Director Jorg Buttgereit sets out to break you down with full-frontal shock value – there is a shockingly hard-to-watch (real) scene early on where we see a rabbit having its throat slit and it then being skinned and gutted. (A scene with a cat being killed later in the film lacks the same shock impact because the cat is obviously just a prop hidden in a bag, not the real thing). This is merely warm-up for the way-out scene in which Daktari Lorenz and Beatrice M engage in a threesome with a corpse, wherein a piece of dowling with a condom on is inserted in the body’s crotch so she can ride it and they are seen kissing its rotting lips, smearing the putrescent goo over themselves and rolling its eyeballs in their mouths.

There is an amateurishly directed scene with a gunfreak accidentally shooting his neighbour that looks like it was filmed while Jorg Buttgereit was still perfecting his style, otherwise NEKRomantik remains a gruellingly intensive view. Moreover, for a film that Buttgereit claims was made without a script – and the dialogue is almost minimalistic – the story holds up surprisingly well. The film ‘climaxes’ with a scene where Daktari Lorenz stabs himself and his engorged penis spurts semen and then blood everywhere, something that expresses the film’s perverse mingling of sex and death with remarkable potency despite an incredibly obvious penis prop.

NEKRomantik was followed by a sequel NEKRomantik 2 (1991). Jorg Buttgereit has made a number of other equally gruelling films, including Der Todesking (The Death King) (1989), a film about suicide; Schramm (1993) about a serial killer; and Captain Berlin vs Hitler (2009), as well as Monsterland (2009), a documentary about genre cinema.