This Belgian production is about the serial killer John Lucker, who happens to perform necrophilia on his murder victims. His sexual excitement and nervousness cause him to rush and constantly screw up these major plans that he has in store for himself and his victims. The combination of his personal narration regarding his past along with his ineptitude and physical clumsiness makes him all the more disturbing than a calculating killer like Henry. Personally, I find this disturbing because of the portrayal of the serial killer by Leder.
Sadly, this was the last movie that director Gerald Kargl would make due financial issues, moving into commercials and promotional films. It has a superb synth score, which has been compared to the band Tangerine Dream. The performance by the lead actor Erwin Leder is absolutely brilliant, who also has appeared in Das Boot, Schindler’s List, and Taxidermia.
It is stylishly shot, with some very unconventional camera work that included high angle crane shots and handheld cameras placed very close to the actors. It is a beautifully forgotten picture that influenced director Gasper Noe and is a precursor to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. This was loosely based on the real life triple murder by Werner Kniesek in Salzburg, Austria, who is as well known as Ed Gein and other popular serial killers in other countries.
As soon as he is released, he instantly goes on the hunt to murder more people in order to appease his lust and pleasure for violence and murder. Manowski would go on to appear in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, while composer/co-star Lorenz would largely give up acting in favor of his musical activities, which included several more collaborations with Buttgereit.This is an exceptional Austrian film about a psychopathic killer who is released from prison after spending ten years in there for previously murdering an elderly woman.
In fact, the film's main corpse was largely synthetic, although real pig eyes from a slaughterhouse filled its sockets - and, in some scenes, the characters' mouths. As Nekromantik's cult following grew slowly in Germany, then abroad, rumors abounded that the filmmakers had used actual dead bodies during the shoot. Although it received its German premiere in 1988, work on Nekromantik started in late 1986, when Buttgereit, the veteran of several shorts, began fashioning the corpse that would figure so heavily in the story the director knew that without a realistic-looking prop, the project wouldn't be worth filming in the first place. Ultimately, this slaughterhouse motif leads Rob to enact a painfully final solution to his deadly eroticism his journey would nevertheless continue in Buttgereit's Nekromantik 2 a few years later. Meanwhile, the haunting image of a rabbit being skinned plays like a cartoon in the young man's imagination, perhaps a childhood memory, perhaps an existential dream. An alienated Rob soon turns to horror movies, animal torture, prostitutes, and graveyard sex in his quest to find the unique combination of utter degradation and total acceptance he shared with his one true necrophile love. When Rob loses his job, material girl Betty hoofs it, and her divorce settlement includes the couple's favorite sex aid. One day Rob delights Betty by bringing home a decomposed corpse dredged from a swampy roadside lagoon with a sawed-off bedpost in place of its rotted genitalia, the body serves alternately as a vile wall decoration and the third member of a grotesque and quite graphic ménage à trois. Passive, blank-faced Rob (Daktari Lorenz) spends his days collecting human roadkill from the side of the Autobahn and his nights enacting a quietly macabre domesticity with girlfriend Betty (Beatrice Manowski, credited here as Beatrice M.) in their autopsy/industrial/Nazi-themed apartment. With Nekromantik, first-time feature director Jorg Buttgereit mixes cheap gore, transgressive imagery, and cosmic dread into a cult-classic examination of sex, death, and boredom among the youth of pre-reunification Germany.