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.

IMDB entry
Available from Tubi