October 19^th, 2000

"OVER-THE-TOP GORE"

This week's grab bag is dedicated to a choice few movies that are so crammed full of extreme and over-the-top gore that they almost become like a parody (with the final movie here being an exception).

Basket Case [1982] was a low-budget wonder debut by Frank Henenlotter. It tells the story of two brothers seperated at birth; one a quite normal guy, the other a deformed blob-ish little creature with claws and sharp teeth. Well when our freak brother gets lose you can be assured that when he's not taking revenge on the doctor's that seperated them, he's out to kill his brother's girlfriend who he's jealous of.

The gore just flies in this one. Throw in that the story is so out-there that it's rendered instantly watchable. Just watch to see a doctor get a faceful of syringes and other extreme dispatch methods and feel sorry for the brothers that's really nothing more than a gooey pile of pink latex.

Dead Alive [1992] is Peter Jackson's most well-known (and loved) film. It's about a meek man who has to deal with a bunch of bloodthirsty zombies after his mother who's been bitten by a rare albino monkey is transformed into the living dead decides to have a bite of humans to eat which just turns them into zombies.

If you want to see completely oddball goings on you're not going to get much better than this. A zombie baby, a lawnmower massacre and a whole gob of comedic gore. Plus a demented sense of humour and a priest who (in what is now horror movie history) proclaims, "I kick arse for the Lord!".

Cutting Moments [1998] from EI Cinema is a collection of many independent shorts most of which are interesting, strange and fun. But it's the title short that really takes the cake. It tells of a unhappy housewife with a boorish husband who gets tired of her life and decides to take some extreme measures.

If you want to see something truly disturbing then this is the one to see. Just to see our lovely housewife cut her lips off with scissors and eventually use hedgeclippers in an extreme way. This one has a way of unsettling and unnerving you even if you think you've seen it all.