YEAR 2003 directed by jonathan mostow
STARRING arnold schwarzenegger, nick stahl, claire danes
Qs: 3. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:40:37. Requesting a cutting tool from John, the Terminator asks him to drive while he lifts up his shirt to reveal an ugly wound and starts to cut the flesh of his chest away to access his ruptured hydrogen cell. Removing a large piece of skin, the Terminator throws it flapping out of the window in the whipping winds of the desert. SR: SSSSS
N 0:53:30. Riding in the backseat of a police car driven by Detective Edwards with Det. Bell in the passenger seat, the TX, disguised as Kate’s fiancé, puts its left arm straight through the seat and Det. Edwards’ chest. Blood and gore splatter into the front of the car as Det. Bell starts to lose it. Bashing him in the side of the head with one of its heavy metal arms, the TX maintains the fiancé’s form even after Det. Bell’s skull cracked his window upon impact and both men were assuredly dead. Driving the car through Det. Edwards’ chest, the TX spins around and heads for the cemetery where police informed him Kate was being held hostage. SR: SSSSS
N 1:33:26. Arnold emerges from a recently crashed chopper, much of the left side of the flesh and muscle of his face burned or torn away, his metal skull visible in places. SR: SSSSS
YEAR 1980 directed by roger spottiswoode
STARRING jamie lee curtis, hart bochner, david copperfield
Qs: 12. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:05:29. Kenny’s fraternity plots a heartless and maleficent prank. They send him into a room with someone on the bed and Alana hiding behind nearby drapes, acting like she’s the one on the bed. Kenny sidles up to her and starts getting cozy. Curtis encourages him to kiss her – which, when he tries to do it, pulls the wig off the corpse they stole from someplace and dolled up to look like a living girl. Her propped-up arms fell off and her chest bore obvious signs that she had been extensively worked over with autopsy equipment. Staring at the necrotic flesh of the disembodied arms, Kenny stands up and starts gyrating on the bed, winding himself up in the curtains. SR: SSSSS
N 0:10:58. JFF: Our first glimpses of a young David Copperfield.
N 0:12:58. Ed, dressed as Groucho Marx, stumbles around with an epee through his stomach. Being the resident jokester, his friends write it off as another lark of his and board the train. They don’t know, of course, that he really had been impaled and was really dying. He collapses beside the train and bodiless arms divest him of his costume and roll his body onto the tracks. The conductor signals, the whistle blows and the train surges forward – over Ed’s dead body. SR: SSSSS
N 0:16:08. JFF2: I know it’s 11 years prior, but doesn’t this guy look like Zipperface?
N 0:20:50. Alluding to a finger-in-the-box gag Ed pulled earlier, the killer, dressed like Ed was, opens the box again to reveal a real finger rolling around inside. SR: SSSSS
N 0:22:25. The killer gets Swamp Thing alone in the bathroom and slams his face into the mirror.
N 0:27:25. JFF3: The paper, The Photo Report, the brakeman is holding says: “the black widow and two dead bridegrooms” as the main headline, “seduce girls” just to the right of the title, “beware – underground gas storage tanks can kill you” to the right of that, shortstops – gay? under seduce…, the big one – 1980 psychic predictions toward the bottom, if only i’d taken my mum’s advice under that at the very bottom of the page, a logo for the sound shoppe at top left and raped, strangled and thrown from a bridge at the very top. Nothing has the slightest to do with anything and if you examine it with the zoom function, it looks like it was assembled like a kidnapper’s ransom note, words and images stolen from who knows where to construct a realistic-looking paper. True, it’s onscreen for only a few frames, but I’ve gone and done it anyway.
