‘Splotsch: Ordnung Muss Sein!’ (Rough translation ‘Splotch: Order Must Be!’ is a 1994 German SOV comedy horror short thats essentially a special effects tech demo thats had a vague plot built around it to help make it something a little extra.

The story is simple enough, a company called Secure-Grau Corp have recieved news that, as a result of them illegally dumping nuclear waste into a local nature spot (Lake Senser) they’ve created a bit of an ecological problem…and by ‘A bit of an ecological problem’ I mean that the wildlife is mutating into horrendous gooey abominations, and that any people who go anywhere NEAR the lake, either end up with all their skin burned off, or they transform into horrendous mutant zombies.

The science team at Secure-Grau are horrified. and after a LOT of deep thinking (2 minutes) they decide to do what any scientist should do in this situation…NOTHING!

we then head down to the lake itself, where a group of ecologists are studying the flora and fauna of Lake Senser, when they stumble across an abomination of an animal, which they quickly dissect, they deduce…pretty much immediately, that Secure-Grau must have been dumping toxic waste into the lake, and they set about trying to locate any more abominations for their studies…at which point they find and kill a mutant…realise they have MUCH bigger fish to fry, and decide to upgrade themselves from ‘ecologists’ to ‘nuclear clean up crewmembers’ which here means they load up on guns and machetes and jump into the woods for a 15 minute mutant on scientist hoe-down showdown. with blood guts and gore aplenty!

Its clear where the inspirations for this film have come from, a lot of the pacing and direction have clearly come from Sam Reimi and ‘Bad Taste’ era Peter Jackson. Its absolutely not taking itself seriously story wise, with an almost Pythonesq level of comedy timing and narrative tropes. In short, its a small silly zombie movie. and I quite enjoyed it.

I felt like the humour was much more on the ‘zany’ side than anything else, but I think they got the balance right of being over the top and crazy, but not SO over the top and crazy that it became grating. I enjoyed the character pieces which were incredibly tongue in cheek. the pacing was pretty breakneck. I think my only complaint here is that they spend a good half of the movies runtime setting up WHY the zombies are at the lake…and then the second half just kind of…throws it all away in favour of comedic vignettes where the scientists hunt down the mutants…which is what led me to believe that Ulrich Fleischer and Markus Metzler (the director, writer and special effects guy respectively) were making this film more as a collaborative effort to show off their directing skills and effects work, rather than the other way around.

The direction and cine, for SOV is actually pretty solid, and the effects work is particularly noteworthy for how well it handled (for this genre) and how genuinely grizzly it gets at times. It is still quite rough around the edges…but given this came out in 1994, when learning about the craft of film making was still fairly localised to ‘whatever your film teacher/mentor told you + whatever you could scrape out of your local library’ I think its handled quite well, its maybe a little washed out, and they could have benefitted from using the tripod a bit more…But the edits tight, the sequence work is solid. Its quite well handled realy…

The performances are solid as well, they mix dry deliveries with zany high energy physicalities here creating something thats positively loony tunes in places. There are a few puns and one liners that I do feel maybe get a bit lost in translation, but on the whole. Its a fine enough work…is it believable? no. But I dont think that was their brief really…

And the soundtrack is cheap whomping synths…which again, given this feels more like a tech demo than a fully fleshed out movie, doesnt surprise me. For SOV, its fine enough…i’ve heard better…but i’ve DEFINITELY heard worse.

On the whole? this was fun! I liked it! I’d say its definitely worth seeing at least once if your into SOV, its wacky, gory and would probably play really well when paired as a palette cleanser ahead of something like ‘Brain Dead’ or ‘Evil Dead 2’

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/splotsch-ordnung-muss-sein/