Review: Premutos: The Fallen Angel (1997)
(aka Premutos: Lord of the Living Dead)
Directed by: Olaf Ittenbach
Starring: André Stryi, Ella Wellman, Christopher Stacey
Written by: Olaf Ittenbach
Music by: A.G. Striedl
Country: Germany
Available on: Blu-ray (Unearthed Films)
IMDb
Herr Olaf Ittenbach was sloppy drunk with zeal for early Peter Jackson when he made this 16 mm oddball splatter-comedy, a mashup of the admirably grotesque and the utterly goofy. There’s a plot here, I think, focused on Mattias, the modern-day son of Premutos — one of God’s earliest fallen angels, who can raise an army of the super-evil dead — as he fiddle-farts his way through early adulthood under the tutelage of his war-obsessed stepfather and shrill mother. It’s all fine and well until Mattias starts experiencing penis-trauma-induced flashbacks in which Premutos ravages his way through various historical time periods. Eventually, Mattias finds a gloopy, oversized, and very diabolical book that unleashes the angel’s zombie-laden hellscape onto Mattias’ parents’ shitty dinner party.
The permeating vibe conjures Dead Alive, with its lewd priests, bawdy and broad humor, and insanely copious violence. Though Ittenbach isn’t nearly as adept as Jackson at walking that balance, Premutos: The Fallen Angel engages at the basest of sensory levels throughout, rich with uncoiled intestines, flayed skulls, exploded heads, and boob, booger, and fart jokes. For those that have longed for a three-minute scene of a character picking his nose, rolling up the sticky, slimy treasure, and flicking it into the open mouth of another person, you’ve struck gold, buddy. Unlike, say, The Burning Moon, the viscera here is played more for giggles than grimaces, which means Premutos is much less a test of endurance and more a good time.
Though the film’s scale is epic, sprawling across hundreds of years and encompassing a handful of important events in human history, Ittenbach’s execution of this scale courtesy of $150 and 20 of his friends is where the magic lies. Imagine, if you will, a conquering medieval army consisting of a baker’s dozen drunken Germans in hoodies and striped V-necks, smiling as they swing their faux weaponry with the fury of a sleepy child. The charm of this flick is found in its ludicrous pursuit of a monumental saga that’s laughably out of reach, the equivalent of a community theater production of Braveheart flooded with cow guts, Karo, ingenuity, and gusto. Ittenbach’s screenplay is minimal, to the point that Premutos’ meandering 45-minute middle feels entirely improvised to reach feature length (though this portion is also home to the aforementioned snot play and a handful of other bizarrely delightful tangents betwixt the gory bits).
But, other than the bloodshed, this loosey-goosey mess-around quality most closely approximates the first films of the Kiwi splatter savant. What we’ve got here is a handful of folks with perverse imaginations and more will than wealth doing something fun. That’s a formula that can get you pretty far in the horror genre.
Overall rating: 7 out of 10
