didn't care at all. Using some stereotypes for humorous effects is fine, but the total ignorance is just lame and stupid. US-screenwriters in the 1970s have been much more culturally savvy that this bunch of hacks. The writers' ignorance is universal. At one point they have a bureaucrat, who spends his leisure time at a music festival, legally perform a marriage. There is no country on earth, where this is possible. "But that's the joke!" No, it isn't. This is a musical and the story is clichéd and silly, alright. But especially in episode 6 this reaches levels of sillyness and cringe that shouldn't even be possible. There is no discernible connection to reality. Going completely over the top can be a stylistic device, but here it only feels amateurish, childish and sluggish. The authors probably feel like high-riders, thinking big and stunning the plebs. That's funny. They should not give up their daytime jobs. They are terrible.

The Bottom Line: Technically fine, but utter nonsense - watch it with really low expectations.

After watching two conventional screen adaptions - by Rudolf Noelte (1968) and Michael Haneke (1997) - I was well prepared to appreciate the very different and much more cinematographic approach by Aleksey Balabanov. It's not a drab study in futility and paranoia, but a colorful grotesque with lots of strange new ideas added to the original story. That's not to say he disrespected the source material, some details in his movie are actually better than in the two afore-mentioned ones. Complementary to the strangeness of Kafka's novel, he created an entertainingly surrealistic atmosphere. The Surrealism and the book were both born in the 1920s, so I'd like to call this addition age-appropriate.

Of the three screen adaptions, this one features the best snow-covered landscape, the best locations, the best art direction, the weirdest people, by far the most people and the youngest leading actor. This is not a musical, but there is a lot of music and singing going on, mostly in the busy backgrounds. But even if this movie version of a Kafka book is more pleasant than others and could be enjoyed by quite a few viewers, this "Fun with Kafka" has of course the emphasis on "Kafka" not "fun".

As for Kafka purists ... The funniest joke about Kafka is that some people actually think that he had access to divine wisdoms and truths. So they get into the loop of reading and interpreting his books over and over again, always ending in some kind of frustration, because Kafka's writings are as hermetic as a well oiled bureaucracy. But that's what being "Kafkaest" is all about - stubbornly looking for truth in all the wrong places. And that's funny.

The last 15 minutes are not from any Kafka script I know of. It seems to be a new, original and appropriately enigmatic ending to Kafka's fragmentary, end--less story. 8/10.

Kafka's novel doesn't have much of a story. A movie that tries to tell this strange, deceptive and repetitive tale is bound to frustrate and annoy its audience. As this is a very famous piece of literature, three state-sponsored TV stations from Austra, Germany and France decided to give it another try, as part of the obligations from their - in the mid 1990s still officially relevant - educational mandate.

Haneke's film remains close to the source material, while still staying somewhat watchable, for most of the time. That's not a small achievement. This is a deliberate literary adaptation, a not too obtrusive narrator adds the sound of Kafka's writing, which is an essential feature. The color scheme that's mostly close to black and white, but not everywhere, is an interesting decision. The art direction is okay. The cast is of course top-notch. The storyline is what it is, not great, not annoying, and there is most certainly no deep hidden meaning to discover.

Kafka himself didn't have access to some divine wisdoms and truths. He described a worldview, a sentiment, created a melody that was very influential in the 1950s to 1970s. Haneke's film does the best it can to bring it to the small screen.

Kafka didn't know how to finish his novel. It's been said that he was considering to just kill K. Off. But that would have been a boring cheat, Kafka accepting his own defeat. Therefore his novel stayed "fragmentary" and was published as such two years after his death. This film ends EXACTLY like his script - not the printed book - ends. It's a surprising and funny moment.

Today, of course, the logical ending seems to be obvious: If everything is lies within lies, people pretending to be from the castle are most likely not from the castle. So when K. Finally gets a coach "to the castle" - he ends up in another village. Fixed it. Once you know the melody, it's easy to do a Kafka. 6/10.

This is a TV movie, made at a time, when the "Theatre of the Absurd" still managed to entertain people. The TV people probably thought: "The story doesn't make any sense at all, but it is completely absurd. So we are good."

The story: A stranger comes into a village with secretive, hostile and bureaucracy obsessed residents. Everything turns out to be deceptions and lies. Or just utter nonsense. He doesn't achieve anything. Still he is hellbent on staying there.

Watching this screen adaption of Kafka's novel is like reading one of the absurdist plays by Eugène Ionesco. It's a pointless chore done for school. It is bleak, dull and every kind of meaning people attribute to it is completely arbitrary. But it is also a product of its time and not without value. It shows how not to do a screen adaption, especially if you want to create a work that can be enjoyed without knowledge of the source material. 4/10.

