a jaded viewer reviews the world of horror, splatter, gore, cult, grindhouse, trash, b-movie, erotica, indie, asian and exploitation films
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Penance (Trailer)
So after Halloween, you just figured the horror flicks would die off. Well that's true for Hollywood. Nothing is really coming out in the last 2 month of the year but what you'll see on DVD shelves makes the end of 2009 very exciting.
Also coming out November 17th is Jake Kennedy's Penance which according to Fangoria:
"A beautifully brutal film, PENANCE delivers more cringe inducing terror than even the most hardcore horror fan will be able to endure. Prepare to atone for your cinematic sins of the flesh, because you won't be able to turn away from the sumptuous savagery assaulting your senses on the screen" --Scott Licina, FANGORIA
Wow check out that hype. Hmm, looks like torture-core is still not dead yet. I may be a little skeptical about this flick because its "from the producers of Automaton Transfusion", a flick I did not like (full review here).
But the all horror star cast is infreakintriguing. Marieh Delfino, Michael Rooker, Tony Todd, James Duval and others.
Here be the plot: With unrelenting suspense and terror, Penance is the tale of a young, demure single mother, Amelia (Marieh Delfino), who hits upon hard times and decides to take her future into her own hands by taking up the one profession that can promise fast cash for a sexy girl like her - becoming a stripper.
Everything is going well until Suzy her stripper friend is beaten up on a job and recruits Amelia to take her place in a high-class strip job that night. Reluctantly Amelia takes the job, only to find that the job isn’t everything that it seems.
Driven to a strange location by a dark and mysterious man (Tony Todd) and confronted by a grizzled hit man (Michael Rooker), Amelia’s world is turned upside down as a case of mistaken identity leads her to be taken captive and forced to confront her sins – the sins of her mind, body and soul.
Her captor (the mind bending Graham McTavish), is intent on one thing and one thing only – to purify Amelia and the other women in his incarceration. It’s time for them to pay their Penance!
After avoiding all the reviews and hype, I figured this was a classic run of the mill torture porn but taken to the ultimate extreme.
Boy was I wrong.
Martyrs has sort of created a new subgenre of horror. Uber-surreal torture-core.
Yeah I know what your saying. What the fuck is that? Dude, I don't even know. But I can say this. This isn't torture porn like Saw or Hostel or any of the other "kill for the fun of it" horror.
It's a twisblended hybrid of the Argentoism, pure unrelenting grindy torture-core and horror taken to a transcendent level.
That's not to say I didn't have my gripes. It's almost pointless at times until you get to the end and figure what the whole thing is about. For 100 minutes, if you take the visceral challenge, you may have been a martyr yourself to a first. Uber-surreal torture-core horror.
Boring Plot-O-Matic
France. A night at the beginning of the 1970s.
Lucie, a little girl missing for over a year, is discovered wandering by the side of a country road.
Near catatonic, she can say nothing about what has happened to her. The cops quickly find the place in which she's been incarcerated - a disused slaughterhouse. Every indication is that she never once left the empty, freezing room in which she was imprisoned.
Filthy, starving, dehydrated, the child's body nonetheless bears no traces of sexual abuse - this was no paedophile abduction, but something far stranger.
What happened in that icy room? And how did Lucie escape?
Lucie is hospitalized - slowly she learns how to live again, an enfant sauvage gradually returning to the real world. In the hospital, she meets Anna, another little girl, and a victim of terrible abuse at the hands of her family. In no time, they are inseparable. Anna takes charge of Lucie, like a mother. As for her kidnappers, the police are at a dead end. Lucie's ordeal remains a terrible mystery.
One night, as Anna sleeps, Lucie hears an awful, rasping breathing. A vision appears: a body, naked, skeletal, tortured. Barely human. The apparition seizes her...
15 years later. A house, isolated in the middle of a forest. A family: Mum, Dad, two kids. A happy home. As they eat breakfast, there's a knock at the door. The father opens it to find a young woman, hollow-eyed and wraithlike and mad. In her hands, a rifle. "Remember the little girl I once was?" She shoots him where he stands, enters the house, and locks the door...
Minutes later, the family lie bloody. All dead. Lucie calls Anna, who tells her not to move, she'll be right there. In shock, Lucie hangs up. And then she hears it. That terrible, terribly familiar breathing...
Awesome Review-O-Matic
If you've seen Inside or Frontiere(s) or even Haute Tension, you know the French may be squeamish when it comes to war but not in their horror movies.
It be best to break this down like Kool Aid minutes. "Oh Yeah!"
