Amsterdamned is weird in a great way. Part police thriller, part slasher flick, it moves like a Michael Mann film with cool confidence and expertly shot action. Too many of these movies include a boring foot chase, often with minimal camera movement. This one has a wonderful chase involving a car, a motorcycle, and a couple of horses on the crowded streets of Amsterdam. Later, the good guy and the bad guy speed through the waterways on motorboats, careening around obstacles and tight corners. It’s what movies were made for.

The villain, a scuba diving serial killer, creeps out of the water at night to murder his victims before returning to the canals undetected. Armed with a diving knife and a speargun, many of his kills take place off screen, but the results are nasty. When one of his victims reels an anchor in, he finds the severed head of his buddy attached to the end. (Now, how the villain was able to yank his buddy into the water, cut his head off, and attach it to said anchor without making a sound is a different matter.) Like Jack the Ripper, this villain displays his victims’ remains in startling ways. I don’t know what the Dutch are drinking, but I greatly admire the way their filmmakers handle fantasy violence.

Enter Detective Eric Visser, reminiscent of William Petersen’s detective in Manhunter. Visser is a single father who’s about as hard boiled as a character believably gets. Upon investigating the local scuba scene, Visser meets the film’s love interest, Laura, a museum guide who has taken up diving on the recommendation of her psychiatrist. The psychiatrist will immediately become the audience’s prime suspect as the film takes its time to give him a mysterious backstory that apparently serves no purpose, at least initially. Meanwhile, with precious few leads, the police begin a patrol of the canals that even they admit is a waste of time.

What’s especially attractive about the movie is that director Dick Maas photographs Amsterdam with the same love and street-level attention as Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee show for New York. The movie is grounded in that sense, which provides a solid base for its more fantastical elements. For example, the killer displays a baffling resiliency for a guy who hasn’t been established as a supernatural entity. He will be shot several times and at one point blown up in a fiery explosion, but he just keeps coming back. So it’s particularly interesting, perhaps very Dutch, how the conflict ultimately resolves at the end.

Amsterdamned isn’t a visually gory film, but conceptually it is a brutal one. It feels like it’s equal parts Tom Savini and Brian De Palma. While I almost always recommend the subtitled version of foreign films, the dubbed version is easy to source and features English dialogue provided by some of the original actors. As far as dubs go, it’s one of the best I’ve ever heard. It’s also one of the most unique slasher films I’ve ever seen. The biggest mystery is how it seems relatively forgotten, though it was a financial success at the time of its release. It deserves a much bigger following than it currently enjoys.

One thing that has always bothered me about Norman Bates’s mythology: Where’d the wig come from? It’d be easy for a criminally insane person to black out and dress up in his mother’s clothes (after all they’re just hanging there in the closet), but the wig is a different matter. In some sort of fugue state, he’d have to get in a car, drive to the nearest general store, and order the damn thing with at least a week of lead time. Psycho IV, which is mostly an origin story, answers that question as well as several more I didn’t have.

Making this film a partial prequel is the franchise’s biggest misstep. I don’t want to see anyone but Anthony Perkins playing Norman Bates, but here we must endure him in flashback form, portrayed by a little boy and a teenager at key points of his life story. The present day segment featuring Perkins goes like this: CCH Palmer, Warren Frost, and John Landis are producing a live radio program about matricide. One of their callers, who refers to himself as Ed, knows a bit about the subject because he’s a poorly disguised Norman Bates. Norman is inexplicably on parole after getting busted for the multiple corpses found at the end of the previous film. So yes, this film asks us to believe that the state let the repeat offender go after only a handful of years—maybe fewer as he’s obviously had enough time to move into a brand new house and get married.

Whatever. It’s always a pleasure to see Perkins in the role, reduced as it may be. He’s never willing to phone it in and he’s always pushing the established boundaries so Norman rarely feels stagnate. As he recounts his earliest memories to the radio program, we see the pertinent ones reenacted out of order. We learn just how close Norman was to his mother, which takes the story in places only hinted at before. This is all stuff that actually strengthens the mythology rather than detracting from it, but it was a mythology that was strong enough to begin with. We were all already on Norman’s side from the very first film. There was no reason to paint him in an even more sympathetic light.

