Ruptured Review: The Coma-Brutal Duel (Das komabrutale Duell)

Country of origin- Germany

Year of release- 1999   

Director- Heiko Fipper                

Stars- Heiko Fipper, Mike Hoffman, Stefan Hoft  


 

Normally it is customary for me to begin a review with a short synopsis of the films basic plot and structure, however this will not be possible in the case of this film. The Coma-Brutal Duel is a feature film that was made up of several short films made between 1984 and 1999, the film makers make little attempt to try and string them together using such unnecessary adages as a story, so the whole film plays out as a series of barley connected gore scenes. Considering this is a German shot-on-video splatter film of the kind that stained the back gardens of Germanic Europe red during the 80’s and 90’s, the story isn’t that important, as directors such as Olaf Ittenbach or Andreas Schnaas have proven in the past. But there is so little effort put into even creating the illusion of a plot in this one that it does slowly but steadily begin to drag. This ultimately this is the films downfall, but the film is certainly not without its good points.

I don’t think I can recall watching a film with as much ultra-violent mutilation, torture and dismemberment as The Coma-Brutal Duel, in terms of shire amount of blood splatter, this film is only rivalled by Adam Chaplin. It is actually difficult to remember parts of this film that didn’t have blood and gore in them in some way. Some of the gore we see includes foetus crushing, limb lopping and dick shooting. The film actually features a large amount of gory gun violence as well, which is actually a nice surprise as we get to see people killed by multiple headshots, and have their appendages nearly blown clean off in some cases.

This brings me on to the most bizarre feature of the film, considering the huge amount of blood gore and general bodily destruction that we see on screen you would easily assume that it has a high body count, you would be wrong. This is because everyone in this film seems to be utterly indestructible. The films attitude to its characters being maimed is basically loose an arm, bolt it back on, bleed to death, just kick your friend in the face and walk it off. Characters in this film survive multiple dismemberments, beheadings and headshots, only to get back up out of a pool of blood and just keep on going. Weather this was due to a constraint on the amount of available actors the film makers had, or they simply decided to fuck reality and just do their own thing I will never know, but I like to assume it is the latter.

The gore and splatter effects themselves vary throughout the film, likely due to the varying budgets of the shot films The Coma-Brutal Duel is made of, we see brown blood one minute, and orange blood the next. The same variation in quality can be said for the cinematography, one minute it looks like filming was being done using a broken toaster, the next it’s not nearly as bad. If you looking for some no budget, extremely gory shot-on-video German splatter along the lines of Violent Shit or Blutnacht this is a fine watch. The makers clearly had a blast filming this (as can be heard by the laughing in some scenes and the gag reel at the end), they made it with not a lot of skill, but a whole bunch of enthusiasm, and chainsaws. I am going to give this one a 6.5/10 it does drag towards the end, but for the amount of gore and bad dialog it is hard to top it.