REVIEW: ROTWANG MUSS WEG !/ ROTWANG MUST GO! 1993 A Krimi-Farce

 The farce has a - albeit very slim - tradition within the Central European cinema. Even fewer are the Krimis made like that. One might argue that each Rialto-Edgar Wallace is in itself a farce and that the CCC Bryan Edgar Wallace Movies were the real deal but then they had that kind of ironic element that made those movies lovable. 

Within the 1960s, DIE TOTE VON BEVERLY HILLS 1964 and LIEBLING, ICH MUSS DICH ERSCHIESSEN 1962 come to mind. In those movies the audience witnesses the complete madness of making a movie. So a staple would be that the actor would break character and talk to the director on screen, maybe even discuss the role. Outtakes are produced on purpose and then left in the movie, and the protagonists constantly discuss their roles while playing them.

If made well, these movies are highly entertaining. If not, they are simply annoying.

Now the plot:

Sebastian Rotwang (Armin Müller-Stahl) has to be killed. Such has decided

a) his wife because he was not only untrue to her but spent more money on his girlfriend than on her (played by three different actresses, one of them Barbara Rudnik - because the director simply cannot get enough of statuesque blondes) 

b) a former Stasi - agent, now a low budget director who tries to persuade Brian de Palma (yes, the man himself) to take a look at his three movies, has revenge plans and 

c) a terrorist sleeper (Udo Kier) gets the completely unfounded order to kill him, but as he now is a fashion-czar delegates this to a former RAF member, who now works as a sex-hotline performer.

The three plans mingle and tangle, sometimes resulting in synergies, sometimes in neutralization. The three parties hire various killers for the job, each with their own problems.

More problems arise as some of the male/female killers fall for each other, and the thing becomes totally uncontrollable when Rotwang decides to leave his wife to live with his girlfriend and leave her all the money - which she would not get if he gets killed. So she has to find a way to stop this.

In the end (and that is made clear at the beginning of the movie), Rotwang just HAD to go and is killed, but we have to find out ourselves who did it. Probably by repeated viewing of this movie...

Hans-Chistoph Blumenberg had crashed with his third big-budgeted thriller, "Madonna Mann" in 1989 and had to work for the renowned TATORT TV-series. Obviously, in 1993 he had licked his wounds enough, formed his own low-budget production company, got some money from the Hamburg council, and decided to take a piss at movie producers.

Needless to say, the movie is interrupted by the most stupid marketing ideas of movie production. So we get boobs, dinosaurs, singing numbers, fashion models, and—crime. Everything that sells is thrown in so randomly that it is cringe. And Blumenberg knows. It is intentional.

This all feels like a Krimi version of "Hollywood Boulevard", for the good and the bad. The scenes with bewildered Udo Kier are long and a joy to watch. The thankfully short one with Jochen Senf is not. 

As usual, Blumenberg, here assembles a stellar cast of local celebrities, and obviously all are having fun. Intellectually, this is more the admission of a defeat than an attack on the movie-financing-system. If this were done by an aspiring, young, no-budget director, this would be impressive. Coming from a former big-budget director, now in midlife, this is more an entertaining manifestation of a crisis.

But then, it is entertaining.