N 0:38:20. The conductor uses the passkey on the bathroom, being that it was locked almost since all-aboard. Therein he finds Swamp Thing laid out on the floor, blood all around. Of course, being a frat train, his first thoughts didn’t go to murder, but rather to a liquor-related accident. When the conductor and brakeman together go in again later, there’s no blood to be seen and Swamp Thing seems to be very much alive, but totally out of it. SR: SSSSS
N 0:46:00. Swamp Thing gets Mitchy in an upper berth and shields them from the prying eyes of the other passengers. He starts stroking her legs and she asks if he “can manage without the flipper.” He takes the left one off to reveal a black hand that he puts on her chest…and leaves there. She picks up quick that things are very wrong when she sees the stump. SR: SSSSS
N 0:51:20. The killer managed to cover his tracks the first time, but things are definitely real when the conductor, alerted by Mitchy’s arm, parts the curtains and finds her dead, throat slit. We see her again at 0:54:45 when Alana finds her, against the conductor’s wishes. SR: SSSSS
N 0:58:13. Doc carries Mo’s body down the train. Seemingly unharmed during the show, he’s started to show unmistakable signs that he may be dead. Urging his friends that he’s not fooling around and that the blood on Mo is real, he places his friend in a lower berth and makes an unfortunate prognosis – fatal stab wounds to the chest. SR: SSSSS
N 1:12:15. The conductor and Alana go to the room where Doc holed up – and find blood on almost everything, the whole way through the car. Pulling open an upper storage compartment, Doc’s body rolls out and knocks him down. Standing again, he discovers it’s open season on morbid surprises when out rolls Doc’s severed head. SR: SSSSS
N 1:18:34. It’s a standard – if a man’s sitting down, facing away from you and not moving, there’s never any question – he’s dead. This time it’s the head porter with one of the magician (whom they now suspect)’s swords in his chest. SR: SSSSS
N 1:22:07. The killer starts brutalizing Alana big-time, attempting to strangle her with his bloody arms, red from the sword-in-the-back routine she did on him earlier. SR: SSSSS
N 1:24:15. Alana stabs her assailant in the eye with a memo needle. SR: SSSSS
N 1:30:47. Think it was the magician? Nope – Alana finds him stuffed in his own sword cabinet, run through with his own swords. SR: SSSSS
N 1:33:20. Alana acquiesces to Kenny (did you honestly think it was anybody else?)’s request to kiss him. Like flicking a switch, everything, all the horror of that day years ago with the body in the bed, the years since and the multiple murders on the train come flooding in. He twists himself up in the curtains there like he did in the room long ago, howling like mad. The conductor arrives and smashes him twice in the head with a coal shovel, knocking him off the train for good.
YEAR 1974 directed by tobe hooper
STARRING marilyn burns, jim siedow, gunnar hansen
Qs: 9. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:01:48. The film starts in complete darkness, only the sounds of a shovel scratching in dirt to be heard. As the scratching and darkness continue, flash bulbs go off intermittently, temporarily highlighting several grisly shots of unearthed and mostly decomposed bodies: a hand at 1:48, a tight shot of an eye socket at 1:52, another hand at 1:58, a leg at 2:05, a pair of hands at 2:14 and a close-up of the toothy grin of a skull at 2:21. SR: SSSSS
N 0:02:36. This begins the longest and grimmest shot in the film – a one minute, eleven second pullback from a gory work of art made from desecrated bodies lumped atop a tombstone. It starts with a gruesome, mostly rotted skull with a giant nose and mouth frozen open in a horrible position. As the camera pulls back further, we can see what appears to be a fresh head, dangling snippets of gore visible blowing around on the neck, in the former body’s arms, the legs of one of the bodies propped up on both sides of the monument they’re lashed to. SR: SSSSS
N 0:06:33. A rather humorous shot of Franklin rolling down the hill in – and then shortly after out of – his wheelchair thanks to the draft of a passing truck.
