YEAR 1977 directed by dario argento

STARRING jessica harper, stefania casini, flavio bucci

Qs: 6.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:12:12.  The film’s opening sequence is of a savage and bizarre killing of a student of the dance academy Suzy sought to attend.  Terrified and shouting unintelligible words, the girl runs off into the rainy night.  Suzy never sees her again, because what happens to her is astonishing.  Fallen upon by an unseen but hairy-handed creature, the girl is stabbed three times in the chest before she’s tied up with a phone cord and stabbed an additional four times, once directly in the exposed heart.  Her head then breaks through the pane of the stained glass window it was on top of, her mouth agape in terror, before the rest of the structure gives way, dropping her body and pulling the cord out from its staples in the wall until she dangles by her neck from it.  Blood runs down her legs and feet into puddles on the floor.  The woman she was sharing the room with, who had been hurriedly trying to summon help, didn’t escape without a scratch.  In fact, she received quite a number: two of the crossbeams between the various colored pains impaled her twice, through the neck and just below the rib cage.  The most graphic injury, beyond even that, was the large shard of glass sticking out of her face, a red pool spreading on the floor from beneath her head.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:34:20.  It’s very possible and certainly likely that this scene where thousands of maggots fall through the ceiling onto the girls below, landing in their hair and squishing underfoot, was copied in the 2001 movie Bones for the sequence in the nightclub (1:01:50.)  Lucio Fulci might also have lifted it for his 1980 flick City of the Living Dead.  As it is, the floor of grossed-out girls makes enough of a scene to prompt a search for the source.  Tracing it to a crate upstairs that just thrives with them, Ms. Tanner squashes a couple dozen of them on her way up to it to pry it open.

N       0:54:40.  Daniel’s dog mysteriously turns on him and bites his throat clean out, chomping away at the meat while his former owner chokes on his own blood.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:07:40.  While it’s possible that Bones lifted a sequence, it’s equally possible that Saw (2004) got its inspiration for a sequence where an overweight man fights his way through razor wire from this number where Sara, in a mad rush from an unseen assailant, falls into a giant pit of wire – not barbed, as in Saw, just wire.  She fights her way around for a while, but ultimately loses the battle when a black-gloved hand enters left frame and slits her throat.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:19:57.  A bat flies into Suzy’s room and flutters around in her hair for a while.  She throws it to the ground, tosses a towel on it, picks up a stool and beats it into a bloody spot.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:31:07.  Suzy turns around and gasps when she finds Sara’s mutilated body before her, many cuts all over her face and across her neck, two giant spikes driven through her wrists.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:34:07.  Exactly three minutes later, she emerges from the darkness with a knife raised high in her right hand.  Doing the only thing she can think of that could save her, she jams the end of one of the peacock’s feathers into the neck of the outline of light on the bed before her.  Apparently, that was the ticket – the figure materializes into Helena Markos as she deteriorates, the rest of her witchy brood going down with her, the Romanian servant bleeding profusely from the head.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2001 directed by dominic sena

STARRING john travolta, hugh jackman, halle berry

Qs: 2.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:07:37.  In what is arguably the best, most technically complicated and viscerally thrilling visual effects sequences on record, two S.W.A.T. guys “rescue” a hostage, not knowing how Gabriel’s plan with the electronic dog collars, 20 lbs of C-4 and 15 lbs of stainless steel ball bearings works.  The collar is synced with the bank.  Hostages leave, they go sky high with the C-4 and the ball bearings turn into very deadly projectiles.  This is exactly what happens as the two men, ignorantly of the impression that they are saving her, pull her, fussing and screaming all the way, further from the bank.  The bomb goes off and in a sequence lasting 45 seconds shot in the then-revolutionary technique of Flo-Mo or Bullet Time as it was called when it was pioneered in the Matrix, we take a tour of the intersection outside of the bank as every piece of glass in a 100-yard radius is blown out, the dozens of ball bearings tear up the police vehicles and policemen in the vicinity, civilian cars and trucks tumble and fly like 3000 lb acrobats and diners in a nearby café eat steel along with their bagels and coffee.  I have no qualms about repeating that this is absolutely one of the most ambitious and visionary sequences in film.  Action fans will eat it up and once you see it, you won’t forget it.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:25:25.  For preparing to squeal on Gabriel, Axel Torvalds is shot point blank in the head through a double mirror, blood spattering back onto the glass.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2004 directed by d. j. caruso

STARRING angelina jolie, ethan hawke, keifer sutherland

Qs: 7.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:16:53.  We get a brief shot of one of the victim’s smashed-in faces.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:24:37.  Another teaser – graphic crime scene photos, but only for a moment.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:32:45.  Poking around in the drop-tile ceiling of an abandoned apartment, Illeana is surprised by the chained-up body of a man that half falls out, a decent-sized gash across his face.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:12:47.  A collision during a tense chase on a bridge leads to the death of a man, thrown through the windshield onto the hood of the car.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:19:40.  Illeana wakes up after a romp with Mr. Costa, only to realize she has blood on the left side of her face and some on her chest.  Running into the bedroom, she sees Mr. Costa is lying in a pool of it, soaked into the mattress.  No alarm – it turns out it was only his stitches breaking open.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:24:00.  The killer takes down a woman in an elevator Illeana was waiting for.  As the doors open, the sight is unreal: a giant red pool spreads across the floor of the car and arterial spray is splashed all over the walls like a Jackson Pollack work.  When the doors fully open, we see the killer cutting through the woman’s neck until he severs her head completely and stands before Illeana, holding it by the hair in his right hand.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:44:00.  Illeana takes down the killer with a pair of scissors to the chest.  Here we see the blood-soaked area around the instrument.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1990 directed by john harrison

