BloedEnMelk Schramm is a movie that really impressed me. It's one of those rare movies that stand above the typical serial killer movie. I would say that it definitely belongs to the best within the genre.It's not a movie with a typical story line. Instead, we are dragged in to Lothar Schramm's mad mind. The soundtrack, the grain of the film, the camera-work, it all adds to a grim and disturbed feeling of madness and desolation.*Spoilers*Lothar Schramm is a very lonely man. On one hand, he is quite modest, charming and even protective in his normal contact with his befriended neighbor, a prostitute. Secretly though, he lusts for her, but he can't find a normal way to make it work. So, when he gets the chance he abuses her, but without her knowing about it. Still, she comes off pretty well, as other people get brutally slaughtered by him. His only way to get intimacy is with the dead or unconscious. And for sure he is not left cold by this, as multiple scenes make very clear that he is struggling with himself big time. He also punishes himself (and it is one brilliantly painful graphic scene.. very well done!) for what he is, for what he does.There is quite some metaphorical stuff. For example the cut-off and the fake leg. My idea of that, is that he sees himself as not capable to have both legs firmly on the ground. He is in a way handicapped, he is loosing control, and it shows through the image of the leg. At the end, it kills him. Lothar Schramm really fears female intimacy, and it's IMO the fear of being emotionally castrated which is shown in his hallucinations of the teethed vagina. * End of spoilers*This whole movie is not linear in time line. This only adds more to the madness of it. It is also a movie in which (repressed) sexuality and frustration have the constant overtone. Lust, frustration and, to a lesser extent but definitely there, rage. Schramms repressed sexuality seeps through in the whole movie, and I found this to be really strong and impressive. Jörg Buttgereit did a brilliant job in sucking us in to the deranged world of a sad and lonely, but also very disturbed and dangerous madman. This film is definitely not for everyone! What I do like about it, other people might totally dislike. The fact that it's not really a story for example, at least not in the way most plots are worked out. It's more a series of events, scrambled up. It's not as much a normal film, but more an experience. It also has an amateuristic feel to it which you may dislike, but which I think works perfectly for Schramm. It's never polished, it never just shines in cinematic perfection, it has no ambitions in being anything even close to a Hollywood production. Instead, it is raw, very raw. It's grainy, gritty, uncomfortable. And wow, did I like it!

BigBabe0 It wasn't until after my second viewing of this video that it occurred to me maybe this was meant to be a comedy of sorts, albeit very "black" (I haven't seen Mr. Buttgereit's other work). The title character, Lothar Schramm, falls off a ladder in his apartment while painting his wall and dies; a news article informs us he was the "lipstick murderer." (We never actually see him murder anyone except a couple of hapless missionaries who barge into his place bent on saving his soul; it turns out to be their blood on the wall that he's later painting.) Lothar's only contact with the "real world" is his job as a taxi driver (thanks, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, for establishing permanently that cab drivers are potential homicidal maniacs) and his somewhat strained relationship with a neighboring prostitute. (Instead of having a pimp for protection, she keeps Lothar and his cab standing by while entertaining clients in a mansion.) His is mostly a fantasy life and (as per Lynch's "Eraserhead") it's not always clear what's meant to be hallucination or maybe an "alternate universe." He wears a leg brace after waking up one morning to discover his leg cut off but still in the bed with him; he reacts in his usual comatose manner, poking at the stub of his thigh rather as Graham Chapman did with Eric Idle in Monty Python's "Meaning of Life," so we're inclined to think he's hallucinating, yet later it's the braced leg becoming detached again that seems to make him fall off the ladder. In some of the film's many "insert" shots (that may be his memory and/or fantasy) he's shown manipulating unconscious or dead women in various ways (applying lipstick to one, tying another's hands behind her back, spreading another's legs) but in "real life" he's reduced to masturbating with a plastic inflatable female torso (which, as a "good German," he dutifully rinses afterward). In what amounts to the film's only "dramatic sequence," he and the prostitute go to a restaurant and eat some very unappetizing-looking stuff (it's when Germans started getting away from good ol' bratwurst and beer that their downfall began) (when she holds up some money, it makes him think of her with a "john") then go back to his apartment where he spikes her drink, renders her unconscious, gradually undresses her while snapping pictures and indulges in the kind of "gutter talk" he'd never say to her face--yet she wakes up the next morning not having been murdered. In a kind of ironic epilogue after he dies, she goes without him to another tryst in the mansion and winds up bound and gagged in a chair, suggesting she may die not due to his presence but to his absence. I'm happy to report this is not another cinematic "whore with a heart of gold"; when Lothar tells her about a dream he had that apparently is significant to him, she "blows it off" with some inane remark."All right," you may be wondering, "what is it about all this that strikes you as comedic?" Well, the background music for one thing, especially the moody cello solos contrasting with the drab little