• Straight to Video
• Director: Olaf Ittenbach
• Written by: Olaf Ittenbach, Thomas Reitmair
• Running Time: 105 minutes
• Language: English
• MPAA Rating: R - Restricted
• Cast: Christopher Kriesa, Martina Ittenbach, Simon Newby, Luca Maric, Mehmet Yilmaz, Jaymes Butler, Dan van Husen, Daryl Jackson, Wolfgang Müller, Jürgen Prochnow, Klaus Münster, Gerhard Jilka, Harald Pucher, James Matthews, Klaus Münster, Gerhard Jilka, Harald Pucher, Lisa Sachsenweger

"Days of ruin…. Eternal repetition of all the same,” says one of the characters in Olaf Ittenbach’s “Chain Reaction”, a film that takes the Friedrich Nietzsche quote literally and has a ball with it, literally. The eternal recurrence as Hell concept - that we are destined to repeat eternally -- is played up, helping to foster along the narrative to a great degree. The most harmless of actions (a dead bird falling out of a tree) begets a sequence of events that spins outwards unveiling a much larger overall schematic. I say schematic because the events, as they play out, feel strangely manufactured or planned (by a higher power or whatever), but could just as easily be coincidental – the film’s ambiguity blasts into the final frame and is better or worse for it, depending upon where you sit as a viewer. I’m not entirely sure where I sit, even as I write this.

Douglas Madsen (Christopher Kriesa) is a good man, a doctor, who is grudgingly pulled into a hostage situation when a prisoner transportation vehicle has a head on with his car on an isolated stretch of forested highway. Madsen arrives late to the party, following a flashback, but is front and center when his vehicle is part of the collision tally when a dead bird kick starts an odd series of events. Fate? Coincidence? We’re just beginning. A few of the prisoners have survived but one is badly injured, which is where our good doctor comes in, recruited as a barely cooperative hostage – one with a doctor’s bag of knowledge concerning, apparently, everything medicinal. The prisoners suggest that luck has dealt them, not one, but two, good hands on this day. However, their luck may soon run out; something given great levity when they vote to head North through the thick forest towards the Canadian border. Considering that it’s the middle of December, there’s a good chance they might not make it.

Arthur Palmer (Simon Newby), the group’s self-appointed leader, is a ruthless killer but he has a soft spot for his little brother, Spence (Luca Maric), because “he’s the only man he’s ever been able to trust” or something. Apparently Spence has a bullet lodged deep in his arm and Madsen is able to translate through a haze of CSI-ish sounding dialogue that unless the arm is amputated, Spence ain’t gonna make it. Arthur is reluctant to chop off little brother’s arm, but upon glimpsing the yucky puss-filled wound, his mind is made up. Sadly, they don’t really have an appropriate place for such surgery, so, within minutes of losing their bearings, luck rears her head again, and through fog and forest they spot what looks to be a pioneer-era cabin, smoke billowing from a chimney. Upon entering - forcibly - they meet a strange family who speak an old backwards-English dialect and dress like jury holdovers from the Salem witch trials. They suggest, all ye Yoda-like, that the group of gun-toting criminals should leave immediately but with gun’s drawn, it is the cons who have the final power of suggestion – and they have an arm to amputate and very little time to do it. Arthur recruits the attractive, twenty-something, Alice (Martina Ittenbach – Olaf’s wife since 2004), from the family to act as a surrogate nurse to help out Madsen for the arm amputation while locking away the rest of her kin in a backroom of the fair sized cabin.

While the appendage removal is pretty crass, it’s only a forerunner to the blood-drenched mayhem that follows as our cabin dwelling clan, spurned by Spence’s blood, morph into demonic flesh-craving monsters – ones with freaky eyes and long fangs, and who could just as easily be vampires as they could be werewolves, but is never determined either way (remember the creepy kids in "Zone of the Dead"? -- they are like that). Doling out equal amounts of carnage, the cons manage to hold off their own demise long enough to allow Ittenbach to pander to his gore-loving fan base, adding up to lots of severed limbs, faces punched in with shovels, eyes ripped from sockets, gallons of blood etc. The demons (or whatever they are) seem to be a literal translation of Nietzsche’s "das schwerste Gewicht" idea. “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?” These creatures represent ‘the demon’, literally, and Madsen’s character is experiencing the “loneliest loneliness” and is bound to repeat it (as are the demons) – something we will quickly learn.

