YEAR 2006 directed by eli roth
STARRING jay hernandez, derek richardson, eythor gudjonsson
Qs: 13. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:01:15. This is the way horror fans like it – sick and straight off the top. It’s clear some sort of cleanup effort is going on, but what’s being cleaned isn’t clear, but rather pink as in diluted blood being carried away by suds, washed off of tile walls. In a later shot a gooey mixture of blood, teeth and who knows what else circles a drain. SR: SSSSS
N 0:33:20. “I go home.” Yeah, right. Oli’s head is shown as the shot widens to be detached from his body, shown to be a pile of gore in the background. SR: SSSSS
N 0:41:57. Josh wakes up in hell, a bag over his head. The bag is removed and his own private Satan starts the show. Picking up a hammer drill, the man bores four holes in his victim’s body: two in his chest just above his pecs and two on his legs, one in each thigh. When he puts the tool back on the table, it has twists of reddened flesh spiraled around it. After informing him about why he was even in that position, the man slices both of his Achilles tendons and feigns letting him go before stopping him at the door, dragging him back and slitting his throat. SR: SSSSS
N 0:56:58. Remember the guy who wanted to be a surgeon? He gets his wish – at doing an autopsy at least. Josh’s body is on the table before him, his chest opened up, blood everywhere. Look carefully on the close-up: a good part of the skin on the back of his left hand and going up his arm to the elbow has been removed, tendons and musculature visible. SR: SSSSS
N 0:58:01. While Pax is being dragged off to his hole, we see many interesting things in the rooms he passes by: a well-bled victim getting his neck cut open; two anonymous female victims and a man being beaten severely about the head. SR: SSSSS
N 1:04:20. Pax’s torturer revs up a chainsaw and holds it in front of his face for a few seconds before he starts to vomit past his ball gag. Once that’s over, the man slices off a good chunk of Pax’s hand, two fingers bouncing on the concrete floor, blood pouring. Slipping in the blood, the chainsaw man falls hard to the ground and the revving tool starts carving into him, burying its chain deep, cutting his leg in half, blood simply flying from the massive wound. To put an end to the matter, Pax fires a round straight through his head. Personally, I would have carved the turkey up with his own weapon of choice, but that’s me. SR: SSSSS
N 1:05:54. Pax puts down the guard and picks up his fingers. SR: SSSSS
N “THE CORPSE DISPOSAL UNIT” 1:07:05. A room Pax stumbles into while trying to evade the guards he soon discovers to be corpse disposal unit where used bodies go to be processed. Shortly, a man comes in and Pax has to think quick. Stowing away on one of the body carts, loaded with corpses, Pax can merely hope he won’t be discovered. Along the way (1:07:54) he passes a room painted thickly with blood, the whole messy scene being hosed down, awaiting the next victim. After they descend in an elevator, the cart-pusher tries to get the load of bodies off, but somebody’s hand is stopping him. After picking it up and stuffing it by Pax’s head, the man rolls on into the chop shop. Plucking a body off of Pax, he uses inordinately large cleavers to hack the meat up for easier handling, carrying a tray of gore off-screen and dumping it. When Pax opens his eyes, who does he sees but his lip-stitched friend Josh on a nearby table. Picking up the next body, Pax loses his fingers and has to fumble around, trying to keep movements minimal as possible, to retrieve them. Going into a leg with a grinder, the man turns around in time enough to pick one up and haul it off with everything else in the next tray-full. A brief shot follows of his table of gore, several legs strewn about, flaps of skin and muscle draped over the side, blood everywhere. Various blades and axes are held up on the wall behind, awaiting the next body to divvy and ditch. We find in the next shot what’s being done with the personal pieces: one by one the large guy is tossing them into the fire. Pax sneaks up on him and when he turns around beats him one good time in the head with a large hammer of some type, then takes off. SR: ããããã
