N 0:17:27. Mike and Debbie encounter their first cotton-candy corpse. At 0:18:11, they see a familiar face in another cocoon, one fresh from the field. SR: SSSSS

N 0:32:28. Shorty comes along on his trike…to a gang of bikers. One of them smashes his ride into itty-bitty pieces. He pops off-screen and then back, now sporting boxing gloves. One last taunt from the biker and his head goes flying into a trashcan. SR: SSSSS

N 0:53:35. Officer Dave, prowling around the jail, finds the cocoons of the two inmates in with the clown. He peels back part of the pink candy to show a human face. An arm drops into view from the second cocoon, most of the flesh dissolved. SR: SSSSS

N 0:54:19. A clown has Mooney dolled up like a ventriloquist dummy. After assuring Dave that all they wanted to do was kill him, the clown pulls his hand out of Mooney’s back, and slings off the glove of blood onto the floor. SR: SSSSS

N 1:03:40. “Ballistic Pastry” I call this one. It’s the best, if not the strangest, death in the film. A typical clown car pulls up outside a tent (a real one) and confronts a guard stationed at the entrance. When he tells them the park’s closed and they’ll have to leave, all five produce pies (from somewhere) and proceed to hit him repeatedly in the face and on the rest of his body for several seconds with many pounds of cream and crust until he collapses. The smoking skeletal remains of an arm (later) indicate the filling wasn’t your standard custard or apple. SR: SSSSS

N 1:22:40. A parting shot from the klowns gets a little messy for Dave, Mike and Debbie.

YEAR 2001 directed by tibor takacs

STARRING sara downing, amy parks, ron perlman

N 0:12:17. Dr. Winslow drops a heavy book on a rat that was in his trashcan. When the book hits, the rat’s body pops like a blister. SR: SSSSS

N 0:23:54. I hope you didn’t get too attached to Naomi. She sneaks out during the evening to have a cigarette. Two rats start sniffing at her feet, one of which is bleeding slightly, but before she gets much opportunity to panic, dozens more fall from the vents above and eat her alive, leaving behind little but a bloody pool with bits of meat sprinkled around. SR: SSSSS

N 0:37:20. A lovemaking session in the bathroom (a choice locale) is cut short when dozens of red-eyed rats crash the party. The rats joined soon by Mama rat bite the living daylights out of the poor soul, leaving him bleeding all over the place. At 0:38:44, Samantha comes upon the boy’s chewed-up body in a pool of blood, Ernst calmly cleaning it up. So far the scene earns a 3, but when we see at 0:39:13 a close-up of the body and see that the right hand has been chewed off, the left arm almost completely, a good bit of the skin and hair right off the skull and most of the skin on what remains of his arms and back, it enables this scene to earn a 4. SR: SSSSS

N 0:44:36. A giant rattrap springs and breaks one of the men’s fingers. SR: SSSSS

N 0:47:58. The two exterminators are dispatched by Mama and her children. SR: SSSSS

N 0:50:30. Here we see an opened-up body of a rat on a tape Michael is viewing. SR: SSSSS

N 1:08:46. Rats bite off Rose’s fingers before Mama rat jumps her. SR: SSSSS

N 1:11:20. Overrun by rats and tied up in a straitjacket, Cypress chews through her left wrist in an attempt to free herself. When she thinks she hears her name, she looks up for a moment, bits of flesh and blood sticking to her face. Going back to work, she takes a larger bite out of herself, her open wrist flowing worse by the second. Dying of blood loss, she falls over and the rats that have been curiously poking around in her cell and on her finally get their chance to feast. SR: SSSSS

N 1:13:29. Samantha and Johnny look through a slot into Cypress’s cell, seeing nothing but a bloody corpse crawling with gnawing, voracious rats. SR: SSSSS

N 1:17:27. I had hopes that he would last, but Mr. Winslow does not. Mama rat jumps him and bites his throat out, blood spurting all over his face. SR: SSSSS

N 1:19:10. Here we see what happened to Rose – rats had apparently been eating through her back for a while, chewing a hole in her and spreading guts and blood around. Starting to flip out, Samantha comes across the chewed-up remains of several animals, guts hanging out, ribs visible whereas Johnny finds the corpse of his OCD suffering pal Morgan. Most of the flesh has been eaten away from around his mouth, his jaw hanging slack. The munching, eating sounds of the rats chewing off his flesh are quite gross, if I may say. SR: SSSSS

N 1:21:17. Johnny rams a length of pipe through Ernst’s chest. He retaliates by falling backwards into Johnny and stabbing him through the chest with the same pipe. SR: SSSSS

N 1:23:37. Mama jumps and bites the throat out of poor Matlida. Lenny goes soon after. SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1994 directed by roger roberts avary

