YEAR 1982 directed by sam raimi

STARRING bruce campbell, ellen sandweiss, hal delrich

Qs: 10.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:36:44.  In a possessed fit of rage, Cheryl stabs Linda in the ankle with a pencil, much red flowing down her heel while she screams in terror.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:43:20.  Shelley, taken over by the demons of the Evil Dead, falls upon Scotty and rakes her nails down the right side of his face.  She wrestles him into the room with Ash wherein he throws her off into the fire, her face and hair burning up.  In rescue mode, fighting for the dwindling vestiges of his former friend, he pulls her out of the flames, the extreme damage already done to her “pretty flesh” including burnt black patches with open, bleeding wounds.  At his neck with a long sword, Scotty pulls a knife from behind him and cuts into her right hand quite deeply.  In a bizarre moment of auto-cannibalism, she starts to gnaw at herself until she chews the hand completely off, throwing it to the floor in a puddle of blood.  In a retaliatory strike of self-preservation, Scotty picks up her sword (with her disembodied hand still clutched around it) and stabs her through the back, much to her displeasure.  Dying before their eyes, Shelly’s body slowly leans back until she’s on the floor, writhing in pain, clutching at the sword stabbed into her.  Almost immediately she starts to spurt a milky liquid from the stump of her arm while blood drools down her face, followed shortly after by the same pasty-white substance that shoots from her mouth.  Thinking she might be dead, Scotty walks through her blood up to her to make sure.  Surprise!  She’s not dead and lurches out at him, a close-up following of her badly destroyed and bloody face.  Knowing what the tape said was the best for her, Ash finds he can’t swing the axe and cut up his friend.  Scotty, however, in a moment of survival instinct, finds he can.  Taking it from Ash, Scotty lashes out at Shelly with the weapon, chopping her other hand off before hacking several times through her left ankle, blood-spouts erupting everywhere as he continues to cut her to gory pieces.  At 0:47:53 we get a shot of the whole scene of savage carnage: at right frame is Shelley’s head, twitching about next to her left arm, which is also twitching.  Twitching too are parts of the rest of her body at left frame, chunks of gore spread liberally overall.  The camera slowly pans up past her twitching right leg to the blood-covered Scotty and the petrified Ash.  We get one more shot of the scene of slaughter before they carry her bloody pieces outside to bury them.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:51:16.  Scotty having gone off to find another way out besides the then-nonexistent bridge, Ash goes in to see how Linda’s doing.  Lifting the sheet to get a peek at her ankle where Cheryl stabbed her, Ash reels when the wound starts to grow and fracture like glass, thick black lines branching out as Linda’s eyes flash open, totally white, and she sits straight up in bed, cackling at him.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:52:38.  Ash tries desperately to get answers from Scotty as to whether or not there existed another way out.  Scotty was apparently severely injured in a terrible attack of some kind, his face badly clawed up and bruised, blood pouring from his mouth as he fights for life.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:58:36.  Linda takes a swipe at Ash’s arm with a dagger, licking the blood lovingly from the blade before rushing him with it again.  At 0:50:39, he pushes her down onto the dagger, the blade punching out through her chest, much blood and that milky white junk erupting from her mouth as she twitches her last.  When Ash drags her body off of Scotty, we can see a steady flow of red coming from his lips as he lies where he fell.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:05:00.  Unable to dismember her with the chainsaw when he had the chance, Ash carries Linda outside to bury her.  After shoveling in the last and patting it flat, Ash dares to turn away.  The interred Linda rises from the grave and claws deep into Ash’s left leg, tearing up the flesh and muscle.  Ash then grabs a giant wooden beam and proceeds to beat her about the head, causing her to spit the mysterious white liquid all over before he finally knocks her down.  Fighting with her a little while longer, Ash finally has the last word when he cuts her head off with a shovel, her decapitated body falling directly on top of him, her severed neck spurting blood all over his face for quite a while.  The legs push against the ground as her body tries to crawl up Ash’s, her head cackling the same skin-crawling laugh she’s been giggling since she turned.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:08:00.  In a horror movie you should never trust a dead body to be dead.  Shelley wrestles with Ash’s shotgun at the window before he pushes her away and shoots at her, thinking he did her in.  She springs to her feet, arcs of blood spurting from her left shoulder as she growls and stumbles mindlessly toward him.  Getting to the front door before her, Ash desperately tries to force it shut, Shelley getting her hand in just before.  Closing the door on it, Ash beats at it twice with the butt of the gun, splats of blood and gore squirting out on the frame.   SR: SSSSS

