La Petite Mort 2: Nasty Tapes (2014)
Matt Boiselle
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Starring Mika Metz, Annika Strauss, Yvonne Wolke, Micaela Schaefer
Directed by Marcel Walz
After I’d finished watching the first La Petite Mort back in 2009, the question wasn’t what more could be done to disgust viewers, but how long the whole “torture-porn” spin on filmmaking could survive. With each succeeding film that has come down the assembly line, whether it be a foreign or domestic product, there seems to be a competition amongst directors as to whom can push the envelope the furthest. I mean, how many schlongs need to be severed to make the collective male audience shift uncomfortably in their seats?
After the 2009 original, director Marcel Walz put pen to paper and brainstormed up a sequel to make watchers want to vomit on demand, and with La Petite Mort 2: Nasty Tapes, the “little death” returns in more stomach-churning fashion with all-new wince-worthy activities to eyeball. The owners of “Maison de la Petite Mort” are back at their grimy, sadomasochistic enterprises, but now they’ve ramped up the user interaction just a bit with people having the ability to chime in on punishments by hopping on the club’s website and entering the chatroom.
The leader of the house of pain is Monsieur Matheo Maxime: a cross dressing kook that expects the heaviest of malice from his employees (Annika Strauss, Micaela Schaefer). His oddball sense of direction is secondary to his appearance; the guy’s look is nightmare-inducing in its own right. For the right price people can have the two dominatrix-style beauties dish out some insane physical suffering (before death) to a few unlucky souls, and we are introduced to each nauseating segment via cinematic short. We’ve got Jesus-style torture (mouth and eyes sewn shut before suffocation); fingernail tearing via pliers; tongues, nipples, ears and noses cut off with a variety of sharp implements; and there’s even an orbital impaling with a woman’s stiletto heel.
Each heinous bit of agony is played out like an MTV video with music and multiple camera angles to enhance each grotesque vision – and while there isn’t a colossal amount of substance here, Walz gets serious points for style, varying back and forth between color/black and white shots. Performances are about as standard as can be, with Strauss as the exception – her blinding good looks are a nice distraction during the down time in between savage smitings – she manages to remain cool as a cucumber even when doling out the most repugnant bits of brutality, and some are simply downright hellacious… just remember the “corkscrew” (WOW).
In the end, La Petite Mort 2 isn’t for the easily rattled so I’d suggest checking out the first to see if you’re really interested in the subject (not that you’d miss anything by skipping the first film), and then you could move on to this particular movie. I can only offer a middle-of-the-road score on this one though, simply due to the fact that the repetition does get tiresome after a while. Most of all remember this: They don’t subtitle the movie “Nasty Tapes” for nothing – this isn’t for lunchtime entertainment on your laptop while at work… unless you’ve got a REALLY cool boss.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
