Garden Of Love, — Garden Of Love,( Blu Ray)
With a title like Garden Of Love, you may be expecting a romantic drama based in the outdoors, or possibly some form of horticultural-themed porn. But in reality, it’s an early 2000’s slice of German Splatter, from one of the kings of the genre Olaf Ittenbach( Black Past, Premutos: The Fallen Angel, Legion of the Dead). The film regards a young woman being tormented by bloody visions of a past she can't fully remember. All she knows is that all of her family was slaughtered when she was a child.
Here from those resurrectors of worldwide extreme film Unearthed Films- here’s a new Blu Ray release of the film, taking a making of, and a few other archive extras.
Garden Of Love (The Haunting of Rebecca Verlaine) is from the year 2003. It was the 8th film directed by Fürstenfeldbruck, Bavaria born Olaf Ittenbach. And I’d say that after seeing a few of Olaf's films is fairly typical of his output- with brutal gore and horror being first and foremost, with decent acting & plotting coming second.
We open with a flashback, some ten or so years back, to a group of hippy-like folk dancing in the sun, going on swings, etc. Then we switch to nighttime- all the family are asleep, as a man in a clown mask & white hazmat suit on- slaughtering the whole bunch of hippies….and by slaughter, I mean slaughter. Throats are deeply slashed, heads are caved/ pulped, limbs and heads are lopped off, and bodies are pulled apart. There is just one survivor, a young girl around ten
We then flash forward to the present day, to meet our two leads, academic/lecturer Gabriel (Bela B) and the now all grown-up Rebbeca(Natacza Boon). The pair live together, but Rebbeca keeps getting violent flashbacks.
In an attempt to try and get closer, the pair go to visit the police officer who had charge of investigating the killings- the very creepy Thomas Munster(James Matthews-Pyecka). It’s agreed that Rebbeca goes back to the crime scene.
As mentioned earlier, there is no great plotting going on here; it’s largely just effects scenes joined together by dialogue scenes, with the film running at just under the one hour and thirty-minute mark.
On the gore/ effects side, we really do get some very impressive/ damn brutal kills- heads are smashed into walls, faces are ripped off, loads of guts get spilled, all manner of deep slashings, heads are drilled & bludgeoned, etc.
The crime scene house is fairly eerie, and there is quite a Hellraiser vibe to the vengeful ghosts that dwell in the house.
The acting/ dialogue for the most part has a very stilted/ awkward- but I’m guessing much of this is down to being a German film shot in English. Really, only Boon and Matthews-Pyecka come across anywhere near decent, with the latter being the most memorably sinister & creepy, though at one point he does rather go way OTT.
All in all, Garden Of Love is exactly what I was expecting- a well paced/, impressively made German splatter film, with a few neatly sinister/ creepy edges.
On the extra side, it’s all archive stuff- Making Of Garden Of Love ( 22.41), A Look Behind Garden Of Love (18.14). Outtakes (32.18). Original intro( 6.47).
Garden Of Love is exactly what you’d expect from an early 2000’s German splatter film, and Olaf Ittenbach is most certainly one of the masters of the form. It’s great to see this reissue on Unearthed- though it would have been nice to maybe get a few new extras.