gore o’clock – Page 7

Tag Archives: gore o’clock

Ne Pas Avoir D’enfants

September 11, 2019 Hud Leave a comment

INSIDE

2007/18/79m

“Don’t let her inside.”

Directors: Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo / Cast: Beatrice Dalle, Alysson Paradis, Nathalie Roussel, Francois-Regis Marchasson, Ludovic Berthillot, Emmanuel Lanzi, Nicolas Davauchelle, Aymen Saidi.

Body Count: 8

Here’s a weird failure – I watched this back in 2010 and obviously thought I’d added it to the site at the time, as my go-to wad of notes just says: “see hudsonlee.com”. Spoilers!

Soooo, this’ll be an awkward review as I don’t remember a whole lot about it beyond it being ridonkulously violent and gruesome, as – Wikipedia tells me – Vanessa Paradis’ youngser sister is an about-to-pop mom, whose husband died in the car crash she survived some months earlier.

Now, on Christmas Eve, a mystery woman shows up at her door asking to use the phone. Pregnant lady – Sarah – declines and when the woman gets weird, Sarah takes her photo through the window and from that, works out she’s been being stalked by this broad for some time.

Various other people find reasons to show up: A co-worker, Sarah’s mother, police, and crazy lady dispatches them all with knitting needles n’ such until the two go at it, and it’s revealed that crazy lady was in the other car and lost her baby, so now wants Sarah’s.

If you thought Haute Tension was going mental on the gross-o-meter, give this a spin. I’ve said it before and will again, but masses of blood doesn’t a great move make, and while Inside packs a lot of tension and a nail-biting dilemma, I’ve never wanted to see it again in the decade that has elapsed, so maybe it’s a good thing I’ve forgotten much of it.

Reviews

Jack the Ripper Retelling #357

September 1, 2019 Hud One comment

FROM HELL

2001/18/117m

“Only the legend will survive.”

Directors: Albert Hughes & Allen Hughes / Writers: Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, Terry Hayes & Rafael Yglesias / Cast: Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Ian Holm, Robbie Coltrane, Ian Richardson, Jason Flemyng, Katrin Cartlidge, Terence Harvey, Susan Lynch, Paul Rhys, Lesley Sharp.

Body Count: 8

If there is any sort of afterlife where the dead can observe the goings-on on Earth, I imagine whoever Jack the Ripper was, he’s chuckling at the sheer number of books, films, and documentaries about him. This time, the tale is grafted into a bleak slasher-cum-mystery box office hit, courtesy of twin-bro directors Albert and Allen Hughes, from the novel by Moore and Campbell.

Johnny Depp – along way from his humble Elm Street victim beginnings – is Abberline, an East End inspector with psychic abilities, who is assigned to find out who killed a local prostitute. True to the events of 1888, the murders continue and Abberline is drawn into the potentially dangerous possibility that the killer is part of a larger conspiracy that could harm the face of the Monarchy.

With a little help from final victim-to-be Mary Kelly (Graham) and the Queen’s ageing surgeon, Abberline begins piecing together the puzzle against the wishes of his pompous superiors, who frown at the theory that a ‘well-bred’ individual might be responsible. Meanwhile, gruesome slayings continue and the reality of the brutal dissections is rammed home – a ferocious throat-slashing sticks out – and the final notoriously stomach-churning act of evil is mercifully hardly shown.

The outcome is satisfying in terms of the world the film operates in, considering it’s unlikely the identity of the real Ripper will ever be 100% certain. The downbeat conclusion suits the grimy backdrop of Whitechapel and the observations of class differences in the era, but the almost I Know What You Did Last Summer-ness of the secret that the victims share requires some stretching of the imagination, that makes this “not just a slasher movie” movie feel more like a slasher movie.

Written out like this, the plot sounds quite stupid, but high-brow big screen slasher films, no matter how opaque they attempt to be, makes From Hell one of the more interesting variables on the genre conventions. Do not confuse with other JTR-pillaging slasher of 2001 Ripper: Letter from Hell.

Blurbs-of-interest: Depp appeared in another period-set slash-a-like Sleepy Hollow; Heather Graham played Casey in Stab in Scream 2; Jason Flemyng was in Seed of Chucky; Terence Harvey was in the 1989 slasher take on The Phantom of the Opera.

Reviews

Daddy Issues

August 22, 2019 Hud Leave a comment

TRAUMA

1993/18/102m

“Some nightmare haunt you. Some can kill you.”

