`Nekromantik' Features A Grotesque Parade Of Gory Obsessions

X ``Nekromantik,'' with Daktari Lorenz, Beatrice M, Harald Lundt, Susa Kohlstedt. Directed by Jorg Buttgereit, from a script by Buttgereit and Franz Rodenkirchen. Jewel Box Theater (in the Rendezvous Restaurant), at 5:30, 7:15 and 9 p.m. tonight through Sunday. No rating; includes nudity, graphic violence and scenes of necrophilia. In German, with English subtitles.

``Pink Flamingos'' creator John Waters calls this three-year-old German horror movie ``ground-breakingly gruesome, the first erotic film for necrophiliacs.''

Although it's reminiscent of the more grotesque images in Waters' crude early movies - the late Divine raping herself in ``Female Trouble,'' the self-castration scene in ``Desperate Living'' - it's hard to locate any of Waters' campy humor here. Indeed, the makers of ``Nekromantik'' have attempted to make something somber and lyrical out of their characters' obsession with death and deterioration.

The extremely simple script tells the depressing story of a morgue attendant who becomes a workaholic in the worst way when he and his girlfriend enthusiastically make love to a corpse. When he loses his job, she leaves him, taking the corpse with her, so he kills their cat, chews on its entrails and bathes in its blood.

The rest of his adventures more than live up to the promise and/or threat of a prologue that describes ``Nekromantik'' as ``gross and offensive and not for minors.'' The filmmakers spend much of the 85-minute running time parading their own obsessions, lingering on close-ups of males and females urinating, blood dripping from the wreck of a car, jars filled with organs and appendages, a rabbit being killed and skinned, eyeballs falling out of sockets, a man being decapitated with a shovel.

Characterizations and dialogue are kept to a minimum. The closest the film comes to expression of a theme is a television talk show, droning in the background, in which phobias and desensitization to violence are discussed. Much of this is accompanied by a romantic, repetitious electronic musical score, partly composed by Daktari Lorenz, who also plays the morgue attendant.

One critic reported that the movie was made by ``a gang of crazies and sleaze hounds who work and hang out at Berlin's best underground theater, the XENON.'' The most positive thing that can be said about the finished picture is that it isn't a snuff film. No one was killed to create the convincing corpses, body parts and skeletons that turn up, and reportedly the bones and organs are not human.

``Nekromantik'' is everything Waters says it is. Whether that's a recommendation is another matter.