!!!SPOILERS BELOW!!!
The first 35......
The movie starts off in pure insanity as we see a teen Lucie escape from her abductors. We see a childhood friendship develop between the victimized Lucie and her new BFF Anna.It seems our baddies haven't been caught by the cops and poor Lucie is having nightmares of the monsters she left behind.
Fast forward to 15 years later and our French girls are now French foxes. And BOOM! like a mushroom cloud we get carnage. Lucie believes she's found those mofo's that tortured her.
Lucie is blasting Dad, mom, Peter Brady and Jan to kingdom come with a freakin shotgun. It's insane first few minutes.
I've never seen such bloody crassness in a while. Lucie goes all child-a-cide killing little swimmer Jan. It's so brutal, you may feel sick. But this is the new wave, and the Rottweiler French horror has gone postal. The beginning is pure mystery, Scooby Doo-ey in a way. Questions are raised. Who abducted and tortured poor Lucie? Is she sure this normal Brady bunch family did it? What is this thing chasing after her?
The next 35........
As Lucie gets bombarded by her dreammares, she starts to self mutilate herself. She starts to slice her arms, back and hand via figments of her torture-verse. Meanwhile, Anna starts to doubt Lucie's saneness and starts to Reservoir Dogs the mess thats been made by cleaning up bodies and calming Lucie the fuck down.
But Lucie has gone cuckoo and slits her throat.
Later, have a brief mourn Anna finds a hidden compartment and works her way down to a lab of horrors. She finds a deprived, almost corpselike body of a woman who she attempts to heal. But shits too late for her. These scenes are like Lynchian and surreal blocks of fuckedupness. The woman is naked and scarred and has a device that has been nailed to her head that blinds her. It's almost like a death piece of art. The one thing most people have agreed upon is that it's breathtaking to see these images on screen. Nothing, and I mean nothing will prepare you for this level of sheer horror.
But I've always said, if I have not seen it before, that's a plus. And if it works within the boundaries of the film, then the amplification goes off the scale.
This all comes crashing down as our poor medievaled victim is blown away by the abductors.
The last 35........
Now Anna is told the experiment into martyrdom by an old lady. It seems the religious are not the only ones to experience the world of martyrdom.
And so begins the torture-core of Anna. It's by far a very difficult thing to watch. Almost bordering on the rape scene in Irreversible.
Anna is fed what looks to be pea soup, beaten constantly, forced to expel her self via a bucket and her head is shaved.
These constant fade ins and outs of Anna's torture are sick to the gut. If one can watch these 20 or so minutes, it's like a running a marathon of horror-core.
Though, how does one survive within the world of this film. She's lets herself go and accepts her fate. This is then leads to her torturers to skin her entire body except her face.
And in this act of letting go, she is the 4th to experience what the movie is about......
Seeing what lies after death.
Because as we are told, Martyr means to witness and that is what Anna becomes.
The thing about every torture porn like flick is you feel super duper empathy towards the victim. Every fiber in your being hopes the victim will go all Kill Bill and somehow escape and kill off the sicko killers. I had that inkling too. Maybe she would kill off these fucked up people and escape.
But that never happens....and seriously that's a good thing.
The whole point of Martyrs is to flip that shit upside down. The big bad evil at the end seems to have a religiously and scientific (sorta) reason of why they are doing this. It's not rich people or some old guy spewing out a "live your life" philosophy. Jigsaw is just evil and so are the wealthy Madoffs.
This world within Martyrs has cult like normals wanting to know what lay beyond. Does the end results justify the means?
Oh believe me, I still want all those people to get tortured and Abu Gharabed, but its almost Argento-y in a way where this insanity is logical.
This film isn't without its negatives. It paces way to long and drags and drags. It also destroys all logic (where the fuck are the police?) But the biggest gripe comes in that the torture that Lucie, Anna and the other victims go through seems pointless until the end. And even the revelation that this is an experiment into martyrdom and what lays beyond death is almost bordering on just being plain stupid.
Shit dude, this was the plot of Flatliners!
But it is a film thats spawned a new subgenre. Uber-surreal torture-core horror.
And that's an accomplishment. Gore-ipedia
Shotgun blasts Sliced arms Shotgun blast to the head Corpse walking art LOTS AND LOTS of torture Skinned alive
Nude-ipedia
I'm going to have to say tortured victim nudity doesn't count Brief boobies from Anna
WTF moment
A skinned Anna witnessing
The Jaded Viewer's Final Prognosis
Martyrs is not as good as Inside which to me for now is the pinnacle of all that is French horror. But its new progeny Martyrs, it's as good as advertised.
