Der Bunker

Aside from a couple major exceptions like the late great kraut Renaissance man Christoph Schlingensief and underground arthouse-splatter auteur Jörg Buttgereit, Teutonic film has mostly been a dreary wasteland since the death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1982 and, in turn, New German Cinema with it. Indeed, the films of the so-called ‘Berliner Schule’ (aka Berlin School) are mostly a sad, pretentious, and plodding joke that seem to reflect the worst cliches of the arthouse world, or as Oskar Roehler—a decidedly degenerate director that has at least directed a couple of somewhat worthwhile films, including Agnes und seine Brüder (2004) aka Agnes and His Brothers and Atomised (2006) aka The Elementary Particles—once rightly said regarding the largely anti-cinematic and equally soulless cinematic works associated with the mundane film movement, “they are always slow, always depressing, nothing is ever really said in them.”  Luckily, things have been changing somewhat in the German cinema world as reflected in genuinely entertaining, original, and highly re-watchable films like Katrin Gebbe’s Tore tanzt (2013) aka Nothing Bad Can Happen and Till Kleinert’s bizarre killer tranny genre-bender Der Samurai (2014). Undoubtedly, one of the most bold and entertaining contemporary Aryan actors is Kleinert regular Pit Bukowski who, despite being quite apt at playing waywardly eccentric characters as demonstrated by his uniquely unflattering performance as the eponymous character of Der Samurai, revealed in Greek-German auteur Nikias Chryssos’ unclassifiable art-trash chamber romp Der Bunker (2015) that he can also play lame and annoyingly passive-aggressive college students. A film with a title that humorously inspires images of Uncle Adolf contemplating his final days in the infamous Führerbunker, Chryssos’ debut feature is as immaculate and idiosyncratic as first films come.  Featuring highly memorable moments of absurdist family awkwardness and obscenely outmoded sets that rival David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), grotesque characters that might be best described as crusty kraut equivalents to the mad Baltimorons of John Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972), and unhinged quasi-incestuous eroticism and dementedly humorous family affairs that might fit somewhere in the same universe as Nikos Nikolaidis’ Singapore Sling (1990), the film is somewhat paradoxical in the sense that it is so patently preternatural yet also a rare contemporary German flick that could be enjoyed by American philistines that are allergic to reading subtitles or not used to watching films that do not feature token cardboard negro and/or arab characters. Like a Teutonic apocalyptic Napoleon Dynamite (2004) set in a creepily quaint dystopian fairytale land where a sort of metaphysical autism pollutes the atmosphere, Der Bunker is a film that somehow manages to simultaneously chill, bewilder, agitate, titillate, disgust, and humor, among other things.  Part narcotizing nightmare and part foul fantasy, Chryssos’ debut is also probably the only film that manages to reconcile the semitic slapstick of the Marx brothers with the low-camp homo humor of Herr Waters.

 If it were not for underrated New German Cinema filmmaker Hans W. Geißendörfer (Jonathan, Der Zauberberg aka The Magic Mountain)—a largely unknown auteur that had the distinguished honor of directing tragic white liberal Jean Seberg in her very last feature—and his daughter Hana acting as the film’s co-producers, it is very doubtful that Der Bunker would have ever been made. As a man that made his debut as a filmmaker with a darkly comedic anti-fascist vampire flick featuring real-life animal-killings and beauteous gothic pastoral scenes that resemble Caspar David Friedrich paintings at a time when his Aryan contemporaries were creating banal commie docs and static quasi-Godardian twaddle, old mensch Geißendörfer could probably appreciate Chryssos’ determination to make an insanely idiosyncratic film with a soul in an era where soulless Berlin School bullshit is all the rage among Deutschland’s spiritually sterilized and emotionally glacial cultural elite. Indeed, Der Bunker certainly was not directed by someone that jerks off to Sartre novels or seriously considers Marxist mischling agitpropagandist Harun Farocki to be a wise old cinematic elder. Despite being an audaciously bizarre piece of cinema that was co-produced by an old auteur that has directed films featuring hardcore incest and interfamilial fecal matters (e.g. Schneeland (2005)), Chryssos has credited a number of Hollywood and/or otherwise fairly mainstream movies as influencing the film. For example, the film features an emasculated father that wears a woman’s apron whilst doing woman’s work that was inspired by Jim Backus' insufferably pathetic character in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Likewise, a strangely intense scene featuring a ‘boy’ cheating on a country capital verbal quiz was inspired by a famous showdown from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Undoubtedly, in his striking talent for paying homage in a uniquely unpredictable yet fairly seamless way to classic Hollywood films, Chryssos follows in the postmodern post-Hellenic tradition of Nikos Nikolaidis. It should also be noted that Chryssos has expressed in various interviews an appreciation for more impenetrable arthouse works ranging from Spanish junky auteur Iván Zulueta's cult masterpiece Arrebato (1980) to the classic Jap doc The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987) to Belgian auteur Fabrice Du Welz's hellish anti-Heimat horror show Calvaire (2004) aka The Ordeal to Aleksey German's celluloid swansong Trudno byti bogom (2013) aka Hard to be a God. 