N 1:17:35. The man who accosted Pax in the dressing room is busying burning Kana’s eye with a blowtorch. As he turns around to tell Pax to buzz off, we can see the organ is hanging from its optic nerve, greasy blood filling the hole where it used to be. Pax shoots and kills him before tending to her. Trying to help in his small way, Pax picks up a small pair of scissors and cuts the nerve the eye is dangling by. A run of a custard-yellow, watery substance pours from the spot down the screaming girl’s face, joining the blood. SR: SSSSS
N 1:21:14. When Pax and Kana fly the coop, they come upon who else but the two degenerate women who led them along the whole time and the creep who recommended the hostel in the first place. Pax floors it and slams into all three, killing one right away, juicy red running in a stream off the sidewalk. The other girl doesn’t get a lot of time to contemplate what happened before a speeding car driven by the men after Pax splatters her all over the street, dragging her body for a short way. SR: SSSSS
N 1:22:05. Being called to pay the toll, Pax and Kana got by with a bag chock full of sweets. When the bad guys come by that same way, they are far less fortunate. First they clobber them with large rocks, then they beat their heads in with large heavy things. SR: SSSSS
N 1:24:45. Just when Pax thought they had it made, Kana sees her reflection at the railway station and gets an idea just how disfigured she is. She reaches up toward her destroyed eye, but gives up before she gets close. Turning away resignedly, she looks at the front of the first oncoming train and leaps directly in front of it, splattering herself across #742 288-4. Her head gets crushed into a gooey blob by the wheels, squashed like a grape, her blood splattering bystanders. Two points are for the red visuals, the third for the idea of girl being hit by a train like a fly by a windshield. SR: SSSSS
N 1:28:15. Pax just keeps having the luck, doesn’t he? Dripping with serendipity, he happens upon who else but the intellectual on the train who wanted to be a surgeon. Following him into the restroom and locking everyone else out, Pax taunts him from a nearby stall with a business card for Elite Hunting. When the man realizes somebody knows, he starts to freak, but doesn’t get far. When he reaches for the card, Pax seizes his hand and slices off the same two fingers as those he lost. Pax then kicks in the door, slams the man’s face down in the bowl he was just sitting on (think about that for a moment), holding it there until he near drowns. Pulling him back, Pax lets him get his first, last and only look at his killer in a reflection in a dispenser before he slits his throat. SR: SSSSS
N The rating of a perfect 7 is upgraded to a 8 based on the very concept of being able to pay money to torture as sickly as you want and then kill a person, free to do whatever to the corpse for as long as you like. It’s a diseased idea and wicked follow-through. It does chill me deeply to consider that somewhere in the world, unthinkable inhuman tragedies like these play out every day. If you’ve heard the hype, it was “based on true events,” but these extend no further than to Quentin Tarantino (surprised?) who reportedly discovered the site, triggering Eli Roth to spin the idea into a feature-length film. Whether or not the site was for real not even they knew, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were.
YEAR 2002 directed by rob zombie
STARRING sid haig, bill moseley, sheri moon zombie
Qs: 14. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:06:12. Captain Spaulding shoots Richard, blowing a good part of his skull away. SR: SSSSS
N 0:29:20. Here are a few shots of several of the missing cheerleaders, piled on a bed, their sweaters bearing bloodstains. SR: SSSSS
N 0:43:40. Bill, bleeding from the blows at the gate, is helpless to escape Otis as he slits his face in several places with a straight razor before cutting his right hand off with a hatchet. SR: SSSSS
N 0:44:48. Bill is transformed and displayed as Fish Boy. His right foot lies at his side while his body from his torso up is integrated into a piscine form, his real skin split in many places, glasses askew on his nose, forehead still bloodied from the gate attack. SR: SSSSS
N 0:52:46. Baby cuts Jerry’s scalp off with a razor, likely the same used to slice up Bill. SR: SSSSS
N 0:53:27. Police open the trunk of Bill’s car to find a dead woman, treat carved in her chest, trick down her left leg. SR: SSSSS