I’m only disappointed because this type of storytelling leaves little room for the precious exploitation elements. You simply can’t generate suspense when your audience knows a character can’t die in his own flashback. Once you accept it for what it is, you’ll find surprisingly well written scenes. It’s also nice to see the Bates Motel and the hilltop house in better times, both painted yellow, while the younger actors portraying Norman do a much better job than Vince Vaughn did in Gus Van Sant’s remake for dummies. One other improvement over parts 2 & 3: the return of Bernard Herrmann’s iconic theme from the first film.

While I would have rather seen Norman escape the institution and continue his killing spree, the more mature approach works better than you would expect. I see why Perkins agreed to come back: the fourth installment leaves the logical ending he gave us in the third film intact while providing the opportunity for a deeper dive into the character… which is unfortunately a lot more interesting for an actor than the audience. So why not make a movie about a different killer and leave Norman’s memory untarnished? Because A) that’s not how the movie business works, kid, and B) this is interesting stuff because it’s about Norman Bates, building on decades of character growth. I don’t think you can accuse Perkins of doing any of these films just for the paycheck. All four are worthwhile, this one less than others. Together they’re among the best horror franchises ever made.

I eventually grew to like the flashbacks, but whereas Norman had become uncharacteristically mean in the previous film, here he becomes downright ugly for his final kill. I’m sorry, folks, but that’s not the Norman I know and love. Get out of here with this bullshit.

Upon retrieving a shiv that he secretly implanted in his arm, the dentist escapes the mental institution by taking his psychiatrist hostage. It turns out that he had been hiding money from the IRS in a small town bank under an alias for years. Assuming the alias as his new identity, he rents a guest cottage from a young woman named Brooke who somewhat resembles his ex-wife, Jamie. Jamie, you’ll remember, is the one whose infidelities made the dentist lose his mind in the first place. Played by Jillian McWhirter, she and Corbin Bernsen are the only returning cast members from the original film.

Jamie, now a mute, has gotten cosmetic surgery after the dentist maimed her and removed her teeth and tongue in the previous film. When she learns he escaped captivity, she hires a private detective to track him down. Meanwhile, through a series of unlikely but predictable events, the dentist finds himself practicing once again, trading the ultra-sterile look of the first film for an old fashioned oak office with tons of shadows. I happen to like sequels that look radically different than the original, but whereas The Dentist’s look ran contrary to typical horror films, The Dentist 2 unfortunately looks a lot more average.

Another downgrade is the cast. Whereas the original film had a number of great character actors, the sequel casts mostly unknowns. Two exceptions are Wendy Robie and Clint Howard, performers who could have easily taken up the slack if they had just been given more to do, but Robie is criminally underutilized while Howard is killed almost as quickly as he’s introduced. I’m also scratching my head over why they went through the trouble of recasting McWhirter as the dentist’s ex when there’s ultimately little reason for her to be in it. In fact, the filmmakers went out of their way to ignore a great setup that practically writes itself: have the dentist struggling to rehabilitate while his wife takes up a revenge plot.

The most major downgrade is the absence of the original’s screenwriters, which included Stuart Gordon. In yesterday’s review, I said I felt they had milked the premise for all it’s worth. The sequel proves it. Even Bernsen isn’t firing on all cylinders until the very end. The original film, though technically meaner, was able to balance its darkness with subtle humor and thrills. The Dentist 2, on the other hand, feels meaner, but only because it’s mean without purpose. By the time the villain straps the hapless secretary who will bear the worst of the torture, it isn’t clever, it isn’t entertaining… it’s just going through the motions.

I guess it’s not a terrible movie. It’s well made and looks better than it cost (south of a million bucks). It just never finds a reason to exist.

Oh, boy. I have never been on a better run of movies than I’m on right now. Continuing the winning streak is Brian Yuzna’s The Dentist, a movie I clearly remember seeing on the New Releases shelf and inexplicably passing on. Maybe I was feeling burned by Dr. Giggles (a film I have since come around on), but The Dentist is clearly the better 90s horror film starring an actor from L.A. Law. (If I had a nickel for every time that happened, I could trade ’em in for a shiny dime.) The titular dentist is played by Corbin Bernsen who not only understands the assignment, but nails it. Today I’m reviewing the Vestron Video release of the film, which looks about as good as you could hope.