 Sort of like a delightfully demented dystopian update of a Brothers Grimm fairytale as assembled for a decidedly deracinated generation of Germans that sees their own rich culture and history as an intangible and outmoded novelty that is no longer applicable to the hopelessly Americanized Aryans of today (notably, the film makes references to great German thinkers ranging from Nietzsche to Heidegger in a variety of less than respectable ways, including kitschy busts and ridiculous philosophical lectures), Der Bunker is more or less like a short trip to a dark corner of postmodern Occidental purgatory in a insanely zany celluloid form. A cinematic work that works as both a trashy yet artsy exploitation flick and an esoteric art-trash parable that features a somewhat erratic emotional range the falls somewhere in between the darkly humorous anti-bourgeois absurdism of Luis Buñuel, the grade school Hollywood sentimentalism of The Goonies (1985), and the mirthfully grotesque eroticism of great polack pervert Walerian Borowczyk, Chryssos’ debut is a seemingly immaculate film that is, for better or worse, completely unforgettable. The bizarrely bittersweet story of a young college student that rents a room in what ultimately proves to be a WWII era forest bunker in the hope of getting the peace and quiet he needs to commence work on some arcane cross-field scientific theory, only to find himself being coerced into becoming the professor of a supposedly 8-year-old boy whose incredibly demented and equally delusional helicopter parents are grooming him to be the president of the United States despite the fact that he is a mentally disabled German retard that somehow resembles a misbegotten cartoon character from some forgotten Nickelodeon TV series from the early 1990s, Der Bunker is, at the most fundamental level, an anti-authoritarian film that was written and directed by a chap that is clearly glad he did not have a traditional Prussian education. Set in an surreally anachronistic maniac microcosm that is ruled over by a mentally unhinged matriarch who uses both her perky lactating tits and a demonic being that may or may not actually exist named ‘Heinrich’ as a means to control and manipulated everyone in her fairly small household, the film also critiques cults and cult-like families and how the heads of such groups will oftentimes use religion and/or some mythical ‘higher being’ as a justification for their dirty deeds. Thankfully, quite unlike many films that critique religion and discipline, Der Bunker is not obnoxious, condescending, or heavy-handed in its execution. Of course, in its depiction of a deranged cold cunt as the dictator of the household, the film also makes for an apt tribute to Angela Merkel era Germany. 

 Der Bunker begins with an unhinged wuss of beta-bitch father (David Scheller) absurdly talking about the “life-affirming” quality of a fried egg while eating breakfast with his wife and son in the kitchen of the titular home in a scene juxtaposed with Chopin’s Nocturne Opus 9, Number 2. The nameless ‘Father’ is a patently pathetic eccentric with a goofy outmoded mustache who is more or less the servile bitch of his strangely sexy yet creepily psychotic wife (Oona von Maydell) who does nothing around the house aside from dictating orders via a supposedly supernatural open wound on her calf.  In terms of mentally unsound mommies that engage in sexually dubious activities with their sons, the Mother of the film cannot really compared to any other character in cinema history aside from possibly porn star Georgina Spelvin's character in Chuck Vincent's underrated non-pornographic horror-thriller-drama hybrid Bad Blood (1989) aka A Woman Obsessed.  While she does not engage in S&M style rape with her son like Spelvin's character in Vincent's film, the matriarch in Chryssos' flick does seem to derive great sexual satisfaction from breastfeeding her overgrown son.

