Red Krokodil: Life Sucks And Then You Die

I’ve taken the opportunity to do something a little bit different this October. During a time when more people are watching (hopefully) good horror films, I’ve been making a point of watching the sorts of horror films I normally avoid, for whatever reason. So far I’ve covered a film made by someone who makes horror films for megaplexes, a film from a genre I don’t really like, and a film that I started to watch once and abandoned after about 15 minutes because the acting and dialogue really sucked. And to wrap up this loosely-themed spooky season, I’m tackling underground horror, also sometimes called “extreme horror.” These are films, usually made very much on the cheap, that are intended to be so shocking or upsetting or transgressive that they’ll never receive any kind of wide release.

My window into this world is a company called Unearthed Films, whose stock in trade is almost entirely underground horror. They specialize in limited-run DVD and Blu-Ray editions of things like the August Underground and Guinea Pig films, something called the “Vomit Gore Trilogy,” and a collector’s edition-quality release of A Serbian Film. If you’re unfamiliar with these titles, the links I’ve provided are safe to click, but this is real “if you know, you know” territory. If you don’t, I wouldn’t go looking – I’m not really sure you’ll be better off for having done so. None of it is illegal, strictly speaking, but these are definitely the kind of films that get banned or seized by customs occasionally. I don’t watch films like this for the same reason I don’t really like slasher films. In general, they aren’t about people as much as they are pretexts for putting a lot of really unpleasant stuff on film or video to titillate fans of graphic violence and people whose sensibilities are so numbed that nothing else affects them. They’re just cinematic endurance tests, and that doesn’t interest me.

Which brings me to Red Krokodil. It’s part of Unearthed’s catalog, the subject matter is right in the wheelhouse, and most importantly, it’s one of the rare films of this kind to actually show up on a mass-market streaming service. As committed as I am to the bit, I’m not spending additional money just to watch something called Slow Torture Puke Chamber. It’s not as sensationalistic as it could have been, and it does seem to aspire to something more than just gross-out, but it just doesn’t get there.

It opens with a crawl describing the drug of the title. Krokodil (Russian for “crocodile”) is a homebrew heroin substitute, a morphine analogue made by combining cough medicine that contains codeine with a bunch of gnarly solvents like benzene and hydrochloric acid, as well as red phosphorous, medicated eyedrops, iodine, and a bunch of other shit never intended for human consumption. It first showed up in Russia, where poverty and draconian drug laws made it a last-ditch solution for heroin addicts. It’s made entirely from over-the-counter ingredients, so pretty much anyone can make it. And its effects are short-lived and the withdrawal exceptionally painful, so batches get cooked up in haste, under less-than-laboratory conditions. The result is where it gets its name, an injectable drug so full of impurities that skin around the injection sites quickly takes on a gray-green, scaly quality, as ulceration and necrosis set in. Trust me, you do not want to do an image search. You will see things far worse than anything in this film.

It's followed by an exterior shot of a Russian city, bombed-out ruins covered by some kind of haze or fog. And in this city lives a man, alone in a tiny apartment. His kitchen counter is covered with chemicals, a small pot bubbling on the stove with something black and tarry in it. The man is filthy, unshaven, his hair lank and greasy, and he’s clad only in bloodied bandages around his hands, elbows, and knees, and a pair of stained undershorts that are almost more holes than fabric. He inspects himself in the bathroom mirror, and notices a new set of lesions spreading from behind his ear. He pokes at them carefully before returning to his work.

There really isn’t a story to this film, and certainly no plot. It’s less about the horror of the titular drug (which is plenty horrific in real life) and more about using it as a vehicle for a recurring motif – holes as disintegration, but also as something through which something more can be glimpsed. There are holes in the body, holes in the walls and doors, shattered windows. Sometimes blood comes through, sometimes light, sometimes a view to another place, sometimes monsters. Though, to be honest, this really makes it sound more cohesive and illustrative than it really is. Mostly it’s just aimless footage of a filthy man lolling around an even more filthy apartment alternating with occasional reveries in nature (which, to be fair, do provide some respite from the squalid claustrophobia of the apartment) and hallucinations which range from dread-provoking to just sort of puzzling. Sometimes he just sort of lies there, sometimes he has nightmares, sometimes he’s in pain. He cooks up and shoots up, and occasionally looks out the window. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of narrative to it, even implied. The dream and nightmare imagery is either so innocuous or oblique that it’s hard to tell what we’re supposed to take away from it. It’s either meaningless, or so intensely personal and specific that it might as well be meaningless, since we’re never given any kind of insight into the man’s experience. Interspersed throughout is a voiceover monologue about, I dunno, life, the universe, childhood, the flesh…it’s the sort of obtuse portentous rambling you’d expect from a stereotypical student film, a lot of stuff that probably sounded deep as shit to the person who wrote it but just comes off as self-important nonsense.

