Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

BA_Harrison The only survivor of a horrific massacre when she was six years old, Rebecca Verlaine (Natacza Boon) has blocked out all memory of the terrible event, so she is understandably shocked when she begins to experience visions of her dead father and his mutilated pals, urging her to find those responsible for their deaths so that they can seek retribution.Garden of Love? Don't worry… Olaf Ittenbach hasn't gone soft on us and made a romantic drama; despite the soppy sounding title, it's business as usual for the German splatter director, meaning extreme gore by the bucket-load, with heads squished, bodies torn asunder, guts ripped out, and blood splashed all over the place. The only problem is that, in order to get to the good stuff, one has to endure those other Ittenbach movie traits: iffy acting (English dialogue with a strong Teutonic twist), questionable direction, and uneven pacing—in this case the film takes an age to get going, explodes into violence for the film's standout scene, drags again, and then gets nice and bloody for the ending.Still, fans of the director's other work should be well aware of what they're getting into and will no doubt hang on in there though the less eventful bits, safe in the knowledge that, when Ittenbach does open his bag of special effects, it is guaranteed to get very messy indeed.

Michael_Premsrirat The quality of the film is so poor. The story itself is fine, the plot is serviceable. However, the execution of the script is so awful-- stilted dialogue, long ridiculous stretches of exposition. Over- explaining things for the foreign markets? No, it's just amateurish.Poorly shot, even though the visual ideas are quite good; it's just not carried out well.And the gore ... most of the other reviewers seem to love it. I think it's effective, although not necessarily masterful.I don't think anyone set out to make a bad movie. I think it's a director and some actors (not good, but making the effort ... don't know how they can understand each other with five million accents going on) who tried really hard. Maybe they didn't have the budget/resources to do it well, or the entire crew didn't care about the product at all. Worst case/worst crime--the director did his best and thought this was good. Ugh.

Heislegend Let's face it...most people do not know the name Olaf Ittenbach. And to an extent, for good reason. While I'm a fan of his, I find it hard to watch a lot of his earlier stuff and even his newer stuff can be hard to find. But if you're a gorehound (I would not say that about myself, but I do love a good splatter movie now and again), then a healthy Ittenbach collection is a must. It would be very hard to make an argument that anyone currently working in special effects (let alone directing) has the talent he has for making a head go pop or letting loose an almost hilariously unnecessary amount of blood at one time.With that said, Ittenbach's movies seem to have a bit of a formula to them. They'll usually assault you virtually in the opening credits, drag along for a little while, give you a pretty intense amount of non-stop gore, fade away for a bit longer, and then hit you with a blood soaked climax. The trick is to make it through the parts that are boring to get to the good stuff. "Rebecca Verlaine" is a prime example of this. Mass murder within the first 5 minutes, then a pretty unimpressive story for 20-30 minutes, a big dose of people getting their faces ripped in two and/or their limbs torn off, more boring crap for awhile, and then a nice finale so Ittenbach can let you know who's boss. That...and his trademark disregard for accents. I swear, if there's 4 people in a scene at least 2 of them will have different accents from the others. And there's no rhyme or reason. Sometimes one brother has a German accent and the other British...Olaf doesn't care.In the hands of a less capable special effects man, this easily would be nearly unwatchable. But as it stands it's quite watchable, especially for the aforementioned gorehounds. A 7 may be a bit of a stretch, but what can I say...I'm a tad biased towards the man's movies. Now if it could just have been as cool as "House Of Blood"...

Tennoji The cover shots on the DVD looked very good and the director Olaf Ittenbach has quite a good reputation, so we decided to check this one out. Plus, the main character, German punk rock drummer and singer Bela B., is a very charismatic person and has shown a lot of good taste in horror movies and comics before, so I was very curious about that one.First point, Bela B. is only in it for a few scenes and has nothing to do except for staring around. OK, he's playing an undead, they stare around and usually do no real acting, but he had shown that he can actually do good acting before, it would have been more interesting to see him in a "real" leading role . So it looked to me that his name was placed on the cover merely to promote the movie.The other actors are absolutely ridiculous. Why do they all pretend that the story is set in Britain? The landscape, the interiors, everything is so German. Why not simply set the movie in Germany? Everything would be just fine, the story would have worked as well, and we wouldn't have wet our pants every time they tried to act "british". What took away a lot of the atmosphere.The gore scenes are only a few, most of the time the movie spins around the investigation on Verlaine's murder. That'd be OK, if it only would have been a little bit more suspenseful. The gory scenes are all set in darkness, so you cannot really see what's going on, you hear a lot of "painful" sounds instead. The make up of the zombies despite of that is very good, haven't seen that good looking dead people so far. Overall, this movie is boring as hell, the acting is bad, the story is lame and a chilling atmosphere does not come up. Better stay away from that one and check out Ittenbach's "Beyond The Limits". I've seen that one before "Garden Of Love" and was very impressed about the great way of storytelling, the very good professional actors and the really really good atmosphere and setting.