Premutos: The Fallen Angel (1997)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Sick Product of a Sick System

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

"Premutos - Der gefallene Engel" or "Premutos: Lord of the Living Dead" is of course a play on words with Prometheus and it is one of the most known works by German filmmaker Olaf Ittenbach. It is Ittenbach third work, so a fairly early career effort and this also shows because the film is in German like most of his very early work. Ittenbach was under 30 when he made this one, what many consider his best film. It runs for 1 hour and 45 minutes approximately and there are certainly moments when this movie drags quite a bit. But there are also moments when this was an entertaining watch. My favorite scene was probably when one character tells another that their boy injured his toe during football and the other character responds with a question if the toe had been ripped off violently. This tells you what to expect here. There is lots of violence in here, some sex too, but the best moments for me were the comedic moments. With Ittenbach, there is gore and splatter here and I don't care about this at all as it's really not my preferred genre at all, but I can somewhat see how people who like the genre much more than I do actually consider this a great creative achievement. I would not go so far, but like I said, this has at least partially to do with my personal bias. All in all, this one had me laughing once or twice and smiling on more occasions, but sadly not enough situations that I would recommend the watch. I give it a thumbs-down.

The story goes something like this. Premutos, a fallen angel (before Satan), wants to rule the living and dead of the world and tries to do so throughout history, possessing a guy of the same bloodline. Now in present time he comes back again by accident of the current guy in this cursed family. The story really doesn't matter though.This movie is a mess and I mean that in several ways. The acting, story, and budget are Troma level or worse. In all fairness, the story may have been damaged in the translation though.It's another type of mess that makes this film so infamous though. It is a huge splatterfest! This is where the film shines. It has beheadings, dismemberment, hundreds of bullet shots, full body explosions, and much more. Clearly, this is what most of the budget went to. You will also see slow motion gunplay like in John Woo's films and comedic lines and gore like in Peter Jackson's early films. Speaking of Jackson, Braindead/Dead Alive (1992) is often compared with Premutos because they are so similar. While Premutos may be a little bit darker in tone at times, I think Braindead easily beats it in every area including gore. The body counter at the end of Premutos was pretty cool though.The DVD had a 50-minute "making of" feature that seemed pretty interesting, at least the bit of it I watched. Overall, if you liked Braindead, you might want to check this out sometime.

PREMUTOS is a fun, pretty much non-stop blood-bath. There are bound to be numerous comparisons to Peter Jackson's gore epic BRAINDEAD because these 2 films seem to be locked in a constant feud over which film has the higher "red count". Personally, I would put money on BRAINDEAD in that bet, but PREMUTOS is a close runner up. To be quite honest, I don't really understand the concept of PREMUTOS. A lot of the scenes are pretty disjointed, and the dub in the U.S. Shock-O-Rama release is really, really, bad (but completely hilarious and makes the film even better...). This film is full of exploding heads, limbs, torsos, whatever...and some genuinely funny/gross moments. Anyone who considers themselves a true "gorehound" has got to own this film. The FX are pretty good, the story may be a little lame, but this is a really fun movie even with it's faults. Not for the squeamish - Highly recommended 8 1/2 out of 10

Watching this film you'll probably feel the urge to skip the "story" parts by using your fast forward button. Very similar to pr0n movies, the story between the "real" scenes is more than boring and with actors even worse than in pr0n (which has its own unintentional humor sometimes). Some actors don't fit their role because of their age - but with so many flaws in the movie this is one of the minor problems. What you can imagine is that Olaf Ittenbach is really ambitious and gave his "Herzblut" for this production. That's something that should be supported, because with a real budget I think he would make incredible movies. Nevertheless, some gore scenes in the movie are quite good and what the film doesn't lack of is blood, blood and then: more blood...