YEAR 2002 directed by andrzej sekula

STARRING kari matchett, geraint wyn davies, grace lynn kung

Qs: 3.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:55:55.  Our pal Jerry, after a tense sequence with the razorsphere, is caught and thoroughly…atomized is the only word.  His right arm is cut off and one of the points of the sphere rips through his chest before dicing him and then dicing the diced pieces and so on.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:22:30.  Her life in jeopardy, Kate takes Simon’s knife from him and stabs him in the left eye with it.  Moments later we see him, aged dramatically, with a swollen and permanently deformed eye.  All over him is the blood of the many victims he took down in the time between when Kate stabbed him and when he found them again.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:26:42.  Opening the last door, Kate puts her hand through the space into the world beyond.  As she does this, we see through her hand in a surreal sort of color X-ray.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2004 directed by ernie barbarash

STARRING zachary bennett, david huband, stephanie moore

Qs: 5.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       “THAT WASN’T WATER” 0:03:50.  If you agree that the opening sequence to the original is horrifying, this one will galvanize you.  It outstrips the original for pure goriness.  A man in the original’s position steps into a cube.  The minute he moves, sprayers deploy and soak the man with what he thinks is water.  Convinced it is much-needed hydration, he greedily sucks it up and licks it off his fingers and arms.  Eventuallly he sees, but too, too late: that wasn’t water.  The flesh on his right arm starts to turn into a thick, translucent gel.  Scratching feverishly at the back of his hand, in no time he digs enough into himself to expose musculature and tendons.  A long, wide sheet of skin peels away from the underside of the same arm just like stripped wallpaper.  The gore of his melting body starts to splatter onto his feet and the floor of the cube.  As the acid continues to work, his skin starts to burn and, in a stroke of almighty fear and out-and-out terror, he starts to pull at his cheeks, coming away with handfuls of his decomposing face (cf. Poltergeist.)  Eventually losing the battle entirely, he starts to melt down his legs, his pants turning into conduits for the human sludge pouring through them.  Finally, reduced to a skeleton dripping with molten gore, the collection of bones collapses, his skull splashing in the slimy puddle that once was his body.  SR: ããããã

N       0:23:48.  Erroneously determining a room to be safe, Bartok ventures in.  The bolts in the walls of the room start to unwind, leaking an oily substance down the wall.  The heads of the bolts fly off toward the other side of the room and magnetically stick, a long, thin wire trailing from it across the room and down the shaft of the bolt.  Numerous others fly around Bartok’s body, around his neck, legs, arms and so forth until he’s strung up like a scarecrow.  The screws then rewind, pulling the wires taut, cutting him up into a dozen pieces.  A dramatic shot of his severed midsection with accordingly cut organs in full view caps off this lovely sequence.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:44:04.  Almost surviving the cube, arriving at the exit, Owen is asked his name and then if he believes in God.  Answering no, fiery jets are ignited beneath him and he’s toast.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:58:50.  At some point, Jellico caught a virus which consumes the skin of her lower face and neck, presumably down inside her clothes and on down her chest.  The progression is far advanced, recognition difficult.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:02:30.  After being betrayed and thrown into a clearly unsafe cell by Haskell, Meyerhold watches as every door in the room covers over with a strange device, soon revealed to be some sort of energy amplifier.  They power up and pump their overloaded frequencies into the room and in no time, Meyerhold’s body explodes in a bloody blast.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2002 directed by david jacobson

STARRING jeremy renner, bruce davison, artel kayàru

Qs: 4.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:10:42.  Jeffrey’s Asian friend, now rendered completely unconscious, lies before him while he powers up an electric drill.  We know exactly what for – there’s only one thing you do with a drill.  Lovingly flattening out a section of his hair, Jeffrey bores into his skull, his unwitting subject utterly out of the sorts necessary to realize he’s being drilled into.  Jeff’s hair blows around a bit while he coolly encourages the bit deeper into the skull.  Powering down the tool, Jeff reaches into his pal’s hair and picks up some of the blood on his fingertips before carrying him to the bedroom.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:28:17.  After a considerably tense and well-choreographed scene of curiosity, cross-questioning, accusations, defensiveness and sundry other things, the straining tension set up by Jeffrey’s grandparents badgering him to see what’s in the box and what he was going to do with the mannequin cracks shortly after he finally convinces them to leave.  Now, it’s not hard to figure out what was in the box, it can be only so many things, but for those simply skipping through I won’t say outright, but suffice it to say it’s something that I wouldn’t want my grandparents seeing either.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:12:10.  The wrestler Jeffrey picked up starts to leave when moral questions of what types of people it’s O.K. to have sex with start turning discomfortingly freaky.  He makes it just down the hallway before Jeff kills him with one blow to the head with a small hand weight.  Blood pools on the hardwood floor while Jeff pokes at it like with the Asian man earlier.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:23:22.  After Rodney’s tearful confession of sorts, we cut back to Jeff when he was forcing himself to cut up the wrestler.  Blood is all over the floor before him and all on his hands figuratively and literally.  At 1:23:48 we have a wider shot of the entire gory scene as Jeff packs the parts into a black trash bag, gallons of blood spilled out onto the tiles.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:36:25.  While it’s not immediately clear what he’s doing, Jeff draws a knife down the chest of the body of another of his victims, reaching far up inside him, appearing to glean some sort of pleasurable impulses from doing so.  No blood or organs are seen for some strange reason, possibly because it was just a bizarre fantasy.