N      1:09:34.  Ash heads downstairs to see what became of Cheryl.  After slipping down the last few steps, Ash comes to a tied-off part of the plumbing that seems to be leaking red instead of water.  While he stares at the dripping, the pipe breaks and a torrent of pure blood washes over him.  At the same time it begins trickling from the outlets and from the joints between the bricks of the cellar walls, it starts filling up the light bulbs like one would fill a cup.  Later, the bloody bulb blows up while red drips from the end of the split pipe, Ash stepping through a puddle of the same on his way to take care of business with his shotgun and a pocket full of shells.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:15:58.  Remember the rule about dead bodies?  Cheryl appears and grabs at Ash through the door.  He squirms free and fires through at her, blasting a hole in her left cheek, blood spurting from the conspicuously visible tube leading down behind her head (J).  SR: SSSSS

N      “GORY SWAN SONG” 1:16:14.  No sooner than Ash blocked the door than did the dead Scotty rise to battle the last survivor of the Evil Dead.  Looking a bit like a dog (the black nose seals the impression), Scotty lifts Ash high in the air with one arm.  In the strongest image of pain so far revealed, Ash reaches toward Scotty’s face and pushes his eyes into his head with his thumbs, much blood pouring forth from the sockets as Ash continues the gouging.  As Scotty moans, Ash pulls the end of a stake of some kind from his abdomen that pours blood like a waterfall.  Later, though eyeless and smoking, Scotty still isn’t dead, reaching for Ash as he tries to crawl away, Cheryl advancing on him with a long metal rod that she proceeds to beat him in the back several times with.  While desperately reaching for the famed Book of the Dead, the bloodied Scotty starts to bite into Ash’s leg as Cheryl continues beating him with the rod.  Reaching the book and throwing it into the fire, everything temporarily stops, Cheryl’s mouth dripping with a never-before-seen blue substance.  Then starts what I think is the most impressive and laborious sequence in independent horror: Cheryl starts to decompose rapidly, many points on her face starting to break down while giant clumps of her hair slowly slide off her head.  Scotty starts breaking down as well, his face caving in as green things crawl out of him and he starts to wear away, the flesh disappearing at quite a clip right off of their bones.  Ash, his face covered in blood, waits to see what’s going to happen next.  He soon finds out: Scotty’s back starts to twitch under his shirt just before a flow of what looks like creamed corn starts to ooze from his sleeves over his rotted hand.  Once again things fall relatively quiet as Ash checks out the advancing stages of his pals’ decomposition.  Before he can say “Evil Dead” a large arm erupts from Cheryl’s midsection, a gross effusion of gore splattering Ash’s face as the limbs writhes around her body, similar appendages bursting out of Scotty’s back, assorted organs tangled around them.  Soon after, a hole in Cheryl’s throat blows out blood into the room as does a spot on her right leg, the rest of her body continuing to rot on her bones as it falls to the floor alongside Ash.  On impact, Shelly’s skull explodes, her bloody brains splattering poor Ash’s already considerably red-soaked face.  Scotty by now has completely broken down, all remaining of his head being clumpy piles of what looks like wet bread and a green slime like pureed avocados, roaches and snakes scuttling overall before the entire mess vanishes in a greenish/yellow chalky splotch, the Evil Dead’s gory swan song.  SR: ããããã

N      Rated 8 because of the following: the mathematical 5.2 + two points for the ultra-vile, super-bloody climax and one for the overall campy horror/comedy feel.

N      This low-budget horror classic pops up just about everywhere: people rent and watch it in The Dead Next-Door, it provided the name for one of the characters in Stephen Norrington’s Death Machine (Raimi) and the name on a bag of ashes a man is filling in Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead.

