JOURNEY INTO BLISS is opening this year's LAUSANNE UNDERGROUND FILM & MUSIC FESTIVAL.
Amongst others appearing at the Festival are ALAN VEGA, MELT-BANANA, DAT POLITICS and COBRA KILLER.

A voice, high and whirring like a dentist's drill and a guitar screaming like a derailed express train: The high-speed-noise band from Tokio were among John Peel's favourite bands and "mercilessly blow everything else off the stage" (BROKEN VIOLENCE), visited King Knuffi's palace during a tour of Europe in 1999.

BEST FILMS OF 2004

JOURNEY INTO BLISS is among the "Best films of 2004" on the American website www.filmbrats.com: "I can't deny getting a kick out of the film, and liking it a little more each time I see it", writes Joe Swanberg.
Jon Watermans complete FILMBRATS-review can be found here.


The INTERNATIONAL MOVIE DATABASE (IMDb), almost certainly the largest film portal in the internet, has this to say about JOURNEY INTO BLISS: "Every set has it's very own colour scheme and predominant material. It is incredibly beautiful to look at, from Gustav's snail-ship to Knuffi's golden palace, and you will find something new every time you watch it. This fits with the brilliant dialog, something you'll never quiet get if you are not a native speaker. (...) I consider it is one of the most beautiful things I've ever witnessed and have seen it four times by now, but I know that there are people who would walk out of it or even yell vicious curses against the screen (I'm not joking here!)."

The reviewer rated it 9 out of 10 and rounded off with the words: "JOURNEY INTO BLISS is a trip beyond the rational, a bizarre, postmodern mish-mash of ALICE IN WONDERLAND and the comic book classic LITTLE NEMO, a phantasmagoria which seems to come directly from another world - sweet, surreal and completely psychedelic."

This summer around twenty-five people were interviewed for the planned JOURNEY INTO BLISS DVD:

The leading actor, Jürgen Höhne, who recently inherited one hundred carrier pigeons and has been battling with mountains of bird poo ever since.

The special effects crew Jörg Buttgereit and Marcel Caspers. Jörg Buttgereit recently directed a German version of the Ramones musical GABBA GABBA HEY and Marcel Caspers was responsible for the extremely bloody effects in Andreas Marschall's TEARS OF KALI.

Friedrich Schoenfelder, the narrator's voice from JOURNEY INTO BLISS.
Friedrich Schoenfelder is the 'grand seigneur' amongst voice-over actors (known to generations of German TV viewers as the German voice of David Niven and Vincent Price). He performed as an actor in, amongst others, Jess Franco's JACK THE RIPPER and in several Edgar Wallace films.

The "Tellerlip Girl"-Singer Max Raabe. Max Raabe is famous in Germany as the singer of THE PALAST ORCHESTRA.
The Palast Orchestra featuring singer Max Raabe has dedicated itself to performing dance and film music of the 20ies and 30ies.

The "Tellerlip Girl" Dana Weber

The soundtrack composer Diet Schütte

The famous communist poet Horst Tomayer - the voice behind the shag crazy rabbit

The sound effects creator Iko Schütte, ex-boss of the legendary tape label PISSING COW TAPES

Annemarie Willberg (83) and Marga Heinze (89), the king loving grandmas

Sammy Ochs, the voice of the owl

Mareen and Mira, two of King Knuffi's fans

And many, many more...

PISS COMES FIRST

Since the film hit the cinemas there have been more than 40.000 visitors to this website. A lot of people found their way to this site via search engines such as Google. Here are the most common search terms since May 2005:

First Place: piss
Second Place: wenzel storch
Third Place: -en
Fourth Place: verhauen
Fifth Place: gehir-
Sixth Place: reise ins glück

THE GOOD AND THE EVIL

The pot smokers central organ HANFBLATT had this to say:

JOURNEY INTO BLISS is a great film, you have to have seen it: "evil people at least once as punishment, the good ones as often as they want, for pleasure, preferably under the influence of natural stimulants".

"There is something really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really wrong with Germans" - these are the opening words of a review of JOURNEY INTO BLISS on LIVEJOURNAL.COM.

KING KNUFFI IN AMERICA

A colourful photo of King Knuffi featured in the March edition of America's biggest horror magazine FANGORIA.