Director/Writer: Dario Argento / Writers: T.E.D. Klein, Franco Ferrrini & Gianni Romoli / Cast: Asia Argento, Christopher Rydell, Piper Laurie, Frederic Forrest, James Russo, Brad Dourif, Hope Alexander-Willis, Cory Garvin.

Body Count: 11

Disclaimer: Giallo is not a horror sub-genre I’m that familiar with. I spin the more slasher-esque films and generally like them, but don’t get all angry if I don’t fall over myself screaming their praises. I can hear my Italian grandmother rolling in her grave.

The archetypal Argento excesses of gore and sex are somewhat played down in this later venture, a confusing flick shot in Minneapolis and starring his daughter, Asia, as an anorexic teenager named Aura, who escapes from the clinic where she’s being treated and returns home on the night her parents are beheaded by a loon known oh-so-subtley as the Headhunter.

Aura is taken in by TV crewmember David, and together they embark on solving the cases ahead of the cops (a-head of. LOL. LOL. LOLLYMCLOLLOL). The killer – who uses a retracting wire device that nearly squeezes the heads off of his quarry – is after the group of nurses and doctor who are hiding a bad secret. As usual, sexy long-haired women are the chief victims of the killer’s fury and most of the unlucky victims who get in his way are also female.

The eventual revelation of who it is and why wraps up some of the hanging questions, but Trauma changes its mind several times and doesn’t bother dropping any hints or building of its backstory until it’s absolutely necessary, because the killer is now unmasked and, well, people wanna know, yo.

All the same, Argento’s signature directorial approach is played to the hilt, with flawlessly engaging photography throughout (yeah, that head down the shaft is… well… you’ll see), although why he chooses to shoot his own daughter topless is a curiosity best not speculated upon ’round these parts.

The same highs of Tenebrae and Opera aren’t hit, but definitely an engaging flick and one of the few high-end 90s body count films that came before Scream.

Blurbs-of-interest: Argento’s other slasher-esque films include Deep Red, Opera, Phenomena (a.k.a. Creepers), Sleepless, and Tenebrae; Brad Dourif was the voice of Chucky in all original run Child’s Play films and the TV series, and is also in Chain Letter, Color of Night, Dead Scared, Urban Legend, and both of Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies.

Reviews

Upsetting the Apple Cart

July 13, 2019 Hud One comment

HOT FUZZ

2007/15/116m

“Big cops. Small town. Moderate violence.”

Director/Writer: Edgar Wright / Writer: Simon Pegg / Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Paddy Considine, Rafe Spall, Olivia Colman, Adam Buxton, Kevin Eldon, Anne Reid, Kenneth Cranham, David Threlfall, Lucy Punch, Ron Cook.

Body Count: 17

Laughter Lines: “You wanna be a big cop in a small town? Fuck off up to the model village!”

Huh? Are we really calling this a slasher film? No, of course not, but let’s also not ignore the fact that a sizeable chunk of Pegg and Frost’s best is just that – with a cloaked mystery killer axing, roasting, shearing, and dropping plinths on to the residents of Sandford.

I’m not massively impressed by Simon Pegg’s schtick usually. Yeah, Shaun of the Dead was funny immediately after Dawn of the Dead (I watched them back to back) and the guy knows his movie shit inside out, but I’m unable to escape a sense of self-satisfaction that more likely comes from all the media gushing than Pegg himself. See also: Ed Sheeran. Weirdly, I love Nick Frost in everything. But let’s forget all that, because Hot Fuzz transcends all of those thought processes with it’s 26-jokes-a-minute tempo.

Pegg is Sgt. Nicholas Angel, literally London’s finest who is shipped off to the small country town of Sandford after his superiors become aware he makes the rest of the Metropolitan Police force look bad by comparison. He is the job and the job is everything, which is why his relationship also failed. With no choice in the matter, Angel grumpily plods off to pastures new, where the local force of various inept and unchallenged officers has little to do other than show up at fetes and hunt down wayward swans.

Angel’s law-is-the-law attitude doesn’t go down well with his new colleagues so none of them are inclined to agree with his hypothesis that a killer may be on the loose when members of the community start dying is grisly ‘accidents’, starting with a double-decapitation by road sign, an explosion, and part of a church spire landing directly on the local journalist’s head, seconds before he was to share valuable information he’d learned with Angel.

