Ah yes, the other German horror director from the age of video nasties, of when video recording technology becoming affordable alongside a cheap and affordable format for home usage led to some people just shooting the shit on the digital camcorder in their hometown on very low budgets.
I will come forward and admit i haven’t seen any of Andrea Schnass films, i’m quite familiar with Jorg Buttgeireit works on the flipside, but i felt it made sense to start tackling his fellow German DIY horror director, starting from his most well known film, the original Violent Shit, which spawned few sequels, and make clear once more than censorship of this kind will be at best circumnvented, at worst will just force fans of the genre to do what many German horror fans did back in the “video nasty” age, just straight started making these themselves in their backyards.
Figures we eventually feature Schnaas, and i don’t think i did fill the “80s German ultra splatter low budget slasher” slot in my bingo card before on this rubric.
So what is the plot of Violent Shit?
A boy, Karl, comes home a bit late, he gets beat up by his mother, then in revenge murders her with a cleaver.
20 years later, Karl is being moved from his prison to somewhere else by the police, but kills the officers, manages to escape, and with a cleaver (which i guess is a thing growing wild in the Gothic II forests) he goes on a killing spree on the West German countryside, indulging himself in some cannibalism while he’s at it.
After killing a couple, Karl faints, and the flashback reveals that 20 years before, when he was a wee lad, he was forced to kill his mother by a demon that coerced him (and might have been his father, too), aftering encountering the entity while he was locked in the cellar as punishment.
After that, he kills some more, encounter a literal tangible apparition of Jesus Christ in the woods, hacks it open and wrap himself in it like a fuckin Ton Ton, then he kills more people outside of a church, collapse again, with his skin that had been decaying for the whole film beginning to rot, leading to Karl ripping himself open from the thorax, revealing a baby covered in blood.
You might wonder why i just basically recounted the entire film events in detail…. but you see, this is a film notorious for its ending and the “Christ-splitting on German Hoth”, plus i can’t really spoil much because i’d argue Violent Shit barely has what could qualify as a narrative.
The plot is actually just “a guy who murdered his mother escapes being transferred to another prison and starts killing people in the German countryside”, it feels like a deliberate joke quintupling down on the typical criticisms lobbed at slashers, so why give critics a target, let’s just make the plot a mere formality, tethering on virtually inexistent.
The rest is mostly nonsense, to the point even the description/synopsis of the “plot” is basically me gluing together scenes in what i assumed what the intention, when the script doesn’t fuckin bother to even entertain the idea of continuity and explanation
I like for example that the Wikipedia page story synapsis implies the “20 years later” text to mean that “child murders mother offscreen” footage of Karl was shot in ’50s, while the events mostly take place in the mid 1970s…. why? This movie wasn’t even made in the 70s.
But i also kinda get it, you’re kinda left filling in the blanks for yourself if you wanna make sense of Violent Shit(which is also a pointless exercise) like i’m sure the movie implied that Karl killed his mother, but first, we just hear her shouting at him, then it cuts to an iris in video effect of something being slashed offscreen with a cleaver and spraying off fake blood (which is also so NOT indicative of the rest of the film), then cutting to Karl leaving home with the cleaver held in hand.
We’re assuming the same guy that escaped the police scooby doo van 20 years later is a grown up Karl, too, but curiously we do get shown the flashback with the demon sporting a Dracula get-up, papermaciè horns, which has heads strapped on his cape and also a fake ass long roll-up tongue that tells Karl (though he’s not named properly in the movie itself, the credits just list him as “K. The Butcher Shitter”) that he’s a devil spawn and to kill his human mom.
Or again, he doesn’t fall and starts convulsing when he sees a church in the woods, he falls off, spazzes out, then the editing cuts to a church interior sequences, also shot by the same drunk cameraman, so again, we’re left to connect the dots ourselves.
This is the weird stuff that keeps you going, despite the horrendous pacing, because you do wanna see where the hell is this thing going….. though you can’t properly predict it, even the random “church in da forest hood” doesn’t really prepare you for the Nazarene bowel dive into a pocket dimension of some kind, or Karl giving a blood birth to a baby from his body.
Then again, we don’t know why he’s rotting away after we’re in the present with him escaping the van… and while it’s tempting to assume it’s symbolical of his further decay of his soul, you’re tempted to do so just because later he meets a Jesus Christ in the flesh, and then rips off said flesh so he can bury his face in Jesus open chest cavity like a squirrel trying to house itself in a tree.
even from that angle it doesn’t make sense (even if its a physical influence of his demon father telling him do to kill his mother, why he just NOW starts rotting away), because it was all always meant to just be extreme, to be extra nasty and in bad taste… and nope, not even the ending makes sense if you wanna frame it as a “redemption”, it’s quite the opposite, really.