N 0:53:51. A man tied with wrist shackles to the wall has been through a world of hurt, apparent by the bleeding down his chest from a large wound, the duct tape around his mouth and his stark pate which would be unremarkable if ragged tufts of hair didn’t remain and if what skin was exposed didn’t make it look like what he lost had been ripped out rather than shaved off. SR: SSSSS
N 0:59:00. Willis and Naish come upon a scene in a shed that offers both men an unbridled, unholy look into another world, one that neither man had previously seen or had preparation for. Doors swing wide and bared for both to behold is a living picture of horror: the remaining four cheerleaders (the body in the trunk being the fifth) are spread out in the shed, three of them chained up, only the one toward right frame still wearing her cheerleading outfit and only the one in the center (the one with boo carved in her abdomen) still alive. One has a pentagram carved in her chest while another has go team etched into hers. The fourth, laid out on the table, her throat slit, has dead meat carved in her right thigh, just what she and three of her friends had become out there. Meanwhile, in the house, Mother Firefly blows Wydell’s brains out his right ear at point blank range, looking on expressionlessly all the while. Out back, Otis is taking control by shooting Mr. Willis twice in the back, appearing to Officer Naish while his partner falls face-down in a puddle, ordering him to “turn around real slow” and “drop ‘em.” Letting go of the referred objects, his radio and gun, he orders him to his knees and holds him in an almightily long state of tension with his gun pointed at his head (a numbing twenty-six seconds) before finally blowing his brains out. SR: SSSSS
N 1:03:07. Otis cuts a man’s face off, caressing the exposed muscles and rubbing some of the blood on his own skin before putting on the man’s face, Texas Chainsaw style. SR: SSSSS
N 1:03:26. Tiny steps in a pool of blood, one of several, before Otis is shown doing something quite painful to his right arm causing it to bleed all over himself. In the same shot you can see what appears to be a human vest he has on, stitching across the chest starting at about the neck and going around to his left side. Shortly after, you get to see in gleaming living (dead?) color the skinned body laid out on the couch that Otis was fooling with earlier. You see a pan up a bloody arm, to the skinless skull, teeth bared and something not quite right with the eyes before a pan back down the bloody arm to the abstract blood painting all over the floor. The chest has been completely skinned as well, no sign of any of the missing epidermis anywhere. Back downstairs, the family, who had been awaiting Otis’s appearance, are granted their wish: he appears at the top of the step, wearing Mr. Willis’s face, with inconceivable cruelty teasing his granddaughter with it before kissing her in it. SR: SSSSS
N 1:08:56. Baby catches up with Mary, tackles her to the ground in the middle of a graveyard and stabs her five times in the chest through her rabbit costume, watching as she dies, her blood spatter staining the fur and her own dress. Baby then licks the blood from the knife as she cackles. SR: SSSSS
N 1:14:59. Denise comes upon the 1000 corpses the house is named for, strung up on the walls on both sides of an unnaturally long hallway. They’re quite old, dry and falling apart, but the idea of several hundred bodies arranged for display is distinctly twisted. At the end of it, through a set of large and heavy doors, she comes to a cathedral of bones. Femurs and skulls are arranged over archways, a chandelier of humeri, skulls and other assorted bones hanging above. SR: SSSSS
N 1:17:00. Denise comes upon Jerry, still somewhat alive, his body studded with operating clamps, his head opened up like a banana while the not-so-dead-or-missing Dr. Satan drills into his skull. Coughing up blood left and right, spitting it into the air, Jerry doesn’t have much longer. Shortly we get a wide shot of the damage the bad doctor has wrought: Jerry’s chest and the upper portion of his right arm opened up like candy bar wrappers as he sputters and dies. SR: SSSSS
N 1:20:10. The unspeakable creature that chases Denise back down the hall of corpses removes what looks like a type of breathing mask, some kind of revolting greenish-yellow slime running out of his…I guess you can call it a mouth. His looks and the thought of whatever that was oozing from the largest hole in his face makes the rating for this scene. SR: SSSSS