N 0:13:45. The obviously beyond unhinged hitchhiker gleefully slices his left palm open with Franklin’s knife, scaring the daylights out of the normal people. SR: SSSSS
N 0:35:43. Jerry gets clocked with a heavy hammer by our friend Leatherface. His body twitches and bleeds for a few seconds until Leatherface slams the door on the issue. SR: SSSSS
N 0:37:20. Pam falls headlong into the infamous bone room with death decor. The floor is done in a fluffy white chicken feather; human bones including but not limited to leg and jawbones accent the morbidity while foot, shoulder and arm bones put the finishing touch on a comfy sofa. Skulls and hands dangle from strings while other body parts are strewn about to give it a lived-in feel. Assorted pelvises, spinal columns and piles of animal skulls and bones complete the design. SR: SSSSS
N 0:39:41. Now for what is arguably the most famous scene in the film – the meathook. Leatherface grabs Pam and drags her, kicking and screaming (don’t you wish just once the young victim would simply walk gracefully into the face of death?) to his favorite place. Now watch carefully: the shot is totally dry – you’ll see what I mean. Hefting her up high, Leatherface sets her down on the hook and leaves her hanging there, the metal riding up into her back, her face horribly contorted with grimaces of extreme pain. There is absolutely no blood, no sign of penetration whatsoever, but the viewer still very much feels it right along with her. Why? Psychology. We know what’s going to happen. We know how. The actions of Leatherface placing her on the hook, the natural logic of what happened and the almighty painful expressions Pam makes seals the impression bloodlessly. Therefore, the three-point rating is for pure concept strength. SR: SSSSS
N 0:52:30. Franklin gets chainsawed through the gut. Again, only psychologically. SR: SSSSS
N 1:19:33. The hitchhiker chases Sally out of the house and slashes at her back with the straight razor he pulled out at the beginning. Sally escapes his grip seconds before he’s creamed across the grill of a passing truck. SR: SSSSS
N 1:20:48. The trucker throws a monkey wrench at Leatherface, striking him directly in the head, knocking him to the ground. Losing control of the chainsaw, the instrument lands on his leg and starts to carve into it. SR: SSSSS
YEAR 2003 directed by marcus nispel
STARRING jessica biel, jonathan tucker, r. lee ermey
Qs: 10. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:10:00. A girl the quintet picks up on their way to a concert plucks a six-shooter from between her bloody legs, sticks the barrel in her mouth and blows a good chunk of her brains out the back window. In a sick (wickedly so) pullback shot, we start at the front of the van and pan past everyone’s horrified faces before touring through the hole in her brain and out the back window just before her emptied head falls back, smoke pouring from her mouth. The sound, the sight and the horror earn it: SR: SSSSS. Incidentally, at 0:13:25 we can see the roof of the van raining blood, the same running down the back window with a chunk of her head as the flies, already on the scene, start buzzing.
N 0:32:07. I hope you didn’t get too attached to Kemp. Sneaking up behind him, Leatherface bashes his head in with one good thwack with a sledgehammer, much like he took out Jerry and Kirk in the original. A spatter of blood lands on the TV screen as Leatherface drags him away. SR: SSSSS
N 0:33:18. Usually I mention connected events in the same paragraph, but this is wild enough on its own to merit specifics. The girl who blew her brains out in the back of the van gets a rough and crude treatment by the Sheriff who insists on wrapping her in plastic, to contain what’s left I’d imagine. When Andy lifts her head, you can see the gigantic exit wound, about the size of a peach, in the back of her head. In the same shot you can see what looks like baked beans and spaghetti sauce splattered over everything in the back. SR: SSSSS
N 0:36:31. Blood simply runs from a table in Leatherface’s little workshop, a horror house abounding with rusty tools and severed ears, hanging cuts of meat and eyeballs in jars, heads quite literally on platters and bloody fishing line. SR: SSSSS
N 0:45:22. Leatherface cuts Andy’s leg in two, thus ending their short chase. At 0:47:52, he lays on the dirt floor of the workshop, blood spurting from the stump, pooling on the ground. SR: SSSSS
N 0:56:26. Morgan spits blood and a tooth when the Sheriff breaks his liquor bottle across his face, knocking his glasses to the floor of the car. SR: SSSSS
N 1:11:00. Forced to mercy-kill Andy, Erin kneels as his foot and weeps deeper than she ever had to as his dripping blood runs all over her and the piano keys beneath. SR: SSSSS
N 1:21:14. Erin attempts to evade Leatherface by ducking into a meat locker, which, naturally, is stuffed with hanging sides of beef, some with bloody skulls still attached. SR: SSSSS
