There are bad movies, and then there are movies that make you seriously question why you ever believed in cinema in the first place. Nekromantik 2: The Return of the Loving Dead is proudly in the latter category. It’s not so much a film as it is a dare—a dare to sit through two hours of necrophilia, seal autopsies, and the kind of Berlin post-reunification apartment décor that screams “this wallpaper has seen things.” Jörg Buttgereit, the man behind this cinematic atrocity, apparently decided that what the world needed most after the Berlin Wall fell was a reminder that art can, in fact, be worse than politics.
The Love Story No One Asked For
The premise picks up after the first Nekromantik, which itself was basically a student film made by someone who took Re-Animator way too seriously while sniffing glue. Monika, our protagonist, digs up the corpse of Rob (yes, the guy who killed himself in part one) and decides to play Barbie and Ken with his rotting body. Red nail polish, pencil skirt, corpse boyfriend—it’s like Sex and the City but directed by Jeffrey Dahmer.
She brings him home, unwraps him like a macabre Christmas present, and sets about cleaning him up for romance. Imagine Pretty Woman, but instead of Richard Gere, Julia Roberts is scrubbing maggots out of her date’s eye sockets. There’s even a photo shoot with the corpse, because nothing says “wholesome couple memories” like framing your weekend with a dead guy propped up in your living room.
The Romance Triangle from Hell
As if one boyfriend weren’t enough, Monika meets Mark, a guy who works dubbing porn films (a subtle detail, because Buttgereit apparently thinks porn ADR is somehow classier than necrophilia). The two bond over a carnival date, proving that popcorn and ferris wheels can temporarily distract from the smell of formaldehyde. Monika decides to “break up” with Rob—romantically, not just logistically. She saws him into pieces, puts him in trash bags, and keeps his head and genitals like trophies. Martha Stewart has nothing on this woman’s sense of home décor.
But here’s where the movie tries to be “deep.” Monika is torn between her old flame (literally dead) and her new one (emotionally dead). It’s the kind of love triangle only a mortician could enjoy. Mark starts to suspect something’s wrong when Monika keeps asking him to pose like a corpse and then discovers her “frozen sausages” in the fridge are actually Rob’s severed genitals. This is not a metaphor. This is an actual plot point. Somewhere, Sigmund Freud is doing the macarena in his grave.
The Seal Scene That Killed My Will to Live
The true low point comes during Monika’s movie night with her necrophiliac friends, where they sit around watching a graphic seal dissection. Yes, a seal. Nothing says “fun night in” like cracking open a marine mammal while your dead boyfriend’s head is on the coffee table. It’s at this point that you realize Buttgereit isn’t making horror—he’s making performance art that actively hates the audience.
When Mark shows up with a pizza, the guests scatter, probably because even necrophiles have standards about mixing pepperoni with decomposition. Monika, cornered, shows him the seal video, which only enrages him further. Shockingly, it’s not the corpse in her living room that makes him question the relationship. No, it’s the seal. I guess everyone has their line in the sand.
The Big Climax (Pun Absolutely Intended)
The finale is the kind of scene that makes you want to call the police on your own DVD player. Monika reconciles with Mark, they have makeup sex, and mid-coitus she chops his head off and replaces it with Rob’s severed noggin. This is supposed to be cathartic for her—her long-denied orgasm finally arrives courtesy of Frankensteined necro-romance. The result is a sex scene that makes you pine for the innocence of The Human Centipede.
And the kicker? Monika winds up pregnant. A doctor congratulates her, because apparently even German obstetrics in 1991 weren’t ready to say, “Lady, your womb is a crime scene.” The film ends on that note, daring you to imagine what kind of PTA meetings this child will attend.
Berlin After the Wall: A Setting Wasted
Buttgereit at least grounds the story in post-reunification Berlin, with all the rubble and decay you’d expect. Unfortunately, instead of making some profound statement about East and West Germany, he makes one about how to fit a human head into your freezer. The film could have been a fascinating allegory about identity in a fractured society. Instead, it’s just a reminder that Berlin has better things to export than necrophilia films—like sausages, beer, or literally anything else.
The Problem with “Shock for Shock’s Sake”
The film’s defenders will call it “transgressive art.” But there’s a difference between challenging boundaries and vomiting on them. Nekromantik 2 mistakes disgust for depth. It thinks that by making the audience squirm, it’s achieved something meaningful. But squirming isn’t the same as thinking. Sometimes you’re just grossed out. And this film? It’s gross for the sake of being gross. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a 12-year-old drawing dicks on the bathroom wall and calling it rebellion.
Performances So Bad They Could Be Corpses
Jenilee Harrison may have left Three’s Company for better roles, but at least Curse III didn’t ask her to saw up a boyfriend and keep his penis in the freezer. The cast of Nekromantik 2 has no such dignity. Haji Suzuki, Onn-chan, and the rest aren’t acting so much as flailing through Buttgereit’s dirty notebook of fetishes. Their line deliveries make it clear that no one signed up for this because they cared about art—they signed up because they lost a bet or needed rent money.
The Legacy of Garbage
Ironically, the film did make history. It was seized by Munich authorities less than two weeks after release, the first time Germany had censored a film since the Nazis. Imagine how bad your movie has to be to make the German government nostalgic for banning things. Fans call it censorship; I call it a public service.
Final Thoughts: Nekro-schlock
Nekromantik 2 is less a horror film and more an endurance test. It’s not scary, it’s not profound, and it’s not even shocking in the way it thinks it is. It’s just gross. If Nekromantik was Buttgereit poking the bear, then Nekromantik 2 is him dragging the bear’s corpse into his apartment for a candlelit dinner.
By the end, you’re not horrified—you’re numb. And maybe that’s the true horror: realizing you wasted two hours of your life watching a woman cheat on her boyfriend with a severed head while listening to Berlin techno.
