thehonestpoet@aol.com
        
YEAR 2005 directed by david cronenberg
STARRING viggo mortensen, maria bello, ed harris
Qs: 4. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:04:45. At the mark we have our first clear signs that some very bad things have happened in the motel office. Billy walks around with a water jug he was instructed to fill and in the process he wanders around what has become a crime scene. Four smears of blood in the form of a person’s hand streak the desk and a man in the background slumps in a chair, brutally stabbed. As Billy moves, we see a woman lying behind the counter, throat cut, much blood pooled about. SR: SSSSS
N 0:23:50. Two men (the same as in the opening) barge into Tom’s diner (not on the corner) and demand more than after-hours service with coffee and pie. Leland pulls a gun on Tom, but when he instructs his cohort Billy to dispense with a female patron, Tom refuses to stand for it. He smashes the coffee carafe against the side of his head, jumps the counter, picks up his gun and kills Billy whose body falls through the glass of the front door. Leland pulls a boot knife and jams it in Tom’s foot. Tom wheels around and blows his jaw off with his own gun. Suddenly, it’s over. SR: SSSSS
N 0:55:10. Tom’s second act of violence is polishing off Carl and his henchmen on his front lawn. After gentle encouragements (and the leverage of abducting Tom’s son), Carl suggests Tom do as he’s asked. Tom would rather not and thus after politely making a request of his own, that Carl and his men beat it, Carl flexes his muscles and dispatches a man on it. After he pulls a gun on him as a final attempt to get him to go with them, Tom wraps his arm around the guy’s, breaks it at the elbow, chops him in the neck and proceeds to ram his open palm up into his nose four times, shattering it and forcing the shards up into his brain. With his gun, he shoots down Carl’s right-hand man before taking a hit from Carl himself. Crawling toward the weapon, Tom is powerless to stop Carl from kicking it away, requesting any last words he might have. Saying them, Tom lies there and waits for whatever would come next. When it did, it wasn’t from any direction he might have predicted – Jack picks up Tom’s shotgun and blasts Carl away, spattering his father with his blood as he goes down. SR: SSSSS
N 1:24:10. Answering a late-night phone call, Tom realizes things aren’t going to stop following him and that he must do something about it. He drives all the way out to Philadelphia to see his brother Richie before he comes to visit him. Ruben comes up behind him with a wire garrote and tries to wrap it around Tom’s neck, his left hand getting in the way. As Ruben struggles and continues to try to work away on his victim, Tom pushes off the desk and tumbles backward in his chair, kicking upward into Ruben’s jaw. He then breaks the other man’s leg at the knee before using his own on Ruben’s nose, thereafter chopping the first guy in the throat before elbowing Ruben, again in the nose. Richie calmly reaches for his gun from his top-right drawer while Tom stomps on the first’s neck, once hard. A third man comes in to save the day, but Tom breaks his neck before fleeing the scene. Noticing the door ajar, Richie heads outside to see if he can find where Tom ran off to, leaving a fourth man inside. The door suddenly slams shut, sealing him in. Tom breaks his nose with his forehead before shooting him point blank in the chest. Opening the door to his “brother,” Tom stares him down deliberately before putting a quick shot through his head. SR: SSSSS
N It’s interesting to note, I think, that a film called A History of Violence could be rated only a 2. As the above testifies, it’s not per se a violent film but a study of the effects of violence on a small town and on family structure.