The technical execution isn’t bad, I’ll give it that. The music and sound design are both pretty good, establishing an emotional tone that probably could have done all the heavy lifting without the monologue. The cinematography in the outdoor sequences is competent, and the interiors (as gross as they are) make good use of harsh white light filtering in through the windows, as if it is perpetually daytime outside the apartment and perpetually nighttime inside. There’s some allusion to a nuclear war having occurred or occurring, and the light that streams in does convey the feeling of someone caught in the glare of the blast. It’s not a gratuitously gory or disgusting movie, much to my surprise – I could think of a much more lurid story featuring this drug than what we got – but it’s still not for the squeamish. It’s still a film about the effects of a drug that starts eating your flesh away as a matter of course, and the restraint means that the moments we do get have an impact. I wonder how much of the restraint was a function of budget, since the practical effects are few and far between, but again, what’s there is pretty effective.

It's not hard to watch in the sense of pain and suffering, but it’s certainly hard to look at, between the overall squalor and the occasional bits of body horror. It could have leaned into the latter a lot more than it does, and I’ll at least give it props for that, but it doesn’t really use it in the service of anything especially compelling or even easy to follow – it’s a lot of moments strung together, some of which work in isolation, but most of which don’t, and even at just under 90 minutes it still manages to feel interminable as a result. Finally, it ends on a note that was probably supposed to be really powerful, revelatory and transcendent, but mostly just elicited an eyeroll from me. Yes, we get it, life is pain and loss feels like the end of the world, this is in no way an obvious or hackneyed idea and nobody has ever made this observation before.

I suppose that underground horror is a lot like above-ground horror, in that it’s occasionally capable of something interesting (I still maintain that A Serbian Film, as unpleasant as it is, has artistic merit), but a lot of it won’t be. It’s easy to mistake naked atrocity for substance and justify it as exploration of humanity’s dark side, but that requires acknowledging the humanity in the first place, and though this wasn’t as sensationalistic as it could have been, it wasn’t really about humanity either. It was a lot of degradation and disintegration that ultimately didn’t mean much.

So that’s four films that represent things I don’t like. I’ll admit that Malignant, though not very scary, was surprisingly enjoyable. And Terrifier, though ultimately just more people getting fed into a metaphorical (this time, at least) woodchipper, did have more visual flair and style than I thought it would. But Bite really was as bad as I thought it was in its first 15 minutes, and whatever people who enjoy extreme horror get out of it, it’s nothing that I really need to experience for myself. So I’m going to keep trusting my instincts. Now, back to the stuff I’m actually looking forward to checking out.

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Bite: Sometimes You CAN Trust Your First Impression

This month, I’m marking spooky season by watching the kinds of films that I normally avoid. First it was a film directed by James Wan, then a slasher film, and now today I’m looking at the kind of movies that I start to watch and then shut off about 10 or 15 minutes in, switching to something else instead. This isn’t a huge category, but it’s definitely happened more than once. And it’s not because the film’s too upsetting or disturbing or gross or whatever, usually it’s because the acting is immediately so bad that I can’t imagine sitting through an hour and a half of it. I try to be open-minded, but there are days when my patience for bullshit wears thin.

And this is exactly where Bite fits in. I was able to get through about 15 minutes of it before I tapped out the first time I watched it, but it’s always nagged at me, like maybe I didn’t give it a chance. So I took another shot at it and was ultimately rewarded with…well, a case of squandered potential.

We start with what looks like home-recorded video footage of Casey and her friends Jill and Kirsten in Costa Rica for Casey’s bachelorette weekend. She’s engaged to Jared, who – Jill and Kirsten keep reminding us – is a catch. He is both attractive and successful. But Casey’s getting cold feet. She’s afraid that she and Jared aren’t on the same page about some important stuff, she doesn’t have the greatest relationship with her mother-in-law, plus all the uncertainty attendant to such a big life change. So there are these moments of doubt and reluctance interleaved between all the sun and sand and drinking. There’s a lot of drinking. A lot of drinking, culminating in Casey vanishing with a very friendly guy they just met for awhile.