lumpen-reality of Lothar's life. The best comedy (that I've seen) is about coping with frustrations of various kinds; Lothar's life is one long frustration. (Oddly, there's no sexual activity on screen or anything particularly erotic, which may be frustrating for some viewers.) (One gathers from Lothar's reveries he was once a runner or at least aspired towards it.) His deadpan reaction to everything that happens (or seems to) (even when some kind of toothed vagina-monster appears) conjures up Buster Keaton. There's an ostensibly pointless scene showing Lothar and the prostitute walking home past a guy sitting on the sidewalk, on whom the camera lingers until he produces a revolver and blows his brains out, then a big hand-silhouette appears on the screen several times, as though Mr. Buttgereit (then a young wise-ass under thirty) is daring us to take it "seriously." Finally, in a foggy post-mortem sequence that may be the afterlife or (the now nude) Lothar's fantasy of it, a young blond dude wearing a shawl appears and takes a vicious swipe at the camera--a kind of final celestial "Eff you"? ....I guess it's obligatory to respond to the famous scene of Lothar driving nails through his foreskin. As a non-gay circumcised man, I had never seen one of those, so there was some "novelty value" to it. I doubt it's the most "queaze-inducing" thing you'll ever see in a movie; it's hard to beat the shot of the guy pounding a piece of metal into his leg in "Tetsuo," or more recently the "eyeball scene" in "Hostel" ...If I could hark back for a moment to the scene of the missionaries getting murdered: not to pick on this movie in particular, but this is about the umpteenth time in cinema where we have one killer and two (or more) victims and while the killer is busy with the first victim, the second victim just sits or stands there screaming or staring or crying, instead of---oh, I don't know---maybe running away, or maybe trying to help the first victim by attacking the killer, or something. We've all heard of the "fight or flight response" in situations of great stress? Well, what's more stressful than seeing someone getting murdered right in front or one? To borrow an example from real life, when Jack Kennedy got shot in Dallas, we all saw on the Zapruder film how Jackie tried to haul ass out of the car.... But then an awful lot of psycho killer flicks would've needed to be rewritten....

Boba_Fett1138 I must say that out of all the Jörg Buttgereit movies I have seen so far this is by far the best. It uses all of the same themes as his other movies (nudity, sex, mutilation, violence, killings, death) but it's more successful with it than usual, making this an artistic successful one, as well as an powerful one that is being effective with its themes.The movie gives us a real look inside the head of a serial killer/rapist/necrophiliac. We see his weird fantasies of extreme violence and sex but we also see his fantasies of how he truly wants to be. The movie doesn't present its main character as a deranged psycho but more as a man who can't help being the way he is. He's struggling with it himself at points but in the end he just can't help being the man that he is. With self mutilation he tries to fight the feelings and punish himself for the deeds he has done but it's all in vein.Yes, it's a quite odd movie, due to its themes and the way it's being brought to the screen. Jörg Buttgereit often picks the artistic approach and uses some symbolism and metaphors. For this movie he obviously got inspired by Luis Buñuel's work. Jörg Buttgereit is like the German Luis Buñuel and Takashi Miike, though not all of his movies work out as well as this one does.It shows the world as a dirty place. Not only with it's extreme violence or people living in it but also with its almost depressing settings. The main characters apartment looks like it's an outdated '70's bachelor shack, in the middle of a bad and poor neighborhood.It's a movie that works on so many levels with its themes and with the story it tries to tell. Jörg Buttgereit always aspires all of his movies to be like this but not all of his work works out as well and successful as this one does though.9/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Igor Shvetsov I don't think that any spoilers could spoil the impression and "pleasure" of watching this stuff.First of all, it's not your ordinary serial killer flick.This comes to a specific category of movies that either you agree to watch (at your own risk) and blame it all on yourself or, otherwise, (if unaware of the contents from the very beginning), rush away from the theater with a feeling of disgust (or convulsively seek the remote control's stop button) after a first couple of minutes.It's hard to evaluate a film without a plot. It's just a sort of unsystematic collages of truly disturbing, paranoid imagery like nailing foreskin to a table, scratching inside the stump section of a hip, and other similarly "eye-catching pleasures". Nevertheless, Schramm is at least one of Buttgereit's mind-bending and loathsome "artworks" that I could have endured from start to finish.Unlike both of Nekromantiks, which I only fast forwarded and cut somewhere in the middle - just to acquire a rough notion of WHAT ARE INDEED THOSE WEIRD UNDERGROUND MOVIES, that were much talked about.Oddly enough (and luckily), this later "masterpiece" doesn't bear the director's trademark - detailed accounts of unspeakably grim executions of innocent animals.I try to figure out whether those are also considered to be high art or pure entertainment?And I used to think that those Italian cannibal movies were top of gross!!!WHO ARE THOSE PEOPLE that make such movies?WHO AM I and WHO ARE WE that dare to watch this?WHY DID I BOTHER to write these comments?If I only knew...Perhaps this is a matter of an elaborate psychiatric research.