YEAR 1994 directed by nacho cerdá
STARRING pep tosar, JORDI TARRIDA, áNGEL TARRES
Qs: 5. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
Aftermath
N 0:00:44. Whether or not it was intended to be real I can’t say, but things open with a very graphic depiction of the death of a dog, looking like he was blown up from the inside, the name of the site (blood, guts and gore) just everywhere, most of its viscera ejected from the body via the mouth, effectively throwing up his guts. An eye’s dislodged and it appears that every single internal organ had then become external organs. SR: SSSSS
N 0:05:43. The first human corpse looks like an accident victim as well, his right foot barely, tenuously attached. Work is being done on his bleeding head involving a scalpel, a corded bonesaw, a pair of boltcutters and a lot of crunching and crushing sounds. The technician then peels back the skin and removes the brain, carrying it off-screen. Later, he stuffs a rag in the void while his fellow morgue man undresses the second body. The former continues work on the stiff by cutting him open completely from neck to groin, not in the traditional Y-incision. Again come the bolt-cutters to snap ribs and remove the sternum to access the organs. An organ is preserved, neatly in a jar whereas the remainder of his gory inner workings are collected and unceremoniously shoved down into the still wide-open corpse, brain included. Now, I’m not a medical anything but I know that nowhere on earth is this standard procedure. SR: SSSSS
N 0:18:06. The second man, who seemed a bit paranoid the whole time, works on his latest body by extracting the brain and weighing it. He then takes what looks like a kitchen knife and runs it randomly up and down the chest, the intensity and mania increasing until blood is drawn. This impropriety multiplies ten-fold with a violation, several actually, with the same blade prior to cutting her open. This reveals much gore and apparently additional ample room to exercise his lopsided libido. SR: SSSSS
N 0:25:06. Gore on the floor: a length of intestine, a heart and a liver. He decides to keep the heart but return the rest. SR: SSSSS
N 0:28:03. Some vile red slime is being mixed – no, pureed – in a blender and fed to his dog. We don’t need to be told – we know exactly what it is. SR: SSSSS
N Upgraded to 3 based on the prevalence of gore and the vile way in which a corpse was defiled in this otherwise pointless film, as pointless I may add as The Awakening.
Genesis
N Not enough collectively to rate, but in the bizarre story where life becomes art and vice versa, there are continual moments where the material splits and bleeds, sort of like statues of the Virgin Mary, on its way to becoming a real live girl. Its creator, on the other hand, becomes a statue, like he received a visit from Medusa.
YEAR 1979 directed by ridley scott
STARRING sigourney weaver, tom skerritt, ian holm
Qs: 4. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:56:40. It’s certainly one of the more famous, recognizable and widely-parodied events in science fiction, the first Alien birth which rips its way free in no time before skittering away. SR: SSSSS
N 1:07:45. I hope you didn’t get too attached to Brett. SR: SSSSS
N 1:21:33. (Ian) has gone completely around the bend and jams a rolled-up magazine in Ripley’s mouth, trying to kill her. Parker whacks him at the mark with a fire extinguisher and reveals an interesting secret: (Ian) isn’t real. He’s a robot, a cyborg, an artificial human. He spits and gurgles what I guess is cyborg juice (akin to hydraulic fluid) until he’s roasted like a marshmallow. SR: SSSSS
N 1:32:23. No one makes it out of this movie alive save Ripley. Here are Parker’s parts, spread about where he made his last stand. SR: SSSSS
SPECIAL EDITION CUT
YEAR 1986 directed by james cameron
STARRING sigourney weaver, michael biehn, carrie henn
Qs: 3. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 1:12:17. The first chest-burster of the film pops from a “live one” found webbed to the wall. When it finally hatches, the guys cook it and the girl by setting the whole place on fire. SR: SSSSS
N 1:24:18. Something goes wrong in the ship when Spunkmeyer doesn’t respond. The result is red splattered on the windshield and an imminent crash. SR: SSSSS
N 2:13:20. I won’t say, not by a long shot, that I can’t be surprised, but I knew better than to think it was over. Acid blood drips onto the ground by Bishop and we know what’s coming. A giant tail rips through him, his android fluid spewing everywhere before he’s summarily ripped in half and thrown in two different directions. His upper half a body manages to hang on, his synthetic organs falling out all over the ground. This isn’t the only time Lance Henriksen has been torn in half: see Hellworld. Well, you’d just as soon not, but… SR: SSSSS
