Sounding like some cheap
pastiche, The German Chainsaw Massacre comes as a surprisingly independent
feature, able to stand on it's own without the crutch of it's predecessor.
However, Tobe Hooper's movie is not so much tipped and winked as screamed
in the face of in this relentless madness and more specifically in a similarly
edited chainsaw chase through a forest. Choosing to loosen Hooper's tight
bolts of 'humour', Schlingensief loses dramatic intensity but gains an
awesome sense of the egregious: unemployed customs officials form appalling
folk groups at the West/East border and a woman with a knife up her butt
sits down...
Schlingensief manages
to attain the almost impossible with virtually no plot leading a blindly
satisfactory and jolly dance. Rather than making love to her 'horny' partner,
Clara kills him/her, androgynous in a wig, before crossing the border.
Here, she becomes masochistically involved with an incestuous, cannibalistic
family that bring out the worst in her. Clara veers between her positions
as killer and user-friendly object of lust as unpredictably as the family's
regard of her as food and companion.
The reason for the agreeable
blending of the movie is that the subject matter is watertight in analogy
in the reunification of Germany and the wanton dismemberment of the individual.
The family here represent the Old Ways, the desire for division taken to
an extreme upon those who flit the borders. They are, of course, equally
divided in petty feuds of their own. Dietrich turns Normanesque and harbours
poor dead Nazi Vati all to himself in his room causing unrest that leads
to physical dismemberment of the family and an icon of political instability.
Anarchy is inherent in
the form and structure of the movie itself. Whilst Johnny daubs a CND logo
on the wall with a freshly amputated stump and thereby expressing his support
for 'disarmament', Arthur glumly removes the gorily convincing flayed skin
make-up from his face, shattering all illusion. Likewise, Clara develops
another skin of her own at one stage that she peels off as the chrysalis
of her new identity. Other textures provide easy cohesion with the introduction
of projected 16mm slowmo deaths and low-resolution video depicting the
Germanic fight for ‘pluralism’. Thus the deconstruction is universal and
plummets into mayhem as each character destroys or is gleefully destroyed.
No redemption. No happy endings.
Ed
Cooper