Film Review: FLESH CITY (2019)

FLESH CITY *** Germany 2019 Dir: Thorsten Fleisch 84 mins 

A young couple are abducted and mutilated by a crazy, holographic doctor guy who may or may not have something to do with beetles. Whilst the man manages to escape minus one of his hands which then grows into some weird fleshy dead chicken type thing that tries to take over the world. In the meantime a really trendy music show, kind of like a cross between old school 90's MTV vs Eurotrash plays a series of experimental, electronica, Euro pop and rock videos whilst talking of the end of days, whilst a rival channel preaching Satanism tries to get their message across.
You may have guessed that this is not the official synopsis of the movie, this is my version of events which makes about as much sense as the real one does. This is going down as the most fucked up and confusing movie that I have seen this year but trust me when I say you need to watch it. The visuals in this are relentless and fantastic. There is so much going on. Granted that half the time I had absolutely no bloody clue what the hell was going on but I could not stop watching. Mostly shot in a very washed out, industrial, black and white style highlighted by flashes of vibrant colour with some great gore and bizarre musical performances, it's entertaining if nothing else. To me it's basically half Arthouse, half music channel. I'm still not entirely sure if the band's featured are real or fictional (I'm thinking fictional as the credits of the tracks  mention a lot of the production crew) but there are some great band names like Womb Envy, Marquis de Sex and Kampfschall with track names like "Dead Baby" and "Nuklear Fanboy". The entire soundtrack to the movie is available on iTunes, Bandcamp,  etc and I urge you to check it out, it's just brilliant. The actors seemed fine. With all the crazy, psychedelic visuals I didn't really pay that much attention to the actual actors. It's one of those mental, nutty, Euro horrors that makes absolutely no sense what so ever but it doesn't need to. It's an attack on the senses from every angle, just a wee word of warning though, with all the rapid flashing images and prolonged kaleidoscopic colour craziness the onset of epilepsy is a very real prospect.

Review by Sarah Budd