It’s worth remembering this is the kind of movie where you see people in the distance and there’s a 60 % chance they were just unaware of being film, recorded while just bringing out the dogs for a walk, only to become unvolontary extras of a movie called Violent Shit. XD
Not that the actors fare any better, its clearly Schnaas casted friends and random German people living there, which appeared dressed as they usually did in real life, they couldn’t even be bothered – or afford – to use some Halloween story cop costumes when driving the kidnapper style van which we know it’s supposed to be a prison transport because they wrote “Polizei” on the side, but it seems petty to focus on that when the characters barely even pretend to performatively fight back.
And hope you like a snuffy rough late 80s solarization video filters and irises, because a lot of the footage is presented like that, which has the hilarious effect of making some gore scenes seem like accidental german homoerotic foreplay and sensual ear whispering more than “gruesome cannibal murderer gnaws on a guy’s throath”, with the Looney Tunes-style transitions making it clear how unserious this is, by design, i mean, even Karl ‘s fake meat cleaver is cartoonishly huge.
Also btw, despite what the cover art and most of the home releases’ marketing material shows, Karl here doesn’t go around with that shitty bootleg Shredder mask, thats literal false adverting because that is from the Violent Shit II, here Karl never wears a mask, even if he kinda should.
There’s something to be said about a movie that calls itself “Violent Shit” and introduces his slasher villain protagonist as “K. The Butcher Shitter”, as in it’s perfectly honest about what it is and who it will appeal to, and revels proudly in its own manifest goofy excesses.
While i respect that playful confidence, it’s undeniably there’s also not much to say about this movie that couldn’t be summarized as “amauter hour”.
The camera is constantly wobbling in and out of focus, spinning around like a caffeinated man-badger, there’s no respecting even basic continuity, as we go from mid afternoon sunlight POV shots to other shots shot at night… some so fuckin black it’s nearly impossible to tell what the fuck is going, because, well, it’s the dead of fuckin night and we can’t afford lighting that isn’t already offered by the car own passenger side features.
Also, surprising no one, even with its runtime of just 75 minutes, it’s overriddled with filler, stupid obese with padding, mostly in the form of random footage of people driving, parking or exiting a gas station, waiting to turn left, listening to Red Red Wine or some classic metal tune, etc.
maybe eventually some of these people will drive in the woods in order to be butchered by Karl…. and i mean eventually, someday, after driving for hours in the countryside, as the editing make it seem like by the constant flipping between day and night shots.
I’ll have to admit, there’s plenty of nasty gore, and for a budget so ridiculously low as 5000 Deutschmarks (which today is about 2500 euros, or about 2000 dollars, roughly still a joke) it could be look far worse, even if it is obvious DIY sammich budget practical gore and yes, it’s really unconvincing, but in hindsight i’ll take volumes of this instead of cheap CG blood or GenAI effects.
I mean, this is the “phantom plot” serving as an excuse to showcase Schnaas gore effects, which start off generic, with the usual hands being cut off, but ramping to the other kind of genital jousting, and eventually go to the extra mile to be more extreme and graphic than previous slasher, even going for a full “vagina to head” split cut that tuns into a detailed full disembowlement, which is still fake (some bowels are just strings sausages, it seems) but also still nasty and revolting.
Despite Violent Shit being beyond awful, virtually plotless, inane and inept in every aspect, with video effects that make this have more solarization than Solaris, so badly paced and overstuff with filler it’s honestly a slog to sit through despite its short runtime, there’s still something to this film that stop me from hating, even if i did honestly struggle to see it through all the way to the end.
Mostly i’d say it’s the charming willingness by Schnaas to go for it anyway, there’s a charming confidence to the film, the soundtrack is very of its time but also surprisingly effective, and even if the gore is unconvincing and the fake blood spouts abundant from chopper off arms, or even a chopped off penis that looks like was on loan from Gumby, it also has memorable weird scenes you will never forget, especially the “Christ diving” and the blood baby birthing scene.
So it’s no wonder Violent Shit it’s indeed an “experience” you won’t forget and a cult horror film, and if nothing else i think there’s some solace to find in its existence, because while not everyone was or could have been Jorg Buttgeireit, you could still exist at the opposite end of the spectrum and still get to make underground German horror movie history.
Given it was kind of a success in German underground horror scene, and was screened in small local places, Andreas Schnaas was able to make a Violent Shit trilogy, later in 2010 he literally resurrected the VS series’ killer for Karl The Butcher VS Axe… and for some reason in 2015 we got an Italian in-name-only remake by Luigi Pastore, with Violent Shit The Movie.
I do wanna cover the two official sequels, eventually we will, mein little Butcher Shitters.