When I say I like horror comedy, I would like to clarify that I prefer this to the kind on display in Thursday’s Deathgasm 2. That film was a comedy with elements of horror and buckets of blood. The Dentist is an honest-to-god horror film with an emergent playfulness counterbalancing its mean streak. It’s like taking two oscillators on a synthesizer and tuning them so they drift in and out of phase for a subtly brilliant effect (an analogy I use because the film is scored by Alan Howarth, a frequent collaborator with John Carpenter… and because my midlife crisis resulted in the purchase of a bunch of dumb music gear). I find a movie like this far more amusing than 90% of Hollywood comedies. Co-writers Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli, who worked together on Re-Animator and From Beyond, are no doubt a significant reason the film is just as effective with its laughs as it is at giving the viewer the heebie-jeebies.

And boy does it deliver the heebie-jeebies. I’ve been watching horror movies for longer than I’ve been forming memories. They simply don’t scare me and rarely elicit a physical response other than laughter or the occasional cringe. Yet this scrappy little straight-to-video production, with the help of prosthetic mouths and tongues, had me squirming more than the “Is it safe?” scene from Marathon Man did. You could make the argument that building a horror movie around a common fear is playing on easy mode, but the fun is watching Yuzna and his screenwriters squeeze every idea they can from the premise. It culminates in perhaps the only fitting climax anyone could possibly dream up for a movie about a homicidal dentist.

It’s the dentist’s wedding anniversary and he’s just caught his wife with the pool boy. Although he fantasizes about confronting the couple with a loaded pistol, he secretly follows the pool boy to his next job where—wouldn’t you know it—he has sex with the lonely housewife who lives there, too. Meanwhile, a fantastic cast of character actors potential victims are filling the dentist’s waiting room, impatiently awaiting his arrival. Little do they know, his mental condition is devolving by the minute. There’s the beauty pageant queen and her sleazy manager, played by a young Mark Ruffalo. There’s the IRS worker (Earl Boen from the Terminator films) who’s threatening penalization for bogus write-offs. There’s the teenage girl who’s uncharacteristically excited to visit the dentist because it’s the day her braces finally come off.

Then there’s Molly Hagan who, much like Bernsen, gives much more than a film like this typically deserves. She plays the dental assistant who doesn’t trust the dentist, never liked the dentist, and tries to rally her coworkers into seeing through his lies. Ken Foree is also at the top of his game, effortlessly injecting flair into an otherwise stereotypical homicide detective. My only complaint about both of these actors is they should have had bigger roles. I can’t stop talking about this wonderful cast because there’s also Jan Hoag who’s kind of the go-to actress for receptionists, nurses, and waitresses, having worked with everyone from Spielberg to Rob Zombie.

I feel like Yuzna has milked the premise for everything it’s worth, but I can’t help it—I must see the sequel as soon as possible. I half expect it to end my streak of good horror movies (going on like twelve now), but even if it’s almost as good, it’s gonna be a good time. Come back tomorrow to see what I have to say about it.

With a title like Scanner Cop, you’d have to assume it’s the goofiest film in the franchise yet. Somehow it sports the most serious tone since David Cronenberg’s original. Hell, I’d argue that parts of this one are more grounded than that one. As far as the sequels go, I still prefer Scanners III for Liliana Komorowska’s insanely entertaining performance, but Scanner Cop is the more rounded experience. From a technical point of view, it’s probably the best made of the sequels.

In it, two LAPD cops are attacked by a scanner who’s gone critical in a spectacular way, sprouting miniature faces that form on his head like mutant skin tags. The cops have no choice but to put him down, leaving the scanner’s son an orphan. One of the cops takes pity on the boy and adopts him, providing a steady supply of Ephemoral to keep the boy’s scanner symptoms in check. Fifteen years later, the cop is now the commander, welcoming his son to the force as a rookie officer.

Shortly after, multiple policemen are murdered by civilians with no criminal records whatsoever. When the commander realizes he’s dealing with something beyond the LAPD’s understanding, he turns to his adopted son, urging him to temporarily go off his meds so he can scan one of the perps. His son initially refuses, but once he finds himself entangled in the case, he decides to skip dose after dose, slowly slipping down a slope that typically leaves scanners in psychiatric care, prison, or worse.