The decidedly dysfunctional married couple of Der Bunker has big plans for their seemingly half-retarded, oversized 8-year-old son ‘Klaus’ (Daniel Fripan), who they are ruthlessly preparing to one day become the president of the United States despite the fact that he is a quasi-autistic kraut gnome with a fiercely flat affect who cannot even memorize the capitals of neighboring European nations. Indeed, despite the fact that homeschooling is strictly illegal in post-Hitler Deutschland, little Kraus is being groomed by his pseudo-intellectual father—an eccentric dilettante that dresses like a hobo who wants to give off the impression that he is actually a misunderstood genius—to be the leader of the world's foremost military and economic power. As an uniquely ugly little boy with a marvelously mediocre personality, horrible temperament, and low IQ that physically resembles the mutant hate child of Andy Warhol and Angela Merkel, Klaus has very little going for him but his mother suffers the grand delusion that he is exceptionally ‘gifted.’ As the film reveals as it progress, the nameless mother is under the ‘spiritual guidance’ of a nasty wound on her leg that is supposedly from another galaxy named ‘Heinrich’ who tells her how to run her family. When a nameless student (Pit Bukowski) makes the major life-changing mistake of renting a room in the eponymous home of the distinctly dysfunctional family in the hope of getting some much needed peace and quiet while he works on developing a groundbreaking cross-field scientific theory that involves Higgs boson, he soon finds himself being coerced into being both Klaus’ professor and the family's all-purpose domestic bitch, yet somehow by the end of the film things fall into place for all those involved in what is ultimately one feverishly fucked family farce. 

 While the Student was expecting to have a nice quaint room with a lake view, he is somewhat disappointed to learn upon arriving at the bunker that he will be living in a cold and damp unfinished room with a low ceiling that looks like it would be a great place to store a bunch of naked emaciated Jewish corpses in some shitty Hollywood holocaust movie. Immediately upon arriving at the house, the Student also begins acquiring an ever growing debt due to not having enough for the rent advance, though the scheming Father, who clearly has unsavory ulterior motives, tells him it is no big deal since he can “help around the house” and then gives him a nice quasi-homoerotic foot bath. Unbeknownst to the Student, the Father, who is more miserly than an elderly widowed Jewess, immediately begins keeping careful tabs on his debt, including whenever he uses a napkin or eats a dumpling during a family dinner. Ultimately, the Father uses the Student's debt as a means to guilt trip him into teaching his son. Indeed, after confiding in ‘Heinrich,’ the Mother, who seems to believe that the open wound in her leg is some sort of all-knowing god, demands that the Student become Klaus’ new instructor despite the Father’s feeble protests. Despite the Student’s refusal to teach Klaus when initially asked by the Father, the Mother manages to manipulate the protagonist into doing her bidding by shedding phony tears and less than subtly hinting at potential sexual favors. Undoubtedly, judging simply by her appearance and especially actions, the Mother is the sort of woman that would have been burned at the stake during medieval times under the suspicion of being a wicked witch. After all, it is not often you meet a woman that is compelled to abuse her husband and child because she is demonically possessed by a wound in her leg.  Indeed, in a somewhat strange way, the Mother is a hot bitch that is begging to be buggered, yet she is ultimately creepier than any of the devilish she-bitch hags featured in Robert Eggers' The Witch (2015).  A lazy erotomaniac that mostly lounges around the house while her eerily emasculated spouse incessantly cleans the place, the Mother's sexual depravity seems to go hand-in-hand with her Führer-esque need for total control as a woman who seems like she has a super clit that puts her pathetic husband's cock to shame in terms of sheer size.

 While Klaus’ schoolroom is adorned with kitschy busts of Shakespeare and Nietzsche, his parents are hardly interested in having him receive an eclectic Occidental education. Indeed, while the Student tries in vain to teach Klaus about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the history of the U.S. Federal Reserve, his parents are mainly concerned with having their son memorize the capitals of countries since they believe it will provide him with the knowledge that he needs to become the president of the United States. Of course, it does not take the Student long to realize that Klaus might have some serious learning disabilities and thus acts accordingly by helping the creepy little lad cheat on a quiz.  Indeed, after the Student writes the names and capitals of various nations on his hand, Klaus manages to trick his parents into thinking he has finally learned something.  As a reward for demonstrating that he is ostensibly capable of mindless memorization, Klaus' parents proudly treat him and the Student to the timeless family ritual of  ‘Joke Night,’ which involves the Father dressing up like a sexually disturbed clown and reciting horrendously hokey jokes from a seemingly ancient joke book.  When it is eventually discovered that Klaus cheated, the Father beats both him and the Student over the ass with a wooden cane as punishment in a hilarious scene that really highlights how passive and pathetic the supposedly intellectually gifted protagonist is.