STARRING eric stoltz, julie delpy, jean-hughes anglade

N 0:52:16. Eric blows away a man and a woman, implied. The mark is the aftermath. SR: SSSSS

N 0:58:26. A customer pulls a gun and starts things on a bloody path right down the toilet. SR: SSSSS

N 1:16:20. Zed pokes around in the smoking rubble Eric turned the vaults into and finds a guard, burnt beyond belief, only half of his face unscarred. Out of mercy, Zed shoots him. SR: SSSSS

N 1:20:00. The titular Zoe wrestles with Eric for his automatic. In the process, it shoots him in his left foot, a wound that leaves a trail noticeable when he confronts Zed and Zoe later. SR: SSSSS

N 1:24:20. Eric and Zed part allegiances and the former slits the latter’s right cheek and pushes him down two flights of stairs. SR: SSSSS

N 1:28:38. Oliver appears, bleeding profusely from a head wound. SR: SSSSS

N 1:29:26. Eric meets his maker in a hail of automatic fire from six very armed officers. SR: SSSSS

N It’s curious to note, I think, that the title is a misnomer: Zoe doesn’t die, but lives happily ever after.

YEAR 1999 directed by steve miner

STARRING bill pullman, bridget fonda, oliver platt

Qs: 7. AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N 0:06:45. Aah, the scene I first wanted to see this for. Our friendly sarcastic fish and game guy goes in the water which we have privileged information to know is inhabited by something far fiercer than anything he had experience with, ever. The local sheriff yanks him back into the boat after seeing him flailing and screaming…well, half of him anyway. Everything from the waist down is completely gone, only bleeding gore left. At 0:12:11 our paleontologist friend Kelly gets a shock when she asks to see the half-a-body and finds it really is half a body. SR: SSSSS

N 0:17:50. That ain’t no branch Kelly. Sheriff Keough reaches out to what looked at a distance like a branch, but clearly wasn’t once they got on top of it. In a hurry to drop it into the boat (it’s a moose head, incidentally), he lets it go a bit close to our slightly spoiled liberated woman and the look of pure horror and effrontery she gives him is priceless. SR: SSSSS

N 0:24:36. The group, save the squeamish Kelly, gather ‘round a maggot-hemorrhaging severed human toe. SR: SSSSS

N 0:39:15. Obviously, pulling up the speaker is a low job in Maine, one the expendable people are offered. A man pulls up the speaker and the creature promptly bites his head right off his shoulders, never to be seen again. SR: SSSSS

N 0:43:27. It’s bloodless, but traumatic as anything. After Sheriff Keough gets caught up in another one of Hector’s traps and is subsequently released, he takes off after the offender with a giant stick, much intent against his better senses and job description to beat his brains in. A bear that charges them wants to make him lunch. With everything against him, where was Hector to go? He dove off to the right, side-stepped the bear and thereby prompted something altogether more frightening. I would like to say here that I appreciate Mr. Miner’s direction because it coincides exactly with what I’d have had done: the mythical croc shoots up out of the lake and grabs the terrified bear by the hind end and drags it, grunting and wimpering, into the water. SR: SSSSS

N 0:49:49. You ever played tiddly-head? It’s where you step on a short stick and catapult a human head onto your foot. Then, you scream like mad. SR: SSSSS

N 1:12:40. Gator bye-bye! SR: SSSSS

unrated director’s cut

YEAR 2005 directed by george a. romero

STARRING simon baker, dennis hopper, asia argento

N 0:04:24. Cholo’s the first one to draw blood. Offloading bodies into a human landfill, he sees one that apparently wasn’t all the way destroyed. He withdraws a harpoon-type device and fires a projectile into its head with a gooey squish. SR: SSSSS

N 0:08:58. A biker blows half the head off of a cheerleader in the street while his entourage shoots up most of what’s left of the walkers. Later, the head walker shoves some of his fellow Zs out of the way, seemingly infuriated at the colorful festivities of the flowers in the graveyard. The last Z has his neck perforated with gunfire from the bikers and thus makes it quite easy for his head to detach, the body landing on the pavement with a splat. Manifesting some form of compassion and respect for the…living dead, the leader raises his right foot and stomps the head into a pile. SR: SSSSS

N 0:13:13. Cholo’s blows away an attacker with a vertical shot through the chin. A few moments later, at 0:14:00, a Z takes a good, juicy bite out of one of his other pal’s arms, mindlessly gnawing on the clump of flesh. Outside, rather than have Cholo shoot him and definitely before he’ll become one of the walking dead, he puts his barrel in his mouth and blows his own brains out. SR: SSSSS

N 0:24:43. Cholo takes care of business with a heavy metal sculpture, bashing a recently-turned Z into mush – more so than the walking dead already are. SR: SSSSS

N 0:25:49. Look for cameos by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright from Shaun of the Dead. Hint: they’re the two chained-up Zs hungering for the lovely ladies they keep being teased with for photo-ops.

