Garden of Love (2003)

I love this movie so much

Best movie of this year hands down!

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Okay, ask yourself if you enjoy gore. Are you okay with weak but humorous acting? Do you like silly writing? Once again ask yourself, if you enjoy gore. You do like gore? And funny acting and writing!? Well, alright, this movie's for you! Once again, the master of brutal gore delivers another solid piece of super violent entertainment. This go around it surrounds a girl who's being haunted by her dead family. They want revenge and the only way they can achieve it is by this young lass to help out. There's more back-story, with some mystery involved, but that's basically the plot.The story itself surprisingly was pretty fun. There were some lulls, but nothing that'll bore you so much that you'll shut it off or skip the scene. Regardless of a slow part here and there, the story was directed well, and with the awesome violence thrown in, it turned out to be a very fun Ittenbach flick. Definitely recommendable to gorehounds and fans of the Olaf.

It's hard to understand why people keep complaining about his works. They all follow a similar pattern. We get some pretense to story, and that all alludes to the eventual gore. Nothing wrong there, he is after a F/X guy at heart.Yet I keep hearing how little gore there is in this film, when it is in fact quite bloody.Take for instance this little clip from the film (WARNING, SPOILER for those that have not seen the film)- http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g166/porknotbacon/gard4.gif It's a head explosion that rivals Maniac, Scanners, and The Prowler! And it is but one scene in a movie geared to F/X. Not a particularly gripping film. Yet it's not boring, and most certainly it has plenty of grue for the fans of splatter films.

I've watched some of Ittenbach's stuff before, and come to know them as entertainment, purely and simply. No strong story or anything, you can't really empathise with the characters, but the effects are impressive and its a way to kill a couple of hours.Basically its the story of a girl who's family gets slaughtered when she's little and she barely survives but because of all the trauma etc. she can't remember a thing. Anyway, when she's older it starts coming back to her and the ghosts or spirits of her dead family come and tell her to lure their killers into the house. fairly simple, straight forward story with a few of the usual clichés, but as I mentioned before, the focus is on the gore effects.Acting isn't the greatest, but that didn't bother me a great deal.Gore is quite free-flowing, with a few impressive slaughter scenes in a variety of way - knives, machete's, hands, people getting dismembered, disembowelled, heads crushed, split open, drills and throats getting slit. Whew...quite a list, but there's quite a bit of it going on. Like I mentioned before, grab a few beers and just enjoy yourself really, don't take it seriously and you won't be disappointed. For a low budget gore flick, it does the job pretty well and people who're into this stuff I think will enjoy it.

The cover shots on the DVD looked very good and the director Olaf Ittenbach has quite a good reputation, so we decided to check this one out. Plus, the main character, German punk rock drummer and singer Bela B., is a very charismatic person and has shown a lot of good taste in horror movies and comics before, so I was very curious about that one.First point, Bela B. is only in it for a few scenes and has nothing to do except for staring around. OK, he's playing an undead, they stare around and usually do no real acting, but he had shown that he can actually do good acting before, it would have been more interesting to see him in a "real" leading role . So it looked to me that his name was placed on the cover merely to promote the movie.The other actors are absolutely ridiculous. Why do they all pretend that the story is set in Britain? The landscape, the interiors, everything is so German. Why not simply set the movie in Germany? Everything would be just fine, the story would have worked as well, and we wouldn't have wet our pants every time they tried to act "british". What took away a lot of the atmosphere.The gore scenes are only a few, most of the time the movie spins around the investigation on Verlaine's murder. That'd be OK, if it only would have been a little bit more suspenseful. The gory scenes are all set in darkness, so you cannot really see what's going on, you hear a lot of "painful" sounds instead. The make up of the zombies despite of that is very good, haven't seen that good looking dead people so far. Overall, this movie is boring as hell, the acting is bad, the story is lame and a chilling atmosphere does not come up. Better stay away from that one and check out Ittenbach's "Beyond The Limits". I've seen that one before "Garden Of Love" and was very impressed about the great way of storytelling, the very good professional actors and the really really good atmosphere and setting.