The young journalist Vivian visits an ancient cemetery to meet its caretaker and gravedigger, Frederick, for an interview. The cemetery is supposed to be the oldest in the country, and after doing some research, Frederick will celebrate his ten year anniversary of his service. Vivian arrives just in time, he says, because tomorrow he will bury one of his most interesting “customers”, as he calls the newly deceased. Frederick takes her to one of the cemetery mausoleums, where he begins telling her the story of Robert Downing, a name you are sure to forget just after a few seconds.
As this story begins, we are in a sunny Californian area where a stressed man in a suit is carrying a mysterious suitcase. While calling his girlfriend and saying she must leave the hotel, she is soon assaulted by two other men who throw her out of the balcony with one of the worst uses of green screen of all time. After some meaningless flashback scenes, he is shot by two other men, who takes his suitcase. Then we jump right over to another scenario, in a mansion where a couple is getting ready for a dinner party. And in comes a man with the suitcase who presents himself as … (drumroll) … Robert Downing. Who? Whatever. But to be clear: who is who, who is what, who works for whom, is not the important thing here. As several guests starts to flock into the house like a bunch of stick figures that are only there to soon be tortured and killed in grisly ways, the gore is the only competent aspect to mention. Heads are blown by shotguns, heads cut off and so on. The acting is so bad it’s good, and one of the actresses even looks like she struggles not to laugh in some of the scenes.
The journalist, however, is clearly not laughing at the story she’s just been told, and says with a straight face that “this one was definitely Beyond the Limits™”.
Frederick moves on to his next and final story, which is set in the medieval times where we learn about James Flynn, a priest who has fled to the countryside where he has gathered a small flock of people in an abandoned church. He is hunted by David, a sadist who causes his men to slaughter the entire flock in front of the priest before he gets escorted away to a torture chamber. David also believes that Flynn has the sacred scripts to The Eternal Heart which grants immortality. Or something like that. We get creative lines like “so, we finally meet again”, some fabulous overacting, a totally incompetent choreographed Deathstalker-style sword fighting scene and some goofy, cartoonish facial expressions. And to top the shitshow all up to eleven, it wraps it all up with a hilariously awful green screen segment that belongs in a David Hasselhoff music video. And if you’ve seen The Burning Moon, you know how this one ends. Not a big surprise there.
Director: Olaf Ittenbach
Country & year: Germany, 2003
Actors: Darren Shahlavi, Russell Friedenberg, David Creedon, Natacza Boon, James Matthews-Pyecka, Simon Newby, Hank Stone, Christopher Kriesa, Daryl Jackson, Twin, Saskia Lange, Mehmet Yilmaz, Kimberly Liebe, Matthias Rimpler, Jeff Motherhead
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0297780/