Cue the next day and the hangovers, and the regret, and the guilt, and the decision to try and wash it all off by visiting this super-secret lagoon where the water’s so clear “it’s like you’re standing in the sky.” After a long, long walk down the beach and into the jungle, they come to a small body of water (not as clear as advertised) in a secluded cove. Jill and Casey take a dip, and at some point Casey gets bitten by something under the water. Nobody thinks anything of it.

And nobody really thinks anything of the clutches of small, translucent eggs coating the rocks around the water.

So, if it’s not obvious from the title, this is a film about how a bite from a mysterious insect goes horribly wrong and has all kinds of gross, gooey consequences for Casey. As such, it can basically be divided into two halves. The first half focuses on Casey’s anxiety about her upcoming marriage, and as it turns out, there’s a lot to be anxious about. Her future mother-in-law is bitter and puritanical, and doesn’t think anyone’s good enough for her precious baby boy. It also doesn’t help that she’s Casey’s landlord and lives in the building. Jared, the precious baby in question, is an absolute mama’s boy who won’t stand up to his mother at all and is more than happy to abstain from sex with Casey until marriage because that’s how mother wants it. The whole reason Jared knows Casey is because they live in the same building, and they live in the same building because that’s how mother wants it. It’s like that. Casey doesn’t want children and Jared really, really does, and they haven't discussed this yet. That is not a small thing at all. That is a page on which you both must be. So there’s all the tension around those things and her guilt at whatever indiscretion happened in Costa Rica, and the wedding is right around the corner and Casey’s been so paralyzed by all this hassle and uncertainty that a lot of planning isn’t locked in yet. And now this weird bug bite she got is turning into a really nasty blistered rash.

I guess this is supposed to be some kind of character study, but it doesn’t really work in that regard. That’s because the dialogue and performances are all stilted and two-dimensional. Everyone has a single defining personality trait and that’s it, and nobody in real life actually talks like the people do in this film. This is what got me to shut it off the first time. There’s only so much freshman creative writing workshop attempts at dialogue you can take before you’re done. And on top of that, most of those single defining personality traits suck. Casey is somewhat sympathetic if only because what’s about to happen to her is wildly out of proportion to her shortcomings, Kirsten seems basically decent, and there’s a kindly neighbor who shows up exactly twice to inquire after her health but everyone else beyond that is terrible. Her future mother-in-law/landlord is gratuitously awful, Jared isn’t paying attention to her or her needs at all (unless there’s something in it for him), and as it turns out, Jill is the stock scheming, manipulative backstabber. That’s sort of it. So the character study doesn’t work because there’s no depth or nuance and the sort of things you should be exploring in a character study go unexplored. Everyone’s basically a cardboard cutout.

That pivots into the second half, where things start to really get gross. And, to its modest credit, I do think that the imagery that comes with insect-related body horror is uniquely disquieting. It’s a very alien angle on life, one that brings with it ideas of infestation and radical transformation. So I think there was a real missed opportunity here to connect Casey’s fears of pregnancy to the specific nature of the body horror involved. Clutches of eggs, queens, drones, hives, cocoons…they could have really dug into some of those ideas and used them to explore the idea that becoming a mother strips you of your identity and even humanity outside of that role. Casey’s on the verge of major life changes and is understandably anxious about them, and she’s trying to hide her regrets and shame and uncertainty from everyone. It could have been really cool if the filmmakers had embodied those feelings as the bizarre metamorphosis she’s undergoing, Casey desperately trying to pretend that everything’s fine while her body is turning into something she doesn’t understand.

They could have done that, but they sure as shit didn’t. Instead we get some sub-Cronenberg’s The Fly antics where one by one, people wander into Casey’s increasingly filthy (and convincingly stomach-churning) apartment and encounter Casey as she descends…well, it’s not really into anything expressly insectile, mostly she just gets really grody-looking. Then they’re dispatched in a variety of gruesome ways that don’t obey any internal logic. Casey’s transformation really just translated into her being able to do whatever the scene requires, whether it makes sense or not. So the second half of the film is mostly just people walking into a meat grinder made up of gooey practical effects, and then the whole thing just sort of ends with a “the end…OR IS IT?” sting (or bite, as the case may be). It doesn’t really escalate so much as it plods inevitably forward, and I’m assuming the filmmakers thought the gore and gross special effects would carry the whole thing, and they really don’t.