N 1:25:02. After a rather tense sequence in the locker room, Erin bursts from one of the lockers, brandishing her cleaver, and hacks at Leatherface’s right arm five times before whacking it with a better sixth, better enough to cut the limb off entirely. While she makes a run for it, Leatherface’s chainsaw break dances circles in his blood on the tile floor. SR: SSSSS
N 1:30:08. Erin very satisfyingly plows into the Sheriff, his blood running down the windshield as he tumbles over the car and flops to the ground. She then pops it into reverse, drives over him, wipes the blood away from view, switches into drive and smashes his body further into the road. SR: SSSSS
YEAR 1986 directed by tobe hooper
STARRING dennis hopper, caroline williams, jim siedow
Qs: 7. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:10:25. Two highly obnoxious college students are out for a night of troublemaking, shooting signs and mailboxes while being quite loaded themselves. Early on in their journey they decide to cut off a truck. Later that evening it proves to have been the wrong truck. It obstructs their path and when they try to go around, it keeps up going in reverse in the opposite lane. After carving up the car for a while, the chainsaw maniac in the pickup bed scores a hit and saws into a sizeable portion of the driver’s head. He twitches around for a while before the disconnected slab of his skull slides off, fountains of blood squirting everywhere. SR: SSSSS
N 0:40:16. Leatherface and what has to be one of the creepiest sickos in horror break in to the radio station playing the only evidence of the chainsaw-massacring family. Falling upon the unfortunate assistant L.J., the creep bashes him in the head at least sixteen times (that we see) with a hammer, his blood pooling around him. At 0:41:56, we see the creep continuing his assault for another four times bringing the total hits to twenty. SR: SSSSS
N 0:54:12. Discovering a trickle of blood leading from the mouth of one of the characters in a mural in the Sawyers’ den and watching as it ran to a small puddle, Lefty kicks a hole in the wall and unleashes a sickeningly sloppy flood of guts and gore that splashes out onto the ground. SR: SSSSS
N 0:56:34. Preparing for a large feast the following day, Leatherface removes most of the clothes from L.J. before taking an electric knife to his body, using it to remove a long sheet of skin from his right leg, a wider sheet from his chest (which he proceeds to hang on a meat hook for display), several cuts from his left arm and finally, at 0:58:04, his face (which he proceeds to model on Stretch), her evident disgust manifesting itself in remarks to the effect of it being “wet.” SR: SSSSS
N 1:02:30. In what is quite possibly the largest leap of logic in cinema, L.J., battered close to two dozen times in the head with a hammer and carved up like the holiday bird, groans like a monster, sits up and attempts communication with Stretch. Over the ensuing few minutes, one can see the literally faceless and blood-covered L.J. gives it his all to stand up, having to rely on a meat hook for support. One can see best at 1:03:37 the substantial section of skin removed from his chest, his bloody muscles and ribs exposed. At 1:04:57 (or close to it), after releasing Stretch from her rope restraint, the massacred L.J. finally dies. Only truly a four, the idea alone of butchering up a person like that and then later seeing him walking around, stumbling and twitching because of the incredible damage done to his body and brain, deserves a point. SR: SSSSS
N 1:27:28. Lefty reams papa Sawyer in the rear end with the chainsaw, blood soaking through his pants. Not gory, but remarkably funny. SR: SSSSS
N 1:30:16. Lefty gives Leatherface his turn at being at the business end of his chainsaw, this time ripping through his gut on to his back, the chainsaw stuck inside his body. Twenty seconds later, we see a closer-up view of the shredded guts. SR: SSSSS
N JFF: Tom Hanks’ character watches this film in The ‘Burbs, 1989.
unrated version
YEAR 1989 directed by jeff burr
STARRING kate hodge, william butler, ken foree
Qs: 9. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:01:14. Instantly things start to happen. A sledgehammer is swung toward camera, a woman screams and we shortly see her being drug along, her forehead dented in. We then see her face being plopped down on a table (by itself, no body with it J) and watch as Leatherface cuts on it with a pair of scissors and then a razor blade. We return to the scissors for a moment before a needle and thread enter frame and start sewing the various parts we’ve been seeing as Leatherface cuts them. A little dabbing with a towel and we’re back to the scissors a third and final time. SR: SSSSS
N A very gruesome and vile sequence this is. A mass grave of homicide victims is uncovered and we have front row, center seats to the occasion.