Despite turning in the most intimidating villain since Michael Ironside’s Revok, Richard Lynch is burdened with the weakest writing of the movie. The role he’s been given is better than what you’d find in most direct-to-video sequels, but it isn’t quite up to par for this movie. Conversely, there’s a believable comradery on display among Scanner Cop’s tight-knit group of coworkers, but the villain’s backstory is only briefly explored and his motivation essentially boils down to plain ol’ revenge. Notably, the villain not a scanner, nor is he allied with scanner henchmen, which gives him a Lex Luther vibe as he fearlessly squares off with the hero.

What’s most interesting about Scanner Cop is what it doesn’t do. There are moments of predictability, maybe even a scene that induces an eyeroll or two, but they’re few and far between. Consider that Scanner Cop’s adoptive father, played convincingly by Richard Grove (Henry the Red in Army of Darkness), seems destined to die by the second act, but the film sidesteps that obvious hero motivator entirely. These characters feel like real cops who care about each other in honest ways, much like the characters in a Maniac Cop film. Somehow, the fun scanner stuff slots in smoothly between the bouts of solid character development.

I don’t have much more to say. It’s just a surprisingly good picture.

No need to watch a recap video before this one. The opening credits feature a song which rapidly brings the viewer back up to speed. Don’t you just miss movies with elaborate opening credits? It’s a lost art and Deathgasm 2 features a fine example of why we should bring them back… along with intermissions for a lot of the dumb Hollywood movies that have no business being three or four hours long. If you’re anything like me, you probably assumed this sequel was going to suck when it was announced it would be a Kickstarter project. Why did the New Zealand Film Commission finance the first one and decline this time around? Perhaps it was the scene involving a zombie mutilating several penises in a glory hole. At any rate, nothing about this picture feels cheaper than the first.

It’s not often that I feature a movie as new as Deathgasm 2, which was only recently made available on streaming services, but it seems fitting as the original was in the first batch of 31 Days of Gore eleven years ago. In that movie, teenage metalheads unwittingly unleashed the forces of evil in their small New Zealand town. (It just occurred to me that I don’t know if that’s actually considered a small town in New Zealand or not, but it’s small by American standards.) In this movie, the metalheads are presumably in their early twenties and purposefully unleash the forces of evil to bring back their dead bandmates.

Perhaps to smooth over the fact that the heroes are directly responsible for the deaths of several people and one dog, Deathgasm 2 becomes considerably more cartoonish. At one point it even breaks the fourth wall like Mel Brooks used to do. I’m gonna be honest: I didn’t need a sillier movie. I’m not disappointed (if anything, Deathgasm 2 exceeds my expectations for a crowdfunded 10-year reunion), but I just prefer the slightly meaner, “don’t give a fuck” tone of the original. I mean, it’s a movie about metal and demonic forces for crying out loud.

What may abrade some viewers is the juvenile humor, the vomit jokes, the higher body count, the much higher mutilated-penis count, and the wall-to-wall gore, the latter of which is nothing short of fantastic. While the original film reminded me of several splatter films, Deathgasm 2 seems primarily interested in emulating Peter Jackson’s first three features. The film particularly invokes Dead-Alive, mostly because Deathgasm 2 turns into a full-on zombie flick as opposed to rehashing the original’s end-of-the-world plot (it also directly references the former with at least one piece of dialogue). The B plot, which has the metalheads vying with a competing band, feels like the kind of lite screenwriting employed whenever an SNL character makes the leap to the big screen. The jokes in service of the band stuff don’t work for me. The jokes in service of the gore work great, but all too often the humor relies on goofy music and reaction shots to sell its verbal gags, which is the cinematic equivalents of hackneyed rimshots.

Another minor downgrade is that Zakk isn’t quite as fun as he was in the first film, very much playing second fiddle to Brody for the entirety of the movie. The filmmakers also decided to digitally alter his voice, but I don’t know… the creative decision kind of makes his jokes fall flat. The same is true of the film’s undead villain: something about the manipulation of the actors’ lines just doesn’t do the comedy any favors. In fact, it does the opposite.

At the end of the day, it’s a great gore movie that sustains its manic playfulness until the very end. It’s stupid, fun, and gloriously gory. If you liked the first one, here’s more of the same tone with a completely different subgenre.

Filmed with such care that it looks indistinguishable from mainstream films of its time, Torso is an “everyone is a suspect” giallo in which the only thing that is known about the psychosexual killer is that he wears a red scarf around his neck when he stalks his prey. Unfortunately for everyone involved, a street merchant who sells the scarf in question tells the police that he couldn’t possibly remember who bought it. This, it turns out, is a lie and the sleazy merchant gets himself murdered after he blackmails the killer. So it goes.