A couple of other films came to mind while I was watching this. The director previously made a film called The Drownsman, which I wrote about a long time ago. And that film was an oddity in that it damn near passed the Bechdel test while at the same time showcasing some truly appalling relationships between women who are supposed to be friends. It was, if anything, even more ridiculous than this film. The other, recommended to me by the streaming service after I finished this, was Contracted. I’ve written about Contracted too, and for its shortcomings (any film that has sexual assault as a central plot point is walking through a minefield in my opinion), it did a lot of what this film does and could have done, but better. Like this film, the acting and dialogue in Contracted was stilted and cartoony, but somehow there it was so off-kilter it almost became an aesthetic. And it was a film about a young woman let down by all of the people who were supposed to support her, people who are uniformly selfish and awful, and because of something terrible she goes through a radical physical transformation that almost serves as a metaphor for her experience. It’s not a perfect film at all, but it points to how you can make a movie like this and end up with something worth thinking about beyond “wow…that’s a lot of slime.” Sometimes it’s worth looking past an initially disappointing first impression, but…this is not one of those times.

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Terrifier: Insane Clown Parting (Your Head From Your Shoulders)

It’s been a long time since I took the month of October to do something a little different. While most people are talking about the horror films worth watching, that’s what I’m trying to do most of the year, so instead I try to change it up. But I think the last time I really committed to the bit was a month of films that aren’t horror films, but are totally horror films, and that was a long time ago.

So I decided that for this spooky season, I’m going to focus on the kinds of movies I usually avoid. I got the idea after watching Malignant, which, despite my reservations, ended up being fun. Although I can’t guarantee that any of the others film I watch this month will get the same reception, there’s a willful perversity to the idea that I like. I spend most of the year focusing on my lane, so October seems like a good time to stray from it, maybe interrogate my dislikes a little.

With that in mind, I really don’t like slasher movies. I like watching horror films that unnerve me, get under my skin, make me feel things, that scare me. And I don’t find slasher films very scary. Because once you get past the spectacle of ludicrously graphic violence, there’s not much there, usually. I know many people find gore and violence upsetting – and don’t get me wrong, when graphic violence is used to help tell a story with relatable people and actual emotional stakes, it can be a powerful storytelling tool, but gore and graphic violence by themselves, for their own sake, don’t really move me. At that point it’s hard for me to see them as anything other than an exercise in special effects. There’s often not much consideration for the characters, not a lot of effort to make them relatable, sympathetic people, and at their worst they can be downright reactionary.

Basically, bloody death without a story and emotional stakes or worse, presented as entertainment, isn’t my deal. And so I decided to watch Terrifier, which has a decent reputation as a pretty unapologetic slasher film. To its credit, isn’t especially reactionary (maybe a little), and it’s made with style, but at the end of the day, it’s the prototypical slasher movie stripped down to its bare bones. It’s a movie where nobody exists as anything more than cannon fodder, and the violence is the only point.

We open on a news program, where the host is about to interview a woman who is the only known survivor of the Miles County Massacre, a murder spree that occurred a year ago, last Halloween. It ended with the killer – known as Art the Clown – dead. Or so the survivor says, despite his body mysteriously vanishing from the morgue. But she’s insistent, and it’s easy to see why, as Art left her with a face that’s very hard to look at. The idea that whoever did something that horrible could return is not a comfortable one. And somewhere out in the city, there’s someone watching this program. Someone so incensed by what they see that they smash their television.

Someone putting on greasepaint and a clown costume and gathering up a bag full of very sharp implements.

And then back at the studio, we cut to the host in her dressing room talking on her phone, making all kinds of disparaging comments about the appearance of the woman she just interviewed, before the very same woman suddenly attacks her and begins mangling her face while laughing maniacally. That is a thing that happened. Now we’re following two young women, Tera and Dawn, who’ve just left a Halloween party, and discover that someone’s slashed Dawn’s tire. Tera calls her sister Victoria, who’s busy studying for finals, but agrees to come get them when her roommate staggers in drunk with some dude in tow. Tera and Dawn walk into the nearby pizza joint to get a slice while they wait. And then they look over and there’s this, like, really creepy dude in a black and white clown costume who just, like, keeps staring at them. Dawn teases Tera that he thinks she’s really cute, and then gets a selfie with him while Tera’s just getting wall-to-wall bad vibes and you can kind of tell that Tera probably prevents Dawn from making some seriously bad decisions on a regular basis. The clown never speaks, never blinks. He just keeps staring.