Completely fed up with Klaus’ complete and utter hopelessness as a pupil, the Student (or, as Klaus calls him, ‘Mr. Student’) also begins using corporal punishment and even actually manages to get the grotesque 8-year-old to memorize the capitals of various countries by brutally hitting him in the hand with the wooden cane every single time he gets an answer wrong.  While Klaus' hands and fingers are left completely bloody and brutalized as a result of the tough lesson, the little lad is so happy that he actually learned something that he is completely joyous as a result of the experience and proudly boasts to his parents about his new skill. As a reward for achieving the seemingly impossible by teaching her son to memorize the capitals of a number of fairly obscure countries, the Mother pays a special visit in a foxy fur coat to the Student late that night and then proceeds to fuck his brains out in what seems to be a rather long and eclectic sensual session that proves to be both sexually and intellectually exhilarating. Indeed, aside from allowing him to drink milk from her tits just like Klaus, the Mother’s sexual powers prove to be so inspirational to the Student that he manages to get tons of science work down while he is in the middle of fucking her. Notably, before having sex with the Mother, the Student had made nil progress on his work, but after being given a special sort of carnal knowledge from the seemingly insane woman the protagonist gets fairly close to completing all of his work.   Unfortunately for the Student, fate has different plans for him that has more to do with women's work like vacuuming carpet than elementary particles.

 Of course, all good things must come to an end, or so the Student learns after making the unwitting mistake of teaching Klaus how to play. Indeed, as the unfortunate child of an almost sinisterly stringent pervert matriarch who dictates a whole set of bizarre rituals for the entire family, Klaus never had the opportunity to live like a normal child and play, hence his innate joylessness and overall lack of personality. When the Student takes the effort to play with him in a variety of goofy childish ways that includes piggyback rides and sword fighting, Klaus develops a sense of individuality and eventually begins rebelling against the strict rules of his family, thus throwing the entire social structure of the house out of equilibrium. Needless to say, the Mother immediately becomes alarmed by her son's newfound love of playing, so she naturally confides in Heinrich and is told to kick out the student lest she risk losing her little boy Klaus. On Klaus’ birthday, the Father awards the Student a phony diploma declaring that he is retired and thus no longer needed by the family. Of course, Klaus’ entire birthday is ruined when he learns that his parents are kicking out his new best friend, who is so angered by the entire situation he calls the father a “sick fool” and then proceeds to physically assault him in what proves to be a rather impotent fight between two very different yet nonetheless similarly weak and ineffectual men. While the Student and Father are fighting, Klaus collapses and becomes extremely ill as a result of his mother’s abusive attempts at forcing him to dance by spinning him around in circles in what ultimately proves to be a sick way to celebrate the poor socially retard boy's birthday. 

 Not surprisingly, the Student becomes the scapegoat for all the family’s problems and the parents demand that he leave the house that night after Klaus collapses during his ill-fated birthday part. Unfortunately for the Student, he has developed an almost brotherly affection for Klaus and decides to rescue him from his family by kidnapping him. Of course, the Mother, who demonstrates pseudo-supernatural powers of awareness that make her seem like a cross between the vampire of Noseratu and one of the voluptuous vampire sluts in a Jean Rollins flicks, manages to awake just before the Student can escape and ultimately uses her sexual powers to virtually hypnotize the young scholar, who she severely wounds by stabbing in the gut just before he attempts to kiss her on the lips. With the Student left bedridden and, in turn, completely dependent on the family, as a result of his injuries, Klaus, who has finally developed a personality of his own, seizes the opportunity to leave his home for good, though not before kicking his mother in her ‘Heinrich’ and making her cry like a little bitch. In the end, the Student seems to be happy to be the new family slave, as he takes over the Father’s housework duties and acts as a sort of more useful replacement for Klaus, thus leading him to not having to worry about stressful things like discovering breakthrough scientific theories.  Not unlike with the death of the eponymous protagonist of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (1972) aka The Merchant of Four Seasons, Klaus' abandoning of the family proves to be to the overall benefit of the family as a whole as the Student makes for a most apt replacement and the Mother and Father seem to now have a normal loving marriage.  Indeed, instead of acting like dickless dictator, the Mother begins wearing makeup and flirting with her husband in an overtly loving fashion that seemed totally improbable before Klaus left.

