Flashback--Germany Hates Us.

Directed by Bernd Schaarmann

Writing credits Bernd Schaarmann

Martin Armknecht Nicole R. Beutler Peter Davor Thomas Hackenberg Klaus Lehmann

Filmed apparently in Germany, we start with the most deranged opening sequence I've ever seen.

A girl and her terminally horny boyfriend share a little friendly banter on a train ride. The boy calls her a tease and of course, she immediately disproves him by collapsing to her back on the train seat. The train goes through a tunnel (LOVE the ironic symbolism!) and the next thing we know, somehow, the boyfriend is dead and the girl's about to take a sickle to the neck.

Can you believe this for even the vaguest of moments? Someone managed to not only enter a train car but also kill a person silently enough for no one to notice.

Unfathomably, we jump cut to a family on vacation, a man, his daughter Jeanette, and his lovely and very French wife, Michelle. The power goes off in the night, and Michelle goes to sleep. When she wakes up to the power coming back on, she goes off to her mother's room. And boy, is there trouble down there. Our sickle killer is in the room, her father dead on the floor, her mother bare inches from dying herself. Jeanette sprints for the door, and is only seconds from dying .

Jeanette wakes up, about ten years older, being psychoanalyzed. Somehow she's in the middle of a mental institution, and about to be released. Released, in fact, to be a private French tutor, and she's also being stalked once again by the Crossdressing Sickle Killer.

You know, the more I say it, the more ludicrous it sounds. A crossdressing, sickle-toting serial killer who can appear and disappear in the space of seconds in total disregard for the laws of physics? It's like Jason, but somehow repulsive. I don't know how they do it in Germany, but over here in the States we like our killers to be huge, manly, and very, very insane! Well...I guess one out of three isn't all that bad.

But hey...since we've got sort of a substandard villain anyway, we might as well give him a real softball in terms of victims. And indeed, we have a serious cakewalk for a serial killer...Jeanette, our French tutor, and three rich, spoiled teenagers almost alone in a house--with a housekeeper.

And these kids are serious horror lightweights. They're watching a movie with a killer that looks strangely like the Predator sans helmet, complete with movable mouth parts, and they're jumping in their seats every fifteen seconds. Screaming, throwing popcorn...all except for the eldest girl in our story...she's busily talking on a cell phone to her friend, also in the theatre, about the movie! It's like watching a German Paris Hilton knockoff.

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