Nostalgia Kinky

A completely bonkers, unhinged and terrifically effective splatter film from German director Olaf Ittenbach, Garden Of Love (2003) is a great low-budget chiller now restored to its full gory glory by Unearthed Films. A wonderful tribute to practical effects and true indie filmmaking, Garden of Love is is more than just another hard gore film as this new Blu-ray from Unearthed shows.

A formal dental technician, Ittenbach began making short films in the late eighties in the wake of the exploding new German horror cinema. Kickstarted by Jean Rollin’s The Grapes of Death release in Germany as Pesticide, the extremely bloody German splatterpunk subgenre powered by the genius likes of Jorg Buttgereit continues to cast a vast influential net. Ittenbach’s first feature, Black Past (1989), announced him as one of the most brutal and visceral German filmmakers of the period. It was his follow-up films, The Burning Moon (1992) and Premutos: The Fallen Angel (1997) that truly introduced audiences to one of the most diabolical new filmmakers of the nineties.

It’s a bummer that it was Ittenbach’s peer Uwe Boll that found actually commercial success amongst the German directors of this period, as Boll has none of the talent or skill only ego. Boll’s works from the period effectively killed the genre, just as France’s own legendary New Extremity Movement was absolutely beginning to destroy the place with carnage even the Germans hadn’t thought of. Garden of Love ironically appeared the same year as Boll’s ferociously awful House of the Dead (2003) and the two works couldn’t have been further removed from each other.

The most surprising thing about Garden of Love is just how good of a film this is. Yes some of the performances are a bit wooden but overall this is a thoroughly well-done example of great low-budget filmmaking. Scripted by Ittenbach along with Thomas Reitmair, Garden of Love is a chillingly effective ghost story on top of being a balls to the wall gore film. The story is simple but the execution isn’t, making Garden of Love amongst the most ambitious horror films of the early 2000s.

Shot in an abandoned house without heat in near ten-below degree weather, Garden of Love is one of those great Do or Die DIY productions whose mere existence is inspiring. Stripped of any corporate influence, Ittenbach and his team really go for it creating a film that is shockingly violent but also contains not a small amount of surprising substance and subtlety.

While it comes from German splatterpunk, Italian horror maestros like Lucio Fulci were certainly on Ittenbach’s mind here. Even the wonderful score from A.G. Striedl has a certain Frizziesque feel about it that’s quite splendid. Plus, unlike Ittenbach’s earlier SOV productions, Garden of Love is shot on film and cinematographer Holger Fleig takes terrific advantage of the opportunity, creating a wonderfully evocative looking film. For whatever reason, Boll was able to get his atrocious films in theaters all over the world while something like Garden of Love sat languishing in bargain DVD bins.

Unearthed Films presents a new HD restoration of Garden of Love that looks wonderfully cinematic. Some minor print damage and fluctuations are present but don’t distract from just how fine this film looks on this new disc. Extras are a fairly plentiful archival bunch featuring an alternate opening, thirty minutes of mostly silent gore outtakes and two twenty-minute behind the scenes documentaries. Everyone on set seems to have a wonderful, ‘How cool, we’re making a film!’ attitude and that comes through during this quite special title. Even the one ‘star’ on the set, Die Ärzte member Bela B. seems just thrilled to be on set, seemingly aware that he was making something nearly as special as his early work with Buttgereit.

Garden of Love impressed the hell out of me and I wasn’t expecting it at all. Olaf Ittenbach made a marvelously effective work and I’m glad that it is resurfacing thanks to Unearthed Films. I enjoyed every extremely explosively splatterific moment of this.

Garden of Love is available for pre-order from MVD or directly from Unearthed.

-Jeremy Richey, January 2026-