SCHRAMM

Schramm

It seems absurd for people to compare Jorg Buttgereit's somewhat infamous serial killer opus SCHRAMM to John McNaughton's HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER but that's usually what they do. Along what imaginary line the two meet is beyond me. McNaughton's film is a somber, terrifying, almost cinema verite excursion into nihilistic madness. Buttgereit's film is similar only in the most basic thematic way. If anything, SCHRAMM is HENRY told through the eyes of a shock merchant-cum-arthouse director who is more concerned with visceral imagery than narrative cohesion. For all it's stomach churning bravada, HENRY is a proper narrative film. SCHRAMM is anything but. It's disjointed narrative makes little sense, offers no solid ground for the viewer to stand on. It is merely flashes of story tied together by a thread of moral decay. While both deal with the messy lives of serial killing madmen, there is literally nothing else to connect the two.


Schramm

SCHRAMM really is a visual experience. You won't walk away from the film feeling anything profound. You're just going to remember the imagery. The story, as it were, is told in stream of consciousness fashion as the titular character, Lothar Schramm, lies dying on the floor of his apartment, having slipped off a ladder while painting his blood-stained walls with a fresh coat of paint. We see his interactions with his next door neighbor, a comely prostitute named Marianne. We see the murder of two door-to-door Bible thumpers, the event which led to our chubby madman's demise. We see Schramm listening to Marianne having sex with her clients and having strange, compulsory sex with a blow-up vagina. We see him cleaning himself, preparing for his day. We see him having hallucinations of a bizarre mouth/vagina creature and a hallucination of his leg being severed. We do nothing but watch this man fall slowly to pieces. We figure out early on that he is the infamous Lipstick Killer that has been killing women left and right - he has the drawer full of memento moris in the kitchen - but we never see him do his thing except in the first fifteen minutes. All it is is image after image after image of one man's lonely, disturbing life.


Schramm

It's saving grace is that it is shot incredibly well, especially for such a low budget film. There is a definite sense that Buttgereit planned this whole thing out well in advance. Unlike HENRY, there is a definite feeling of control here. The whole film feels coordinated to put you on edge, to confuse you, to break down that sense of time and space necessary to gain some kind of footing. It manages to do that rather well, but I can't help but feel that it works against the film in many ways. It's hard to become emotionally invested in a serial killer movie on a character level anyway so the fact that Schramm remains a virtual unknown through-out the film doesn't really matter, but the level of disconnect here runs straight to the material itself and without some semblance of cohesion, any kind of impact the film might have had is blunted. In a sense, the whole purpose of the film - to shock, to revolt, to depress, to engage on the basest of levels - is lost simply because there is no place for US in it.


Schramm

Even in it's roughest, most depraved and transgressive scenes, SCHRAMM feels too composed to achieve a solid effect. The scene of Schramm driving nails through his foreskin - an unsimulated scene that probably accounts for most of the film's notoriety - is little more than a geek show moment tossed in for good measure. The use and cleaning of the blow-up vagina, the masturbating over the drugged-up body of Marianne and the scenes of Schramm posing his murder victims for Polaroids are hardly tame but they're not very effective either. They're just there for the sake of being there. At one point, the fourth wall comes down entirely when the camera decides to focus on a man sitting on the street. The man pulls out a gun and fires a shot through his skull. The camera rushes forward, a hand blocks the lens but then pulls away, allowing us to see the small stream of blood pouring from the man's temple. I couldn't figure out what Buttgereit was trying to achieve in these scenes other than a sense of queasiness. Perhaps that really is all he was going for. If it is, he fails. Not because of the material itself. Only because of the way he uses it.


Schramm

SCHRAMM definitely provides evidence of a maturing directorial sensibility in Buttgereit following his two-piece magnum opus of NEKROMANTIK and NEKROMANTIK 2. Both of those films were solid pieces of shock cinema in their own right, but neither film could carry their length very well. SCHRAMM is shorter and much more concentrated than either of those two films but it lacks their conviction. It needed to go further. It needed something more to it. A cohesive narrative might have solved that problem. Like recent shock films like THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE: FIRST SEQUENCE and A SERBIAN FILM, the lack of a compelling narrative renders many of the transgressive elements moot. Without that narrative interest, all we are left with is shock after shock after shock, more of a demo reel of moral bankruptcy and less of an effecting piece of cinema.


Don't get me wrong, SCHRAMM is most definitely an interesting film and one that I would recommend to anyone looking for yet another serial killer flick to add to their collection. But it's a little hard to not be disappointed with it. For all it's effort and all it's underlying skill, it is little more than a curio piece for those who feel the need to drown themselves in a sea of existential and moral dread.


Recommended.