Ruptured Review: Black Past

Country of origin- West Germany    
Year of release- 1989 
Director-  Olaf Ittenbach
Stars- Olaf Ittenbach, Andrea Arbter, André Stryi  


 

The film begins with a pre-credit sequence set in a sleepy village in 1978. We then see a man who looks very ill, who begins to have horrible visions of him killing a little girl with a meat clever. The next thing we see is him picking up the worlds biggest meat clever, and walking out of his front door to where his young daughter is feeding the dog. You can pretty much guess what happens next.

 

After the credits roll and we are introduced to are main character Thommy who is played the director Mr Lettenbach himself. Thommy and his family have just moved into a new house, which is in fact the same house that the child killer from earlier lived in. As we begin to follow Thommy in his day-to-day life we find out pretty quickly he is a bit of an outcast and a bit of a waster. This is a fairly common character point for the parts Lettenbach plays in his early films. Eventually Thommy is sent into the attic of the house to fetch some things, but while he is up there he finds a wooden box that has been chained shut. He manages to open it and finds a diary and an old mirror, both of which used to belong to the child killer form earlier who we find not only killed his daughter, but his whole family. Thommy decides to hang the mirror on his bedroom wall, because I am sure we would all do that if we found a murders mirror. But Thommy begins to wish he had never even opened the box in the attic, as his life starts to become a living nightmare filled with horrific visions of torture and murder. And as Thommy descends deeper into his own personal hell, his visions start to become reality.      

This is film is the directorial debut of Lettenbach, and in my opinion one of his best along side The Burning Moon, and Premutos both of which I love. Although this film is a little slow to get going and at times the pacing is a bit off, it is still very entertaining. As with all of Lettenbach’s films this one delivers on the gore and then some. The last 20 minutes of this film was almost nothing but gore, and I’m not talking about your nice clean modern gore, no no no, this is grimy shot on video gore that looks like they just ripped it out of a cow. Throughout the film I was able to see some of the director’s influences, mainly The Evil Dead, Hellraiser and Demons. I personally really enjoyed this film, and would recommend it to gorehounds like myself, although the extreme gore may not sit well with some people. I am going to give this one a 8/10, it’s a fantastic watch.          

 

                 Its such a good watch she cant keep hers eyes off it.