Who is Ogroff, the Mad Mutilator?
Ogroff (Norbert Moutier) is a masked man who lives in a shack in the French countryside. The walls of the shack are covered with pictures of naked women and Charles de Gaulle. In a dresser drawer, he keeps newspaper clippings about his time as a hero of the French Resistance and about how he refuses to talk about the prisoners he tortured and killed during the war. Outside the shack, the ground is littered with body parts. Ogroff especially seems to have a bad habit of leaving hands all over the place. A few limbs get buried in the garden. A few others get eaten for dinner. Ogroff leaves every morning with his trusty hatchet.
Ogroff is established as having gone AWOL from the army. Now he apparently spends all of his time waiting for people to park on the side of the road so that he can attack and kill them. This happens quite frequently throughout 1983’s Ogroff. Despite a newspaper headline about all the people who have vanished in the wilderness, people still keep hanging out there, and Ogroff keeps attacking them. In one of the film’s more over-the-top moments, Ogroff fights a chainsaw-wielding lumberjack. Ogroff only has a tiny hatchet, but he makes it work.
The film takes a turn about 40 minutes in. That is when yet another killer decides to invade Ogroff’s forest and ends up getting decapitated by a potential victim. Ogroff appears to fall in love. Romance will have to wait, however, until after the zombie attack. “Les morts-vivants arrivent! Vite! Vite!” shouts Ogroff’s girlfriend. And then, to top it all off, Euro-horror regular Howard Vernon shows up for an enjoyably demented cameo.
Norbert Moutier not only starred as Ogroff but also directed the film. At the time, Moutier owned a video store and decided to make a film of his own to sell to his customers. The film was shot on Super 8 and quickly developed a cult following. The gore is surprisingly realistic, and the film moves at a kinetic, almost frantic pace. Beyond that, it plays out like a filmed nightmare. The forest is dark and full of ominous (and, even more importantly, natural) shadows. Many of the chase scenes take place while the sun is either setting or rising in the background, bringing to mind the classic final shot of the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There is little dialogue, but the droning musical score (which, at its best, is reminiscent of Goblin) creates an atmosphere of relentless danger and horror. If the first 40 minutes perfectly capture the fear most people feel when they find themselves isolated in an unknown landscape, the second half plays like a deliriously deranged homage to the Italian zombie films that were all the rage in Europe in the early ’80s. Much like Tobe Hooper, George Romero, Jess Franco, and Jean Rollin, Norbert Moutier appears to have had an instinctual understanding of how to get the most from a low budget.
Ogroff may be a pastiche of American horror films, but it plays through the lens of French culture. Ogroff’s shack is decorated with pictures of French cultural icons. The aforementioned photograph of de Gaulle not only establishes Ogroff as a soldier but also identifies him as a man from a different era in French history. While American slasher films feature victims who head into the woods to have sex and smoke weed, Ogroff features victims who sneak into the woods to play chess. Much like Rollin’s The Grapes of Death, Ogroff shows that horror is universal without losing its own cultural identity.
Norbert Moutier passed away in 2020, at the age of 78. Ogroff, however, will live forever.
