YEAR 1994 directed by tobe hooper

STARRING ted levine, robert englund, daniel matmor

Qs: 8.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       I don’t care what critics and nay-saying nincompoops claim – this movie is cool and a horror classic.

N      0:03:27.  After cutting her hand on a switch to the Hadley-Watson speed ironer she was working on, a run-in with two men nearly costs the young Sherry her life.  Her arm is covered in her blood and a spatter of it is on the machine from when it first happened.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:09:45.  As one can expect in a film with this title, somebody’s getting mangled and it isn’t going to be pretty.  The fact that Tobe Hooper’s directing assures it.  The fact also that it’s from an original story by Stephen King only adds.  Anyhow, the elderly Mrs. Frawley, who was frightened by a rude wake-up call to get back to work by the overseeing foreman Stanner, reaches rather intelligently into the tight space formed by the safety bar and the belt beneath for one of the EZY gel antacid pills she was trying to take when he scared her.  Her hand, as one might have predicted, gets caught and the woman is dragged inside the machine and crushed, ground and rolled like a cigarette, splattering the machinery and present company with fountains of blood as the rollers draw her further and wrench the very life from her body.  Bloody sheets being folded at the time pop out from the other end to the staggering horror of Mr. Stanner.  The idea of a woman being, well, mangled completely to death in an industrial accident is worth a point.  SR: SSSSS Special Note: in the alternate version of this sequence in the special features menu, extra shots are given showing Mrs. Frawley’s head as its slowly being sucked in and crushed like an orange in a juicer.

N      0:14:46.  Lasting only a handful of frames (you might have to run your player on slow or step-frame if you can), a graphic shot of what was left of Mrs. Frawley appears, courtesy of the flash camera the “picture-man” is using.  Amid a solid pile of gore is a right hand and a sorely mashed skull, teeth either missing entirely or broken off at the gum line.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:15:10.  Again, for the same fleeting duration, we see the remains of Mrs. Frawley.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:21:02.  In a rapid montage we are shown snapshots of the folding mechanism slapping Mrs. Frawley’s remains in the center of the machine.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:11:55.  In a valiant attempt to shut down The Mangler, Mr. Stanner gets his left hand caught in the machine and slowly crushed like grapes in a wine press.  In a fit of sheer survival instinct, Stanner pleads for one of the technicians on site to chop his arm off with the fire axe rather than let all of him fall victim to the bloodthirsty machine.  SR: SSSSS Special Note: as with the Mrs. Frawley sequence, an alternate version is shown with only a sprinkling of extra frames showing Mr. Stanner’s bleeding stump before he finally dies of massive blood loss.

N      1:28:17.  This scene’s a twofer.  First, we see the mangled remains of Lin Sue whom Mark threw over his shoulder into the works.  Second, after Detective Hunton clocks Mr. Gartley and he falls onto the machine, we see him get folded up onto himself, almost flat, from the mechanical legs up, the old goat screaming all the way.  SR: SSSSS Special Note: in the alternate version (the third and last on the disc,) extra seconds of Mr. Gartley being treated like one of his sheets show his progressively smaller body spurting blood all over the machinery.

N      1:34:38.  Having uprooted itself from the factory floor, the murderous Mangler chases down Det. Hunton, Mark and Sherry.  Catching Mark, it snatches the lower half of his body off, his stump spurting blood like crazy.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2005 directed by matt cunningham and erik gardner

Qs: 9.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:04:17.  Hadley cuts his right hand on the machine he’s restoring.  It immediately sucks in the red and starts whirring to life.  When he tries to retrieve a wrench that it was about to pull in, it grabs his arm and starts chewing it up, splattering his face with his blood.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:18:01.  JFF: cameo by director Jeff Burr, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III.  He’s the working class man mowing the lawn while Hadley kidnaps another victim.

N      0:17:50.  Jamie frantically searches under her bed while Hadley strangles her for something to defend herself.  She finds a high heel shoe and jams it in Hadley’s left ear.  At the mark he pulls it out, red running down the side of his face.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:27:20.  “Alejandro” flicks on a light in the disappointing house he and his son had been casing.  He reports that there’s nothing to be found in there, but he misses the multiple bloody handprints streaked across the wall just behind him.  At 0:31:23, it hits.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:57:37.  Hadley washes up at the bathroom sink and inspects in the mirror the worsening effects on his skin of where Gwen clawed him earlier.  Poking at it and then grabbing hold of a section, he pulls off a gross chunk and drops it into the sink.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:04:05.  Hadley feeds Mike to the deadly machine.  It stabs and gouges, cuts and carves, slices and dices poor Mike into a bloody mess.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:05:55.  Hadley opens a valve in the machine after it ground Mike and fills a jar with a dark red but slightly transparent substance, like bloody water.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:14:00.  Hadley feeds his own daughter to the hellish machine.  It gobbles her up until nothing’s left, splattering her dad’s face with ounces of red.  Jamie meanwhile forces herself to slide down the offal duct to wherever it led her.  She pops out the other end in a sloppy pile of erstwhile people, the leavings neither the machine nor Hadley ingested.  Shortly, Hadley gets curious and heads downstairs, right to where Jamie was hiding.  Back in the gore-tube she goes, coming out of the bloody conduit of entrails once again when he leaves.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:18:15.  Hadley takes his hand away from his face at which time we see what happened to him when Jamie swiped him – his upper jaw broke it half and is now hanging loosely in his skull and much of the skin of his right cheek has come apart.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:18:20.  Jamie tries to escape, but Hadley has her by the arm.  At the mark they both get sucked into the grinding wheels and slashing blades, within being cut, stabbed, mutilated and sliced apart, red soaking the walls and pouring down the hoses wound about the machine.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1976 directed by john schlesinger

STARRING dustin hoffman, laurence olivier, fritz weaver

Qs: 7.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:08:09.  The challenger in the road rage road race is hanging over the steering wheel, bleeding from various places, not a few of which probably came from flying glass.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:26:00.  Scylla drops in on LeClerc in his theater box as promised.  Only, there’s one thing LeClerc didn’t promise – that he would be simply propped up in his seat, his throat slit wide.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:29:58.  A man sneaks up behind Scylla and tries to strangle him with a wire.  He puts his hand up to block it from reaching his throat.  The man pulls the wire tight enough that blood starts to spurt from his hand and down his chest and arm as he struggles with the attacker.  As the sequence continues, the flow is increased indicating that the wound was much worse than we were shown.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:00:00.  The stabbed and bleeding Scylla arrives at Levy’s apartment.  He collapses on the floor, red continuing to flow from under him and soon dies in his brother’s arms.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:44:40.  Levy satisfyingly shoots Janeway in the gut and then in the head.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:50:37.  Szell slits the throat of a man who recognized him with a blade ejected from his right sleeve.  To cover, he calls for help, saying the man needs a doctor, which is easily apparent.  SR: SSSSS

N      2:00:28.  This film comes to an expectedly tense climax with a surprising dénouement.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1996 directed by tim burton

STARRING jack nicholson, glenn close, danny devito

Qs: 3.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      It would be exhausting and in point of fact unnecessary to list every occasion on which an alien’s head exploded in a slimy green burst inside their helmets and the ways in which victims die at the end of the aliens’ death-rays is cartoony and not gruesome.

N      0:00:32.  No, it’s not a mistake – the timestamp is right.  The very first thing the film opens with is scary.  I was 13 when I first saw this sequence in theaters on the big screen.  (My b-day is in December and I hadn’t yet turned 14, for the nitpickers.)  It was quite disturbing because of the general concept then, and it still is now.  A Lockjaw resident is chatting with a man on a tractor when they see a rather bright glow on the horizon at the end of the dirt road they were at the corner of.  The glow gets brighter and the men notice the pervasive scent of cooked hamburger.  The glow turns into a blinding light and the scent is straight up the men’s noses.  What it is shocked me then, that initial discomfort remaining today.  It turns out that the intense light and the incredible smell were coming from a dense herd of cattle running by – on fire.  Evidently they ran (stampeded?) afoul of one of the alien ships that promptly set them alight.  Terrified and burning, the kine were merely attempting to escape the pain.  Mooing and pounding the ground all the way, it was an unsettling sight then for me as it is now.  The central notion of setting an entire herd of cattle on fire and watching as the scared and imperiled animals run for their lives earns an extra point for the film.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:04:00.  A sumptuous woman Press Sec. Jerry Ross invited up to his room bites his index finger off when he tries to fish out a piece of gum she appears to be chewing on and spits it into the fish tank where the occupants poke at it.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:29:40.  Waxing diplomatic, The President tries his most eloquent to establish an accord with the Martian people.  The right hand of the leader comes off upon a handshake, a wily, serpentine spike-type device wriggling around furiously from the wrist.  The President tries his darnedest to let go of the whacko hand before it races around his body and clings to his back, shooting the spike device through his chest.  When his body collapses, the spike telescopes into a flagpole for Mars.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1986 directed by stephen king

STARRING emilio estevez, pat hingle, laura harrington

Qs: 6.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:01:35.  The inevitable cameo appears right off the bat: King appears as a harmless man trying to get money from a temperamental ATM.

N      0:03:10.  A pretty cool and destructive sequence on a drawbridge starts at the mark when switches in the control room go out of control and signals for the parts of the bridge to rise and separate get sent even though no humans are in the loop.  One man’s truck stops right on the break; a motorcyclist goes down and rides the bridge down in the ocean; a car skids into another vehicle and the female passenger breaks through the windshield; a van with a overtly visible logo for AC/DC on the side spins wheels and burns rubber futilely as it slides sideways.  The man who stopped on the break revs things, though why he didn’t just, gee, get out of the truck is beyond me, but his rear axle falls off before the whole rig plummets; another motorcycle rider slams into a car and gets thrown through one of its windows; a van piles on a car; a jeep rolls up on another car; the watermelon man’s load is spilling and splattering all over everything; the truck itself flips over on a station wagon and the jeep finally turns upside-down and at 0:06:10 the last truck falls and the carnage on the bridge is over.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:11:11.  I’m not making this up: one of the names on the timecards at (Pat’s) is Gene Poole.  For real.

N      0:11:29.  An electric knife goes berserk and saws into Wanda June’s right wrist.  The scene gets two points because for one the blade looked quite deep in her arm and because as it spins on the floor, it slings her blood in dotted lines.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:14:12.  A little league coach gets shot in the sweet spot twice and then hit directly in the head by a ballistic soda can that causes an illogically large but nonetheless bloody injury on his forehead while the vending machine-turned-cannon fires on innocent kids, felling them like trees.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:20:30.  It’s not clear how this guy became a corpse, but bloody handprints are everywhere and it’s quite obvious he’s a stiff.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:32:24.  The diesel-blinded Duncan gets splattered all over the grill of a wild truck.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:11:33.  A vehicle that’s essentially a gun on wheels pulls up outside the truck stop and sprays ammo for a spell, wiping out four more victims – make that five when Wanda goes.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2002 directed by lucky mCkee

STARRING angela bettis, jeremy sisto, anna farris

Qs: 13.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:00:39.  Young May holds her hand over her eye, blood seeping between her fingers.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:14:34.  The man who came in earlier, enraged and confused by the apparent loss of one of his dog’s legs seems like a complete nut, until the leg actually turns up and he brings it in, torn off at the shoulder, various parts visible inside.  Rated 3 drops instead of 2 because the notion of a dog having had its leg ripped off and seeing it by itself, no animal in sight, is rather unpleasant.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:38:52.  May and Adam start watching a deceptively innocent film he made in college before he dropped out.  Two souls, on a blanket, on a wonderful date, start kissing and touching…and biting fingers off, reveling in the squirting blood.  The girl licks on, for about a second, the boy’s index finger before snapping it off and chewing on it.  He’s just as thrilled as she is, even as he gnaws on her arm and eats away at it like a chicken wing.  By the conclusion of the sick little picture, both of our morbid participants are soaked in their own and the other’s blood, dancing around each other as if in an animal face-off before continuing to revel in their bloodiness.  It’s B & W, but two points are for the idea of two teenage picnickers dining on each other instead of conventional food.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:42:07.  While getting frisky, May bites Adam’s lower lip, later rubbing the blood he picked upon his fingertips across her cheek and down her neck.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:43:46.  Back at the animal hospital, May works with the doctor on holding a cut open on a cat, her job being dabbing blood out of the way.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:55:11.  In a mini-psychotic fit, May kills Polly’s cat, Lupe, by throwing the heavy clay ashtray the girl at the daycare center made for her.  Blood is visible on the toilet bowl as are the rear legs of the cat and the shattered pieces of pottery.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:59:12.  This scene is considerably disturbing and should be watched only by viewers with solid constitutions.  May brings her best friend, her mother’s doll, to a kind of show-and-tell at the daycare with the blind children.  After telling them that she always stays in the case because she’s very fragile, the children fight her for the caged doll.  The case falls and the glass shatters out all over the floor.  Petey, the “main” character in the group, announces in a Children of the Corn sort of way (it’s a stretch, I know, but it’s the idea of children running things, which, in this shot, it looked like they were, as if preparing for an uprising of some kind) that “she’s out!”  They drop to the ground and, with bare knees and hands, start crawling about the place, cutting themselves badly all over, bloody hand and knee prints quickly covering the tile floor.  The injuries only intensify as the manic mini-psychopaths continue to roll around in the shattered glass, puncturing themselves with the shards and bleeding on each other as they slowly rip May’s doll apart in her arms.  Later, with a traumatized sort of shaking and twitchy nervousness, she tries to reassemble the bloodied pieces of her destroyed friend.  The next scene starts with her lying on her couch, the bare parts of the blood-spotted doll laying across her eyes, the body of Polly’s dead cat on her chest, held and being petted like alive.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:01:55.  After her peaceful rest, May takes the doll parts off of her face and looks at herself in her mirror.  The glass massage she manically gave herself at the daycare has cut her face in many places and caused her eyes to look badly bloodshot.  In a separate thought but in the same scene, the broken body of the dead cat becomes an object of nostalgic feelings as she “misses petting her pretty fur.”  Evidently, she missed having her room not smell like decaying animals as she sprays the deceased feline with a nameless deodorizer.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:05:07.  A man May picks up from the bus stop opens her freezer and finds the plastic-wrapped body of the cat.  Understandably disturbed, he definitively tells her he’s in no way going to be her friend.  He doesn’t have a chance to leave as May notices a pair of scissors nearby and proceeds to use them to stab him through his left hand and then nail that hand to his head with the protruding blades.  With bloodied hands she lights a cigarette and takes us through a montage of morbidity, going through all the foregoing nasty scenes: stabbing the guy in the hand and head; biting Adam’s lower lip and rubbing the blood on herself; the torn dog’s leg; opening up the cat at the hospital; her cut-up face; Adam’s sick little picnic film and killing Lupe.  The sequence ends with her laying a sheet over the bus stop guy’s body, a pool of red spreading on the tile floor.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:13:05.  Asserting (erroneously) that May would never hurt her, Polly finds out quickly that the belief wasn’t true.  May slits her throat on both sides with pilfered scalpels from the animal hospital.  Blood flows down her neck and between her fingers and she grasps, too late, what’s happening.  Later, at her place, a partially covered bloody body stains the rug beneath her and the white parts of the couch in mid-frame looks like the slaughter wasn’t confined to one spot, but spread out across the upholstery, ending up in the heap on the floor.  After cruelly taunting Ambrosia, Polly’s favorite catch, May admires her “beautiful legs,” an acknowledgement of which, by now, we know the deeper meaning.  Swiftly stabbing her in both sides of her head with the scalpels she just used to kill Polly, May watches her source of beautiful legs fall to the floor, her blood mixing in wild swirls with the spilled milk that ended up being her last beverage.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:19:15.  When May shows up at Adam’s, we realize she’s on a one-night scavenger hunt.  Finding her hands (a.k.a. Adam) with another girl wasn’t the issue – finding his hands with another girl did him in for her.  She stabs his latest fling in the side of the neck with the scalpels she already committed two bloody murders with, arterial spray landing on Adam as May performs her last killing of necessity to gather the final pieces of her personal puzzle.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:19:27.  It’s only twelve seconds after the last, true, but it starts an entirely different scene, so it’s listed separately.  May arrives back at her place, lugging behind her bloody cooler.  Opening it up (though it was a foregone conclusion what was in it), we see its exact contents: many parts of various human beings wrapped in cloth squares.  The one we see her open is Adam’s left hand, the bones visible in the wrists upon first reveal.  Going to her red-fingerprinted freezer and removing the body of the dead cat, May washes the blood literally off her hands as she replays the episode of killing him in her mind.  We see her washing the blood off of a severed leg (Ambrosia’s) before we see her laying parts out on the floor (we don’t yet see exactly how) and doing what looks like making an outfit for her impending creation.  As clothing continues to fly (and I could swear that’s Lupe’s fur she’s cutting up), we see her stitching Adam’s hands to who-knows-who’s arms with a conspicuously thick black thread.  She then constructs a mask for somebody’s head that she sets atop someone else’s torso, likely the memorably-coiffed soul she met at the bus stop.  Stitching the skin from his and whoever used to own the head’s neck, May lays out the pieces that spell her name of the ashtray she used to kill Lupe, playing with the anagrams: yam, Amy.  Her construction complete, we are shown an overview of May’s labor of love: a perfect patchwork person, every part eminently desirable.  SR: SSSSS

N      “THE ONLY PAIR OF EYES” 1:26:14.  It comes full circle and in a most horrific way.  Remember my caveat about solid constitutions with the blind children at the daycare?  For those who boldly traipse through the stomach-churning gore and violence of the films listed here that they have not seen, the warning of not reading write-ups of films you hadn’t seen would bear much relevance.  As it is, it’s a heart-stopper in its portrayal of a woman completely gone over the edge, never, ever to return.  I didn’t pick up on things as quickly as maybe I should have, but when I got it…  Dressing up her creation, her grisly handiwork, May applies eyes to it, setting them on the mask she made for the head of whoever-it-was.  Apparently dissatisfied with this, she nervously puts her glasses on them.  This still proving ineffective, the narrative catches up with where we were introduced to her at the film’s opening.  I can safely guarantee that you, by now, have gleaned a wickedly accurate picture of the pure psychosis about to be unleashed in the most outrageous of ways.  Again, I didn’t pick up exactly what was happening in May’s mind as far as the character’s eyes went until she ripped the left one away and walked over to her vanity.  Then, all at once, like the ground after falling off a bridge, it hit me.  Every part had to be just perfect.  Clearly, they all were, farmed from the ideal sources.  All but the eyes.  Obviously neither Polly nor Ambrosia’s, neither Adam nor the bus stop guy’s were going to cut it.  So, at her mirror, she resolves to take care of that with the only pair of eyes she knew that would fill the bill: her own.  She stabs herself straight in the right eye, dropping the scissors while she bleeds between her fingers and down her arm, screaming like the world was ending.  Of course, I don’t conjecture that jamming a pair of scissors in your eye would be a thrilling experience.  As it is, May begs for her creation to see her, laying her real eye where she took its fake one away.  The bulging blood clot in her right socket where her eye was, once upon a time, moves around as if it were an eye itself while she weeps, with her remaining eye, at her conglomeration’s side.  SR: ããããã

YEAR 2004 directed by renny harlin

STARRING val kilmer, christian slater, ll cool j

Qs: 13.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:02:52.  Sara looks through several crime scene photos of murder victims.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:05:25.  Sara bursts into a room marked private wherein she finds dozens of animal bodies suspended from the ceiling by hooks amidst the frenzied buzzing of hundreds of flies.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:07:21.  You have to look quick to see it, but in the LL corner, you can see a grapefruit-sized hole opened up in a man’s head offering an unblocked view of the interior of his skull.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:25:53.  Sara finishes brushing her teeth and after she turns on the light, she sees in the mirror the image of a dead cat hung in the middle of the room.  It’s wearing a badge on its chest and has a watch stuck up in its mouth.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:28:51.  The group comes upon a simulated crime scene with the body of a woman hung Hellraiser-style from several hooks in her body, a pool of red on the floor below.  Much simulated splatter is behind the counter, suggesting to one of the investigators that the body was moved.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:31:33.  A complex trap sets up the release of much liquid nitrogen that freezes J.D.’s legs, the force of the escaping gas and the below-zero temperatures breaking them apart in large pieces that fall at his disembodied feet.  With no supports, the rest of his body falls backwards and breaks open laterally across the chest like a dropped ceramic statue.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:37:36.  Sara tends to Lucas’s badly injured arm hurt in the explosion on the pier.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:43:39.  Bobby lifts Rafe’s head, thinking maybe he wasn’t awake, and his head falls off his neck, but he doesn’t bleed out – apparently he had been exsanguinated some time ago, the whole volume of his blood used to write hundreds of numbers all over the walls of one of the rooms.  SR: SSS