Blutbad Productions Triple-Threat!

Hello everyone. In my first review of the year 2021, I'll be returning to an indie film group whose movies I kinda shit on in some of my earliest reviews. That film group is Blutbad Productions, a small company from Austria that used to make zero-budget gore shorts in the mid to late 2000's. Their films are pretty rare and it took me a while to finally hunt some of them down and see them. Unfortunately, the ones I have seen were very disappointing and didn't inspire a lot of hope in checking out their other work. But eventually I did find copies of the rest of their movies and decided to finally give them a look.

What are my thoughts? Well, let's see..

A Guads Neix Joah (2005)

This is the first ever film in the very small Blutbad Productions library. It came about very spontaneously one night, when the two filmmakers suddenly decided to make a gore film.

The "story" goes that it's New Years Eve, and on a night of celebration and wine-drinking, two buddies sit down and watch some gore movies. They put in a DVD copy of Sebastian Zeglarski's short film Goretrip (2005). They fire up the movie and Goretrip's metal soundtrack blares through the speakers. The camera pans across the room, showing the many posters on the walls, including a lot of Olaf Ittenbach movies.

While watching the movie, an argument breaks out over who gets the last of the wine. The one in the glasses attacks the other and starts punching and kicking him. This escalates to the guy hacking away at his friend's arm with a meat cleaver, before cutting his stomach open and then going on about his night.

There's not really a lot I can say about this one. The metal music playing over the top of it is fine, but the rest of the short is just so silly and poorly filmed with poor lighting and the some unconvincing gore effects. Now, this short is not meant to be taken seriously, and was obviously only made for fun. Nothing wrong with that, but the end result is only minimally entertaining.

Directed by David Mayrhofer.

I Cut My Hand (2005)

A man very slowly cuts his hand open. The loud techno soundtrack gave me a headache. Next.

Directed by David Mayrhofer.

Revenge Beyond Death (2006)

Finally, a Blutbad Productions movie that was kind of worth sitting through! Granted, I'm not sure if I'll be watching it again, but hey it's a start!

This 28 minute short has by far the most plot out of any Blutbad Productions movie. A group of guys set up camp in the middle of the woods, where they smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink a boatload of beer. A couple of the guys to go looking for something, leaving three of the others at the camp site. In a drunken fit, two of them get into a fight and one ends up accidentally killing the other by hitting him in the head with a rock. Him and a witness try to cover up the body by putting a plastic sandwich bag over his head and burying him in leaves. The group comes back and they find out what happened, but decide to forget about it. One year later, they revisit the forest for another party but this time, the man rises from his shallow grave and sets out to get his revenge..

That was almost a long plot description for this fairly short movie, but even then the story isn't anything we haven't seen before. In Revenge Beyond Death, he characters don't really have any personality other than getting so drunk that they don't realize they may be hurting their peers, but a lot of character development isn't really necessary for this short movie. I also find it funny that after sitting under leaves in the forest for a year, the killer's body hasn't decayed at all, but that's kind of nitpicky. 

The acting and sound mix, like every other Blutbad movie, is poor at best so it's not really worth discussing. A lot of the gore and the carnage is offscreen, and we usually only see the aftermath. However, the gore that we do get to see is decent by amateur movie standards. It's probably the best gore these guys have done.

Revenge Beyond Death may not be the greatest thing ever, but it's the only Blutbad movie I can truly recommend. If you wanna kill half an hour, you could definitely do worse than this.

Directed by David Mayrhofer.

CONCLUSION:

The last film that Blutbad Productions released was Schlampen Schlächter, released in 2006. There was going to be a sequel, and that DVD even came with a trailer for the sequel, but I don't think it was ever released. They also have a short film called Sick Man, which came as part of the German short film collection Masters of Trash. They also had another film called Rape My Innocence which I believe was made around 2007, but the only evidence of is existence is a trailer on YouTube and nothing was released other than that trailer.

Even though I may have been disappointed by Blutbad Productions' short films, I'm glad I at least got the chance to finally see them. These shorts are pretty tough to find and even to this day, underground amateur-splatter fans are still talking about them, and there are quite a few people who like these shorts. That's awesome, and I'm glad people can enjoy and appreciate them for what they are.

RELEASES:
-A Guads Neix Joah was released on DVD by Blutbad Productions in 2006, and comes with burnt-in German subtitles. Extras include the I Cut My Hand short, a Making-Of FX segment, and a few trailers for other Blutbad releases.

-Revenge Beyond Death was released on DVD in 2006, but the DVD comes with just the movie and no extras.