YEAR 1993 directed by george a. romero

STARRING timothy hutton, amy madigan, michael rooker

Qs: 6.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:04:17.  After suffering some sort of seizure after getting off the bus, Thad is rushed to surgery where doctors remove a portion of his skull to get a look-see at what may be causing the trouble.  What lies beneath makes a nurse sick, forcing her to reel and seriously consider vomiting.  It doesn’t so much alarm, per se, as it does severely confuse the life out of the doctors who managed to contain themselves.  Poking at an ostensible clot, one of the doctors inadvertently coaxes open – get ready – an eye.  Pupil-less, iris-less, just the white, is a human eye, embedded in Thad’s brain.  No wonder he had weird visions and seizures, huh?  Anyhow, the squeamish nurse who managed to gather enough together to stay in the room freaked and bolted for the door when the mutant eye came on the scene.  Very calmly, with a professional equanimity unparalleled in my book, the doctor who prodded the eye into opening diagnoses the situation as an absorbed twin, an unborn fetus assimilated into the developing body of the one who managed to escape.  He identifies the evident eye, a nostril and two small teeth (one of which he rather nonchalantly remarks has a small cavity).  SR: SSSSS

N       0:39:00.  Police at the door to question him burst in with the expectedly cantankerous landlady.  The signature buzzing of flies around a fresh corpse as well as the gruesome sight of Mr. Crawford greet them.  We don’t see what happened, but we do see blood running down the corpse’s right leg, pooling in strange shapes under the chair and the message the sparrows are flying again written in his blood on a nearby wall.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:49:40.  After hitting Miriam Cowley, Thad’s agent’s ex-wife, in the face with something, we never see what, George drags her to the sofa where he tells her she’s going to make a phone call to Thad Beaumont.  Apparently dissatisfied with her compliance, certainly unhappy about something, George cuts Miriam’s other cheek and silently tolerates her screaming.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:17:13.  Capping off a mad fit of automatic writing, Thad stabs himself in the hand with the pencil he was using to rattle off George’s thoughts on why he wanted to continue writing.  At George’s place, he sports a similar injury except it’s in his right hand as opposed to Thad’s left.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:23:02.  After slashing the doctor’s throat, George slowly lets his body to the ground so as not to alert Thad to his presence.  Blood spurts in pulses down the doorjamb as George sets the dying man down gently.  Also, the “cut,” if that’s what it is, on George’s face beneath his left eye is worsening, opening wider each time we see it.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:53:20.  The goodbye sequence for George Stark is remarkable.  An almighty, otherworldly spate of killer sparrows peck hundreds of holes in the walls of Thad’s study before spilling inside in an effusion of unnatural proportions.  Starting with his already falling-apart face, they proceed to peck and bite chunks of his flesh off, tearing it away in places as they swarm about, a relentless flock of soul-carriers bent on taking this one back with them.  By 1:55:00, the flurry of murderous birds have all but stripped George’s face of flesh and tissue, his head little more than a screaming skull with a few bits and pieces of himself left in place.  Continuing to nibble and destroy though very nearly out of flesh to devour, the avian horde starts breaking apart George’s bones, cracking pieces from his skull, his ribs and his arms and taking them away.  After a while, what remains of George is nothing at all but barely connected vertebrae, ribs and select other bones still gleaming with tatters of gore.  SR: SSSSS

N       Bumped from a 3.2 (rounded to 3) to a 4 because of several shots of George’s face as he gradually loses composition (which starting another book was supposed to cure) and an earlier sequence that didn’t merit mentioning elsewhere in which George slit Rick’s throat and left him to die in his luxurious living quarters.

YEAR 2002 directed by jUAme balagueró

STARRING anna paquin, lena olin, iain glen

Qs: 3.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:40:58.  You have to step-frame to see it, but while Mark’s unraveling and chopping potatoes faster than a machine, a bloody hand slaps against a window pane for all of two frames; at 0:41:03 also for two frames there’s a pair of red-gloved hands cleaning off a knife in what appears to be a bathroom, similar color streaked on the walls; at 0:41:04 it returns for four frames; a blood-soaked hand slams down into the shot; at 0:41:11 a glimpse of a red-painted faucet and at 0:41:23 the hands on the glass return.  When things restore, Mark has somehow in his frenzy cut himself and badly, blood dripping furiously from his cloth-covered wound.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:30:48.  Regina jams the blade into her father’s throat in a flash, red spurting from the site.  We’ve seen this kind of operation before in Anaconda, if you remember.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:32:47.  Every wall, every surface in fact, that Regina passes on her way upstairs is streaked with…  Actually, when she comes back downstairs, everything there is drenched with it – the walls in the kitchen, the living room, everywhere.  SR: SSSSS

feature only

YEAR 1993 directed by leif jonker

STARRING gary miller, michael gisick, randall aviks