This is basically a slasher film with all of the fat trimmed from it. It’s not even an hour and a half long, and the story doesn’t really extend past there being a bunch of people out on Halloween night for one reason or another and now an evil clown is murdering all of them. No history, no backstory, no legends. There’s an evil clown and he’s killing people. So it gets right down to business. On the one hand, the near-minimalism of its approach is something to appreciate, but at the same time it’s also laying bare just how little there is going on beyond sensationalism here. No niceties, you just came for the killing and we know that, so here you go. In that regard, it’s all pretty two-dimensional.

But I will give it this: this film has a well-realized aesthetic. It’s grainy, the colors are garish, and everything is starkly lit. Every scene feels like a well-lit island in a sea of darkness - almost theatrical, as if spotlights are illuminating sets that consist of what’s necessary for the scene and nothing else, which makes the stripped-down, minimalist feel seem more intentional than crass. The score is ominous synthesizers right out of a 1980s slasher movie, and so along with the visuals, the whole thing feels vintage without feeling like pastiche. It evokes a mood and feeling without calling too much attention to it. Art the Clown does make for an interesting antagonist as slasher-film killers go. He’s clad and painted all in black and white, which stands out well against the blues and reds and purples and harsh light sources spilling over the rest of the frame. His face is stark white with gaping black holes for eyes and a mouth, and he’s totally silent, doing all of his expression through mime. I have to say, it’s a nice change from your bog-standard hulking figure in some kind of mask, and it ends up making for a lot of pretty striking moments, along with injecting some pitch-black wit into the proceedings. I don’t know that I would have wanted a backstory or any kind of dialogue or anything from the antagonist, because the inexplicable, near-supernatural murder clown thing worked better than I expected it to.

Outside of that, it’s wholly of its type. It's a grungy film, where every location is believably deserted, abandoned, and filthy, and there’s a lot of blood and guts (with Art’s costume getting more and more bloodstained, and the shocking red against the white is an effective visual), and though the effects aren’t the cheapest I’ve seen, they’re low-rent enough that it’s relatively easy to maintain some kind of comfortable distance from the horrible shit that’s happening. Which, yeah, that’s one of those things I don’t like. That’s what makes pain and suffering entertainment, when you can hold others’ torment and ugly deaths at arms’ length. The camera lingers on bodies getting punctured, stabbed, shot, mauled, gnawed on, stomped, and sawn in half. That’s the point of the film and really the only thing that matters. I don’t dislike these characters, certainly I don’t think they deserve their fates, but I can’t really say that I care about them either. You know right off the bat that this is a film where lots of people will die, and they do. There’s no surprise to it, no shock or upset, really. And we don’t get to know them, no there’s nothing to hope for, nobody to root for. It’s a bunch of gross death scenes broken up by cutaways to other people or someone walking from one place to the next to meet whatever fate has in store.

This film is unapologetically what it is - a film made for people who expect scene after scene of violence, and on that front it delivers. It’s got a more cohesive aesthetic than I expected, and some vivid moments among the gore, but I can’t say it’s changed my mind about the genre.

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Malignant: Out Of My Head

It’s probably safe to call me a member of the No Fun Club when it comes to horror films. I don’t especially like horror comedies, and I like my horror to be bleak and unsettling and not especially interested in entertainment. I get that, and I’ll own it. This is mostly because the whole reason I started writing this a really long time ago was because I felt (and still feel) like horror isn’t extended enough respect as cinema. And so, as a result, I tend to be very much into Very Serious Horror That Is Not Fun At All, Because Entertainment Is Bad.

And that’s probably not fair. And I realize this because although I didn’t find Malignant frightening, let alone bleak or unsettling or whatever, it was so much fucking fun to watch that I can’t dismiss it. It’s a love letter to earlier eras of horror film crafted with thought and vision and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

It opens on a shot of an old, gothic-looking building, looming over a stormy night. A title reads “Simion Research Hospital, 1993.” Inside, Dr. Florence Weaver is recording a report about a patient named Gabriel to tape (we know it’s videotape because it’s got that viewfinder overlay with a blinking red light in the corner, like you don’t actually see on videotape unless it’s in the movies). And then, as you’d expect, someone interrupts to tell her that Gabriel has gotten loose. There’s a lot of hurrying down corridors lit in lurid, flashing colors, as this other person exposits that Gabriel isn’t affected at all by electricity, that he’s almost drinking it up, and there’s a trail of bodies along the corridor. Something’s been cornered inside a room, almost feral. Finally it’s subdued and strapped into a chair. That’s when Dr. Weaver says “it’s time…to cut out the cancer.”