YEAR 1987 directed by sam raimi

STARRING bruce campbell, sarah berry, ted raimi

Qs: 7.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:17:30.  While the piano plays (unassisted by human hands, naturally), Linda’s corpse unearths itself and dances around for a spell, summoning its severed head back to itself before jaunting off into the darkness.  Confused and frightened, Ash is taken off-guard by Linda’s possessed body’s sudden appearance at one of the boarded-up windows of the cabin.  After trying repeatedly to pull him out into the night, her head rolls back and falls off.  Ash wakes in a rocking chair, thinking it all to have been some weird dream.  Suspicions are dashes and replaced with fear as her head lands in his lap, latches onto his hand and hangs on for the ride while he flails about, bashing the disembodied head against everything in the room in an attempt to get it off.  After several minutes of trying to no avail, Ash runs out to the shed and clamps the head in a vise.  While the head taunts him, Ash promises her that she’s “going down.”  He doesn’t get a chance to make good on that threat as his prized chainsaw is missing, replaced with a chalk outline.  What he doesn’t suspect until it’s almost too late is that Linda’s headless body is brandishing it, bursting in the shed door and swinging the running saw all around her…neck, trying with one of the blind swipes to get Ash.  He successfully deflects it with a crowbar, driving it backwards into the body’s neck, the twice-severed region spurting black blood into Ash’s face.  Pulling the chainsaw free, taking the corpse’s arm with it, Ash drives it down through the demonic head, splattering the door with oodles of blood.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:30:00.  Ash’s possessed hand drags his body toward a meat cleaver, likely with intent on chopping his head in half when it got to it.  The hand doesn’t make it however when its owner pins it to the floor with a large knife.  Pulling the chainsaw’s starter cord with his teeth, Ash courageously cuts off the mutinous appendage in a spray of blood and screams of wild pain.  Later, chasing his independent hand around the cabin, taking aim at it with his shotgun, Ash blows a hole in the wall from which a trickle of red starts to flow along with mournful death moans.  Satisfied, Ash had no idea that out of the hole would erupt an almighty flood of blood that washes over his face and body and covers the cabin floor, having broken out from another three spots on the same wall.  Soon the effusion turns black and reverses itself back in the holes whence it came.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:38:40.  When the possessed Henrietta pops up from the fruit cellar floor after Ash, our intrepid hero stomps down the door on her head.  This causes one of the eyes to pop loose, fly across the room and into Bobbie Joe’s mouth.  She chokes on it for a second before spitting it out, the rest of the group getting busy chaining the cellar door shut.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:45:30.  Ed has turned and started to cause problems immediately, taking a clump of Bobbie Joe’s hair right out of her head.  Ash has had enough and runs to fetch an axe.  Hacking, chopping, cutting, mincing, the green antifreeze-looking blood of the creature splashes and squirts all over the walls in an otherworldly mess.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:03:10.  The possessed Henrietta starts to drag Jake’s body into the cellar with it.  Annie fights for him, trying to drag him back out.  She slowly fails as Henrietta pulls him in almost all the way.  When it’s just his feet left, a bloody geyser splashes all over Annie and gushes out all over the floor of the cabin, the battle for Jake a loss.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:13:00.  While Annie distracts the even further mutated Henrietta, Ash rams the bar of his chainsaw into its gut.  Limbs fly as he hacks off its arms and then its head.  Unfazed, the head continues its taunts: “I’ll swallow your soul!  I’ll swallow your soul!”  He steps on the neck, points his double barrels at it and says: “swallow this,” before blowing it up.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:17:14.  Ash rams the running chainsaw into the eye of the latest creature to reach out and seize him.  This time, the blood color is blue as the severed organ runs a river into the cabin.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1973 directed by william friedkin

STARRING ellen burstyn, max von sydow, linda blair

Qs: 3.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      1:00:42.  Regan walks backwards down the stairs on all fours (the “spider walk”), opening her mouth wide when she reaches the bottom to reveal dripping red.  Note: this scene is visible only in the uncut, unedited edition.  It's featured elsewhere on some discs as "the most incredible scene not in the movie," or something like that.  It indeed is disturbing, but interesting to note that it was performed by a trained contortionist.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:18:47.  Regan stabs herself in a sensitive area repeatedly with a crucifix.  When her mother enters the room, she grabs her head and rubs her face in the bloody area before smacking her across the room and telekinetically moving furniture, turning her head backwards to hurl a final insult.  SR: SSSSS