STARRING deborah harry, christian slater, william hickey

Qs: 5.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:21:30.  The freed mummy from the first segment, Lot 249, finds a coat hanger and works on straightening it as the awoken Lee searches to find the cause of the broken window, thus to find the intruder.  Anyone familiar with Egypt or its ritual practices will know what the mummy was doing, but even if not, it’s made quite clear here.  Seizing Lee by the neck and hoisting him off his feet, the mummy inserts the end of the coat hanger bent like a hook up his victim’s left nostril and scrambles around for a while, blood dripping all over his feet and the floor beneath him.  Later, when Susan arrives home, she turns on a light and sees next to it, draped over fruit in the basket, what looks like brains.  Seeing a bloody handprint on the refrigerator and Lee’s bloody body in the kitchen doorway, she is shocked by what she finds, perhaps more so by the millennia-old creature walking out of their house.  Now, for those who maybe are still lost on what happened, in the Egyptian culture when one died, provided they were worthy of being so treated by their survivors, they were mummified.  In this process, among removal of organs for storage in sacred jars, the brain is removed.  One can guess how this is done by this segment and by a colorful explanation from Evelyn in The Mummy from 1999.  Obviously, this process is done while the subject is deceased.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:26:00.  An equally painful thing befalls Susan, something that once again goes back to ancient practices during mummification which Dr. Bellingham explains early in the segment.  Catching up to her, the mummy takes a dagger and slices open her back, stuffing several chrysanthemums in the wide-open gash.  Andy later finds her haphazardly mummified body, wrapped with adding machine paper, seated in a chair by the desk.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:55:49.  In a decidedly disturbing scene from the second segment Cat from Hell, the titular cat attacks and kills Halston, the man sent to kill him, by crawling down his throat and suffocating him to death.  Later, when Drogan arrives home, the cat fights its way out of Halston’s mouth, splitting his skin like an overcooked hot dog and spattering blood everywhere.  The struggle to dig his way down Halston’s throat is much more violent and protracted than the escape sequence, but the entire episode is very twisted but original – I’ve never seen anyone killed by a cat burrowing itself down through the body and then emerging the same way.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:04:05.  In the final segment Lover’s Vow, Jer has his right hand sliced clean off by something, something that slashes the left side of his face up something fierce.  The torn skin on his cheek and the ragged stump of an arm bleed furiously while the poor man pleads for help from his pal.  Sorrowfully for him, Preston doesn’t get to him in near enough time before his head is cut clean off his neck and left to roll in the alley.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:24:54.  At the conclusion of Lover’s Vow, there’s a horrible scene where a person changes into the creature Preston saw kill Jer ten years prior.  Its arms burst out of the skin of the body it was inhabiting, the torn and bloody flesh falling away; a claw grows out of the heel of the blood-covered left foot; a similar claw emerges from the knee on the same leg, chunks of muscle and tissue spilling out like fish guts; the scalp splits in half and comes down off of the head to reveal the creature’s head; the rest of its body splits open the back of the human’s skin, sinews and such hanging from the rips up and down the spine; the shoulders break open, slimy wings emerging and unfolding in the evening light.  Bartering for his life doesn’t work that time, the creature taking a large bite out of Preston’s throat before letting his body fall at its feet, one of which is visible at left frame.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1976 directed by martin scorsese

STARRING robert deniro, cybil shepherd, jodie foster

Qs: 4.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       1:37:57.  Finally having slipped a gear, Travis drives up to Sport’s building and walks up to him like nothing out of the ordinary is going on.  He starts to chat things up with him, busting his chops for a while before he shoots him point blank in his gut, blood flying out behind him.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:39:38.  Walking into the building another way, he encounters Murray Moston’s character of Iris’s Timekeeper and promptly blows all the fingers off of his right hand with one shot.  Bullets fly and blood squirts as Sport returns, shot down again by a second, fatal shot from Travis.  Evidently having been caught in the neck by Sport’s shot, he fires a third and walks right up to his body before firing a fourth, ensuring he’s dead.  Walking back past the Timekeeper, he shoots him in the gut before proceeding up the stairs.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:40:35.  A fourth man enters the picture and shoots Travis in the right shoulder at close range.  Whipping out his spring-loaded concealment from his left sleeve, Travis retaliates and shoots the man six times right in the face, causing him to stumble backwards for a while before dying at Iris’s feet.  Still not down, the Timekeeper returns and fights with Travis for a few seconds before he’s stabbed with a concealed knife in the hand that wasn’t blown off.  Backing the man against the wall, Travis puts the gun on his right cheek and blows his brains out all over the wall behind him.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:43:14.  In a masterful exercise in engineering and innovate cinematography, Martin Scorsese gives us an overview of the bloody carnage Travis left behind him.  Starting over Travis in Iris’s room, the camera starts moving south, panning down the bloody hallway and then down the blood-soaked stairwell where it all began, ending with Sport’s bullet-ridden, red-soaked body.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2002 directed by matthew bright

STARRING michael reilly burke, boti ann bliss, tom savini

Qs: 4.  AR: