DVD review: Schlaraffenhaus (2011)

It will be a night of terror for Maria (Annika Strauss) ... After her long-lost sister Kira (Alex Anasuya) has returned home, a pair of unknowns invade the family home and transform it into a living hell of pain and despair. Schlaraffenhaus is written by Annika Strauss and Marcel Walz who also is the director. The acting is good, it´s professionally shot and edited. It has some really nice visuals, some scenes have a real nice/tense atmosphere. Schlaraffenhaus is reminiscent of the Hollywood movie The Strangers but with a german twist, yup add some gore and nastiness. We get degradation, sadism, torture, cannibalism and rape. It takes it time to get going, time spent establishing the characters and their relations before things take a turn for the worse. It´s violent but not as gory as I was kinda hoping when reading that Stefan Svahn is responsible for the special effects. The violence is mean-spirited and nasty but for some reason the filmmakers choose not go the whole way with the gore (an example, a character gets shot in the head but we don´t get to see anything, instead there is a quick cutaway) but the fx that are on display are good. There is no T & A but there is a nasty (non graphic) rape.
This review is based upon the German region 2 DVD release (it´s a DVD + Blu-Ray combo in the Mediabook format) from NSM Records, it´s uncut and german language only.
Rating: 5 out of 7. I enjoyed this,  Annika Strauss, who also co-wrote it, is very good as Maria and Selin Deveci is very good as Simona who is as creepy as she is beautiful. Schlaraffenhaus is  well made and offers more than one twist. Check it out but make sure to buy the uncut version as the cut release is missing 6 minutes....

/JL