Jörg Buttgereit

After WW2, many of Germany’s train stations were destroyed and had to be rebuilt; cinemas were drawn into the plans as a canny way of financing the rebuilding work. Thus the strange world of railway cinema was born: a fantastic place for movies that would never make it anywhere else. The “Bahnhofskino” was the German answer to the American grindhouse cinema. Featured by Jörg Buttgereit and Uwe Boll, “Cinema Perverso” takes you on an entertaining and unique trip into this terra incognita of modern film history and dives deep into German exploitation cinema, with strange masterpieces like the Schlager-softporn film “Lovecamp” or “Machoman”, a bizarre martial arts film shot in Nuremberg.

As a chain letter from the self-proclaimed "Brotherhood of the 7th Day" circulates encouraging its recipients to end their lives, a series of grim murder-suicides unfold. In one vignette, a young woman massacres a room of concert-goers before turning the gun on herself; in another, a man, driven to madness by some unspecified mental disturbance, repeatedly slams his head into a wall before collapsing in a pool of his own blood... These are just some of depictions of death and despair that make up the tortured fabric of Der Todesking.