N 0:06:21. Here we see a quick flash of one of the individual sites. You’ll have to pause at exactly this moment to see it. The shot contains a skull buried up to its eye sockets, grubs and maggots luxuriating in the mire, and what I believe to be a right hand just to its left. A slime of what I don’t think is just mud (dwell on that for a moment) surrounds the remains.
N 0:06:28. Exactly seven seconds later, another flash goes off, this time of a right scapula, a half-buried rib cage and a set of arm bones, most noticeably the ulna and radius. Amongst the bones are more of the same grubs and maggots writhing about.
N 0:06:35. A virtually completely buried skull is just visible top frame (covered in the expected grubs, but no maggots) with three phalanges of the left hand at bottom frame.
N 0:06:46. This is the best frame for the fourth sight we’re treated to. Visible are: a skull toward top frame; three unidentifiable bones just beneath it; a head at middle frame with (surprisingly) much of the skin remaining, the mouth open wide and full of dirt, worms and grubs; the right arm of the body that the intact head belonged to and a fresh left leg at upper right. After one of the men in the biohazard suits flash photographs the site, he digs the intact head out of the mud, the sucking sounds making it just that much grosser.
N 0:07:21. A fifth body makes an appearance in flash photography, this one entirely decomposed and half-buried in the sludge, its back arched and worms, maggots and grubs (oh my), wriggling over each other between the slack jaws and the slime-encrusted ribs.
N 0:07:28. The second of the men (not the one who pulled the head out of the mud) picks up a portion of a spine and makes a keen observation only a trained and experienced eye could have made: “looks like a pretty advanced stage of decomposition.” Really?
N 0:07:41. Here we get a last overview of the body pit the men were in. SR: SSSSS
N 0:10:05. In a sequence reminiscent of the original, Ryan and Michelle hit an armadillo which they immediately stop and get out to investigate. A blood trail leads away for about two feet along with an unidentifiable pile of organs. SR: SSSSS
N 0:44:30. Leatherface catches Sara, backs her up to a tree and eviscerates her with his chainsaw, blood spatter spraying all over her and his (well, somebody’s) face. SR: SSSSS
N 0:45:43. The unsuspecting Ryan steps square into a bear trap, the vise grip and sharp teeth breaking his leg and digging deep into his flesh. SR: SSSSS
N 0:49:32. Back at the ranch, Tex hammers nails into the backs of Michelle’s hands and into the chair she’s strapped to. He then picks up some of her blood on his finger and licks it off. SR: SSSSS
N 0:51:00. Tinker drags in Ryan whom Leatherface earlier reamed with the chainsaw. Removing the bear trap from his bleeding and broken ankle, Tex and Tinker jam meat hooks into his calves and hydraulically lift him so he’s suspended upside-down above a small table. SR: SSSSS
N 1:05:43. The unnamed “little girl,” as she’s called in the credits, whines that the next one is hers, that “next one” being Ryan who, incidentally, has been hanging upside-down for almost fifteen minutes. Anyhow, what happens to him was painful enough for me the first time I saw it that I winced at the idea. I still do. Hanging at the perfect height for the maneuver, the little girl pulls a cord that releases a switch on a sledgehammer mounted to the ceiling on a hinge. It swings down with great force and cracks Ryan solidly on the left side of his head. We don’t see it (groan of disappointment), but the idea and the sound effect of the strike are good on their own. SR: SSSSS
N 1:08:44. Several rounds from Benny’s gun pile into Mama in small, bloody bursts. In the same spree, Tink gets two fingers of his left hand blown off (the practical effects could have been better) as well as his left ear, which lands on the stove and starts to sizzle. Grandpa gets hit in the gut, which ruptures with a splat before his nose is blown off. SR: SSSSS
YEAR 1994 directed by kim henkel
STARRING matthew mCconaughey, renee zellweger, robert jacks
Qs: 3. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:11:47. Barry’s flashlight shows the skull of a long (but not too long) dead dog, its eye gone, a worm wriggling in the socket and all over the exposed organs in the rest of the body. SR:
