The summary could be enough to describe this film! MONDO WEIRDO: A TRIP TO PARANOIA PARADISE (the international title of Jungfrau Am Abgrund) is one of the greatest movies of all times! Of course we're not talking of conventional cinema...this is pure madness, a sick perverted hallucinating nightmare! It keeps you glued to the screen, from the first second to the last one!!! Non-stop breaking madness underlined, no, glorified by a soundtrack that alone could be one of the TOP experimental/new-wave records of the 80s, if only it had come out as a record! This movie has got it all: horror, grotesque, surrealism, expressionism, sick hardcore sex (straight, homo and lesbo),grand-guignol, insanity! All put together with such a brilliant taste...of course a sick taste...but so powerful, inventive, fresh, bursting...it's similar to the early works of people like Richard Kern and Nick Zedd (NY Underground cinema),but WAY more intense and breathtaking! I watched it the first time in 1992. It went straight to my cortex, it kinda possessed me for days, months, its images kept on floating in my mind, along with that incredible music! I watched it countless times, and it never gets boring...it's like listening to a great record...the more you know it the more you enjoy it when you put it on!!! ...few films can have this quality, let me tell you!!! This is no doubt Andersen's masterpiece...and even if no other will follow, I think he should deserve a first place in the history of sick movie-making! This movie is now in my DNA!

P.S. it's from 1989, not 1990!

This gritty German film is one wild ride. All the expectations I had from this film went down the pooper, but not in a strictly negative way. I expected more surreal scenes and insane visuals, mixed with the obvious sex theme the film has, but it's actually not as surreal as I was hoping. Instead of that, we got a very odd and totally insane hallucinative dream-like vampirism themed black and white film, filled with perverted graphic sex and industrial/experimental 80's rock music. Some people categorize it as horror, and even calling some scenes "scary", but that's not something I would agree with at all.

The movie starts out with a doctor's narration, explaining that the events in the film are taken from real life, and he's explaining the plot of the film in great detail. All this is very good, because it's hard to understand without it, and not because the film is in German, cause there's only a little dialogue, but there isn't anything at the beginning that "tells" us that she gets messed up fantasies after seeing the two lesbians at the concert and stuff like that. What makes it all even better is that the guy who's narrating has a really stupid German accent, and you can't help but laugh when he says that "the film is not for the squeamish" because it sounds so ridiculous coming from him.

When the silly German is finally done talking, it's only a matter of seconds before we see the first nudity, and just a minute or two after that we get our first lesbian scene. Not bad, huh? Well, there's plenty where that's coming from. This film is literally filled with "filth". Blowjobs, masturbation, gay sex, lesbian sex, and even going down on a guy after they've cut his entire chest, are some of the things we get. Surprisingly enough, the pornography in this film can barely be called porn, because it's done in such a way that it's hard to watch for that purpose. The only scene I can imagine turning people on would be the climax scene at the end, because it's a lot more graphic, longer and beautifully shot than the rest. Even though it's pretty vile at times.

That takes me to the supposedly "squeamish" scenes. I can't say there are any scenes in this film that would make people turn away..at all. Except, well, the gay scene, but that's for other reasons. I'm just not into that. The thing about that scene that bugs me the most though, is the fact that it's there. The film is about a girl who sees these kind of things around every corner, everywhere she looks, but the girl wasn't in that scene. She couldn't possibly see them. And if they were suppose to be gay, and the things they did wasn't in her fantasies but actually real, then it was just pointless to have in there. Correct me if I missed something there.

The movie lacks gore, but it didn't really need it. Of course, it would have been awesome as hell if it had some really cool gore and lots of it, but the fact is that most of the effects in this film are horrible and it doesn't drag it down. We have lots of stupid paint-looking blood when throats and wrists are cut, and only one of those scenes are close-up so we can see that they actually CAN make gory wounds. Other than that we get a cut-off penis that looks decent until the girl grabs it and looks at it, 'cause it just looks like a dildo.

Overall, it's a very dark and depressive trip into a girls visions of absurd sexuality. Even though it's a good film even if you look at every flaw, I understand why the film hasn't gotten that much attention, but I do think that it has what it takes to become really popular if the right people see it. Too bad it's hard to come by.

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Dedicated to Jess Franco and Jean-Luc Goddard - man, talk about the literal furthest points apart - Austrian director Carl Andersen not only references the director, but uses an actress named Jessica Franco Manera who either was his daughter - which I think is complete kayfabe BS, as the only daughter I've seen listed for Franco is Caroline Reviere, his step-daughter from his marriage to Nicole Guettard.

That said, this movie feels like it could be one of his children if he shot on black and white and had watched Begotten a few times while smoking jazz cigarettes. Manera plays Odile, who likes a character from a Franco movie has a sexual encounter with two showgirls and then loses all touch with reality, eventually finding her way to Elizabeth Bathory.

Andersen also made Vampiros Sexos, in case you wanted to know how much he loved Franco. And much like some of the darker trips Jess took, this movie seems determined to shock, so if anything offends you, perhaps you should consider this unwatchable. I mean it - there's envelope pushing and then there's setting the envelope on fire and shoving it up someone rectum (which I'm shocked did not happen in this movie).

The Cinema of Transgression doesn't care if a movie about female vampires and menstruation and people urinating on the dead upset you, you know?