Terror 2000

As I expected it would be, Terror 2000: Germany out of Control – the final chapter in recently deceased Ger-maniac auteur Christoph Maria Schlingensief's delightfully deranged “German trilogy” – is easily the most depraved and wickedly perverse work in the series. Like the first two films in Schlingensief’s trilogy, Terror 2000 is another example of the director’s sadomasochistic obsession with being a self-loathing German who is haunted by his fatherland’s National Socialist past. Also, like the previous films in the trilogy, Terror 2000 is an absurdist political satire that pretends to be a mindless gross-out flick, thus, the film is indubitably a work that will offend both the one dimensional minds of gorehounds and the anally retentive tastes of arthouse princesses. As far as production values, Terror 2000 beats its predecessors. I have a feeling that Schlingensief slowly learned how to direct films via his German trilogy, as all three features suffer from amateurish direction and incoherent plots yet these “weaknesses” only add to the mighty character and crude charisma of these marvelously maniacal movies. Terror 2000 is a film about race chaos and Neo-Nazi vigilantes in post-reunification Germany. As one would expect from a film directed by Christoph Maria Schlingensief, a Neo-Nazi group terrorizes colored refugees (Ausländer) who have relocated to the fatherland. During the beginning of Terror 2000, a turd of a social worker (who seems more Amerikkkan than German) and a Polish family are kidnapped by the usual racist suspects. From there, Terror 2000 turns into an anarchistic work of scorched-earth sspoof ssinema where every convention and norm of film is wonderfully exterminated. Had German auteur Christoph Maria Schlingensief lived during the Third Reich, there is no doubt in my mind that he would have been lined-up for a firing squad. If it was discovered that Schlingenief was the illegitimate Grandson of degenerate German communist Dada artist George Grosz, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised as both Aryan artists had a special talent for portraying Germans as racial untermensch and a strange affinity for creating the anti-pornographic (sexually unappealing sex scenarios). 

What makes Terror 2000 extra-special is that director Christoph Maria Schlingensief plays the role of Michael Kühnen; the real-life gay German Neo-Nazi and ex-Maoist who died of HIV-related complications in 1991. In fact, the film goes as far as poking fun at the fact that Kühnen contracted gay cancer. I must admit that Schlingensief did a swell job exaggeratedly copying Kühnen’s homo-pantomimes and overall daintiness. Everyone’s favorite gay German character actor, Udo Kier, also plays the role of a Neo-Nazi priest in Terror 2000. If you have ever questioned Kier’s ability to play a macho man, you have yet to see Terror 2000; a film where the humble-homo-actor shoots bullets faster than he guzzles down semen. Of course, Kier also still lets the audience watching the film known that he is still on the brown-team by sharing homoerotic lingo with his brownshirt comrade. In short, Terror 2000 is the kind of film that provides nationalists with enough ammo in regards to the dubious morality and nature of leftist artists. Although Christoph Maria Schlingensief uses sick gross-out humor and sadistic satirical content as a martially mean artistic means to mock Neo-Nazis, it is quite apparent that he is supremely fond of scatology. After all, I can’t think of any other film that features an ugly Aryaness masturbating in public as a group of men fight behind her, revolting closes-ups of real Scheiße covered with flies, and jokes about AIDS, thus, although Terror 2000 is a leftist absurdist satire, it is surely a film that will offend most people from both ends of the political spectrum. To be fair, Schlingensief’s sordid portrayal of colored foreigners is not exactly respectful, as he characterizes them in a manner comparable to a Tom Metzger-esque Neo-Nazi concocted caricature. In fact, a Negro repeatedly states “Fuck-fuck white shit” (translation: I want to rape German women). The foreigners in the film are quite ungrateful quests who have no problem stating that the free food that they receive at their refugee camps is “shitty” while also demanding that Germans give them more welfare. Of course, the refugee camp in Terror 2000 is presented as a neo-Auschwitz of sorts. 

