Mosquito der Schänder (1976), Or I Want To Suck Your Blood, But Only If You Are A Corpse

My dearest readers, friends, I bid thee well-met. It is I, the Duke of DVD, once more exposing the contents of my brain like so many sweet treats spilling forth upon the loamy ground from the rent bottom of a piñata, worked to be an effigy of the Vicar buggering a sheep. “What are we celebrating?” you ask, sphincter contracting alarmingly. The onset of cold weather, of course! The hoary wind of fall ripples across our skin, raising our nipples erect, a harbinger of the dread winter to come. So let us sit before a roaring fire, a crystal glass of port in hand, and muse upon the bleak abomination that is German cinema.

Not content to merely churn out endless chest-shitting videos, which they could easily do given their industrial capacities, the Germans have instead deigned it necessary to befoul the world with another form of disturbingly MAD cinema: blood-drinking, doll-collecting deaf-mutes who love molesting corpses. “But Duke,” you bleat in a piping voice, “isn’t this a sub-genre that the Germans should excel at?” Be at ease, sir or madam! It is indeed a sub-genre that only the Germans could pay adequate service to! Not only were the makers of this film up to the task of bringing us the eerie world of deaf-mutes who play with dolls obsessively, but they were also keen on throwing the doors open wide on the multi-faceted world of breaking into funeral parlors and molesting corpses.

Are you with me so far? Don’t be afraid! Grip the Duke’s hand, and let us explore, shall we?

Mosquito der Schänder or Mosquito, the Rapist (renamed Bloodlust for the U.S.), is set in the bleak, soundless world of a deaf-mute. We don’t know his name, and in fact as far as I could tell, no one in this movie is given a name. He is credited simply as “The Man” (played excellently by Werner Pochath). He is no one, and everyone. Or something like that. Our deaf-mute friend lives in a simple apartment, the walls painted black, surrounded by shelves of dolls of various sizes. Dolls are his passion, and he would like nothing more than for them to be alive, so that they might comfort him and love him.

"I get 50 mpg on this hog, baby!"

Our movie opens with this poor soul riding a hilariously small scooter through a nameless small town. He arrives at his apartment building, and we are given a disturbing flashback that gives us a bit of insight as to his mental health. As a young boy he is beaten severely by his father, who leaves him bleeding on the floor as he begins to molest his young sister (in a rather graphic and shocking scene). These things, which presumably went on for some time, left him a shattered individual, capable of feelings only for his dolls. He’s in love with a young girl who lives in the same apartment complex as he, but of course doesn’t know how to express this.

"Now... where did I leave the non-doll-related porn?"

At work, where he is an accountant, he fares no better. His coworkers laugh behind his back, and in some cases straight to his face, accusing him of being a pervert and gay. He tries to find solace with a prostitute, but he has no clue as to how to “be” with a female, so the hooker kicks him out when it becomes clear all the dude knows to do is lay his head on her flabby stomach. So, what’s a social outcast to do, when all you have are dolls and a pet rat to give you attention? Well, logic dictates that you try to bring the dolls to life, of course! This comes at the wrong time, though, because he finds he’s obsessed with how blood looks on skin. This first manifests itself when he first spills ketchup on himself at lunch, and then later spills red ink on himself at work. He realizes that, damn, blood sure is awesome!

"I'll teach you to change the channel during Sanford & Son!"

This sets off a truly epic series of scenes in while our burgeoning pervert repeatedly breaks into funeral parlors and molests corpses. There’s never anything overtly sexual; instead he’s obsessed with their blood. It starts out small, just cutting a corpse and licking the blood off his hand, but escalates quickly, culminating in the drinking of corpse blood with a forked glass straw (hence “mosquito,” get it? haw!). Like any bandit worth his salt, our man signs the wall “Mosquito,” perhaps as some sort of calling card to let the funeral home know that he was all up in their business, drinking blood and what not, yo.

"No, it's an ACTION FIGURE!"

He further defiles some corpses by taking their eyes out of their heads. The effects here were adequate, but nothing too showy. He tries using the blood from the cadavers to breathe life into his doll collection, but he must be doing something wrong, because this plan fails. (Shocker.) He’s going through life, enjoying his blood-letting festivities, when suddenly, tragedy strikes! The young (living) girl who is the object of his obsessions falls off the apartment building roof in what I could only deem an accident of Darwinian proportions. She’s dancing, eyes closed, near the edge, and suddenly over she goes! I, for one, am thinking deaf-mute guy is better off not dating someone so stupid.

"All right, luv, just swipe your credit card and we'll be good to go!"

Her funeral is barely over when Mosquito digs her up and drinks her blood, which is the only way he knows how to express true love. Awwwwww! Her death, though, is more than he can take. As if his mind weren’t snapped enough, he comes unglued, and stalks the first couple in love he can find, following them out to the woods. He watches them make the beast with two backs for a bit, before finally stabbing both of them to death and drinking blood out of the girl’s breast.

Everyone knows Berliners are jelly-filled!

This proves one step too far, as the cops arrest him at work shortly after, dragging him out past a lot of employees who aren’t surprised in the least. The movie ends with a dream sequence showing the girl he loved, dancing around. Fin.

Ahem. So you see, fellow readers, that a movie shot in Switzerland, made and released by Germans, can have quite a bit of depravity in it. The movie stops short of showing actual necrophilia, but I believe this is only because our poor deaf-mute guy simply didn’t know how sex is made. He instead penetrated the corpses with his glass tube, and drank their essence. Despite the grotesque subject matter, I found myself fascinated by this movie. The use of theremin music during the scenes when mutie was in his apartment really kept me on-edge. The namelessness of everyone involved added to things as well. The child beatings and molestation were just disturbing icing on an already unseemly cake.

The director (Marijan David Vajda) does a great job in composing each shot, giving us a constant barrage of the claustrophobic world that the deaf-mute inhabits. Hookers leer at him from side alleys, coworkers stand too close and laugh at him. Even his ridiculously small scooter is somehow appropriate. Werner himself does a great job, and is very convincing as a man driven to follow his desires, no matter how twisted.

"At last, my RealDoll™ has arrived! And what a spiffy collector's case!"

I do have to take exception with a few things, however. For one, the movie was titled “Mosquito the Rapist,” yet no actual rape ever happens, to living beings or corpses. The closest we get is the man’s dad molesting his own daughter, but this only goes as far as groping. Perhaps stabbing a glass straw into a corpse’s breast to drink its blood is considered rape in Germany? This brings me to my other nit to pick, and that is the fact that there’s blood in the corpses to drink at all. I don’t know the state of embalming during 1970’s Germany, but I’m pretty sure corpses were being drained of all fluids back in Egyptian times. I can forgive this, however, because if proper embalming techniques were used, we wouldn’t have a movie, now would we?

In the end, Mosquito served as the genesis for a glut of German necrophilia movies (such as the infamous Nekromantik series), and for that we should give the creators thanks. Don’t feign mock alarm! You know it’s true! The movie is worth watching, not only from a purely historical point of view, but from a pure Euro-trash point of view as well. Come for the corpses, stay for the blood-drinking!

2 Thumbs Up.

Extra bonus images from Mosquito der Schänder (1976):
 

Never question the accuracy of Klaus's accountancy. EVER.

"I didn't want to kill her...but just LOOK at this dress! Really!"

"Hurry up, Billy!  Before someone comes along and wants to drink blood from my breast!"