N Upgraded to two based on the prevalence of alien gore, ooze, acid blood and the general way they look. J
YEAR 1992 directed by david fincher
STARRING sigourney weaver, charles dance, charles dutton
Qs: 8. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:07:58. A body in the EEV is guaranteed dead, the head splattered like a dropped pumpkin, jaws split apart, blood all over and maggots thriving in the scene of death. SR: SSSSS
N 0:24:35. Everything looks nice and hygienic as the scene opens, but when the camera pans down and we see that every tile wall in the room is covered in blood and there are in fact dead animals hanging from places on the ceiling, it’s like something out of Hostel. A maggot-infested ox is dragged in, ready for “processing” to put it nicely. SR: SSSSS
N 0:28:35. While Dillon contemplates innocence and punishment, the fat ox corpse the men drug in earlier starts to quiver and pour fluids from a rip in its side. It doesn’t take much to know what goes on, but I’ll go into it anyhow. The Hostel atmosphere continues with hacksaws and other devices on display as the blood continues to pour and the body continues to shake, disgusting sounds emitting from the widening hole in the animal. Then, it happens: a massive explosion of various substances and the usual maggots bear a slimy alien baby. SR: SSSSS
N 0:38:48. I’m not sure what Murphy the sewer rat was looking for, but when he found wasn’t this Spikey, but rather an Alien. He gets the acid spit right in the eyes and starts tumbling along in the tunnel. Now, you knew as well as I did that when that fan blade came on, something bad was going to happen. Tumble, tumble, tumble – instant mincemeat. Later, we get a shot of the tunnel bespattered with gore, an associate bringing him out in buckets. SR: SSSSS
N 0:55:02. One of the brothers sits up against a wall, pretty well ripped up by the resident Alien, great portions of his head torn away and brain fully visible. Thirty-four seconds later, another one bites the dust when it looks like the Alien ripped the guys skin off his face, his blood splattering on the timid sort who looked like he’d be sick back at brain-man. SR: SSSSS
N 1:10:45. Getting picked up by the head seems to be the preferred way to snatch prey. Leaves a bloody mess to clean up too. SR: SSSSS
N 1:29:39. Slit jugulars bleed like a mother, don’t they? SR: SSSSS
N 2:04:25. Jude didn’t make it, at least not in one piece. SR: SSSSS
N Upgraded to 5 from 3 for myriad instances of minor bloodshed and the cool Alien explosion at the finale. J
YEAR 1997 directed by jean-pierre jeunet
STARRING sigourney weaver, winona ryder, ron perlman
Qs: 12. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:04:35. Alien baby. SR: SSSSS
N 0:35:15. The new Ripley shows us she’s indeed something special beyond her corrosive blood when she forces Winona’s blade through her hand and doesn’t blink. SR: SSSSS
N 0:42:00. Getting frozen a la Terminator 2 or Mind Hunters blows, doesn’t it? More so when your arm breaks off and flesh starts to disappear from your head. SR: SSSSS
N 0:45:23. It’s a massacre under glass when an Alien slips into an escape pod and makes human au jus out of the unfortunates on board. SR: SSSSS
N 0:46:15. Totally worth mentioning under a separate heading, when Perez gets the Alien’s second mouth through back of his skull, in a really rude move out of Bad Taste, he reaches around to the site and pulls a piece of brain out and looks at it. Nice, isn’t it? SR: SSSSS
N 0:49:01. It was obviously Elgyn’s time to die when the Alien shot his second mouth through his chest. In a sick but slick gesture, someone whom we don’t immediately see sticks a rather wide gun barrel through the hole in his chest and blasts the Alien to smithereens. SR: SSSSS
N 0:59:08. It’s a little shop of horrors when Ripley stumbles into I-7, a research lab where ungodly abominations are grown in jars, essentially: a freakish human-type thing with a long, distinctively Alien tail; a female subject who looked like she was giving birth to one through her face, one of the creature’s second mouths emerging from her left cheek; a truly ghastly type with virtually no human features and nothing for a face but a giant toothy mouth; a man with sickly long fingers and much else wrong besides and some sort of unrealistically-hellish-experiment-gone-massively-wrong type of woman who looks more like an alien platypus with the variety of parts and things she had in place of regular limbs. In mercy, Ripley roasts the travesty of nature alive. There’s no B & G but rather a motley assortment of biological terrors, things that didn’t mix nor survived whatever exactly kind of wanna-be-God sorts of things they were perpetrating in there. SR: SSSSS