"German film maker Wenzel Storch spent two years begging, borrowing and raiding farms and factories to collect the props for this hallucinatory fantasy, which is frankly impossible to summarize", writes FANGORIA editor Michael Gingold. "With its carnival-esque atmosphere, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink production design and emphasis on bodily effusions, it suggests a cross between Alejandro Jodorowsky and a Troma flick with touches of early Terry Gilliam."

If you believe the German press then Wenzel Storch is not only an "ingenious halfwit" (HAMBURGER ABENDBLATT), but also "Germany's greatest fairy tale film-maker" (FRANKFURTER RUNDSCHAU).

Apart from that, he is also "Germany's strangest" (DER SPIEGEL),
"most eccentric" (GEO),
"most extreme" (SARA KUTTNER / MTV),
"most obsessed" (DIE WELT)
and "most daredevil film-maker" (ROLLING STONE, German edition).

WHAT DOES THE CHURCH HAVE TO SAY ABOUT ALL THIS?

JOURNEY INTO BLISS is "exactly the masterpiece we have been waiting so long for" wrote Georg Seesslen in EPD FILM, the evangelical news service magazine. He went on to state that Wenzel Storch uses the "most uncorrupted film language".

On the other hand, the catholic FILMDIENST magazine saw the film as "a children's adventure for infantile adults", full of "cheap faecal gags".

On 2nd of February Wenzel Storch appeared as a guest on a talk show, SARAH KUTTNER - DIE SHOW, on the German music television station VIVA. The presenter, Miss Kuttner, said that watching Storch's films either left one feeling as if one was "on very hard drugs", or that "something is wrong with me".

JOURNEY INTO BLISS had cinema release in Germany on the 6th January 2005.

DER SPIEGEL, Germany's most significant news magazine, dedicated a full-page to JOURNEY INTO BLISS under the title "Attack of the Fun Fair Rabbit" saying the film had "never seen before pictures" and was "great film art".

On the occasion of the cinema release of JOURNEY INTO BLISS on the 6th January 2005 the Munich WERKSTATTKINO will be showing for a whole week Wenzel Storch's favourite films. What does that mean in concrete terms? - At long last Louis de Funès on the big screen again! For more about the films, watch this site, soon!

For years and years the public prosecutors and the anti-vice squad have been amongst the most regular of visitors to the WERKSTATTKINO. It was there that in 1991 the copy of a film was actually confiscated during the performance. The film in question was Jörg Buttgereit's necrophiliac love story NEKROMANTIK II.

Jörg Buttgereit, together with his crew (Michael Romahn and Marcel Caspers) is responsible for the special effects in JOURNEY INTO BLISS and also makes a small cameo appearance in the film: in the 35th minute of the film his head explodes after he has just eaten a roast quail.

JOURNEY INTO BLISS ran on the 12th and 13th November at the BRAUNSCHWEIG INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.

"As a member of the teaching profession, I was shocked," super 8 legend and secondary school teacher Stefan Möckel was forced to admit, after the sell-out performance in CinemaxX 4 "the film is undiluted dope - you can give up joints altogether after this!"

In the current issue of the Braunschweig city magazine SUBWAY there appears an interview with Wenzel Storch. Here is a short excerpt:

SUBWAY: In Canada, where earlier this year your film was awarded the "Silver Prix Publique For The Most Groundbreaking Film", you were praised as being a version of "Terry Gilliam on crack"...

STORCH: Drug comparisons are always an enormous compliment. In another Canadian newspaper the film was heralded as "a risk-free acid trip for the price of a cinema ticket". So anyone who's up for trip or crack-like exüeriences onscreen is warmly invited to turn up.

The trailer is to be seen from the beginning of December in, amongst others, the following cinemas:

"Northampton, so safe and PC, needs more off-the-charts movies like this one", wrote Gerald Peary in THE BOSTON PHOENIX and characterised JOURNEY INTO BLISS as an "obsessive, scatological German nightmare fantasy, beyond DELICATESSEN, Terry Gilliam, and even the brothers Grimm".