Alice, we discover, has been in Madsen’s life before in the past, in his youth, although it is never sufficiently explained outside of a hazy flashback sequence involving Madsen as a boy crawling from an accident that claimed the lives of his parents. She promised to protect him, and she keeps her word, defying her family by helping the good doctor escape into the night. He is immediately spotted by some S.W.A.T. teamers out looking for the escaped cons and is promptly rescued... er arrested. Huh? Unable to find the prisoners, or the cabin, or the reason why there is the blood of five different unknown people on Madsen's shirt and with six dead deputies on his hands, the lead detective on the case, played by frigid-as-ever Jürgen Prochnow (2000's "Gunblast Vodka"), in a wee cameo, can’t resist putting Madsen through the proverbial ringer – looking for answers to his questions, answers that don’t involve fantastic cannibalistic demons eating jailbird for dinner. Madsen, at this point, is a beaten man and instead of making something up to pacify Prochnow's icy stare, he sticks to his story and in turn lands on a Department of Corrections-Transport bus surrounded by prisoners. Yup, the good doc is on his way to the Big House for crimes undetermined. Thankfully, fate or coincidence or divine intervention or random chance or whatever, will rear her head yet again and, one dead bird and a couple of major league collisions later, we have a bunch of cons, one injured badly, making a break for the Canadian border with the doc in tow, through the cold December forest. This time a reluctant Madsen is brought along as a semi-hostage to assist the injured con with the gaping scrotum (a whizzing bullet punctured his nut in the scuffle with the prison guards – ouch!!!!!) and again, despite his dire warnings, the cons stumble upon the cabin and decide to go inside. This group, like the last, succumb to the same fate as those earlier. It's all very deja vu-ish.

German special effects wiz, Olaf Ittenbach’s body of work is an uneven jaunt, comprised mainly of titles which feature copious amounts of mayhem and gore, including some genuine cult hits like “Seed”, “Dard Divorce”, “Barricade” and my personal favourite “The Burning Moon”, an eerie, unforgettable film that prompted a nightmare or two for me in my youth – or my youthier. “Chain Reaction” (re-named “House of Blood” for its North American release), slips nicely into his resume as it features plenty of awe-inspiring gruesomeness, but, in keeping with the whole uneven thing I mentioned, it also features a somewhat stilted storyline that seems devised entirely around a life-is-a-recurring-series-of-events-that-ultimately-amounts-to-nothing concept. The actual story story comes second… or maybe third, behind the gore. While I enjoyed the rinse cycle aspect of the film, I wish their was more time spent explaining events, or even Madsen’s character in detail – other than the obvious; that this was one man's spin-round, playing out eternally and ending tragically each time. Like Timo Rose, another German-born director/special effects master of some stature, Olaf's priorities as a filmmaker are somewhat askew, as blood and gore effects seem to trump story and characterization each and every time out. However, it's not a total wash, as the film does have a certain uniqueness to it. Much like Tarantino’s “Death Proof”, “Chain Reaction” takes an interesting and unexpected turn at about the midway point, killing off a good portion of the characters in a shocking show of violence – only to reboot things a few minutes later with one connecting piece (Madsen) and a group of characters who are strangely similar to the first group of characters. We know the outcome already and that their fate will be repeated, however, this time, instead of being casual observers, we are Madsen, and we have a completely different perspective on the events about to occur – and our warnings, as expected, will go unheeded. At times this becomes tiresome, as we can only wait and watch as events unfold, exactly as we expected them too. Yawn.

American-born Christopher Kriesa (2001’s “The Man Who Wasn't There”) as Douglas Madsen is a better actor than the films that he appears in and “Chain Reaction” goes to great lengths to prove that. Whenever he’s on screen, which is quite often, the film seems to be moving forward, as his twenty years in front of the camera lends a certain gravitas to the proceedings. His confident, subtle, comforting style of acting is a direct contrast to the annoying, bombastic and feeble style that weighs down nearly every other performance in the film – laden with lots of German actors who feign English accents, and terribly so. The fact that the film is supposed to take place in the United States while nearly every actor on display here speaks with a German accent or with broken-all-to-hell English, is laughable, and only works to take an audience out of the picture. Dan van Husen (2005’s “Forest of the Damned”) and Simon Newby (2005’s “V for Vendetta”) as the comparable bad guy leaders, each offer characters so over-cooked that they begin to wear out their welcome mere minutes after appearing. While Newby approaches his character as a brutish, overbearing and loud thug, van Husen (the better of the two actors) is more refined in his performance, waxing deeply poetic and quoting great literary names, usually at the most inopportune times – regardless, each is maddening in his one-dimensionality.

Christopher Kriesa, thankfully, is a strong enough actor to keep the whole ship afloat, along with lots and lots and lots of yucky effects magic and a quirky déjà vu idea. For fans of gore or those looking for something off the beaten track, this one will not disappoint.