Bloody Intro

What you're looking at is not, to quote an inexhaustible cliché, for the faint of heart. It is an immoderately shameless compilation of extremely detailed and fearless examinations of the most brutal, gory, shocking, sickening and violent scenes to be shown on the big and small screen. It is constantly being updated as new films arrive and I discover old ones, as unrated cuts are unearthed and the arcane becomes available. As it is, for the films currently included, it is a thorough record of the grisly gore and painful violence exacted on the poor souls forced to inhabit them.

No, not all of the movies included are gems. Some are, in point of fact, quite bad. For your convenience I've indicated in the mastheads for each film in the Worst list where it sits so you may peruse the refuse and see if you agree with my placement. For the most part however, the films listed are decent fare with more than a few real winners and several pure gold. Quality (a subjective notion) aside, Blood, Guts and Gore considers things people can agree on: watching displays of violence and bloodshed is disturbing and gets attention. Any doubters of this I refer to their local news.

I’m not here to impart a lesson or to speak out against these savage and horrific acts for this: they’re not real. It’s smoke and mirrors make-believe and the charge for real life violence and death falls not on the authors of gritty, coarse novels and filmmakers but on those who can’t differentiate what’s right from what’s wrong and it’s as simple as that. Therefore, I wish to expose you, the reader, to a mesmerizing level of verbal detail in recounting the most awesome scenes of what the subtitle states: blood, gore, extreme violence and disturbing images. It isn’t a social commentary on the depiction of brutality in America or anywhere else in the world, a deeply philosophical take on human aggression or anything but a straightforward project with a specific aim: frightening and horrific things. Put simply, it was something I thought of doing and I did it. J

There is however a strong case for making certain points here and again, which I do. This is because to a lot of people there is something to be said for those who make and those who watch not just horror but films that carry such elements. To them, anyone who makes or views such things must have something wrong upstairs, a sickness of some kind. Truth is, that may go for a number of cases worldwide but at the same time it’s not explicitly indicative, not an absolute. Many people who film, write, watch and/or study horror or similar genres are stable, moral people who simply like a good jolt now and again with perhaps a touch of grimness for a thrill.

Now, I’ll familiarize you with some of my abbreviations. A film’s Q number is the total amount of qualifying scenes: i.e., scenes including elements directly of or indirectly relevant to the four specs in the subtitle: blood, gore, extreme violence and/or disturbing images. Individual scenes are rated from one blood drop (mild: a shotgun wound or a stabbing) to five (extreme: spilled guts, rooms full of blood, large-scale killing.) A number of entries, however, have ratings that don’t fit within five drops and are represented ããããã which signifies drops that have burst because they can’t adequately hold the scene. Called a splash, it automatically translates as two points for the AR. Unlike the basic scale, the AR runs to ten drops. The rating is determined by taking the total number of drops for the film, dividing it by 5 (the full scale), rounding the figure (.1 to .4 are rounded down, .5 to .9 up) and allowing for any special circumstances discussed early in the film’s write-up that might add additional points either because of splashes or the conceptual horror involved in what is being done: i.e. the very idea of what is happening in a given scene, is worth it. Killing children, chopping up animals and assorted other acts earn extra points because of the very thought (cf. The Cell, High Tension.) In cases where many blood/gore situations are mentioned in one paragraph because they all occur in a single scene, the rating is for the collection. JFF = just for fun and signifies a relevant factoid.

Each scene is accompanied with a timestamp hours:minutes:seconds, just like the clocks on DVD players. Now, often marks are very specific and are the exact moments at which the mayhem starts and so, for those who wish to employ them to their fullest, they might consider going back a few moments to leave room for the build-up to the payoff. Stamps are colored red if the scene involves B & G and black if it’s only severe violence being discussed. Special Note: timestamps are for the release described and might vary in other cuts (i.e. Special Editions) and formats like VHS or Laserdisc. Some scenes might not be present at all in cases of rated edits of films for which an uncensored version is available. When possible, uncut, extended, un-rated etc. versions are used.

The first button, BLOODY INTRO, is this page and brings you back to the alphabetized title listing and the oft-used abbreviations.

#2, GORY FILTERS: AR, leads directly to the Average Rating filter that enables you to go to one-drop flicks, five, eight or the limit of ten. A drop-down menu unfolds with Qs, Heap which leads to the films with the top eleven Q numbers and a digest of the Eleven Worst Movies Ever Made, the eight films so bloody, gory and outrageously violent that they break the bank of a maximum AR of 10 and are listed separately along with their respective ER values, their Extended Ratings which give the exact value obtained by the typical operation used to assess the AR. All the asterisks told viewers in the past on this site was that the film couldn’t be expressed in 10 drops or less. Now, the ER tells exactly by how much the film blew past that scale. Also on the same page is a digest of the bloodiest single scenes on the entire site, the ones that couldn't be expressed by even five drops. Too under Gory Filters: AR is Deadly Directors. Now don't make me have to tell you what that means. :) These indeces are only for the clinically morbid, the terminally hooked on suffering and severe warped-ness. Such it takes, however, to have written such a thing in the first place…

Button #3, AHistory-Amity, leads to the first half of the indexed individual pages, the scrunched titles describing the bounds of what's contained on those pages: A History of Violence to The Amityville Horror [R]; American Psycho to Blade; Blade II to The Brothers Grimm; Brotherhood of the Wolf to Chopping Mall; Chupacabra Terror to Cube; Cube 2: Hypercube to Dead Birds; Dead Meat to Doom; FFC's Dracula to Event Horizon; Evil Dead to The Fly [R]; The Fly II to Friday the 13th VIII; (F13IX) Jason Goes to Hell to The Gore Gore Girls; Gothika to Hellraiser 2: Hellbound; Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth to Hollow Man; Hostel to Infection; Irreversible to Kill Bill Vol. 2; Killer Klowns from Outer Space to Madhouse; The Mangler to Mummy 2: The Mummy Returns.

#4, Nailgun-Nmare7, takes you to The Nailgun Massacre to The Nightmare on Elm Street 7; Once Upon a Time in Mexico to Phantasm 4: Oblivion; Phantoms to The Prophecy II; Pulp Fiction to Ricochet; Robocop to Scream; Serial Mom to Silent Hill; Silver Bullet to Starship Troopers 2: HOTF; Street Trash to Terminator 2: Judgment Day; Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines to The 13th Warrior; The Toolbox Muders [R] to The Unborn; Un Chien Andalou to Virus; Wishmaster to Zipperface and Single Serving Scenes, or films with only a single bloody/gory scene. Simple, isn't it?

#5, Lethal Links, takes you to dozens of eerie, morbid, disturbing or otherwise appropriate locations on the web.

At this point, the only thing left is to get yourself a full meal and send it down to your stomach while you read up on exploding bodies, gouged eyes, floods of entrails, savage beatings, impalements, dismemberments, vehicle crashes, chemical accidents, extreme torture, people being carved up like jack-o’-lanterns and a whole lot more.

Pre-reading note: There are a number of spoilers in these pages. Surprise twists, shocking endings, plot developments and the like are laid bare but only when unavoidably necessary. Though secrets are revealed, I have done my level best to preserve as much of the surprises therein. This warning of course goes only for those who haven’t seen a particular film listed. If you’ve seen one of the films here, feel free to look it up. If not, you should skip to the next one and come back after you’ve seen it. I’m thinking of your viewing experience and the filmmaker’s right to have their work kept hidden until their cinematography, narrative tricks or similar efforts reveal it.