'Berlin, I Love You' has been made by people, who don't know much about Berlin. The amount of things they've got completely wrong is amazing. Nearly everybody in Berlin speaks English all the time? That's a fundamentally distorted view of the world. Some of the authors quite obviously think that Berlin would be a better place without Germans.

Most of the ten segments' stories could have been used for a 'Dallas, I love you' or 'Birmingham, I love you' compilation, because Berlin is nothing more than the background scenery. All of them are quite pointless, cliché-ridden and extremely predictable. If the nagging feeling that you are wasting your life tends to give you depressions, you should stay clear of this movie. There is an awful lot of obtrusive agitprop by pundits who don't have a story to tell and therefore settle for sending some platitudinous messages. On the other side it sometimes gets so bad and pathetic that it gave me some laughing out loud moments - so that's a positive.

The segments in chronological order:

• 0 "Transitions", the wraparound (director: Josef Rusnak)
• 1 "Berlin Ride" (Peter Chelsom)
• 2 "Under Your Feet" (Massy Tadjedin)
• 3 "Love is in the Air" (Til Schweiger)
• 4 "Berlin Dance" (Justin Franklin, Daniel Lwowski)
• 5 "Me Three" (Stephanie Martin, Claus Clausen)
• 6 "Hidden" (Dani Levi)
• 7 "Sunday Morning" (Fernando Eimbcke)
• 8 "Lucinda in Berlin" (Dianna Agron)
• 9 "Embassy" (Dennis Gansel)

Three episodes could be considered as tourist promotion: "Berlin Ride", "Berlin Dance" and "Transitions". In "Berlin Ride" a simple photo safari through Berlin cures an American tourist of his suicidal thoughts. "Transitions" borrows heavily from the imagery of Wim Wenders' "Der Himmel Über Berlin" (Wings of Desire). It shows an emotional journey from depression to lust for life. While Wenders' movie features an angel with an interest in humans, here the brooding angel impersonator (Robert Stradlober) seems to be more attracted to the great beyond. A tourist from Israel will fix this - temporarily. "Berlin Dance" is basicly a music clip for Max Raabe and his Palast Orchester, it's actually nice and by far the best segment.

Three episodes are completely expendable: "Love is in the Air", "Sunday Morning" and "Lucinda in Berlin". "Love is in the Air" is a trainwreck of a story and it features Mickey Rourke - a match made in the heaven over Berlin, I guess. It is notable for the complete absence of Berlin, everything happens inside of a hotel. "Sunday Morning" is the dream of a drag queen to get hit on by a cute 16-year-old. (Yeah, that's exactly what it is!) In "Lucinda in Berlin" the depression of an American tourist gets cured by puppetry.

Two episodes are hypocrisy on steroids: "Under Your Feet" and "Me Three". Whoever still likes this kind of heavy-handed propaganda is in dire need of a software update.

Two episodes are so bad that they are actually funny: "Hidden" and "Embassy". In "Hidden" an asylum seeker who killed a 15 years old German boy (but of course he is still the good guy, because it was somehow "self-defense"), seeks refuge in a brothel. Unintentional hilarity ensues. Definitely on the funny side of bigotry. In "Embassy" the passenger of a very talkative taxi driver reads my mind and asks her: "Do you really need to keep talking? It would be great if you just not do that." It's the beginning of a wild ride that had me in stitches. Your mileage may vary.

There is an eleventh short film, beach boy Ai Weiwei directed the filming in Berlin via Skype from Peking. Sadly, it didn't make it into this compilation, which is a shame, because this sounded like the perfect recipe for a desaster.

If you suffer from depressions, Berlin is probably the last place you want to be, except if you just want to surround yourself with like-minded people. David Bowie and Iggy Pop tried it in the 1970s, you should listen to their Berlin-made records from 1977 "Low" and "Lust For Life" - not really fun stuff. 42 years later they are still a perfect soundtrack for this city. In spite of reiterated attempts of cheerfulness, 'Berlin, I Love You' is basically a very bleak and boring movie. It will not attract many tourists, if any at all.

