Chain Reaction (2006)

AKA House of Blood, House of Horrors and Zombie Onslaught

While most directors would be happy to carve out a niche for themselves in various styles or genres, it can also be somewhat of a curse with only one aspect of their directorial skills being highlighted while others are given a cursory notice at best and at worst, ignored completely. For instance, filmmakers like Ruggero Deotado and Umberto Lenzi only being recognized for their cannibal films while their other genre work tends to get sidestepped, or Walerian Borowczyk remembered only for erotica while ignoring his sense of humor and astonishing visual sense. German splatter auteur Olaf Ittenbach also belongs to this group of directors. As one of the forefathers of German splatter, it was inevitable that Ittenbach's claim to fame was going to be his special effects work and understandably so. Ittenbach's gore effects are on another level of quality than most, and his films certainly go into extreme territory so it's a reputation he's earned. One particular quality of Ittenbach's work that tends to get ignored is that, along with his always innovative approach to violence, Ittenbach can always be relied upon for some fairly idiosyncratic storytelling with films like Premutos: The Fallen Angel (1997), Garden of Love (2003) and Dard Divorce (2007) all taking their stories into interesting directions. For Chain Reaction, Ittenbach takes a fairly simple horror concept and steers it into some frankly esoteric and exceptionally bloody realms.

After colliding with a bus transferring prisoners, Dr. Douglas Madsen is taken hostage by the surviving prisoners, demanding that he lead them to the Canadian border and treat the life-threatening injuries of Spence, the brother of Arthur, the de-facto leader of the convicts. While trekking through thick forest, the group happen upon an isolated cabin which they invade for shelter, discovering a strange, devoutly religious familial unit speaking in old-tyme language. After declaring the cabin theirs and isolating the family, the group soon discovers the true, blood-thirsty and demonic nature of their hosts.    

Chain Reaction is perhaps the quintessential film when making the case for Ittenbach being far from a one-note filmmaker. Granted, the concept of escaped convicts discovering a cabin inhabited by demons isn't the most novel of set-ups, and in the hands of nearly any other director would have probably been approached in a pretty straightforward fashion. Ittenbach however takes an entirely different approach right from the very beginning, opening with a damn near Roegian montage that makes more sense as Ittenbach unfolds this elliptical and weirdly emotional narrative that seemingly takes place in a parallel world where deja-vu is a reoccurring, pre-determined fate. Having the cabin family speak in bizarre old-tyme tongue greatly adds to this slightly alien feel, and Ittenbach conjures up dense atmosphere around the cabin and its surroundings. While Ittenbach could have very well made a good movie simply utilizing the basic escaped convicts vs. demons story, he does something fascinating in the middle of the film by repeating the scenario a second time with a different set of cons and making Dr. Madsen a prisoner. Because of Madsen, the second go around twists some other things as well, adding to an already loaded story a connection of sorts, perhaps past-life, between Madsen and the most “human” of the demonic family, Alice, played by Ittenbach's then wife Martina. Needless to say, the films big gore centerpieces are flawless with Ittenbach once again inventing highly unique ways of dismembering the human form and actually builds tension between the major bloodletting sequences.

The film is comprised of a host of Ittenbach regulars with Christopher Kriesa making his third is appearance for Ittenbach following Legion of the Dead (2001) and Beyond the Limits (2003). Also making their third Ittenbach film are James Matthews-Pyecka and Daryl Jackson, both also in Beyond the Limits and Garden of Love and of course Martina Ittenbach would later feature in Dard Divorce and Legend of Hell (2012) amongst others. Unfortunately, like so many of Ittenbach's films, Chain Reaction has suffered on the home video front thanks to cut releases with its most easily variable North American DVD release under the “House of Blood” title being cut, begging the question of why even bother release an Ittenbach film in the first place if all the gore effects weren't intact? Much like Garden of Love, the film has also had the misfortune of being released under the wildly inappropriate alternate of “Zombie Onslaught” complete with equally misrepresentative cover art. There is however a very good Polish DVD containing the complete version of the film and is pretty easy to track down making it a good buying option and it is a more than worthy purchase. Chain Reaction is first and foremost a splatter film, but the unorthodox storytelling and other various oddities Ittenbach mixes in make the film one of Ittenbach's more curious and one of the more interesting films in contemporary horror.