Killer Condom

When I first saw the German homophile horror-comedy Killer Condom (1996) Kondom des Grauens aka Condom of Horror directed by Martin Walz (one-time boyfriend of Teutonic scream queen Monika M. from Buttgereit’s NEKRomantik 2 and Schramm) way back in middle school, I had no idea what the hell I just watched, but I was at least able to realize it was one of the most unrelentingly campy castration-anxiety-driven comedies ever made, so naturally the comicality of carnivorous contraceptives has grown on me as the years have passed, especially considering more personal disdain for schnitzel sheaths as they make sex superlatively less satisfying. Based on the comic book of the same name by popular kraut comic book creator Ralf König, Killer Condom is not as idiotic of a film as one would expect judging by its brazen, b-monster movie inspired name, as it is essentially a quasi-anti-American pro-fag flick that makes for more entertaining viewing when one learns to ignore its innately insipid and asinine political subtext and pro-poofter propaganda. A sharp satire of sodomite society and the large segment of mainstream America that despises it, as well as an intrepid tribute to classic 42nd Street exploitation films, Killer Condom is like an Andy Milligan movie on Viagra and a work that does for condoms, seedy hotels, and perverts what Street Trash (1987) did for cheap wine, wanton winos, and derelict liquor stores. Featuring special-effects (i.e. the killers condoms and cut-off cocks) by aberrant Aryan arthouse auteur Jörg Buttgereit (Nekromantik, Der Todesking) and a contribution from Swiss sick sensual-surrealist H.R. Giger as a “creative consultant,” Killer Condom is like a deranged cinephile’s dream and to some extent it is, albeit with brazen buffoonery and ball-biting buggery being more prevalent than sexual sadism and sicko special effects. Centering around a patently pessimistic NYC police detective named Luigi Macaroni (Udo Samel) who hates his city just as much as he loves young Adonis-like twinks, Killer Condom follows the butch, bear-like cop-sucking cop as he searches for the source of the carnivorous condoms that chomped one of his testicles off. Featuring a number of respected and serious German actors, including Ralf Wolter (Cabaret, A Love in Germany), Iris Berben (who was once on the cover of "Time" magazine as one of 36 "European heroes 2003"), Otto Sanders (Das Boot, Wings of Desire), Evelyn Künneke (Fox and His Friends, Flaming Hearts), Henning Schlüter (Ludwig, The Tin Drum), and Gerd Wameling (Faraway, So Close!, Stille Nacht), among various others, as well as German cult stars like Daktari Lorenz (the star of Buttgereit’s Nekromantik), Florian Koerner von Gustorf (film producer and star of Buttgereit’s Schramm), hack German-Jewish director Dani Levy (Meschugge, My Führer – The Really Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler) and members of the industrial group Einstürzende Neubauten, Killer Condom is a loony libertine hodgepodge of high and low brow kraut kultur in a strikingly sardonic and scatological form. Utilizing the much cherished Hollywood tradition of disregarding a nation’s official language, Killer Condom features a terribly trashy Teutonized Big Apple (most of the inside scenes were filmed in studios in Germany) where even naughty Negroes and hunk hustler’s speak Deutsch. 