YEAR 2003 directed by uwe boll
STARRING jonathan cherry, tyron leitso, clint howard
Qs: 7. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:15:30. Matt’s all-skin, no-brains girlfriend finds him stowed away with a bunch of Zs, blood dripping from the corners of his mouth just before a hand reaches through his chest and the rest of his pals descend upon her. SR: SSSSS
N 0:32:53. Cynthia runs out from behind a tent – changed. She lunges at Simon and breaks his neck. She then starts for everyone else, but a hitherto unseen heroine blows her away, her bloody body twitching while she suffered. A final shot to the head put her down permanently. SR: SSSSS
N 0:40:25. A notable Z head-kill. SR: SSSSS
N “A ZOMBIE KILLIN’ BLITZ” 0:51:00. In one of Uwe’s characteristic gun battles set to rock (cf. Alone in the Dark), many things happen in a zombie killin’ blitz: a sickening chest-hit, much gooey gore spilling out; various body shots; a blast in the head; another chest hit; two bloody head explosions; several more through-and-through chest shots; a number more of the same; a spectacular explosive head-kill; half a body dragging itself around; one serious round of gunfire that shoots through three Zs at once and countless more bloody direct hits, one to the forehead of one of Casper’s former fellow officers; another through the skull of a Z busy attacking Casper, its bloody brains splattering on her face. She pushes him off, but doesn’t last much longer. While trying to crawl through a window after Rudy, several Zs hack her legs off, a bloody pool forming at the stumps. Cap’n provides several with machete slashes, one losing an arm in a red spray. SR: ããããã
N 1:01:51. Greg peels back the gauze pad covering the acid burns on his face, all of the flesh gone, a square hole representing where it used to be. SR: SSSSS
N 1:08:00. The group comes upon a Dr. Frankenstein-type lab, body parts stored everywhere in jars. A few of the highlights: a dead Z laid out on a table; a stitched-up head put together like a crazy quilt; an intact brain and spinal column; a Z Greg accidentally steps in and a head under glass. SR: SSSSS
N 1:21:57. Rudy slices off Castillo’s head, his severed neck gushing blood even as the body continues to move and try to strangle Rudy. Fortunately though, Alicia isn’t dead. She gets on her feet and stomps Castillo’s head in a gross splat, brains spilling out of the crushed skull. SR: SSSSS
YEAR 1999 directed by william malone
STARRING geoffrey rush, famke janssen, taye diggs
Qs: 12. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:04:00. One nurse runs camera while another assists Dr. Vannacutt (think about it) in what looks like performing an autopsy on a living patient. Cutting into his gut just above his belly button, blood pours over his chest as the doctor continues to slice. SR: SSSSS
N 0:04:45. Mutinous and marauding patients mob up on an orderly, one of them grabbing three pencils tight in his hand and jamming them through his neck, leaving the man to cough up blood as it slowly fills his lungs. The patients continue committing mass murder on the entire staff of the hospital, drowning some in bathtubs and simply slitting others’ throats, leaving them to bleed to death where they fell. The sequence switches to B & W as a patient picks up the camera the nurse earlier was using to document the rampage. It rounds out with a man held down on the same table Dr. Vannacutt’s patient at the opening was on. Another man lies beside, awaiting the same fate. The first man’s chest is cut wide open and the patient who presumably did it is fiddling around in the gash. Interesting Note: immediately after the closing credits, there is a longer sequence that shows an alternate view of these events coupled with a bizarre twist. SR: SSSSS
N 0:32:00. This segment has some curious background and historic relevance. When Watson finds a lever that turns on the light to the room he, Eddie and Sara are poking around in, Sara shrieks when she realizes what she was standing next to: a skinless figure of a man on a skinless posed horse. A shot of a child treated in a similar fashion with the skin of its head sliced into triangles and peeled back off of the skull. The bodies went through a process call plastination, a technique pioneered by one Honoré Fragonard (cf. Anatomy.) A veterinarian by trade, he specialized in preserving medical specimens in this way. Both examples in this sequence are direct copies from works of Fragonard. The child is one among several in his oeuvre and the man on the horse is a rendition of a figure called the Cavalier Anatomie, what many consider his best work. SR: SSSSS
