Martyrs hits differently after the Epstein revelations. Now its depiction of a secret society of wealthy sickos getting away with horrifying crimes hits too close to home. Yes, there have been several such films dealing with underground organizations, usually as mere plot devices. Almost all were labeled “tortured porn” to dismiss their value. Martyrs, however, is more in the vein of Funny Games than a Saw film. More Straw Dogs than The Human Centipede. It’s such an electric piece of entertainment, I wonder how its director ultimately ended up making a film starring Jessica Biel, the Avril Lavinge of cinema.

First, a disclaimer: some may call shenanigans on my praise here due to my distaste for movies such as Haute Tension, a similar “New French Extremity” (a classification I find nearly as idiotic as “torture porn”). I’ve also made it known that I prefer fun gore to the realistic kind. That’s a preference, not the law. I don’t mind a dour movie if it doesn’t take itself more seriously than it deserves. Martyrs is as serious as a heart attack, but it’s well-made and thoughtful enough to earn it. If I had any complaints about its style, it’s that the kinetic camerawork stays so close to its subjects that it’s right on the edge of losing readability. Which is obviously intentional.

In the prologue, little Lucie escapes her kidnappers and ends up in an orphanage where she befriends Anna, a girl roughly the same age. Suffering from extreme PTSD and depression, Lucie finds herself incapable of telling the authorities anything useful. Fifteen years later, an adult Lucie invades the secluded home of the people she believes kidnapped her, armed with a double-barrel shotgun. The result is bloody and unflinchingly brutal. She calls Anna, who secretly loves Lucie, to help her in the aftermath. When it’s revealed there’s an additional threat in the house, you may be thinking to yourself, “Why don’t they just get the hell out of there? Why do they keep going back in?” But the reasons are complex and, halfway through the movie, become utterly obvious. A lesser movie would have saved this explanation as the big twist at the end. This film knows modern audiences are savvy and doesn’t try to hide it.

This is not a film in which women are abused just to exact their revenge for entertainment reasons, à la I Spit On Your Grave (which I would argue is great in its own right). It’s a film in which abuse becomes cyclical and violence begets violence. None of that violence is fantastical. None of it is easy to look at. None of it is fun. Yet the gore never feels gratuitous even though there’s a boatload of it. At any rate, there is a sickness on the screen and it is certainly not for the faint of heart.

There’s nary a bad performance. Even the villains’ farfetched scheme (my least favorite aspect of the movie) is acceptable at best and negligible at worst. I could talk about Martyrs at length, but doing so would necessitate the need for spoilers. I have been very careful not to give away what this movie actually is. You can praise the mainstream appeal of “elevated horror” all you want, but horror will always be at its best when it’s as polarizing and unapologetic as this.

It’s nearly a perfect horror film. I have zero interest in the American remake.

Brain Dead was a film I wanted to feature during last year’s 31 Days of Gore, but the only copy I had available at the time was the same crappy 4:3 edition that’s currently playing on Tubi. Starring Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, can you blame me for wanting to see it? George Kennedy, Bud Cort, and Patricia Charbonneau fulfill supporting roles in this Julie Corman production. That’s a good cast and a good producer so fuck it—I’m there, dude.

Bill Pullman plays a research scientist with a large collection of human brains. The extent of his studies, as far as I can tell, is prodding a brain that’s connected to a cadaver’s face. Pullman and his research assistant poke the brain’s wrinkles to see what expressions the face will make. Though the movie fails to convey the scientific value of such an endeavor, Bill Paxton, playing a corporate sleazeball, convinces Pullman to operate on a live human brain. The patient? Bud Cort’s character, a brilliant mathematician who was institutionalized before delivering a valuable equation to Paxton’s company.

<SPOILERS AHEAD>

Shortly after performing the surgery, Pullman is struck by a car while crossing the street. Spoilers, I guess, but I’m not ruining anything you won’t see coming from a mile away, anyway: everything that happens from that point forward takes place entirely in the hero’s head. You could show this movie to a child in an uncontacted tribe and they’d probably sigh and say, “It’s all just a dream, isn’t it?” I feel like the reason these movies were so popular at the time is because the filmmakers could do whatever they wanted, make no effort to give the film a coherent narrative, and end the movie wherever they wanted. None of this means anything. None of it is consequential. There’s zero suspense when you know exactly what it’s up to.