Despite being easily the most lavishly produced film in Christoph Maria Schlingensief’s German trilogy, I found it be the weakest of the three films. Naturally, many of the themes featured in the director’s previous two films – A Hundred Years of Adolf Hitler (1989) and The German Chainsaw-Massacre (1991) – were once again covered in Terror 2000. That being said, I still found Terror 2000 to be a notable and totally worthy exercise in iconoclastic sinema. I also rarely find films to be funny (especially when the director is attempting to be comedic) but I found the intellectual toilet humor in Terror 2000 to be first-class display of satirical sass. It has been a long time since swastikas burned in Germany but in the Teutonic nachmahr Terror 2000; the ancient Aryan symbol burns on (albeit, in a mocking manner that parodies that of American KKK cross-burning). In the film, you will also find such charming dialog as “Long Live Hatred!” and “Adolf Hitler was a Nazi. My mother was a Nazi. My father was a Nazi. I’m a Nazi!” After watching the film, I wondered whether or not Christoph Maria Schlingensief had any full-fledged Nazi grandparents. Seeing as Schlingensief seems to hate Nazis more than Steven Spielberg does, I can only assume that he regretfully had an SS man or Gestapo agent swinging from his family tree. Schlingensief is well known in Germany (and even on an international level) for his tactic of incriminating politicians and their empty lies of "hope" by "playing something through to its end" with his various libelous claims against them. Of course, I sincerely doubt that the films in his Germany trilogy made for a successful outlet for expressing his political views, but I respect the anti-Aryan-Aryan’s unconventional approach. Christoph Maria Schlingensief must have learned all he needed to know about satiric filmmaking by locking himself in his room and religiously watching Stanley Kubrick’s apocalyptic cold war satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) for months on end. Like Dr. Strangelove, Terror 2000 is a quasi-nihilistic satire that is blacker-than-a-firebombed-Dresden-resident-from-1945 comedy that leaves no group/political ideology unscathed. With Terror 2000, Christoph Maria Schlingensief also pays tribute to Jewish filmmaker Mel Brook’s iconic Nazi-parodying in The Producers when an obese investigator in the film (who is a glutton that sports a XXX –Large Nazi SA brownshirt uniform) sings a verse from Springtime for Hitler, thus he is the kind of German filmmaker that the original National Socialists would have labeled a “white Jew” (as they did to German theoretical physicists like Werner Heisenberg). Despite his admiration for God’s chosen tribe, Schlingensief had no problem including a controversial scene (especially for modern Germans) in Terror 2000 where a Hasidic Jew hangs lifelessly from a tree.

One scene I found especially humorous in Terror 2000 is when a passionate Neo-Nazi states, “We can’t stand the Jews because they left Germany in 1933 to go to Hollywood.” Although I share the Neo-Nazi's sentiment in regards to half-Jew Fritz Lang, I see the immigration of Aryan auteur F.W. Murnau to America as German cinema’s greatest loss. Despite Schlingensief’s criticism of so called xenophobia among German Nationalists, the film still expresses the universal fact that race chaos and Neo-Nazi movements are truly symbiotic of multi-cult-uralism. Almost two decades after Terror 2000 was released, German politicians – including social democrat banker/economist Thilo Sarrazin and Angela Merkel; current chancellor of Germany – have publicly admitted the total failure that is multiculturalism in post-war Germany. One of the strangest aspects of Terror 2000 is that Schlingensief chose to use a Polish family as the central target of discrimination in the film. Although the original National Socialists showed a somewhat hostile hatred towards Poles (especially those of a darker and more swarthy phenotype), most modern Neo-Nazis accept the fact that Slavs and Eurasians are imperative fighters for the Occident who have yet to be totally tainted by liberal democracy like western Europeans and Americans. Whatever his exact political persuasion was, Schlingensief certainly foresaw the chaos that would erupt in Germany as a result of racial diversity. As a character states during Terror 2000, “Germany is not America, We’re not an immigration country.”  After all, no one is telling Mexico nor South Africa that they need more white immigrants yet in European nations reverse-colonialism is demanded by conspiring Third World leaders and liberal Europeans alike.

-Ty E