The main players are Jane, an American college student in Perugia; Stefano, who creepily pursues Jane’s coed friend Dani; and Roberto, a young doctor. In order to keep you suspecting every man who so much as wanders into the movie, director Sergio Martino casts some of the creepiest lookin’ dudes you’ll ever see. This contrasts greatly with the stunningly gorgeous actresses. At one point Jane and her friends decide to spend the weekend at Dani’s family villa. Once there, the four women spend a lot of time sunbathing and skinny dipping, driving the local men (and perhaps the murderer) crazy. In fact, all the women in this movie merely roll their eyes at window peepers as if it’s a daily occurrence for them. Meanwhile, minor characters drop like flies until the danger closes in on the villa.

I didn’t really think about it until now, but this movie has a lot of filler in it. It’s got a lot of killin’ in it, too, but describing the plot made me realize just how little happens in between the murder scenes. It just so happens that it’s good filler as I never really found myself disengaged. On the other hand, if I were to describe any more of the plot, I’d damn near give the whole thing away. The two paragraphs preceding this one are about half the movie, minus the kill scenes. Naturally, the action ramps up and there’s a great moment of suspense involving a broken ankle, a locked door, a skeleton key, and a sheet of newspaper.

So yeah, while I tend to focus on the goofy fun stuff for this blog (because sometimes that’s all these movies have going for them), Torso is one that exhibits magnetic filmmaking, solid performances, and beautiful vistas. And while characters make dumb decisions from time to time, there’s never really any “Why would she do that?!” moments. Although it has a reputation for being a real sicko film, I hesitate to give it three whole points on the Gore Meter. The gore is suggested more than it is shown and some characters have the audacity to die off screen. Even so, there are expertly timed cutaways that are almost as effective as later giallo films’ tendency to show it all whether their effects are good or not.

Torso is a pioneering example of the subgenre, somewhat routine but fascinatingly prototypical. It probably doesn’t do anything that will blow your mind, fifty years after its release, but it isn’t hard to see why it was so daring for its time. It isn’t jampacked with cliches, either, if only because the genre had yet to develop ’em. The killer’s reveal is no huge surprise, but it’s the journey that matters, not the destination. It’s just a solid slasher flick all around.

We have now reached the shot-on-video portion of our yearly programming. I will now include my usual disclaimer: I unironically love movies that are shot on camcorders by a group of friends and neighbors. Whenever some Cecil B. Delulu talks his homely acquaintances into spending a weekend soaked in red food dye and Karo syrup, I find the result irresistible. I have given favorable reviews to Video Violence (and its even dumber sequel) and I’ve seen Blood Cult and The Ripper multiple times apiece (though I probably wouldn’t recommend ’em). I love SOV horror for precisely the reasons the average person hates it: It looks like shit and the acting is generally horrendous. Hell, almost everything is horrendous, from lighting, to sound, to special effects. But if you were the kind of person who found yourself strangely fascinated by the local access TV shows that used to come on late at night, you may enjoy SOV horror as well.

I hesitate to say it, but I don’t think Sledgehammer was shot on consumer grade camcorders. Then again, all video in 1983 looked like garbage so it’s hard to tell. To me it feels more like it was made by folks who had access to professional production gear through a university or something (the Wikipedia page currently lacks a “PRODUCTION” section and I don’t feel like doing much more research than that). At any rate, it’s not nearly as good looking as 1989’s Iced, which I featured last year, but I like this better. On the other hand, it was obviously cut on fairly state-of-the-art equipment at the time, including a title maker that looks exactly like the one that I cut my teeth on when I was a multimedia student nearly thirty years ago.

The movie opens in a secluded cabin where a woman locks her son in a closet so that she can have sex with her illicit lover. The couple have rented the cabin to cheat on their spouses. When the woman asks, “Do you think they figured it out yet?” The man says, “Who cares?” as he very awkwardly puts the moves on her. (Later there’s another sex scene in which a different actor pretty much just lies on his lover, presumably because they’re real life acquaintances and not trained actors.) A figure armed with a sledgehammer enters the room and bashes the man’s skull in. In case you missed any part of this sequence, it plays again, almost in its entirety, in a completely unnecessary flashback midway through the movie.