Movies like this can work when the character actively grows as he unravels the mystery, but Pullman is completely confused to the bitter end, having ultimately stumbled through one disconnected scene after another. In one scene his wife is cheating on him with Paxton. In the next, Pullman’s murdered them both. And in a scene shortly after that, Paxton has become an entirely different character. Don’t get me wrong: the actors are as good as they can possibly be in a movie like this. Bud Cort is particularly entertaining. Pullman’s performance, too, is noteworthy as always.

I’m not saying it’s a terrible movie. It’s mildly entertaining and I never got as bored with it as I did with yesterday’s Hellmaster. Frankly, I’m jazzed as all get-out that there’s a movie with my two favorite Bills sharing scenes. That alone is worth a look, but you really don’t have to finish the damn thing once you get a taste. With this cast and the inherited creepiness of humans poking around in brains, it should have been a whole helluva lot better. In fact, where are the good horror movies about brain surgery? I can’t think of a single one off the top of my head.

“20 years ago this place looked like a Nazi prison camp, but it wasn’t our fault. The program was young… things went astray. It was time for the superman. We dubbed it Project Nietzsche… after the philosopher. Back then, a lot of young minds were destroyed by something which, if used properly, could increase mental powers.”

—A mad scientist moments before getting punched in the face

Hellmaster opens with the Nietzsche quote “God is dead,” but if you’re expecting a thoughtful examination of the human condition in modern society, I must remind you that this is a blog in which, just yesterday, I praised a movie because it had a lot of boobies in it. The quote, conveniently truncated to remove all nuance, isn’t employed because Hellmaster is about to get philosophical on our asses. The film uses the quote because the filmmakers saw it in a magazine or something and went, “Huh-huh, cool….”

In the opening scene, David Emge (“Flyboy” from 1978’s Dawn of the Dead) is writing a letter to his wife, Lovecraft style, about horrors he has recently uncovered. A gaggle of zombie-ghouls shuffle into the room, one of whom is his wife. The man is presumably killed off screen and the film jumps forward six months, introducing the Kant Institute of Technology. The institute is a bare looking university (likely filmed during a real university’s Christmas break) in which the students don headsets and gather in a study hall to telecommute with their professor. The professor isn’t off campus or anything, he just prefers to do it this way.

When one of the students refers to a “mad man” living in the abandoned church on campus, it’s revealed that the so-called mad man is Robert, the character who was presumably killed in the opening scene. Robert is gathering the evidence to blow the whistle on the institute’s drug experiments, which turned a class of students into superhuman ghouls in the 1960s. The faculty faked a church fire as part of a coverup and… look, this is a pretty basic setup and I’m getting sick of explaining such things. All you need to know is that mad scientists create bad guys and good guys have to fight ’em.

And the bad guys, adorned in fun but merely decent prosthetics, are actually kind of interesting even though they seem heavily inspired by the cenobites in Hellraiser films. Led by John Saxon, who insists on being called Papa, the small group of mutant killers have recently wiped out a church camp group, hijacking their school bus which has a big creepy crucifix wired to the grille. Saxon himself is uncharacteristically weak here, though that seems more of a screenplay issue than an acting one, and his evil scheme is as routine as it can get. Emge, in his final film role, is quite good as the capable, crossbow-wielding hero. He seems to be having a blast, too, providing the film’s very best scenes.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with Hellmaster. For my money, the only thing it’s really lacking is an insane Italian director at the helm, who could have easily leveraged its dull moments into equal parts art and shock entertainment. It has all the makings of a supernatural giallo, but little of the fearless exploitation seen in those films. With its off-screen kills and premature cutaways, it just needs a little extra umph. Gnarly in concept, not so much execution. A cute picture, but not very good.

Psycho isn’t the type of movie I would normally feature on 31 Days of Gore. Don’t get me wrong: I love it, it’s a masterpiece, blah-blah-blah. Really, what more can I say about the film that hasn’t been said a million times before? The fact that it’s the first mainstream film to show a toilet is a bit of movie trivia so tired that kids know it (and it’s not even true). People who’ve never even seen the film already know that Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane is dead meat, just as everybody knows Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. I just want to watch Psycho sequels this month, which are the type of movies that belong here, but my OCD prevents me from starting with part 2.

So yeah, Marion dies early on. That shocking twist is why theaters were required to refuse entry to latecomers. In 1960, when movies were considered as disposable as a Readers Digest, people used to wander in and out of theaters whenever they damn well pleased. The rule allowed Hitchcock to pull off something far more interesting than the fact that he killed his lead actress off. He forced moviegoers to sympathize with a psycho.

