VIOLENT SHIT

Directed by Andreas Schnaas. 1989. Germany.

Andreas Schnaas’s 1989 shot-on-video gore opus VIOLENT SHIT is not a movie as much as it is an inside joke. Structurally, it is not too dissimilar from Chris Nash’s 2024 critical darling IN A VIOLENT NATURE. Both films follow a slasher movie villain wandering through the woods doing slasher villain things. Neither film has a narrative, per se. They trade in their stories for long tracking shots and bloody mutilations. If you were pretentious enough, you might call both films deconstructions, but neither film has anything even remotely interesting to say about violence in general or movie violence in particular. These are not films about form, but function. People go to slasher movies to indulge in a bit of blood pornography. Nash and Schnaas are simply delivering it.

I was bored to tears by IN A VIOLENT NATURE, and I was bored to sleep by VIOLENT SHIT. The first time I attempted to get through it was at an all-night movie party with my friends. It was around the third or fourth time the lumbering killer held his comically oversized meat cleaver against the skin of a victim, blood spraying like a garden hose while the soundtrack droned on and on, that I felt my eyelids become heavy as stones. I drifted off to sleep. It was a better use of my time.

This time around, I made it the whole way through, my first successful attempt at watching this insufferable load of shit in at least 25 years. Now I get to talk all about it. Good for me.

I mean, what is there to say about VIOLENT SHIT? We begin with a five-minute opening sequence of a young boy playing with a ball. They shot this sequence at such a low frame rate that it plays out as a series of still photographs, choppy and pixelated as all hell. I will admit, I did not appreciate the POD PEOPLE flashbacks it was giving me. The kid returns home and kills his mother off-screen. We cut to many years later, and our little psychopath is now a full-grown man sitting in the back of a police van.

This police van, by the way, has a couch and curtains. The cops are all wearing t-shirts and jeans. The killer escapes, finds a cartoonishly large meat cleaver in the woods (?), and butchers the cops. We iris in and then iris out, and now we are sitting in a random woman’s car as she drives around listening to UB40 on the radio. When the car breaks down, the killer finds her and cuts off her breast. Wholesome. He then stumbles across two workers in the woods. One is cutting down a tree with a hedge trimmer (as one does), and the other is just digging a random hole in the ground. The killer uses the cleaver on one and then uses the hedge trimmer on the other, cutting him in half at the waist before severing his head… and then cutting the head in half.

Do I need to go on?

At one point, the killer (played by Schnaas) trips and falls over. He lies there on the ground, squirming around. I couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not. There are no characters to follow. There are maybe 200 words spoken during the entire film. All we do is watch a hulking dude with ever-increasing facial deformities butcher everyone he comes across. At least IN A VIOLENT NATURE got creative from time to time with its bodily trauma. Here, the killer just holds the oversized cleaver against the actor, using the giant blade to hide the blood tubing that’s pumping five times the human blood supply into the air.

The only scene to leave an impression on me was when the killer rams a knife into the exposed vagina of a victim. It’s unnecessary, edgelord trash that ruins any unintentional giggles or gruesome glee you could potentially pull from this turd of a movie. It’s ugly, mean-spirited, and completely amateurish.

We do get two unexpected cameos, the first from Satan, and the next from Jesus Christ himself, crucified in the middle of the woods. The killer cuts Jesus’s stomach open and crawls right inside because why not? Later on, the killer will lie down and die, only to have a toddler dig its way out of the mess of flesh and viscera. I’m sure the director thought he was saying something.

There is no earthly reason to watch this slop, not when there are so many other wild and fun splatter movies out there. Do you really need to watch a man with a camcorder spin around inside a church for three minutes? Do you really need to sit in a car and stare outside the windshield while a whole W.A.S.P. song plays on the soundtrack? Do you really need to watch the director struggle to cut through an unconvincing fake dick?

You could spend that time snorting salt or dripping dishwashing detergent into your eyes. You could bite your tongue until it bleeds or walk on some LEGO in your bare feet. You could flay your forearms. You could chew on aluminum foil. You could throw yourself down the stairs or drop a dumbbell on your groin. You could buy new shoes and then step in dog shit. You could dislocate your shoulder. You could set fire to your home or drive your car into a wall. You could bathe in piss or wipe your ass with your bare hands. You could give yourself paper cuts. You could mace your mother. You could get chemically castrated or stick forks into power outlets. You could do your taxes or get a part time job at an old folk's home. You could text your ex. You could organize your movie collection by the number of letters in the titles. You could get molested or eat raw chicken. You could collect roadkill. You could get hooked on heroin. You could eat cigarette butts from the gutters or lick a trash can in the park. There are so many better ways to spend your time.

Look, when I was a teenager, my friends and I would make horror films. We had a camcorder and as much fake blood as we could afford. I've done special effects for no-budget, shot-on-video stuff before. None of it was for the eyes of the public, and none of it would be worth your time to watch. We made those films for us. Never in a million years would I have thought to subject you to the utter garbage we made back in the day. I wish Andreas Schnaas felt the same way.

But hey, I'm the one who chose to watch this shit, so I don't really have anyone to blame but me. Shame on me. I hope I'm proud of myself.