Be warned, it's not a movie with any semblance of plot, or an in depth look into characterology or any sort of "horror" kills.
It's something new and that should be something we all need to witness.
Good enough? No? Arghhh. OK. Let's see what I remember from this flick before I dozed off.
Everybody has that friend that when you go over their house, they always turn on the video camera and videotape everything. That same friend also makes you watch old video footage of him/her with her friends doing something goofy on camera. Everybody has that friend. The amatuer video star. The person who loves seeing themselves on camera. He/she is in every shot, every interview and every embarassing moment.
If you watch APSK, that's Shane Ryan.
I never watched the 1st one, just watched the trailer and a clip on YouTube. But I got the entire gist of it. But I got curious. Could a POV serial killer flick with porn work on both levels???
Umm. Ehhhh. Sorry dude.
It doesn't.
Porn and Horror (though very similar) are like oil and water. They kinda don't mix. Yeah horror initiates it's world through sex and violence, but porn is raw. And I really can't say this works.
The pseudo snuff movie genre seems to be making a come back. With the release of the Poughkeepsie Tapes, somehow we've got a new genre of POV killer movies clammoring to be seen in the world of the over drenched world of torture porn.
But thats it. If your playing in the world of torture porn (which is what APSK2 tries to do) and you add real porn, somehow it loses the point.
If you read all that, the plot revolves around a pseudo doc about Brandon who has murdered over 22 girls. Between the main storyline which he stalks a victim played by Kai Lanette (who cowrote the movie), we see various old video footage flashbacks of Brandon and his murders of various girls (being identified as "Victim #3" and such)
The dialogue is cluttered, improvised and reality tv show-ish. The slow tension burns into obliviousness. And the climax (pun intended because I'm fuckin bored of writing this review) was just boring. Real porn movie endings are better.
I quote a line from Scream to end this rather jaded review.
Sidney: "You sick fucks, you've seen one too many movies!"
Billy: "Now Sid, don't you blame the movies, movies don't create psychos, movies make psychos more creative!"
Shane Ryan wanted to be a porn star and instead made a torture porn flick with real porn.
All Night Long Trilogy (Japanese Horror) (Reviews)
Ooru Naito Rongu aka All Night Long Trilogy.
Three movies (or 5 if you want to keep count) Matsumara's All Night Long Series is all about the very real and disturbing problem of bullying in Japan.
Each of the movies deals with the problem in some way.
Holy fuckin cow. This shit hit my top 5 movies on my all time disturbing list. NO PLOT! Sorta follows same revenge theme from ANL1.
Geeky kid who likes to grope Manga dolls gets bullied by this gay (y'know gay) ass kid and his hysterically crazy gang. Utilizing the Internet he tries to get help from some other hackers.
One of the most violent flicks I've ever seen. So many disturbing scenes, I shiver just thinking about them.
Sex slave torture, Samurai stabbings, Barry Bonds power blood swings with baseball bats...more blood and guts then you can handle.
Fucking crazy Japanese at it again, this time with nerdy teen working in sleazy motel and collecting woman's trash including condoms, maxipads, food and other junk. Boy becomes obsessed with girl but can't talk to her because he's fucking nuts.
Using girl's garbage he creates a montage including pubic hair (!). Eventually as you'd expect, boy kidnaps girl and proceeds to express his love to her psychotically.
Not as pulsating as part 2 but has it's good share of moments.
Urination, sex, degradation, torture and rape (Japan loves their rape).
Fear.net has created an online game that is part Saw part mystery. Seems like they are putting a twist in the torture porn motif. Check it out.
Buried Alive centers around a handful of 20-somethings, each unwillingly encased in a custom-made coffin. Trapped in this underground world that is ruled by a maniacal antagonist, the group must discover the connections between themselves; the reasons for their abductions; and, with luck, an escape from the nightmare. Aiding the group above ground are two sleuths, siblings Melanie and Travis, each with a secret stake tied to the victims' fates. The detectives--and the viewers of BURIED ALIVE--can piece together information gleaned from found footage and online diaries hidden on the Web, in the ultimate race against time to unravel the mystery and discover the locations of the buried coffins before time runs out. This innovative daily series will feature a new two-minute episode premiering each morning at 10:00 AM EST--so check daily for new clues.
So after Halloween, you just figured the horror flicks would die off. Well that's true for Hollywood. Nothing is really coming out in the last 2 month of the year but what you'll see on DVD shelves makes the end of 2009 very exciting.