Of course, first-time viewers would not have known they were rooting for the psycho. Until the end of the movie, they believed Norman’s mother had killed Marion. Hitchcock pulled a fast one, not just with a protagonist swap, but by leading viewers to believe Norman was taking care of a mentally ill woman. They would not have accepted a murderous protagonist, but a young man covering up the crime of his beloved mother? That they could accept. I can only wonder how many people, in an age when TV couples slept in separate beds, consciously examined why they felt a tinge of suspense when it seemed as though a car full of evidence wouldn’t sink into the swamp during Norman’s cover-up. And that’s what the best movies do: rewire an entire generation’s brains.

Like I said, the film has been analyzed to death. I have nothing new to offer on the subject. The fact of the matter is I just really like Anthony Perkins, especially in this role, so be sure to come back each Monday this month to see what I have to say about the sequels.

So why does this relatively tame slasher film score a 3 out of 4 on the gore rating? Because the way Hitchcock juxtaposes the knife against his actress’s tender flesh is the absolute high mark of an artist subverting the censorship of the time. You don’t see it cut her flesh, but you certainly feel it.

The marketing for Wolf Creek looked like more of the same boring shit we were getting too much of in the early 2000s. I wrote it off, as I did most mainstream horror movies in that era. When I saw Grindhouse two years later, I took notice of the fact that one of the Death Proof cars careens through a marquee with Wolf Creek’s title on it. Was that a nod or a dunk? I wondered. Either way, the filmmakers had something to say about the movie so I made a mental note, right there in the theater, to check Wolf Creek out for myself sometime. Nineteen years later, here I am.

What’s immediately striking about Wolf Creek is how effortless it feels. Three twenty-somethings buy a beater station wagon and drive across the outback. The two girls are English tourists. The boy is Australian, born and raised. The girls think the boy is cute, but they take a moment to decide which one will hook up with him so they don’t sour their friendship. I actually liked this trio and the (presumably) improvisational filmmaking that made their dynamic feel grounded and real. I was frequently reminded of The Blair Witch Project, which employed similar acting techniques. In fact, I actually started to dread the inevitable moment when they would take a wrong turn into a horror movie—not because I cared about the characters, but because I tend to dislike this type of movie.

This is all to say I’m probably not the right person to review a Wolf Creek film.

The wrong turn comes halfway through the movie when they find their car won’t start after a hike. For some reason their watches stop working, too, but that detail is never mentioned again (I thought the movie was introducing some kind of environmental battery drain or something, but a couple scenes later they have perfectly functional flashlights so… WTF?). They accept a tow from a charismatic stranger by the name of Mick Taylor (a phenomenal John Jarratt). Mick is reminiscent of the old man in the first two Texas Chainsaw Massacre films as he quickly puts the kids’ suspicions at ease with his quick wit and folksy banter. He tows them miles away from their intended path and lets them set up camp in the abandoned mining town he’s made his home. When the kids wake up, they discover they’ve been drugged and bound in the middle of the night.

The torture begins, psychological as well as physical. One of the girls manages to free herself and get her hands on a rifle. What follows is one opportunity after another to escape or kill the antagonist, but she screws it up each time. And while that’s par for the course for many movies of its type, it’s especially frustrating here because this film demonstrated so much promise early on. Had the first half been shit, I wouldn’t have been so disappointed by the routine “I’m gonna catch ya” stuff. The moment these bright young women become helpless morons for the sake of the plot, I couldn’t wait for the whole thing to end… and at that point it had like forty minutes left.

I’m well aware I’m probably breaking rank with most horror fans on this one (I wasn’t a fan of The Descent, either, though I often hear it referred to as a classic). By comparison, I find The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original, not the aforementioned remake) to be a brutally thrilling film, but its first half is its weakness. This one follows an opposite curve, though it’s not the fault of the performers. They’re firing on all cylinders, especially in that superior first half, and I admire the director even though I disagree with where he ultimately goes. On the other hand, I enjoyed it more than literally any Saw film I’ve ever seen and I suppose I’m not entirely opposed to seeing the sequel someday. I just hope they go the TCM2 route and amp up the goofiness.

Underworld, aka Transmutations, is the first feature length screenplay by Clive Barker, who reportedly hated the finished product. There’s no word on whether he has commented on (let alone seen) the version I’m reviewing today, which is the extended cut containing eleven minutes of footage not found in the poorly received theatrical version. Although I haven’t seen the film before, it’s immediately clear which bits have been spliced back in because they stick out like a sore thumb. The 35mm film from the theatrical version was scanned for the restoration, but all the extra stuff existed only on an old VHS. (Curiously, the same thing happened when Barker himself was involved with early restorations of Nightbreed.)

