The film opens to a night-time scene. A woman urinates on the grass by the side of the road. She then pulls up her underwear and enters the nearby car, where her husband is waiting for her. Then they drive away. The couple have lost their way in the night, and subsequently run off the side of the road. The next scene occurs in daytime, and depicts their corpses. The man has lost an eyeball, but remains inside the vehicle. While the woman was thrown off the vehicle, and her body was cut in two pieces.[4]The film centers on Rob Schmadtke, the tragic hero, who works for "Joe's Cleaning Agency", a company that removes bodies from public areas. They clean up the mess after traffic collisions. Their emblem is the Totenkopf symbol (skull and crossbones variant) within a pentagram.[4][5] This job leaves him the perfect opportunity to pursue his full-time hobby: necrophilia. He returns home from his job to his apartment and girlfriend, Betty. He plays with his assortment of preserved human remains and watches television while Betty takes a bath in blood-laden water. Their apartment is decorated with centerfolds featuring models, pictures of famed killers, and jars containing human parts, which are preserved in formaldehyde.[4]Rob watches a televised interview of a psychiatrist, speaking on the topic of arachnophobia and ways to overcome phobias. Rob then enters a daydream of a young lop rabbit being caught on a farm and graphically slaughtered. By implication, these are memories of his father killing "a beloved childhood pet". Followed by memories of a pathologist performing an autopsy on a human cadaver.[4] The following scene is seemingly unrelated. A man drinks beer and practices with his rifle at the same time, while listening to an oom-pah rhythm. The character would not seem out of place in a Heimatfilm. He accidentally kills a nearby gardener, and then discards the corpse.[4][5]Rob then returns to work and discovers his new obsession, a whole rotting corpse. The corpse of the unnamed gardener.[4] It is discovered in a pond, and during the removal process Rob absconds with it. He excitedly returns home to Betty like a husband returning with a romantic gift for his awaiting wife. They immediately cut a steel pipe and put a condom over it so Betty will have a phallus to straddle during their mÃ©nage Ã  trois. This is immediately followed by a jump shot of grilling meat which is never established as either human or otherwise.Betty and Rob dine and converse while watching their new "toy" hang on the wall, while plates collect the fluids that drip out. Rob goes to work the next day to be confronted by his co-workers, who are tired of him leaving his dirty suit to fester in his locker and for his constant tardiness. His foreman Bruno (Harald Lundt), who disliked him to begin with, bullied him up the stairs to see the boss. Rob is fired on the spot.[4]The film then jumps to Betty in the apartment, reading a love story to the corpse. She asks the corpse if it could feel the love in the story and begins to straddle the face of the corpse. When Rob returns, he informs Betty of his termination and she berates him for his failure as well as the fact that he did not stand up for himself. He comes home later and finds that Betty has left and has taken the corpse. In a violent outburst, he kills their cat and bathes with its blood and entrails in the tub while the body hangs over the tub. He then leaves to go to see a film, a low-grade horror film. After being bullied by a fellow movie-goer, Rob leaves to go back to his apartment, visibly despondent.[4]Once there, he attempts suicide with pills and whiskey. He begins to drift into a dream where he emerges from a garbage bag as a partially decaying Rob. He is soon greeted by a woman in white who gives him a corpse's head and they begin to dance, tossing the head and entrails of a body back and forth. Once he wakes up, he leaves his apartment and hires a prostitute. They go to a cemetery, where he hopes the environment would help satisfy his libido. He fails to perform sexually and the prostitute mocks him. He strangles her and then has sex with her corpse.[4] He is startled as he awakes beside her with an old gardener standing over them. Rob grabs the man's shovel and chops his head off.[4] This is followed by Rob running along the coast.The film closes with Rob's suicide. A grisly "climax" to the film, which is composed of Rob stabbing himself while ejaculating. This scene is filled with flashbacks to the rabbit slaughter seen earlier in the film, but in reverse. In a final ironic twist, the camera depicts seeing Rob's gravestone while a woman starts digging him up. Only her foot is depicted, in stockings and high-heeled footwear.[4]
Output: Question: What type of story does Betty read to a corpse?, Answer: love