N      2:01:24.  Father Karras takes a flying leap out of Regan’s window and tumbles down the three flights of concrete steps to his eventual death below.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2004 directed by renny harlin

STARRING stellan skarsgård, izabella scorupco, james d’ arcy

Qs: 14.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:00:50.  It starts instantly with a walk through a real field of blood, corpses and parts of corpses littering a tract of land as far and wide as we can see, the shot thereafter pulling back a considerable distance to reveal what must be thousands of inverted crucifixions, several of the later victims still alive while birds were pecking at them.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:30:32.  A hyena from deeper than the well leapt therefrom and joined several of its own for a savage feast on Joseph’s brother James, biting into him on all places before dragging him off, presumably to their lair for a further feast.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:34:20.  Merrin enters the room where Monsieur Bession was kept and immediately after, blood starts to drip to the floor between Bession’s feet.  When he gets up and takes his hand away, we see the source of the flow was a swastika he carved into his chest with the same what looks like a piece of mirror that he summarily slit his throat with.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:38:30.  Joseph is seated, running his hand over an object concealed by a burlap bag as if petting it.  When Sarah asks to see what it is, my bet is she wished she hadn’t when she found out that it was the head of his brother James, whose eyes open after he’s revealed.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:43:40.  Blood starts to come back up through Joseph’s IV.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:49:02.  A preganancy goes horribly wrong when it turns out after the baby’s delivered that he’s covered in writhing maggots.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:58:12.  Sarah notices a red path from the shower to where she stood looking over Joseph’s bed.  Feeling around in a likely area, she pulls back four fingers that confirm what she feared – the red path was indeed coming from her.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:00:40.  Merrin is summoned when Jeffries doesn’t show and they soon find it was with good reason why: blood, hair, flies and teeth don’t typically lead to good things.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:07:40.  The situation in Jospeh’s room gets bigger than just the issue of his health when his father and a band of Turkana surround his bed, cut his shirt open, put leeches on his skin and threaten to plunge the blade into his heart.  At the mark, the fingers of one man are bent straight backwards on his hand, blood pouring from the sites whereas the rest of the men have their arm and legbones broken out of their skin where they stand, the crew taking the hint and leaving.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:14:00.  When Major Granville bursts through the doors of the church they uncovered, he finds a most grisly sight: a man strung up, hands bound, insides totally hollowed out, gore dripping inside, birds pecking away at the remains and blood dripping all over the altar he was trussed up over.  His spine is completely visible but his ribs are nowhere to be seen and just before Granville orders the body taken down, a bird pecks out a bit more of the man’s left eye.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:17:30.  A man pins a butterfly and thereafter rubs the back of his hand along his forehead, drawing a streak of red.  When all the butterflies in his various cases flap their wings simultaneously, he takes out his gun, points it at the side of his head and the forces stop.  When a creature crawls out of his mouth and then back in, he blasts his brains out.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:23:23.  Merrin breaks into a room where thousands of flies and gallons of blood coat the walls, much of it involved in an insignia of some sort above the bed, more maggots than even flies writhing over everything in sight.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:25:38.  When the Turnkana encounter the British Army, it’s almighty slaugher on both sides when men kill each other indiscriminately, whether or not they were originally on the same side.  Turkana takes down Turkana, British soldier takes down British soldier, both taking down the enemy alike until every man is dead.  Kills include an axe to the skull, washing up a splash of red; a bayonet to the throat, slit throats and scores of direct hits with the soldier’s firepower.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:42:03.  What looks like Sarah’s entire body’s quantity of blood leaks out onto the ground beneath her head while Merrin holds her, unable to help.  SR: SSSSS

N      I’ve done anthology films before (Underworld JA, Fangoria Blood Drive [after Falling Down]), but I’ve never done one where I rated the collection as I have here.  I do so because it is very much qualified for it due to the, well, extreme nature of the first segment and a couple instances in the second.  Simply taking the AR from the two rated shorts and dividing it by 2 yeilded the collective value.

