Violent Shit II: Mother Hold My Hand 1992

Set roughly twenty years after the events of its predecessor, Karl ‘The Butcher’ Jr., the son of the previous film’s antagonist, opens with a brutal act: using a machete to kill the sole survivor of a drug deal gone wrong. The narrative then shifts to Hamburg, following reporter Paul Glas as he meets with an informant known as “Mr. X” to discuss a string of murders Glas believes are connected to Karl Sr.’s old killing spree. After showing Glas top-secret photographs of several victims, Mr. X lays out what the authorities know and hints at a deeper, unresolved pattern linking the new murders to the past.

Two years earlier, Karl, Jr. is depicted receiving a machete as a birthday present from his adoptive mother, Mother, a decrepit woman who discovered and buried the original Karl’s remains and raised the son Karl Sr. fathered. She intends to mold him into the ultimate killing machine to avenge his father’s death. From the start, the bond between mother and son is built on a disturbing mix of care and cruelty, and the boy is sent out to fulfill a dark destiny. The unsettling dynamic is reinforced as Karl attacks a quintet of campers, killing two and taking the remaining three back to a home where acts of mutilation and torture unfold under her watch, a grisly ritual that she treats as a show for her own amusement.

Embarking on a broader homicidal rampage, Karl continues to kill across the countryside—taking down a pair of fishermen, a group of construction workers, a jogger, and a young couple. His spree culminates in a violent break-in at a pornographic theatre, where he kills the manager and more than a dozen patrons, leaving a trail of fear and carnage in his wake. When he returns home after this mass shooting, he discovers that his mother has been decapitated; the severed head utters a final chilling line before dying: > “your father’s back”.

In the present day, Mr. X tells Glas that the police eventually located the killer’s cabin, a hideout that contained an old woman’s head and at least fifteen dismembered bodies. When Glas asks whether the man responsible was ever caught, Mr. X says no, and urges him not to publish the photographs he has shown him. As soon as Mr. X departs, Glas makes a difficult choice and tears up the images, deciding that the tale is too twisted to reveal to the public.

The film also features performances by Son Le, Giang Le, and Alexander Jurkat in supporting roles, rounding out a cast that underlines the bleak, inheritable brutality at the story’s core.