The German Chainsaw Massacre

MOVIE #1,188 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 10.11.23 50 MOVIES IN 32 DAYS! I don't even know where to begin with this one, folks. Obviously it is capturing a zeitgeist for something I'm not and can't really ever be familiar with, but the chaos it invokes for a wildly uncertain moment in time, how hope for the future is perhaps just a cloak for some greater fear, is a remarkable idea. I haven’t seen the second Texas Chainsaw Massacre (I reviewed the first last year) but I know that one focuses more closely on the fucked up family of Leatherface, and this one — although it still has a ton of gore — is 100% a farce that seems more in line with the tone of that sequel. It features Udo Kier in a dual role as “dream sequence Hitler” (at least the second time he’s played the Führer) and, umm, this absolute freak…

Painting West Germans as sociopathic cannibals hungry to turn East Germans into sausages in “The First Hour of the Reunification” (the film’s subtitle) is the kind of pointed social commentary satire that is so overt and excessive that it comes full circle and is genius again. This is actually the middle film of director Christoph Schlingensief’s “Germany Trilogy” which is bookended by the movies, 100 Years of Adolf Hitler – The Last Hour in the Führerbunker and Terror 2000 – Germany out of Control. And I am sold on those titles alone.

The “all gas, no breaks” mood of this works with its barely-a-feature length run-time (it clocks in at 60 minutes on the nose) and its absurd/comedic tone more than offsets the graphic violence. It’s also chaulkful of several, oft-repeated quotable lines such as “in times when everything is possible it is unimportant if something is good or bad” and “everything has an end, except for hope” (to which the maniac Udo Kier playfully responds with the joke: “everything has an end, except for wurst — it has two!”). There’s just a lovely nihilistic bend here working counter to the perceived emotional spirit of the era, one of exuberance and closure (the film actually begins with archival footage of the fireworks-laden reunification ceremony). Again, I am not German nor am I history buff so some of the specifics (and their accuracy) will forever be lost on me, but I can still greatly appreciate the sentiment.

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The German Chainsaw Massacre - The First Hour of the Reunification (German: Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker), also known as Blackest Heart in the United States, is a 1990 German horror film written and directed by Christoph Schlingensief and starring Karina Fallenstein, Alfred Edel, Udo Kier and Irm Hermann. It is the second film in Schlingensief's Deutschlandtrilogie (German Trilogy). It was released on January 1, 1990.