 Dumplings – Short Film Version

directed by fruit chan

Qs: 6.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:03:58.  The gross SFX start with the chef herself cutting something…we know generally what it is, but precisely what we don’t know.  By 0:13:20 however when we see her chopping it again, we know exactly what it is.  The rating is mostly for the very idea.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:17:00.  I can’t say what we’re watching here because it would reveal the contents of the dumplings, but suffice to say it’s veeeery gross.  SFX, visuals, the whole nine yards.  SR: SSSSS

N      “ALL YOU’D WANT TO SEE” 0:19:07.  It’s all you’d want to see, clearly visible of what makes Aunt Li’s dumplings so special.  The horror continues into 0:20:22 when the women are discussing…it…and the wholesome, unbeatable nutrition of…it…while a prime example of…it…sits in a glass bowl.  SR: ããããã

N      0:26:55.  The notorious SFX start here and we see what caused it: blood simply flows over the corner of what could be a table, a counter or…a bus seat.  Two girls disembark, two men board, the one by the window feeling something cold and gross he just sat in.  He investigates and withdraws a handful of blood, having retained a seat-full as well.  We see it came from the girl who previously held the same spot, now bleeding in the road.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:33:00.  Police respond to a bloody incident in room 2103, namely a man whose neck’s been cut open by the woman sobbing in the doorway.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:35:50.  I’ve heard of this done with a bicycle spoke, but I guess a coat hanger, if that’s indeed what it is, can work too.  SR: SSSSS

 Cut

directed by CHAN-WOOK PARK

Qs: 3.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:41:33.  By now we know what the deal is, but this is still a Q for the idea of a woman throwing up that much blood at once.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:11:13.  Three fingers, piano, blender.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:17:10.  Things take a righteous and revolting turn when the captor slips on the wife’s ring and falls in the entanglement of piano wire strung about the room.  The first opportunity she’s had all evening, she bites, and I mean bites, long and hard into his neck, holding for quite a while until he falls to the floor, gushing blood in a big way.  She spits out the mouthful of flesh, blood around her lips, the scene mirroring perfectly the one the film started with, right down to…  After bleeding for a long time from his bite wound, the wife gags for a bit and then vomits a splash of blood all over the floor just beside her, the assailant’s body still bleeding not far.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1997 directed by john woo

STARRING nicholas cage, john travolta, joan allen

Qs: 4.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:34:07.  After outlining Archer’s face in marker, a technician turns on a laser device and begins cutting away along the line.  The mask is put in place and his face is lifted off of his head and transferred to a preservative bath.  If you look quick when they first take it off, you can see the bare muscles and underlying structure of his features.  Later, they do the same for Castor.  Here, the skinless area where the face was is easier to see directly.  They fit Castor’s face onto Archer’s head and shift it around to secure a proper fit, wrinkling and flattening it out like a mask, which essentially it is, to get it to bond to Archer.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:48:04.  For nine frames you can see Castor’s head without his face, having awoken from his deep sleep and realized something was dreadfully wrong.  At 0:48:16 you see it the best they’re going to give it to you, in the reflection of the scientist’s glasses, Castor’s full-on gory facelessness.  He gives the man one guess what he really wants – tit for tat, to be switched with Archer.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:39:12.  Archer (as Troy) accidentally throws Castor’s brother Pollux through a window in the roof of the building, causing him to fall some four stories, going splat on the hard floor of the first level, red running from his cracked skull.  When an FBI agent sees a man whom he thinks is Archer getting distraught over the death, he dares to say: “it’s just Pollux Troy.”  He gets a quick bullet in the head and Troy (as Archer) goes back to mourning.  SR: SSSSS

N      2:08:40.  After a short tussle on the beach, Archer and Castor’s final battle begins with a harpoon gun Archer jams into Castor’s left thigh.  Backing him up against a wall, Archer takes aim and pulls the trigger – but Castor manages to grab the weapon and prevent it from firing.  While Castor realizes it’s over, he takes a shard of glass and starts cutting at his – rather, Archer’s – face, saying that every time he looks in the mirror, he’ll see it.  The real Archer takes a low kick to the private area and forces Castor to release his grip.  The arrow fires and pins him to the wall, marking the actual, real, once and for all end to their long-standing feud.  SR: SSSSS

N      Upgraded to 3 for the fierce episodes of gunplay and several unspecified episodes: when Archer got shot in the very beginning, where a man got his ear shot off and when Archer’s daughter jammed the blade of her butterfly knife into Castor’s thigh and twisted it, just like he told her.