All in all: Yes, this is a very bad movie. But it is made with adorable incompetence and a complete lack of self-reflection. Yes, sometimes it is so bad, it is kind of good. ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 17)

The story of MUTE is not a science-fiction-, it is a Vietnam-story, informed by the M*A*S*H-franchise. If it were set in the early 1970s and in Thailand, many annoying details that are just wrong would fall right into place. This is where it belongs. The gratuitous SF-masquerade is only an inane gimmick, it turns the plot itself into a fish out of water. "Cactus Bill" and "Duck" (Paul Rudd & Justin Theroux), two US army surgeons who deserted from their military unit during a war in an Asian country, are even still dressed for the 1970s.

The CGI-look of Berlin in 2052, praised by an astounding amount of shills, is a complete rehash of ideas from the 1970s and 1980s, predominantly mimicking the vision of 2019 Los Angeles in "Blade Runner". Back then it was of course unique and amazing, but it was also far from being prophetic. The L.A. of today doesn't look like the one imagined in 1982 at all. On top of this MUTE's production designers still think that nothing says "future" better that neon signs ("Neon lights, shimmering neon lights", Kraftwerk, 1978) and nothing says "Berlin" better than graffiti scribblings. This is just lazy and tacky. While "Blade Runner" is still great, MUTE was born as and will always be kitsch. Some people will hate it, others will like it - "Kitsch is a beautiful word" (Barry Ryan, 1970). Whatever. The main reason for the praising of MUTE is a bunch of stale stereotypes, really.

40-year-old Leo (Alexander Skarsgard), who is mute since an accident in his childhood, hasn't learned yet to really cope with his handicap. Most of the time he looks awkward, gawky, insecure. In MUTE's 2052 it would only take minutes to give him back his voice. Author and director Duncan Jones' cop-out: Leo is a devout Amish - even though he is not living in an Amish community and is working as a bartender at a strip club. That's not how Amishness works, Mr. Jones.

Leo drives a Mercedes-Benz built in 1972. It still can't fly.

Leo's weapon of choice is a bedpost. At this point it should be clear to everyone that Mr. Jones is just joshing with his audience.

MUTE will make it in every top ten list about stupid decisions villains make when they are going to kill the hero.

The mise-en-scène is sluggish, the characters are as unappealing as the anachronistic story lines. This movie is a complete train wreck. Duncan Jones has dedicated it to his father, David Bowie. That's a sacrilege.

What is wrong with this picture? Everything.

--Tod den Hippies!! Es lebe der Punk! (Death to Hippies!! Long Live Punk!)--

This is not a punk movie, but just - after "Die Unberührbare" (2000) and "Quellen des Lebens" (2013) - the third effort of Roehler to get back at his long dead parents. The bizarre antics of their proxies, Gisela and Klaus, are at the center of this film, the rest is seriously random stuff. In his mind Roehler sees himself as a punk and his parents as hippies. But the obsessive blaming of the parents has always been a core part of hippiedom. Hippies might actually enjoy this movie, with all the sex & drugs and all the lazy drug-induced imagery they would quite likely mislabel as "surrealistic and artful".

Part 1: Punk Comic. Completely grotesque, insanely exaggerated characters. A school that looks like an university, with every hippie cliché personified. A "Nazi Punk" who drugs / narcotizes his hippie teacher and cuts off his long hair.

Part 2: Hippie Underground Comic. Roehler's alter ego, Robert Rother (Tom Schilling), moves to Berlin and starts working in a "peep show", a place that actually existed during the early 1980s. 15 booths surrounding a stage upon which a naked woman performs some kind of gymnastics. In "Tod den Hippies" all customers are superhumans, therefore RR has to clean the little windows in front of their faces all the time, because they get completely covered with white goo. Two underground rock stars arrive, Blixa Bargeld & Nick Cave. They are allowed to enter the backstage area, where they are given the full VIP-treatment by the overjoyed "models". This is seriously a hippie fantasy, straight from the pages of Gilbert Shelton.

Part 3: New Wave Posers. People sitting or standing around in a little, white painted bar, with Bargeld filling up some glasses from time to time. Really heavy, serious posing. So pathetic that once or twice it's actually funny.

Part 4: Old hippie blames his parents for his misery. A nearly sixty-year-old, still obsessed with his parents. So sad. The main part, not much to write about.

Epilogue: RR wants to move to the USA, but goes to Egypt instead, because someone told him he could get to the USA from Egypt for free. On a transportation van in the middle of a desert he meets his old boss from the peep show who is carrying a suitcase full of (unchilled) sausages with which he wants to open a snack stall in Egypt. RR tells him about the prohibition on the consumption of pork, the sharia, stonings. The end. Completely random stuff.

Roehler was the grand master of the auteur trash movie, but with "Tod den Hippies" he is only the grand master of "What the Heck?" ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 16)