Komabrutale Duell, Das [DVD]

Silly. Outrageous. A tale of revenge. A man, Heiko (played by the director) hits another man while drunk driving. Stefan, the deceased's son, vows revenge and hires the Eightlets Mafia (Mexican octuplets) to kill Heiko and his family. His parents are slaughtered and Heiko beaten so senseless he's left in a coma. Upon awakening, he meanders about almost as if nothing happened...until he is attacked again, this time by Stefan personally, and the coma-brutal duel begins, involving Heiko's two brothers and the Eightlets Mafia.The plot is thin. The filmmaking, garbage. The splatter levels high. The entertainment through the roof.Heiko Fipper is one of those "one man band" directors. Here he handles the scripting, lighting, directing, effects, music, sound, and a whole assortment of other duties in addition to being co-star. His craft isn't exactly refined (unlike Shinya Tsukamoto when he made "Tetsuo: The Iron Man"), but it's good enough to create an enticing thrill ride, and aspects that stand out are the low-key music and insane gore effects, the latter of which being where the movie really shines.Violence in "Das komabrutale Duell" is off the wall. Practically nobody dies, though when they do it takes a barrage of attacks (fists, cars, chainsaws, drills, bullet wounds, split craniums, crucifixions, faces ripped off, etc.) to get them there. The characters are superhumans. There's a glorious amount of bloodshed and gore, and the players just keep coming back for more--thanks in part to sewing up gaping wounds and various revival techniques, one involving injecting mass amounts of blood from others (with no concern over blood type or where the blood travels through the body; "injecting" isn't exactly the right word, as they both drink and pour the blood back into large holes in their arms). There's an extremely cartoony, comic bookish quality to the action, violence, and humor in this flick, and from watching the outtakes during the end credits, you can tell that all involved were having a fun time bringing it all together.One of the highlights in the film is when two brothers take their dead brother to a ramshackle operating room in somebody's attic, where they figure their brother needs a new brain to resurrect him. His head was completely blown out, you see. But one of the brothers says there's no time to fetch someone else's brain and volunteers half of his own. Heiko rips off his brother's head at his request and proceeds to saw the skull in two. Half the brain is applied to his other brother's head (an empty bowl of blood soup) which is then put back together using a hot glue gun. Both brothers function fine each with half of one man's brain and behave no differently than before. Inspired storytelling.If you're a gorehound and someone into absurd humor and bottom-of-the-barrel budget filmmaking, this one is not to be missed. The bloodshed and gore is near endless, and while not as fun and varied and skilled as something like "Dead Alive", there's much enjoyment to be had. And just remember: if you ever get a large bullet wound to your cock and balls, just staple the skin together and you'll be OK.

The no-budget amateur chaos that reigns in Das Komabrutale Duell is of a kind that suspension of disbelief must be constantly employed. In addition, all rules about what "good filmmaking" or even "good horror filmmaking" are must be thrown out the window in favor of total anarchic energy. But once that is done, this movie lives up to expectations and delivers with a completely over-the-top bacchanale of violence, horror, gore and back-and-forth revenge for its full running time.There is so much bloodshed in this movie that some look at it as one of the most violent of its kind anywhere on earth. Others will say that they see it as a budgetless joke. Still others might call it an ingenious satire. But most everyone will have an opinion and few will be "blah" about it, and that is the sure sign of a movie doing something different - regardless of what it is!With the backdrop of warm-weather public parks in Germany as their only "sets" for the most part, the filmmakers nonetheless deliver a seemingly endless chronicle of vengeance and violence as the participants rage back and forth at each other with hand to hand combat, guns, "chain saws" and arterial sprays of blood in a bid to be the ones who will at last come out on top.Along the way there is plenty of cheap "scary" music, nice no-budget scenery and entertainingly bad acting, so much so that it is all compelling somehow, and certainly interesting at least in my oddball estimation.The "special effects" here are sometimes ridiculous, but they are always excessive, and they seem to be making a comment on both the absurdity and the maudlin, repetitive nature of violence, whether the filmmakers intended this or not!The film also has its own original atmosphere, its own special weirdness, something that big-budget Hollywood productions can rarely claim. An absolute must-see for low-budget gore afficianadoes!