N 0:42:29. Catching up with Eddie, seeing him at least, Sara chases him around that floor of the house until she finally spots him – standing at the edge of a giant vat of pure blood. Going limp and falling in, Eddie thrashes about as if he were being sucked under and were going to drown. SR: SSSSS
N 0:48:00. Hearing Melissa scream, Sara, Eddie, Stephen and Donald come upon a good-sized pool of blood connected to another by a thick trail. Wondering where she went, Sara’s flashlight beam shows a considerable blood smear all along one wall of the room beside the stairs and across the ceiling as if she was dragging across the surfaces into the unknown. A little bit later, Sara reviews what Melissa recorded, the images being of her left hand flopping around in the larger of the two puddles the group found when they went in the room at the mark. SR: SSSSS
N 0:52:02. Bursting in on Carl Schacter, the man who was supposed to be overseeing everything, verifying that Mr. Price’s scares were going according to plan, Steven finds a horrendous sight on the other side of his chair – Carl’s entire face is gone and much of his head was hollowed out like a pumpkin at Halloween, the gory inside gleaming in the light. The only thing other than the rest of his skull was his lower jaw, several teeth still visible. SR: SSSSS
N 0:54:14. Everyone comes upon Evelyn’s convulsing body, hooked to electroshock. At the mark, she stops twitching when the machine is shut off, a red flow coming up out of her mouth. SR: SSSSS
N 1:02:39. In this B & W sequence, Price is plunged into a large water tank with the nude corpse of a woman. The corpse releases a mouthful of red that diffuses like ink from an octopus. SR: SSSSS
N 1:09:05. Dr. Blackburn is stabbed in the stomach four times, his shirt soaking up his blood, more pouring from his mouth as he dies. SR: SSSSS
N 1:11:02. Watson comes upon the blood-covered floor of an operating room at the center of which is a blood-covered table with an ominously placed bone saw in the middle of it. SR: SSSSS
N 1:11:38. Waston, Eddie and Sara come upon the saturation chamber and see Dr. Blackburn inside. Opening the door, they’re horrified to see that what they saw through the portal was merely his severed head sitting on a ledge just under the window. His headless, blood-soaked body falls out onto the floor between them. SR: SSSSS
N 1:18:48. A glass case pops open, the displayed organs and other body parts obviously fresh out of one of the guests. Within the case are:
N 1: on the right side, a completely skinned left arm. The upper portion of it is all muscle whereas the lower half is cleaned down to the bone, including the fingers.
N 2: On the same side, a left femur.
N 3: On the back wall at top right is a liver.
N 4: Below that is the heart.
N 5: Below that, the stomach.
N 6: Below that, a complete set of lungs.
N 7: To the left of the previous four items is the headless, almost armless, almost legless body in which the organs were previously encased. It’s opened in two places on the left side, from the upper chest to the hip and from roughly two inches below to the upper thigh, the flaps of skin hanging out, showing blood vessel placement along the dermis. The organs of course are cleared out, displayed to its left, thus the halves of the ribs that weren’t cut away are visible as is the spinal column. What I meant by “almost armless” is the right arm is there, a rectangle from the crook of the elbow to the wrist cut away to reveal underlying musculature. What I meant by “almost legless” is most of the left leg is present, everything below the knee removed. The right leg is gone, the next item in the space where it would have been.
N 8: The head of young Miss Marr hangs with the rest of her, the face stuck in an expression of visceral fear. In the same frames where you’re given a close-up of such, you can see the exposed bone and muscle tissue of the left leg.
N 9: At 1:19:03 you can barely see her right femur on the left side of the case. SR: SSSSS
N JFF: It should be no surprise to classic film fans where Stephen’s last name came from – Vincent Price, the actor in the original House on Haunted Hill, 1959. Cf. House of Wax [R] (next), 2005.