On that note, we jump to the present day, and a young woman named Madison. She’s visibly pregnant, and very tired. She’s been working extra shifts to save up money for after the baby comes. Her husband, Derek, is lounging on the bed watching television, presumably tired after his arrival from Abusive Creep School. Madison is really concerned about this pregnancy after suffering a number of miscarriages, and Derek starts off unsympathetic, before moving pretty quickly to cruel, and from there he gets rough, pushing his pregnant wife into a wall. She hits her head hard enough to leave blood behind. When Derek walks out, she locks the door behind her and lies down on the bed, where she has a horrible nightmare about a mysterious figure getting into the house and stabbing Derek to death.

And when she wakes up and walks out of the room, Derek’s lying there, dead. Just like she saw it happen.

So what we’ve got here is Madison and her sister Sydney trying to convince the police that she didn’t kill her husband, and that’s she’s having visions of more murders as they’re happening. And, as you’d expect, the pair of detectives assigned to the case aren’t believing her. If this sounds like something you’ve seen before, maybe more than once, that’s probably not an accident, because this film is an homage to a whole range of things. It’s got elements of 1980s slasher films as well as the weirder, grungier stuff Stuart Gordon was doing back then, along with giallo, proto-slasher films like Black Christmas, and thrillers like Eyes Of Laura Mars. It’s not self-consciously retro, it’s got the effects budget of a more modern horror film, but everything else about it screams one flavor of 80s schlock or another.

And it works. It works because those flavors are note-perfect. This is a film from a reality much like our own, but one where there’s a mysterious gap in the dictionary where the word “subtle” should be. I really thought that the opening scene would end with an off-screen voice calling “cut” and establishing the protagonist as an actor in B-grade horror movies, but no, that’s just the vibe. From jump, it’s ridiculous. Performances are consistently over-the-top, the dialogue is immediately overheated and mostly consists of pure exposition of the “you know you haven’t been the same since [insert long string of events here]” variety and lots of stating the obvious (during a firefight, someone actually says “they’re shooting at us” without any irony whatsoever.) You’ve got the stock wisecracking police detectives, and a crime scene technician whose sole defining features are that she is 1) mousy and single, and 2) clearly hot for one of the detectives. And everything is played completely straight, without a single ounce of self-consciousness or winking at the camera. Which is exactly how you do something like this.

Almost all of the scene-to-scene beats are predictable, which is a big part of why I didn’t find the film scary, the rhythms are so familiar that they’re almost comforting. But they’re all executed with a great sense of visual style - a shot that follows Madison through her own house from a top-down cutaway view, the doors and walls stretched impossibly high comes to mind, as does the way the killer is presented as an entirely black shape as if he’s a living silhouette, all black leather and a stylish gold dagger like he stepped right out of an Argento film. There are plenty of Dutch angles, everything is slathered in the most lurid reds and blues you can find, and there’s sinister music painted over every scene. With the exception of a few sedate exteriors, everywhere in this film is shadowy, covered in cobwebs, foggy, and with light pouring in from one angle or another. It’s like the cinematographer was instructed to make everything look like a nightmare sequence from one of the early Elm Street films. Much like the dialogue and performances, it’s all so earnestly overblown that it comes out the other side as art.

And it’s all paced with a wonderfully delirious sense of escalation. By and large it seems like the story of a young woman who has some kind of mysterious psychic link to a killer, and it continues along in that vein until the last act, when everything gets more grisly before going utterly apeshit. It gets much weirder and much bloodier than everything preceding it without getting any more serious in tone, blending the giallo-style flashbacks that reveal exactly how everything really happened with some classic body horror. Like everything else about this film, it swings for the fences and I found my jaw in my lap at how melodramatic and audacious the whole thing ended up being. As much as I’m partial to grim, unsettling, straight-faced horror, I have to admit I was absolutely delighted to take this ride. I guess I needed a reminder that I don’t need to always treat this like some kind of intellectual crusade, that it’s okay to loosen up and get out of my head sometimes, and I’m glad this film provided it.

IMDB entry
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