MOSTLY FILM: Love Is In The Ground
I wasn't really planning to do a new thing for Mostly Film, it just happened that way. I had a bit of a gap in last Friday morning's schedule, and the editor suddenly announced that unless anyone had any better ideas, there wouldn't be a new piece going up on Monday.
As it happened, I knew that a film I'd already namechecked on the site over four years ago - Jörg Buttgereit's grim necrophile comedy Nekromantik 2 - was, astonishingly, about to get a legitimate release in the UK. So I laid my hands on a, let's say, less legitimate copy, rewatched it for the first time in over two decades, smashed out a thousand or so words of instant reaction and had it in the editorial inbox by later that afternoon.
The review is now up on the site under the title of Love Is In The Ground, simply because this had been posted a few days earlier. Looking back on it now, in the calm after the frenzy of its creation, it strikes me that at least one more read through on my part could have been a useful thing, to pick up carelessnesses like the sentence which contains the word 'really' twice. (Amusingly, that sentence was picked up by Mostly Film's Facebook team and used as a pull quote to cement my shame.) It also strikes me now that the whole piece fails to really acknowledge at any point that necrophilia is not nice. Kids! Monika M. is a professional, do not try to imitate her. Besides, she has a hacksaw.
Anyway, as the piece was written in a bit of a rush, the Red Button Backup Content for it has been hurled together at similar speed (and is also a bit late, sorry). Want to see a tasteful collection of film clips on the subject of sex with dead people? Then here you go.
Next comes Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed, which I think was my first encounter with actress Molly Parker in 1996. Just a clip here, but it gives you the general idea.
See what I mean about them being tasteful takes on the subject? That stops now. There are plenty of trailers for the original Nekromantik out there on the web, but I'm going for the one that Arrow Films put together for their re-release last year. It's built around the assumption that most people who know the film already will only have seen it on a grungey pirate VHS. The fake tracking errors and fast editing manage to shield the casual viewer from the horrors being depicted, while still getting across that this is grim stuff.
And so to wrap up with the movie under review, Nekromantik 2 itself. I'd offer you a trailer at this point, but all of the ones on YouTube are full of spoilers, or dick, or spoilers and dick. So instead, here's NecroHimno, the gratuitous musical number from the film, featuring Monika M. on vocals and composer John Boy Walton on the piano. Sadly, it's been clumsily cut a second or two before the end, so you'll just have to imagine the unexpectedly pretty modulation into the major key that closes the song.
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