Garden of Love

Let's face it...most people do not know the name Olaf Ittenbach. And to an extent, for good reason. While I'm a fan of his, I find it hard to watch a lot of his earlier stuff and even his newer stuff can be hard to find. But if you're a gorehound (I would not say that about myself, but I do love a good splatter movie now and again), then a healthy Ittenbach collection is a must. It would be very hard to make an argument that anyone currently working in special effects (let alone directing) has the talent he has for making a head go pop or letting loose an almost hilariously unnecessary amount of blood at one time.

With that said, Ittenbach's movies seem to have a bit of a formula to them. They'll usually assault you virtually in the opening credits, drag along for a little while, give you a pretty intense amount of non-stop gore, fade away for a bit longer, and then hit you with a blood soaked climax. The trick is to make it through the parts that are boring to get to the good stuff. "Rebecca Verlaine" is a prime example of this. Mass murder within the first 5 minutes, then a pretty unimpressive story for 20-30 minutes, a big dose of people getting their faces ripped in two and/or their limbs torn off, more boring crap for awhile, and then a nice finale so Ittenbach can let you know who's boss. That...and his trademark disregard for accents. I swear, if there's 4 people in a scene at least 2 of them will have different accents from the others. And there's no rhyme or reason. Sometimes one brother has a German accent and the other British...Olaf doesn't care.

In the hands of a less capable special effects man, this easily would be nearly unwatchable. But as it stands it's quite watchable, especially for the aforementioned gorehounds. A 7 may be a bit of a stretch, but what can I say...I'm a tad biased towards the man's movies. Now if it could just have been as cool as "House Of Blood"...