Ten years later, a group of middle aged actors playing teens rent the same cabin for a weekend of partying. (Maybe the performers aren’t quite middle aged, but it’s hard to tell because in the 80s… the concept of drinking water instead of alcohol had not yet been invented while most people generally started smoking at birth.) This is a pretty large group of potential victims for a movie like this, which typically only feature four or five performers and drags the kills out for a plodding pace. Sledgehammer manages to innovate by having all these characters and still plodding. At one point the movie cranks up the stock melancholic music as two lovers wander the outdoor scenery… you get the sense that the editor employs slow motion here just because A) his sick VHS editing station is capable of it and B) he wanted to stretch the footage out long enough to let the song end. Similarly, establishing shots last forever.

Look, that kind of amateurishness just goes with the territory. It doesn’t hurt the movie. It endears it.

Eventually the killer is cornered, at which point he reveals his motivation. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying so I turned on the subtitles. The subtitles said, “(MUMBLING)” because even they couldn’t figure it out. So much for the grand reveal. Also muddled is the gore, which isn’t great, but I’m grading on a curve here. At least they gave it a good effort. That’s all I was asking for, really.

By now you should know if this is your type of movie. If it’s not, that’s okay. I don’t like every subgenre, either. But it is my type of movie. And no, I can’t defend that. I won’t even try. It’s some admittedly ridiculous shit to enjoy.

When Tippi Hedren asked Alfred Hitchcock why her character in The Birds would do something as stupid as investigate an obviously dangerous room, he simply told her, “Because I tell you to.” The director of Psycho II, one of Hitchcock’s protégés, also had a lax relationship with logic. Playing loose with logic doesn’t always work, but when you learn from the master, you’ve got a shot.

This time Anthony Perkins steps into the director’s seat, turning in a movie that scores higher on believability, but earns fewer points in the entertainment category due to his marginally weaker performance. The beginning is especially strange. It’s as if it takes Perkins a while to warm up to the double duty of actor and director. Once he does, he feels more like his old self, albeit a little bit meaner. That’s the 80s for ya, though. (You’ll recall this was the same era that had Timothy Dalton fighting Columbian drug dealers in a James Bond film that was considerably more violent than anything in Daniel Craig’s run.)

The film opens when a young woman (Diana Scarwid) has a mental breakdown before taking her final vows as a nun. Climbing to the top of a bell tower in a bout of hysteria, she accidentally shoves one of the nuns to her death. The convent kicks her out and she wanders the country side until she finds herself at the Bates Motel. It seems completely obvious she should become the Bride of Psycho, considering she’s stark raving mad, but the film never goes there. It’s a massively wasted opportunity if you ask me. See, she and Norman Bates have a meet-cute when he bursts into the bathroom to murder her, only to find she’s already slashed her wrists. He takes pity on the poor thing and rushes her to the hospital where the locals laud him as a hero.

Meanwhile, a no-good traveling musician (Jeff Fahey) and an LA journalist (Roberta Maxwell) conspire to get to the bottom of the killings. The musician becomes the motel’s day manager, keeping an eye on our hero while the journalist pokes around for clues. Returning as the sheriff is Hugh Gillin, once again cheerleading for Norman’s complete rehabilitation. Even though this is due to his utter incompetence as a lawman, it’s refreshing that Gillin completely sidesteps the role of an antagonistic sheriff, which are a dime a dozen in flicks like this. Besides, his incompetence is the very reason Norman can get up to his old tricks.

I’m also glad to have Fahey and Maxwell. The two vibe well with the cast, but especially with each other. Fahey has been one of my favorite actors for literally as long as I’ve been watching movies. I mean, just the fact that I’m praising the acting in a film like this should tell you it’s atypical. For a Psycho film, it’s not great, but for a slasher film, it’s high art. I’ll probably even see it again someday.

At any rate, our boy Norman is evolving. Whereas the last film was an excuse to reset the status quo, this film aims to see the character grow, which is no doubt because the man closest to the character also served as the director. The resolution is satisfying, but not nearly as insane as the last film, which had me howling with laughter at one point. (It was the comedic timing of a shovel bonk that did me in.) I’d like a little more of that in this picture, which isn’t to say it’s not funny, and it does up the gross-out factor. I mean, just wait until you see what they do with a handful of bloody ice.