YEAR 2005 directed by juame collet-sara
STARRING elisha cuthbert, chad michael murray, paris hilton
Qs: 14. AR: SSSSSSSSSS
N 0:20:54. This early sequence is quite disgusting when you think about it. Actually, it’s considerably disgusting even if you don’t think about it. Falling down a hill, Carly lands with a splat in a putrefied pile of rotting animals, the monotonous buzzing of flies filling the stench-encrusted air around her. What we don’t see immediately until Carly herself realizes it is that the pile is not just a pile and it’s not just in front of her. As the camera pulls back, we see it’s all around her and it’s a wide-open semi-liquid sea of decomposing roadkill in various stages of decomposition. Deer (deer and more deer), raccoons, you name it, it’s there and it’s breaking down into its base elements, guts and blood from the legion of burst bodies seeping out onto each other, skin breaking and falling off the bones, the released fluids coagulating and stinking to the highest of heavens. Think that’s all? It’s not over yet. A pickup caked all over with dried blood arrives, rattling and clanking the rusty, gory tools used to scrape up what the driver collects from the roadways. Letting down the tailgate to drop off a newcomer (another deer), the guy chucks a dead chicken with a dull thud on top of the partially solid mass of dead fauna before working to heft the deer out of the bed. SR: SSSSS
N 0:48:45. A mysterious hand reaches out with a giant pair of shears and clips Wade’s right Achilles tendon in a splat of blood and screams of pain. While Wade frantically makes excuses for attempts to defend himself, the hand comes back out of the nowhere whence it came and stabs him in the chest under his left arm with the same shears. SR: SSSSS
N 0:55:00. Vincent hooks up Wade to an extraordinarily uncomfortable-looking apparatus, turns open a few valves, flips a switch and over half-a-dozen showerheads break out with sprays of wax, coating Wade from head to foot.
N 0:56:36. Carly gets her first real clue that quite untoward things were going on in the strange town when she pokes around in the church building that earlier was bustling with funerary activity and she accidentally breaks the arm off of one of the women, seeing red gore under the wax. SR: SSSSS
N 1:04:34. Carly sticks her forefinger through a grate, trying to get Nick’s attention. Bo reaches down with a pair of clippers and cuts it off at the knuckle. He then picks it up and puts it in his pocket along with the clippers, all the while trying his best to get Nick away from the shop where he has Carly imprisoned. She manages to pry her superglued lips apart (they don’t go easily) to shout to Nick that she’s down there and needed help. SR: SSSSS
N 1:07:35. Wade, who was waxed (ahem) earlier, is treated just a bit worse when Dalton finds him seated at the piano in the wax museum. Dalton knows it’s him, but sees that something’s up, something that doesn’t feel right. When he reaches out to touch Wade’s cheek, he finds out what doesn’t feel right. Wade’s skin – it’s waxy instead of soft and warm, like skin usually is. Horrified, Dalton jumps back when Wade’s eyes move, proving that he was still alive. Trying to rescue his friend, Dalton starts to pick away at the wax, inadvertently picking away pieces of Wade’s flesh, exposing his freshly gory facial muscles underneath. Poor Wade’s eyes cry rivers of constant tears at the indefinable pain of his skin being torn apart, his unknowing friend just trying to help. When a dark attacker jumps in from just behind him, Dalton ducks, the strike missing him and slicing off a sizeable chunk of Wade’s face, his entire right cheek in fact, revealing the bloody muscle around his jaws and the right halves of his upper and lower sets of teeth. The section of waxy skin falls away with stretchy strings of still-warm wax kept semisolid by Wade’s residual body heat. As this happens, look at his eyes: they roll straight up in his head as if he couldn’t take any more pain and having his cheek sheared off pushed it over the top. SR: SSSSS
N 1:08:38. Vincent falls upon Dalton, chases him through the kitchen and throws him down the stairs. He then withdraws two knives and jams them at opposing angles into his neck, severing his head off completely. Not only do we see the headless body as it’s dragged away (including the open neck) but also we see the head, blood pouring and eyes blinki
