Like the filmmakers, Kris knows his audience, and knows that Ausländer regard the Third Reich as the be-all and end-all of German atrocity – so he duly takes the four tourists to a bricked-up bunker said once to have belonged to Hitler's chauffeurs and festooned with unusual Nazi murals, all the while creeping them out with urban legends about a medically mutated SS elite said still to haunt the underground passageways in search of foreign slaves. Going under the significant alias of Dante, Kris plays cicerone for the four foreigners on a journey to a literal Germanic underworld, offering them a grim reminder of the pain and suffering on which today's thriving, united Berlin was built.įor while Urban Explorer may be filled with the sort of troglodytic torture, monstrous madness and bloody death familiar from many other genre films, at heart it is a 'foundation' myth for the city in, around and under which it was shot. Nothing quite refreshes hoary old tropes like the odd splash of local, culturally specific colour, and with its subterranean Berlin setting, Urban Explorer hits a dormant mother lode of horrific 20th-century history just waiting to be mined and exploited. On the way, it cribs copiously (and overtly) from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Descent - and revisits the sort of sub-metropolitan slash-and-dash already seen in New York (C.H.U.D.), London ( Death Line, Creep), Paris (Catacombs) and Moscow (Trackman). Urban Explorer follows that formula to the letter, right down to the detail, mutatis mutandis, of who eventually gets to survive. After all, Wolf Creek has already shown us outsiders being entertained by a local boy's tall tales of supernatural disappearances and then running into an all-too-real maniac on the margins who has learnt a torturous trick or two from his military past. "Welcome to the dark side of Berlin!" exclaims earnest native Kris (Max Reimelt) to the four foreigners – American Dennis (Nick Eversman), Venezuelan Lucia (Nathalie Kelley), French Marie (Catherine de Léan) and Korean Ju-na (Brenda Koo) – who are joining him on an illicit guided tour of the tunnel network beneath Germany's capital city – and his words summarise precisely where this film's originality lies.Ĭertainly that originality does not derive from the plot.
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