JOURNEY INTO BLISS HAD ITS USA PREMIERE AT THE 40th CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

The Festival was thronged with such guests as Christopher Walken and Tom Hanks. The German film industry was represented by, amongst others, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta and Wenzel Storch. JOURNEY INTO BLISS played to 3 performances in Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema.
In the printed programme they said: "The surreal fairy-tale world of JOURNEY INTO BLISS resembles something out of Lewis Carroll's raunchiest and most depraved fever dreams... a land where the tree frogs are art critics, hired thugs are cineastes, and trash-talking bears drive propeller cars. Bursting with political satire, gleefully over-the-top scatological humor, and the foul-mouthed anthropomorphic crudity of Peter Jackson's MEET THE FEEBLES, this bizarre odyssey has earned Wenzel Storch the label, 'Germany's most daredevil filmmaker'."

PRO & CONTRA

“I watched JOURNEY INTO BLISS with my mouth gaped about two inches wide. I couldn’t turn it off and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I stayed glued to my chair...” With these words there began an thorough-going slating in HOLLYWOOD BITCHSLAP, and a little later, they said: “At one point, one of the film festival organizers emailed me about something and I replied to him that I felt very scared by the movie I was watching. He replied, ‘I think I warned you about that one…have you got to the part where the animals get drunk, hump the furniture and turn into time machines?’ No. I hadn’t. Am I ready for that?”

Lee Shoquist (REELMOVIECRITIC) on the other hand recommended JOURNEY INTO BLISS with the words: “Like a bizarre car wreck between Ken Russell, Peter Jackson, Terry Gilliam, Marc Caro, and Jean Pierre Jeneut... It’s an experience like no other, to be sure, and a supremely confident one that’s a defiantly political, sexual, rudely adult fractured fairy tale to end all others. It’s also a wholly original vision. Love it or hate it, there’s nothing else like it.”

And on WWW.FILMBRATS.COM Jon Waterman wrote: “The director attended and impressed me. He was hilarious and astute. His film is the craziest I've seen in years, but is still quite amazing. (...) Wenzel Storch has definitely made a name for himself as one of the most outrageous directors, not only in Germany but also in the world. (...) If you’re into trying new things or want a good, trippy flick I don’t think you can do much better than this. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a lot of fun and entertaining and I loved it.”

And here are some further comments on www.livejournal.com:
"I saw this movie, JOURNEY INTO BLISS, written and directed by Wenzel Storch last night. Holy fuck, it was messed up. It was sorta like MEET THE FEEBLES meets ERASERHEAD or something like that, but waaay more disgusting. Those sick German bastards!"

JOURNEY INTO BLISS has been proposed by the Hessen Film Development Board for the possible award of the Hessen Film Prize.
The winner receives the award from the hands of Hessen’s Prime Minister Roland Koch.

Under the cute headline "Smells like pee in Taka-Tuka-Land!", in the current issue of "Splatting Image", the magazine for the misappropriated film, Christian Kessler has an encounter with JOURNEY INTO BLISS. The author discovers, amongst other things, and alongside a mixture of "Jules Verne, Petzi and Splatter" a work of "great film artistry".

IN THE LAST FEW DAYS TWO AMERICAN REVIEWS HAVE APPEARED

Chip Lamey writing for VIDEO CRYPT on the occasion of the international première in Montreal:
"We've been coming to FanTasia since 1999 and I can safely say this is the strangest film I've seen so far. If it sounds silly--don't fret--this is a truly cosmic viewing experience. I was completely mesmerized by what unfolded on the silver screen.
Some of the effects were provided by Jorg (Nekromantic) Buttgereit. There is also one outrageous "golden shower" scene--don't expect this to be playing at your local multiplex any time soon--which I'm sure surprised even the most callous viewer. In the FanTasia program, JOURNEY INTO BLISS sounded "cute and cuddly," but, in reality it was fairly sick--but in a good way."

HORROR MOVIE REPERTOIRE awards it nine point out of a total of ten:
"The animals are the real stars of this movie. They are just too adorable! The bear is my personnal favorite, I'd hug that big ball of fur (if I didn't fear having my head whacked off that is). As for the rabbit... well... you'll have to see for yourselves. He is cute and sympathetic as well though, no doubt about that."

And Aleksi K. Lepage writing in the Montreal daily LA PRESSE:
"Difficult to be more freaked-out than this... Over the course of the years FanTasia has taught us to be accustomed to every conceivable kind of eccentricity and excess (from those Troma things right up to the films of Takashi Miike), but nonetheless, one was inadequately prepared for this strange and unaccountable JOURNEY INTO BLISS, which one can really only compare to a particularly intense acid trip. These Germans are out of their minds..."