Excessively cock-hungry Armin Meiwes is currently in a German jail for biting and cutting off Bernd Brandes' penis, frying it and serving it as a light meal for the both of them, before slaughtering Brandes, carving his body into choice cuts and storing them in the fridge. Before he was arrested Meiwes had eaten about 20kg of Brandes, who'd responded to Meiwes' cannibal website chatroom advertisements for a willing victim.

Grimm Love - German title Rohtenburg, from the small town where the quasi-murder took place - is a turbid dramatisation has been banned in Germany but thankfully not in Australia, where it provided my viewing partner and I with numerous unintentional giggles and a nice tranquilising effect after our own lip-smacking feast of sausages and sauerkraut dinner at a Sydney schnitzel restaurant.

Keri Russell (TV's "Felicity") plays Katie, an earnest American grad student doing her doctoral studies near Rohtenburg. Fascinated by cannibalism, she bites off more than she can chew when she decides to investigate the notorious local case. In the film, Armin Meiwes becomes Oliver Hartwin, played by Thomas Kretschmann, who was the stern captain of the "Venture" in Peter Jackson's King Kong. Thomas Huber playes the Bernd Brandes role, which has been made older and renamed "Simon Grombeck". The quietly disturbed Simon lives with the relatively cheery Felix (Markus Lucas) who has no suspicion that his porcine lover spends all his time on the net searching for someone to eat him alive, literally.

The details of the real-life story may be shocking and bizarre, but the story itself is really quite neat and linear, concerning two people who have a very unique relationship that ends with a bang. Here, though, it becomes a tangled, constipated mess with nothing like the efficient narrative drive of Grimm's dark fairy tales, from where, presumably, the film takes its English title. Ludicrously simplistic Hannibal Rising-style attempts to link the men's indigestable psyches with textbook childhood traumas stall what little story flow there is and the casting of these flashbacks, which gives us two almost-identical young boys with matching blond neurotic mothers makes it difficult to distinguish whose backstory is whose.

Russell's Katie provides totally superfluous voiceovers, sharing her inner dialogue and ever-changing reactions to the information she uncovers. In a movie about a middle-aged gay cannibal who eats his willing victim, I personally had no interest in hearing how the story was filtered by a cheery Gen-Next US chick doing a year's foreign exchange. Get rid of the entire role! Surely Felix, who is given nothing to do, would have been a far better narrator and this would have narrowed the focus down to an enticing love triangle, with a mystified Felix unravelling the story and detailing his more audience-relevant responses from the time he finds missing Simon's will.

Russell's fan base, played to by Katie's 90210 gumshoe smarts, would have absolutely no interest in this grimy tale of gay psycho love. It really is impossible to work out what she's doing in the film.

But the acting, even Russell's, is generally sound even if the actors are undermined by the dreadful script which treats its characters like random degustation menus where no short course has any relation to the next.

Tittilating audiences with body parts frying in saucepans and so on is a futile attempt at sensationalism as we go in to the film prepared for scenes of cannibalism, scenes that the Silence of the Lambs series and the hysterical cleaver-whoosing antics of TV's "Iron Chef" have inured us to. Wasting time with Katie and one excruciatingly bad flashback after another, the film's first two acts tell us nothing about either of the two leads, and so we end up with a dimly lit finale where two guys we know nothing about agree to do incredibly strange things to each other for no apparent reason.

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