Only Nick Frost’s loveable PC, Danny, remains on side, keen to end up in a gun fight right outta Point Break or Bad Boys II, but Angel eventually offends everyone and then finds himself in need of their help once his suspicions turn out to be true and there is not one, not two, but an entire cult of psychotic townsfolk so hell bent on winning Village of the Year, they’re willing to permanently rid the place of anyone who might endanger the trophy. Yes, it’s Scooby Doo on speed.

Hot Fuzz switches to buddy cop movie for its final act – by way of a few borderline homoerotic near misses – with a huge shoot-out between cops and the kind of sweet middle-aged lady you see pedalling past with flowers in her basket. The film misses nothing in its composite of set pieces, cameos, and the tiniest details, all of which come back to play a valuable part later.

The only flaw is a gaping hole for a central female role of any real stature, with Olivia Colman’s perky WPC the closest. But this is boys stuff, made for lads by lads, so there’s no time to be wasted on that kind of PC stuff. This came out at the peak of the Pegg/Frost/Wright hype machine, so it would be entirely possible that it’s overrated because of this, but watching it again the other day to write this up, it still had me laughing out loud several times.

Look for cameos of varying impact from Cate Blanchett, Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan, Bill Nighy, Stephen Merchant, and Peter Jackson.

Reviews

The Longest Day

July 3, 2019 Hud Leave a comment

SLASHER: SOLSTICE

2018/368m

Director: Adam MacDonald / Writers: Ian Carpenter, Lucie Pagé, J.P. Larocque / Cast: Baraka Rahmani, Lisa Berry, Salvatore Antonio, Dean McDermott, Mercedes Morris, Gabriel Darku, Joanne Vannicola, Paula Brancati, Ilan Muallem, Erin Karpluk, Jim Watson, Rosie Simon, Robert Cormier, Patrice Goodman.

Body Count: 19

Laughter Lines: “He jacked cars. He was a hood – he ended up *on* one.”

Season 3 of the Canadian stalk n’ slash anthology opts for a sort of 24 approach, setting each episode over three hours of the longest day of the year, while a mystery killer hacks, burns, and dissects their way through the residents of the Clayborne apartment building, a year to the day after bisexual man-whore Kit was stabbed to death there. So, in a similar move to 2012’s Tower Block, the other inhabitants failed to help the dying man and are so systematically eliminated.

Solstice employs an interesting character approach that caused mucho online moaning of its ‘liberal SJW agenda’: We have a Muslim final girl, Saadia, left alone for a few days while her parents are out of town, her best friend Jen, who’s is being raised along with her brother, Connor, by unhinged lesbian stepmom Amber; Angel, bereaved sometime boyfriend of Kit, who is having an affair with Joe, who is with desperate-for-attention blogger Violet. Deep breath in. And then there’s white supremacist Dan, his very slutty daughter Cassidy; annoying artisan coffee shop owning hipster Xander, and his asexual girlfriend Amy.

Virtually all of these people have hideous personalities, so when the aggressive wife-beating guy down the hall has his head axed off on the street in broad daylight and left on the hood of the car he stole, the detectives who still haven’t solved Kit’s murder are back on the scene.

Throughout the day, the detestable individuals are murdered in a variety of particularly gruesome ways: Face forced into a toilet bowl of acid, boiling water poured down a glass tube directly into the throat, a biology teacher dissected like a frog… The killer is inventive with their weapons to say the least. But who is it? And why? And why is it that these same assholes who were submitting noise complaints suddenly now can’t hear the screams of someone having their face forced into a blender next door?

Intermittent flashbacks inform us that Kit was a huge dick who pissed off virtually everyone, from receiving oral sex in the corridor, to sleeping with various co-residents – or trying to – and breaking hearts wherever he goes. Then there’s the matter of the woman who posted a bad Tweet about it, was flamed and threatened, until she burnt herself to death in front of everybody.

While marginally less aggressive in its horribly drawn characters than Guilty Party was, Solstice doesn’t do itself in favours either. A handful of the teens aside, everyone else is only capable of shitting over everyone else, from Violet’s slappable gossipmongering, the requisite high school twat who mocks the suicide and calls Saadia a terrorist, and the anti-everybody rants of the bigot – it’s as if the writers are either incapable of, or too afraid to write people we might, heaven forbid, care about or root for.

More actors return in new roles than from season 1 to 2, but if they’re going to forge ahead with further adventures, they really need to invest some time in building a universe where people are capable of more emotions than just hate.

Blurb-of-interest: Erin Karpluk was in Ripper 2: Letters from Within.

Reviews

« 1 … 5 6 7 8 9 … 43 »