N 1:03:13. Wondered what’s been happening to those test subjects who were so respectfully immobilized in pens with alien eggs and facehuggers? Here they are, guts hanging out. SR: SSSSS
N 1:33:13. Revenge is a dish best served…violent. The nickel worker gets his licks in and how on * for putting him through the whole experience. Charging him while taking direct chest hits the whole time, he pounds his head into a solid metal girder seven or eight times before he holds * against his body and lets the bursting Alien rip through his chest and out his hostage’s forehead, making the episode a bloody two-for-one deal. SR: SSSSS
N 1:35:42. After a nauseating birth sequence, the white, slimy thing that looks like a successful cross of the two species (more like an obscenely over-calcified human skeleton, really) comes forth from the equally as disgusting mother Alien. The new creature then turns on its mother and rips her head in half. How’s that for thanks? Its attitude gets worse when it responds to Gediman’s admiration by biting the top of his skull off, exposing his pulpy brain. SR: SSSSS
N 1:42:50. That thing is really friggin’ ugly. Just thought I’d say that. Anyhow, I hope you didn’t like Distephano because he’s on his way out as you could no doubt tell by the teary “I’m gonna die” look in his eyes. The Alien thing grabs his head in its fat little hands and crushes it like an elephant stepping on a watermelon. SR: SSSSS
N 1:45:33. Definitely the grossest sequence in the entire movie is right here when Ripley turns on her own kind and slings some of her blood on a nearby window, which, when it eats through, permits the vacuum of space to simply suck the creature right through the quarter-sized break and into nowhere. First a bit of the beasts’s flesh stars to pull away toward the hole. When it finally gets through it starts to swell into a bubble until it can’t handle the imbalance any longer and explodes in an effusion of blood and gore that eventually starts to work the creature over from the inside, sucking its guts out through its back before taking the rest of it, butt-ugly face and all through the opening. Reeeeeally gross stuff. SR: SSSSS
N Upgraded an extra point for the standard reasons: miscellaneous nastiness and that gut-wrenching (and spewing into space) conclusion. Eeeeeewwww…
YEAR 2004 directed by uwe boll
STARRING christian slater, tara reid, stephen dorff
Qs: 8. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:10:54. Edward engages in a face-off with a man of abnormal strength and agility. Firing into his chest twice, he throws the man onto a pipe that rips through, suspending him upon it. SR: SSSSS
N 0:19:55. After what must have been an intense scene of carnage, the imprisoned Professor Hudgens emerges from his “cell” to come upon a bloody ship-full of victims, red pooled around them, much splashed or streaked on walls and across the deck. SR: SSSSS
N 0:32:05. A Zeno tentacle grabs in its claws the head of an unfortunate security guard before jamming a spike through his occipital and out of his mouth. It then bends his head down, breaking his neck, to retrieve its spike before it disappears. SR: SSSSS
N 0:37:04. Dr. Fischer is performing a post-mortem operation on the man who chased Edward around earlier. Having cut a lengthy slit in the man’s back, he uses a mechanical device to spread the cut further. A minute later at 0:38:04, he does some more cutting around in the body before seizing and extracting a worm-like creature “fused to the spinal cord.” SR: SSSSS
N 0:52:01. During an exhilarating shootout sequence set to rock, filmed like a music video and lasting just over a minute, three of the men from Alpha Unit who crash the party to fight the Zenoes along with Edward and Ms. Cedrac end up being dealt with rather swiftly, a spotty arc of blood following two of the men as they’re thrown through the air. SR: SSSSS
N 0:54:42. One of the infected seizes a man from Alpha Unit and rips his throat out, reveling in the coursing flow of blood pouring from the wound. SR: SSSSS
N 1:12:34. A Zenoe falls upon one of the men assigned to protect the perimeter, ripping his right arm off and a good part of his shoulder, the massive wound pouring blood. SR: SSSSS
N 1:16:33. Agent Miles, one of the last surviving, dispatches Agent Feenstra, telling her that he’ll stay behind. Later poking around along the route she earlier traveled, Miles discovers Feenstra by seeing motion out of the corner of his eye, discovering it’s a pair of twitching legs. Moving closer, he finds it’s her – but in a way he never expected. In what I rate the nastiest death in the film, Agent Feenstra’s head has been split cleanly in half down the middle, gore stretching in thin strips from one side to the other, blood simply pouring from the break. SR: SSSSS
YEAR 2003 directed by f. gary gray
STARRING vin diesel, larenz tate, timothy olyphant
| 
