YEAR 1975 directed by jim sharman

STARRING barry bostwick, susan surandon, tim curry

Qs: 2.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:45:08.  Eddie is described in the credits as an “ex-delivery boy.”  With the rock number Hot Patootie, we see what he did to make him an ex-.  Racing his motorcycle around the lab (among other things), Eddie pushes Frank past his limits.  Going into the freezer Eddie burst out of, Frank retrieves a pickax, chases Eddie back into the freezer and hacks away at him.  We don’t see the strikes, but we do see a serious quantity of red flowing out into the lab from the carnage and Frank’s pink gloves are slick with his blood.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:09:35.  After a very uncomfortable dinner scene (it looked like chicken and I’m sure it tasted like it but I assure you it wasn’t) and Dr. Scott’s song, Frank reveals what the group had been dining on the entire time.  SR: SSSSS

N       JFF: this isn’t the only time Meat Loaf meets a terrible end.  Cf. Formula 51.

YEAR 2000 directed by andrzej bartkowiak

STARRING jet li, aaliyah, isaiah washington

Qs: 3.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:14:15.  This isn’t a bloody film by any means, rather an incredible action film compared umpteen times to The Matrix.  It doesn’t have any outright B & G shots, but it does have three distinctly cool CSI-type shots of bad things happening to people.  The first is when the trussed up Han (Romeo) wakes up from being beaten unconscious by men with batons and takes care of business.  At the mark, he handles the last of them, the cinematography shifting into a color X-ray of Han breaking the guy’s right arm, snapping the humerus in half.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:11:14.  Han and Trish put down one of their would-have-been assassins by kicking her backwards onto a large spike.  The shot shifts, like at 0:14:15, into color X-ray mode as the metal jams up through her body into her heart.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:47:25.  Han’s final battle results in a direct kick to the head which resonates like a crack through a glass all the way down his spine, compressing and breaking every vertebrae down to the end, the image shifting once again into the almost psychedelic color X-ray.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2002 directed by craig r. baxley

STARRING nancy travis, matt keeslar, kimberly j. brown

Qs: 4.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       D1 0:17:46.  Emery Waterman receives a grisly premonition regard his impending trip to Rose Red: his once clean and ordered refrigerator turns into a bloody mess, red dripping from, out of and into everything in both the refrigerator portion itself and the freezer.  SR: SSSSS

N       D1 0:57:24.  Joyce accidentally cuts her finger on something when she reaches into her purse for the keys to her office door.  As she’s badgered and berated about tenure and her time at the college, she’s working up the blood on her right hand so it covers her palm and her fingers.  She uses the clean hand and the bloody one to illustrate a point about the world we see and the world beneath it, meshing her fingers and mixing the blood around on both hands before transferring some off onto her accuser’s cheeks and then the door behind him.  SR: SSSSS

N       D1 1:59:14.  JFF: the delivery guy is – you guessed it – Stephen King.

N       D2 0:16:35.  Every door in Rose Red slams shut – including the one Emery’s fingers were busy holding open.  He loses most of the four on his left hand, red covering what’s left.  SR: SSSSS

N       D2 0:20:32.  The birds that congregated on Vic’s body have started to peck at it, drawing blood in many places along his chest.  SR: SSSSS

N       Upgraded to three based on the prevalence of malicious supernatural acts and walking dead.  J

YEAR 2002 directed by james d. r. hickox

STARRING david keith, vanessa angel, john rhys-davies

Qs: 5.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       .  Bloody attack.  SR: SSSSS

N       .  Pig parts.  SR: SSSSS

N       .  Clawed body; ignored pleas.  SR: SSSSS

N       .  Jonathan’s gory parts, leg in trap, flesh chewed up.  SR: SSSSS

N       .  Catherine’s guts ripped out.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1998 directed by steven spielberg

STARRING tom hanks, edward burns, tom sizemore

Qs: 6.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:09:00.  In the slaughter on the beach, we have: an unlucky soldier gets his left leg blown in half; a man’s guts hang over his side (0:11:32); a man dragging an injured solider across the sand is horribly shocked to find that after a blast went off nearby, that the man he was hauling along was missing everything from the waist down (0:12:42); another’s shoulder wound spouts blood (0:17:23); an enemy soldier gets shot right in the eye (0:21:40).  SR: SSSSS

N      0:55:41.  Another direct-to-the-head shot in the eye.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:58:38.  A soldier sits down to get a “hitcher” out of his boot and in the process knocks over a beam that topples into a very weak wall, felling it and revealing a cache of Germans.  Tensions maintain for about a second before soldiers on higher ground drill the lot with auto fire.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:28:45.  Wade is hit and bleeds furiously for a long time while his comrades fight to save him.  Two for the visuals, one for the intensity.  SR: SSSSS

N      2:13:37.  I had to see this twice to make sure, but a soldier gets ready to plant an ill-timed charge on a German tank and is summarily blown to bits.  SR: SSSSS

N      2:22:25.  A shot in the dark produces a heavy thunk behind a wall and a fast-growing pool of blood.  SR: SSSSS

N      Upgraded just a touch to 3.  I hope you understand.  :)

Uncut version

YEAR 2004 directed by james wan

STARRING leigh whannel, danny glover, cary elwes

Qs: 7.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       I just thought I would start the text to this film with a fitting comment: the very idea of a film called Saw being issued in an Uncut Version must be some kind of sick joke.  J

N       0:02:46.  When the film opens, the two main characters (Dr. Lawrence and Adam) are chained to heavy pipes in a grungy bathroom so filthy one has to see it to believe it.  In the center of the room is the body of a man who shot himself and bled out in a giant pool all over the tile floor, much of the back of his head blown off.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:16:31.  The first of Jigsaw’s victims, Paul, is an overweight man who tried to take his life by slitting his wrist.  In a morally didactic way, Jigsaw has thoroughly surrounded the man by many, many yards of razor wire saying that if he really wants to die, all he has to do is stay put.  But, if he wants to live, he’ll have to cut himself again.  In his struggles to escape, the man tears himself up badly enough that detectives say traces of stomach acid were found on the floor.  We see shots of his bloody body, a notable one being of his slit-open abdomen that permitted the release of stomach acid.  Also, Jigsaw removed several puzzle-piece shaped sections of his skin.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:19:00.  Mark, the next victim we hear about, has a slow-acting poison in his system.  The antidote is in a locked safe in the center of the room.  He’s naked and slathered with a flammable gel, there is broken glass all over the floor, the room is virtually pitch black and his only source of light by which to read the army of numbers written about the room, somewhere within he is promised is the combination to the safe, is a small candle.  He does not succeed in cracking the safe, not because he ran out of time, but because the candle touched his skin and torched him to a crisp.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:27:00.  Amanda, a drug addict, is fitted with a cumbersome device called the jaw trap which is hooked into her mouth and connected to a minute timer which, when it goes off, will trigger release of the spring in the device and permanently rip her mouth open.  The key to the padlock on the back of the device she is told is in the stomach of her dead cellmate.  For starters, her cellmate isn’t dead, but she doesn’t notice as he is phenomenally drugged up with an opiate overdose.  Second, after stabbing him a sickening nine times, when she slashes open his gut, she has to sift through his bloody intestines to find the key.  In the Uncut Edition, there are several more shots of her sifting through the intestines and reaching into the stomach like putting on a glove to find the key.  There are also additional shots, once she discovered it, of her bloody hands scrambling to unlock the device before she takes it out of her mouth and throws it across the room seconds before it goes off, Amanda cries deep tears for having to carve up a man to retrieve a key from his entrails.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:53:30.  Chasing Jigsaw around his shop, the two detectives (Tapp and Sing) both suffer at his hands.  Tapp earlier had his throat slit by a hidden knife inside Jigsaw’s right sleeve.  The mark is of his partner Sing and his tragic death.  On the heels of the cloaked killer, Sing fails to notice a fishing line tripwire connected to four shotguns aimed downward.  They all go off and splatter his head on the walls on both sides of the narrow corridor.  A series of color and B & W crime scene shots follow, some of the blown-open wound itself.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:30:15.  Being led to believe that his family is in danger, Dr. Lawrence takes one of the hacksaws supplied to him and, tying off his ankle, proceeds to cut his foot off.  A sequence follows of him forcing the blade through his leg, Adam screaming his head off as the doctor continues to cut, blood spurting up on his animally determined face.  Later, as he crawls toward Adam, he leaves long red trails all over the room.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:33:56.  Encountering who he believes to be the killer, Adam beats his head in seven times with the ceramic top to a nearby toilet, the top breaking in half on the final strike.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2005 directed by darren lynn bousman

STARRING donnie wahlberg, shawnee smith, tobin bell

Qs: 12.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:04:00.  As soon as the film opens, we’re treated to the plight of one Michael, a “snitch” who’s made a living watching others.  A key to the thorny death mask around his neck is hidden behind his eye.  He’s given a scalpel and sixty seconds to get it over with.  Will he cut out his eye to get the key and save himself?  No, he instead frets the time away, the mask closes and blood pours from the holes therein, Michael’s empty gaze permanent.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:12:47.  A SWAT man steps on a rigged stair and releases a mechanism that cuts off his feet just above the ankles.  It’s too fast to see red, but the idea factor scores alone.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:23:35.  Written instructions are so difficult to comprehend…Xavier finds a note and a key, the former bearing advice on how to use the key, namely not to use it on the door to the room.  Xavier does just that while another man looks through the peephole – and a wicked contraption with a chain and bicycle gear triggers a gun that shoots him point-blank in the eye, blasting his brains across the room and all over the people therein.  The exit wound at the back of his head is staggering and the blood loss is intense.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:45:43.  John survives a drive off a cliff, but not intact.  He has to pull a long piece of metal from his broken body, bleeding badly as he stumbles away from the wreckage.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:48:33.  Amanda shows Daniel why if she passed Jigsaw’s test once that she’s back in it – she’s sliding razor blades across her wrists, letting the red flow.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:52:50.  Xavier throws Amanda into a Jacuzzi-sized pit of used hypodermic needles, infected with who knows what level of biologically hazardous material.  Flailing and screaming, being stabbed and pierced all over with the implements, Amanda eventually finds the key Xavier threw her in there for.  It did not come without a price, but not one Xavier paid.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:02:22.  A fight between Xavier and Jonas goes to the limit when the former uses my favorite weapon – the spiked baseball bat – and buries it in the latter’s skull.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:07:17.  Things between Eric and John reach their climax.  Eric flips over the table the two of them had been talking over, demanding a straight, immediate answer as to where his son is.  He picks him up out of his electric wheelchair, tearing him from his IV hookups and throws him into a counter before punching him directly in the jaw he already broke once with a flashlight.  When John makes a discourteous remark about his son, Eric calmly takes hold of one of his fingers and snaps it backward, thus enjoying the pain it puts Jigsaw in.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:08:30.  The spiked bat is my favorite weapon, but the arm-box is my favorite trap.  It is my favorite because it’s the simplest.  Two square holes are covered with an arrangement of four sharp metal triangles overlaid in a way that permits passage through them in only one direction.  In other words, when both of Addison’s arms went into the box, the triangles kept her there while cutting hard and deep through her flesh, quickly filling the bottom of the box with her blood.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:12:58.  With Xavier pounding at the door, breathing threats and murder against Daniel and Amanda, the latter runs over to Jonas and, with some effort, pulls the spike bat out of his head and uses it to jam the door long enough to let them figure a way out.  Look closely while she holds it – pieces of Jonas’s brains are stuck on the ends of some of the nails.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:16:57.  Prepare for a major shock – several, actually, many of which follow.

N       1:19:00.  Long after Xavier discovered the numbers, he knows he’ll have no problem collecting them.  That is until Amanda points out that he still doesn’t know his own.  When she asks how he’s going to get it if she doesn’t tell him, he tries futilely to look in the mirror and see it.  When that doesn’t work, he takes the knife he pulled from the body bearing Obi’s name and uses it to cut the square of skin from his own neck that contains the number, putting it in his pocket like one would change from a newsstand purchase.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:19:46.  Daniel, who wasn’t dead, kicks Xavier long enough to distract him and slit his throat, a wound that pours blood, the former choking on it while he dies.  SR: SSSSS

N       Upgraded to 6 from a perfect 5 for obvious reasons, namely the pervasive perversions in the violence-laden traps and the general atmosphere of death imbuing the grave situations, also for several instances of the coughing and spitting up of bloody saliva because of the nerve agent.