"Humans, they're living garbage!"

Pissing on a girl's face? They can't show that in Hostel! People, no matter what the director says about their film being a "hard R", you are not going to see the kind of violence at the movies that you can see in the comfort of your own living room. I've been watching a lot of low budget DVD's and for what the lack in polish and production values they make up for in explicate acts. If you can't make out what the image is on the screen cause it's too fuzzy, well it better be gore and sex that you are trying to see, otherwise it's just not worth it!

I reviewed volume 1 of the All Night Long trilogy not too long ago. Well volume 2 was gross, but the last, All Night Long 3: The Final Chapter really takes the cake. Are you a dust collector? Have you ever dumpster dived? I suspect some of my readers have. Me, I loved picking through the boxes in the trash room in the dorm at boarding school. I even applied for a job at the recycling center so that I could have a go at the entire campuses used magazines. Well, I got that job, but my supervisor was so laid back that he told me to not bother showing up for work the entire semester, I'd get the credit anyway. Seemed nice at the time, but think of the goods that I missed out on!

So we're dust collectors, but wait a second, no we are not! A dust collector, it would seem, not only keeps the salvageable good, but also stuff that I certainly would not even want to touch on accident. Pubic hairs, soiled underwear, and bloody pads - these catalogued in binders or or taped to the wall and dated to determine exactly what days the menstrual cycle is heavy or light. Half eaten food? The fact that the bites in the sandwich were made by the object of our obsession makes them test better. No, I've never done this, I really was grossed. It's the hair collecting that got to me the most - then taping it to the vaginal area of a crude female marker drawing. The extremely wet and bloody deaths that followed washed away some of the icky feeling I'd developed from watching weird perverts in action, but I'm still disturbed.

Celebrity actor in All Night Long 3: The Final Chapter - Tomorowo Taguchi of Tetsuo as the older dust collector. I read of this, I have not seen Tetsuo.

Humans are garbage is what Katsuya Matsumura's antisocial series tells us, and that is a very different message from that of Andrew Copp's Mutilation Man. This one is rough on the eyes as it's shot on 16mm and is at times employs effects that blur or obscure the images. What we end up with is a story of someone coming to terms with his pain via his self-mutilation touring show. In the end he walks away with an angel so I guess the "Life is Beautiful" tagline attached to this movie is not meant to be ironic. Of course along the way we get lots of gore and sex and pain and stock footage or real life atrocities and murders from wars past. Copp's not nihilistic, he thanks God and his parents in the closing credits. I would say that this movie shows excellent editing skills, though I don't know if I recommend watching it. The wasteland looks and awful lot like rural Ohio and the Mutilation Man's rabid followers look a lot the director's heavy metal-listening friends. Copp appears in a couple of Jim Van Bebber's movies, My Sweet Satan and The Manson Family, which is getting a lot of press right now, and some negative press from me right here. Van Bebber is billed 3rd in Mutilation Man, he's in here as the Mutilation Man's abusive murdering father, the source of all of his pain.


Mutilation Man (1998)
Everything is explicate in this movie - nudity, porno, gore, real pissing, carnage. There is almost no dialogue. From Sub Rosa, probably a cut above all the rest of their shot-on-video fair.

Off topic: Extreme gore can often become cartoonish no matter how high the budget. I don't think Murder Set Pieces is cartoonish, but some viewers, beaten over the head with the nonstop increasing violence in the film, find it hard to take seriously. One friend told me that A History of Violence had what felt like cartoonish violence to her, though I found it to be convincing. Hostel's scene with the dangling eyeball? That did feel very Toxic Avenger to me - the effect failed.

What's next? Aftermath, #2 from the Top Ten Sickest Movies. My friend Larry has this movie and next time I'm over there I'm going to see it. Hopefully this movie will remind me of the beauty of gore. There is such a thing, when good is simulated well it can be visually stunning and pleasing to the eye. Both the films I discussed tonight were ugly to look at, which doesn't necessarily mean that they failed, it might mean that they succeeded.