N 0:39:52. After Zs penetrate the compound, one bites out a man’s eye while he was still alive. Another has finger food (I apologize) while others dine out of the chests of recent kills. SR: SSSSS

N 0:48:16. Kaufman actually calls a spade a spade and uses the Z-word: zombies.

N 0:50:39. The men go on a search for Brubaker, thinking for one second they found him. It’s only the lower half of his leg, torn off below the knee. Another Z stumbles into view, eating off of the leg like it was a chicken wing, down to the bloody bone. As the men shine their lights around toward the sources of much flesh-munching, they see many very gross things:

N Two Zs eating off of a man’s body, one at the legs (or what was left of them) and the other tearing intestines out of the chest cavity.

N A real stomach-turner: another Z reaching into the mouth and down the throat of a man and pulling something out, much blood in tow. SR: SSSSS

N 0:52:42. This one, let’s be honest with ourselves, is really pushing it: seconds after hot-wiring a car, the group gets ready to head out when one of their number takes a hit. A hand lands on Manolete’s shoulder and he instinctively turns to see who it is. The body standing there doesn’t have a head – that we can immediately see. One comes flying up from behind, connected by only the most tenuous of threads, and chomps into him. Charlie takes aim and shoots the Z through its chest and through the head hanging behind. SR: SSSSS

N 0:58:47. I hope you didn’t get too attached to Mouse…Zs fall upon him and tear him absolutely to pieces. One bites into his neck while another bites into his arm. As more stream in, drawn like sharks to the kill, they pull him apart starting with his left leg ripped off at the hip and his arms torn off at the shoulders before they yank all 30+ feet of his intestines out. SR: SSSSS

N 1:05:46. It’s only in silhouette, but deserves mention: a Z tears a man’s head off and in so doing rips out his spinal column. SR: SSSSS

N 1:06:25. A butcher Z hacks a soldier’s hand off below the wrist. A second later his body blows up thanks the grenade from which he just pulled the pin. SR: SSSSS

N 1:08:05. A Z bites a chunk out of Motown’s cheek before tearing off her ear. Slack is forced to put her down before going after her killer, blowing half its head off. SR: SSSSS

N 1:10:55. Tom Savini guest stars looking a lot like he walked out of From Dusk Till Dawn (which, coincidentally, he was zombie-ized in too). It’s curious, I think, to note that Tom was also in the original Dawn of the Dead in 1978, almost thirty years ago. Had he been able to hold on for those thirty years and was turned recently or did he meet his end somewhere between and manage to keep under the radar for all this time?

N 1:13:43. Zs feast on people in The Throat: one rips a man’s Adam’s Apple out with his teeth while another scoops brains from a fresh body. Yet another rips a man’s mouth open and pulls his face up over his head like a ski mask while friends of his unravel a man’s bowels and drag him apart at the waist (already done in Day of the Dead [O]). After that chaos, the walking dead discover tools: jackhammers, axes and shovels among others. As a gruesome capper, an arm gets ripped in half lengthwise from the hand, pried apart between the ring and middle fingers. SR: SSSSS

N 1:17:40. Zs storm Fiddler’s Green and the usual havoc results: a man’s arterial spray coats a window as his neck is bitten out and a woman’s blood covers the glass block floor she’s being killed on in a similar attack but with a twisted twist – somebody rips out the jewelry and a tatter of flesh from her belly button, blood rushing in quickly to fill it. SR: SSSSS

N 1:19:32. As the Zs claw and paw at Dead Reckoning, one of them rakes its own fingernails off, all four, all at once.

N 1:20:14. Riley slices the head off a Z, leaving it to splash into the river below. As he scampers back in to Dead Reckoning, another grabs hold of his ankle. Undeterred, he kicks its face in before it’s full steam ahead and the truck rolls right over another, squashing it flat like grapes in a wine press. A fourth (without legs past the knees) clings on for the ride. SR: SSSSS

N Upgraded a point to 10 for all the standard reasons for upgrading past Z flicks. J

N Bonus: in the “Remaining Bits,” there are several gory things: a girl bites a guy’s lower lip off and Pillsbury (do not tell me he’s not named for the dough-boy) grinds a Z’s fingers to mush through grating with his gigantic boot as if he were snuffing a cigarette.

YEAR 1995 directed by tom holland

STARRING patricia wettig, dean stockwell, bronson pinchot

N 1:02:00. Craig snaps, as we suspected he eventually would. He jumps up from behind a counter in the café and jams a knife into Dinah’s chest, directly into her sternum, the blade breaking off in her body. He runs

YEAR 1988 directed by stephen chiodo

STARRING grant kramer, suzanne synder, john vernon