 As a work of aberrant absurdist comedy, Der Bunker is seemingly perfect, but I have to wonder about what sort of message Chryssos is trying to make. Don’t get me wrong, I consider helicopter parents to be a wholly corrosive social pestilence that has contributed to a generation of socially and sexually autistic cripples that cannot even tie their own shoes or find a clitoris, but the film also seems to have a dubious slacker message about the supposed need for one to not strive for greatness or reach their peak in terms of personal accomplishment or intellectual prowess. Indeed, in the film’s depiction of a protagonist that initially strives for intellectual brilliance but ultimately gives up and becomes a meek man-slave as a sort of relief from the stress and hard work that comes with acquiring said intellectual greatness, one suspects that Chryssos has somewhat of a loser defeatist attitude that is contra to the sort of innate Übermensch philosophy that once made Germans great in the past, thus making it somewhat fitting that the film references both Nietzsche and Heidegger.  Of course, one can only assume that Chryssos associates Nietzsche and Heidegger, who were both innately anti-liberal and philosophically revolutionary thinkers, with National Socialism, hence why he and many modern Germans would misguidedly subscribe to a slacker Weltanschauung.  Notably, while researching the film, I discovered that, quite unfortunately, Chryssos is an enthusiastic leftist ethno-masochist of sorts that regularly tweets and retweets on Twitter about imaginary anti-Semitism and anti-towelhead sentiment in contemporary Deutschland, as if he is totally oblivious to the fact that his nation has been completely colonized by hostile Islamic hordes, but I digress.

 Also, one almost gets the sense while watching Der Bunker that the director is brainwashed by the typical German leftist narrative and believes that homeschooling is an evil, as if public schools do a better job rearing kids (obviously I have never attended a German public school, but any American can tell you that public schools are all about indoctrination and mindless memorization, hence why girls tend to do better in school and so many Americans graduate from high school despite being illiterate or sub-literate). After all, homeschooling is illegal in Germany because the government is afraid of supposed “parallel societies” that abstain from the quasi-commie public school objective of so-called “lived tolerance.” Of course, the great irony is that anti-homeschooling law is Nazi-esque legislation that was created specifically for the prevention of parents raising their kids to be National Socialists, just as so-called hate speech laws in Germany are an overtly fascistic means of attempting to prevent fascist sentiment.  To Chryssos' credit, he does hint at the joke that is modern education in his depiction of Klaus being forced to do mindless memorizing, which any monkey can do and proves nothing about an individual's true intellectual prowess.  Of course, if modern public schools actually taught students how to think for themselves instead of what to think, they might begin to question classic oxymoronic liberal slogans like “diversity is our strength.”

 Judging simply by his depiction of homeschooling in his debut feature, one can only assume that Chryssos is the stereotypical kraut leftist lemming who naively believes in the same Judaic Allied Powers propaganda that has been fed to Germans since 1945. Somewhat ironically, despite being a fairly subversive genre-bending comedy, Der Bunker demonstrates in its grotesque depiction of outsiders that live off the grid the same sort of conformist mentality and naivety that is stereotypically German and ultimately led to the collective support of the Third Reich. Indeed, to make a truly subversive and socially insightful Teutonic comedy that reveals what is truly sick and unnatural about the Fatherland, one would have to make a film featuring an emasculated pink-haired German boy that sports an Israel t-shirt who gladly accepts being sodomized on a playground by a gang of Somalian negroes because he was taught in public schools that whites are evil exploiters and rapists that must atone for the sins of their ancestors by dedicating their lives to the perpetual comfort and coddling of angry and ostensibly oppressed brown-eyed and black-haired peoples from the Global South. Indeed, only in contemporary German will you find a political movement like ‘Antideutsch’ (aka ‘anti-Germans’)—an innately anti-Teutonic social disease that is heavily influenced by kosher commie theorists like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer—that hold protests where they celebrate the killing of German civilians and firebombing of German citizens by holding banners featuring an image of RAF commander Arthur ‘Butcher’ Harris that read “NO TEARS FOR KRAUTS.”

