4. The Corpse Of Anna Fritz
There are films that are a horrible watch and then there are films that are just plain horrible. The Corpse Of Anna Fritz, which premiered at SXSW and did the festival rounds throughout 2015, is the latter. It's an art-house video nasty, made to shock by any means necessary at the expense of everything else, but never makes it stick. Violence, murder, betrayal; it's all here, primarily pushed forward by necrophillia. How does the film frame such a bankrupt act? Erm... It just kinda does it. Two guys convince their morgue-working mate to go view a dead celebrity's body and then a couple of minutes later they're using spit as lube and humping away. If there's such a thing as necrophillia titillation, this is it. It's tasteless, and not in sickly sweet way. Are we meant to sympathise at all with these awful people? Shut up and be shocked. Why do the trio so willingly jump into something so horrific? Who knows, they just do. Each man is a cliché, a thriller archetype ready to justify their actions because that's who they are. The whole thing only takes a little over an hour, but there's hardly enough ideas to fill half the run time. The film clearly wants to be about how we treat celebrity, but after the decision is made to desecrate her corpse she could be just about anyone, and her attackers any old generic trio of friends. In fact, by the end we could be in just about any low-budget horror film, with a booming, leading score, basic continuity errors and contrivances galore. The necrophillia itself becomes a side plot, something to shock you at the start and hopefully trick you into accepting the later tat through residual horror. It's a horrible trick - pointless and, in an perverse way, disappointing.