 Ever since the day misanthropic detective Luigi Macaroni (Udo Samel) left his family farm in Sicilian, life has been nothing but bitter debilitating disappointment, monotonous misery, and pathological fudge-packing. As someone who describes his city as follows, “The streets are a stinking cesspool, a playground for perverts. Even goods girls from Oklahoma end up biting off some guy’s dick. As a cop you lose touch with reality. You see nothing but filth and scum,” one would think Macaroni is a parody of some bitter and deranged cop played by Harvey Keitel à la Copkiller (1983) and Bad Lieutenant (1992), and to a certain extent he is, but he also shares some qualities with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s character Jansen from Kamikaze 89 (1982), except actually gay as opposed to just an overweight cock-sucking cop who jogs around in a leopard-printed suit. On top of having to deal with slimy criminals, Macaroni is constantly by his ex-beau Babette/Bob (Leonard Lansink); a hysterical cop-turned-tranny and menacing mental case who seems to be a parody of Erwin/Elvira Weishaupt from Fassbinder’s masterpiece’s In a Year of 13 Moons (1978). Things seem to be looking up for Macaroni when he meets a teenage twink hustler named Billy (Marc Richter) and the young man seems especially interested in the cop because he has a 32-centimeter (approximately 12.5 inches) cock, but their first attempt at hot hotel room sodomy is cut short when a killer condom bites one of the man in blues balls off. Of course, Macaroni is not the first and certainly not the last to have his member dismembered by ruthless, renegade rubbers. As a man who proudly comes from, “an ancient Sicilian family,” Macaroni vehemently declares to his uppity Negro Chief of Police (Ron Williams) that, “Nobody bites off a Macaroni’s jewels and gets away with it,” and being a wild wop of limited self-control, the decidedly dedicated man makes good on his word and searches every rotten corner of NYC to uncover the cacodemonic creator of the killer condoms. While his fellow police find his claims of cut-throat condoms to be dubious, Macaroni’s campaign against killer condoms becomes national news when a presidential candidate named McGouvern (Georg-Martin Bode) has his boner bit off by the sexual-organ-severing sheaths, thus resulting in the newspaper headline “dickless dick.” After following a couple leads, Macaroni discovers that a crazed and clearly sexually repressed woman named Frau Dr. Riffleson (Iris Berben) has a genius, albeit senile scientist named Professor Boris Smirnoff (Ralf Wolter) creating the Trojan with teeth in a subterranean lair hidden under an altar in a church. A holier-than-thou bitch who hates whores and homos, hence her perverse proclivity towards killer condoms, fierce Frau Riffleson pays Smirnoff in red jelly to design and create lethal latex. Needless to say, Macaroni deals with the anti-fag hag in a manner any honorable homo cop would. 

 Featuring a lame LGBT-style speech of poofer preaching at the conclusion of the film that is almost as embarrassing as Charlie Chaplin’s at the conclusion of The Great Dictator (1940), Killer Condom is at its best when using sickening scat humor and at an ultimate low in bad taste and entertainment when it turns into a grotesque celluloid campaign for gay rights. A nauseating bit of Negrophilia was also added to Killer Condom in the foul form of the Fugees’s "Killing Me Softly" being sung by drag queen Babette in a blatantly out-of-sync manner, but then again, such aesthetically disgusting noise probably makes for the perfect music film about pricks being pierced prophylactics. Indubitably, a high mark in cinematic eunuch entertainment, Killer Condom is a positively penetrating reminder why krauts only become the kings of comedy when dealing with castration, masculine trannies, racial stereotypes, and just about any sort of sexual perversion. Oddly, the New York City of Killer Condom bears a striking resemblance to Weimar Republic Berlin, thus showing a certain kinship of sexual degeneracy. As director Martin Walz and special effects mastermind Jörg Buttgereit have revealed (mainly on the audio commentary for the American Troma distributed dvd), many of the more bloody and offensive scenes of Killer Condom, including a scene of a condom spitting out a dismembered cock and a magical detached penis throbbing in a pretty prostitute's hand, were cut while a contrived 10-minute rant by well-known German actress Iris Berben (playing Frau Dr. Riffleson) was highlighted so that the film would be more marketable due to the actress’ popularity, but it was also in vain because despite having a large publicity campaign, including a full-color magazine, clothing and apparel, and novelty condoms, the film both failed to recoup its cost and was somewhat of a critical failure. Needless to say, Killer Condom could benefit from receiving an ‘uncut’ director’s cut where the scenes of detached dicks and pernicious prophylactics are reattached and certain ghastly and grotesque gay preaching is cinematically castrated. Described as a mere “dialogue comedy” by director Martin Walz, Killer Condom is evidence enough that even krauts make better postmodern scat comedies than philistine Hollywood heeb directors like Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer.  Indeed, while Melvin James Kaminsky owes his success to cinematically satirizing boorish Germans, one must give credit to the makers of Killer Condom for shitting on the Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid muddied mystery meat third-world cesspool that is NYC.

-Ty E