Naturally, I was not surprised to discover a photo from the set of the Der Bunker shoot featuring an Antifaschistische Aktion (aka Antifa) flag in the background, thus indicating that Chryssos is probably a proponent of fascistic antifascism.  Of course, only Chryssos knows what is going inside his head, but it amazes me that a man that could make such an uncompromisingly wayward flick could be such a stereotypical conformist bitch when it comes to politics, but then again, as the career of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg sadly demonstrates, you cannot be taken too seriously or respected as a filmmaker in Germany unless you subscribe to something that is at least as left-wing as the mainstream (neo)liberal narrative. After all, even a miscegenating homo anarchist like Fassbinder was accused of being racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic during the 1970s.  That being said, Chryssos deserves credit for managing to make a German film that features an all-German cast and not a single Turk or negro, even if the Teutons are portrayed in a less than flattering fashion that recalls the grotesque anti-German caricatures of super smug kraut commie George Grosz.

 Notably, in his article A Note On Comedy In Experimental Film featured in the summer 1963 edition of Film Culture magazine, avant-garde artist and filmmaker Sidney Peterson (The Petrified Dog, Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur) wrote, “Given the activist approach, the tendency to exploit the intrinsic and often misleading comical-diabolical attributes of the medium is almost overwhelming. Thus, we get film-makers’ films in which the basic elements are as ill-matched as Boehme’s flesh and the devil. And because they are ill-matched, the consequences are inevitable. New and perhaps unintended subjects emerge […] Perhaps 90 per cent of all experimental [film] work is, from this point of view, in its very nature, comical. It is unnecessary to mention particular works. Some are funny, some funnier. It is partly a question of when. Inconsequence has a way of becoming consequential, and the most illogical sequences may lose their irrationality by merely becoming familiar. Thus, new unintentions emerge from an original lack of intent, and the process may continue indefinitely, with the same eyes never regarding the same film.” Undoubtedly, the ‘genius’ of Der Bunker, which is more of an experimental comedy than an ‘experimental film,’ is that the viewer oftentimes finds themselves questioning the director’s true intent, as it is a film that simultaneously makes laughing feel awkward and awkwardness laughable. In other words, the film derives it greatest strength from its extreme open-endedness and unwavering ambiguity of intent, though it should be noted that the director once confessed in an interview with Lola magazine, “I want to use humor as a means of anarchy.” Indeed, in stark contrast to the director’s conformist cultural Marxist political persuasion, Der Bunker is the closest thing to a kraut arthouse equivalent to a Million Dollar Extreme (MDE) movie. Like the anti-liberal anti-comedic skits of the MDE boys, Chryssos’ film depicts an innately sick and dysfunctional world that is only made even remotely tolerable through the most absurd approach to humor. In fact, I suspect that autistic mass murders like Adam Lanza, Elliot Rodger, James Holmes, and Chris Harper-Mercer might have been less apt to snap had they been exposed to movies like Chryssos,’ which would have probably been solacing to their distinct mental wiring.  I also think that Todd Solondz would find Der Bunker to be a great masturbation aid.

Easily the greatest film ever released by Artsploitation Films aside from possibly Kleinert’s Der Samurai, Der Bunker hopefully represents a sign of a new renaissance in Teutonic cinema, though my cynicism leads me to think otherwise.  More recently director Nikias Chryssos directed a short 10-minute doc entitled The Double Feeling about a Las Vegas fleshlight factory, thus underscoring his somewhat refreshing lack of seriousness as a filmmaker (of course, considering his politics, it is probably for the better).  If Chryssos continues making warped aesthetically autistic dark comedies, he might have the potential to evolve into an evil Greco-Aryan Mel Brooks.  After all, the last thing that the Fatherland needs is another ethno-masochist twat that directs serious ‘experimental films’ about culturally schizophrenic Turkish feminists and children with Down syndrome.  Indeed, I might be the only one that holds this opinion, but arguably the greatest and most singular accomplishment of Der Bunker is that it proves that someone that is totally brainwashed by the leftist narrative, the false faith of Holocaustianity, and the multicultural myth can still make a seemingly immaculately constructed and somewhat politically incorrect film that is not totally tainted by bogus blue-pill bullshit.  Surely, one cannot go wrong with a film that seems like it was directed by the strangely Americanized heterosexual brood of Werner Schroeter and Ulrike Ottinger, as Der Bunker is like an aesthetically decadent arthouse film for exploitation fans that hate arthouse films, which is certainly no small accomplish, especially in a nation where the hyper humorless and humdrum films of the Berlin School are considered the height of cinematic cultivation.  While Germany will probably never produce another Nietzsche or even a Fassbinder, it certainly has room for a Mel Brooks or a John Waters, though hopefully Chryssos will evolve into something more enigmatic yet red-pilled.

-Ty E