Blutiger Freitag

The writers of the original Dragon’s Den role-playing game have described a character with a conviction for chaotic evil as: "Chaotically evil characters are characters who do evil simply because they want to. They have no long-term goals or even plans, but often revel in chaos, destruction, battle, or the suffering of others. They tend to be very selfish and satisfy their desires without regard for anyone else. They make decisions based on emotions and moods and dislike being bound by any rules or laws; the only thing that can tame them is fear for themselves, for which they may temporarily submit to laws or a stronger creature though still craving freedom. Organizations or groups with beings of this persuasion only form around a strong leader and are held together only by fear of that leader, but usually the subordinates will betray the leader at the earliest opportunity and the organization will fall apart through infighting. Demons are a typical example. Another example is the serial killer, who satisfies his craving for murder, oblivious to the fact that it may one day cost him his life." Well, I think they wrote this only moments after seeing Bloody Friday, because few things better describe its main character. (03.08.2022)

This qualitatively inconsistent West German contribution to the category of violent urban crime movies, in which Italy excelled at the time, is able to stand out among the masses of its genre competitors due to its roots. Journeyman director Rolf Olsen otherwise primarily made popular comedies and run-of-the-mill exploitation flicks about nightclubs and prostitution. He took an identical approach to making a violent crime film as he did to comedies of the time, not in the sense of levity, but of excess. There is nothing wrong with that per se and the truth remains that this is the reason that Blutiger Freitag has several memorable scenes, especially in the reconstructed, unabridged 102-minute version from the Subkultur Entertainment label. However, the effort to offer something shocking to the international audience causes those scenes to stick out like a sore thumb and they thus unfortunately do not fit into the overall concept of the film. Particularly the rape scene, with its terrifying expressivity, foreshadows Olsen’s later projects from the mondo Shocking Asia series. It is also worth noting the screenplay’s effort to touch on the social and political issues of the time and the relationship of events in the film to the actions of the Red Army Faction. As in the case of explicit scenes, however, this rather contributes to the film’s lack of balance, as it involves only randomly used motifs that the film’s creators do not in any way consistently develop. Though it’s a solid piece of work, Blutiger Freitag therefore remains a genre curiosity that can’t match the brilliance or multi-layered nature of, for example, Roland Klick’s Supermarkt released two years later. (15.11.2020)