This patchwork of film and shitty VHS footage sounds more jarring than it actually is—and not only because the bitchin’ synth score ties it all altogether. The restored bits make Underworld more interesting from a technical point of view while slightly improving on the neo-noir mood the director was trying to establish. Above all, it’s an intimate look at what an editor actually does, showing how much freedom they have in shaping the final movie. We’re not talking about merely restoring some missing cutaways. There are entire conversations, scenes, and bits of character development restored here. Above all, the extended cut shows just how short-sighted the producers were to go through the trouble of hiring top-tier talent, just to turn around and attempt to normalize it for maximum profits. Worse, their edits were probably demanded for a shorter runtime, so I wonder: Why didn’t they cut the long bits where the hero plods through the least convincing sewer set in history?

All that meddling didn’t help. Though Clive Barker would work again with director George Pavlou on the superior Rawhead Rex, the experience ultimately led him to become a director himself with 1987’s Hellraiser. If anybody’s gonna screw up his work, it might as well be himself, right? Still, I think there’s just enough of Barker’s personality in Underworld to make it worthwhile for his completionists. Like too many supernatural detective films, this one is at its best before the mystery reveals itself disappointingly early on. Underworld’s noir elements are fine. Its horror elements are not.

The film opens with the kidnapping of a high class prostitute, which leads a rich business mogul to hire a private investigator to find her. It turns out that the detective is the prostitute’s old flame, which is hard to believe considering he’s so reluctant to take the job. Similarly, when the detective and his love interest reunite (the first time they share any screen time in the movie), their chemistry is anything but convincing. In fact, the hero has a stronger chemistry with another prostitute whose advances he keeps turning down.

The private eye, with his oddly streaked hair, bears some resemblance to David Vanian, frontman of The Damned, particularly during the group’s brief transmutation (see what I did there?) from punk to goth. No, he’s not a particularly strong actor, but he’s serviceable as a prototype for Clive Barker’s Harry D’Amour, the hard boiled detective played by Scott Bakula in Lord of Illusions. Another point in the film’s favor is that, even forty years ago, Barker was drawn to the denizens of his fictional underworlds. An early strand of Nightbreed’s DNA is woven throughout, particularly in the film’s dreamlike opening sequence and the comradery among subterranean freaks.

Among the supporting cast of character actors (Steven Berkoff, Art Malik, and Miranda Richardson) is Denholm Elliot. He’s easily the best actor in the film, but he’s reduced to playing a mad scientist who doesn’t gel with Barker’s more recognizable sensibilities. You’d expect themes of sadomasochism, bondage, and identity, not a routine villain with a grandiose plan to… well, what the hell is his plan? To get streetwalkers hooked on a drug that will ultimately deform them? That’s, uh… I fail to see the scientific merit in that, much less any kind of financial or power gain. Even so, the film’s goofy premise does explore something Barker is very much known for: body horror, but it just isn’t horrific enough to warrant interest.

Don’t let anyone tell you it’s an uninteresting movie. It’s not. Undercooked, perhaps, but it still offers a fascinating if not crude glimpse into Clive Barker’s psyche as a filmmaker. Check it out if you’re a fan of the writer’s early work. Skip it if you’re not.

Ah, Scanners. You may look high and low for a bigger fan of this flick, but you may not find one. It’s not just the candy bar scenes that draw me into David Cronenberg’s first masterpiece of many. It’s the quiet moments in between. Few genre filmmakers were great at these stretches of relative silence (John Carpenter and George Romero come to mind). I would argue almost no one actively making films like this are even allowed to try today. How could they when the most common note from studio execs is now “Keep repeating the plot because most viewers are staring at their phones”?

Scanners, with its liminal spaces and flatly shot subjects, is clearly made in a bygone era, reveling in the fact it isn’t a Hollywood movie rather than trying to mimic one. Its machined plot feels influenced by The Terminator, though it predates that film by three years, and it’s photographed like a utilitarian art flick. There are moments of goofiness—wonderful goofiness—and Cronenberg embraces that stuff rather than acting like he’s above it. Look, it’s a story about people who control other people with their minds. There’s simply no way for a movie to look cool when its performers are emoting such things. Can you imagine how fucking dull this would be if it brought out the leather coats and slow motion?

For the opener, a young transient by the name of Cameron Vale is captured by ConSec, a private security company, after psychically attacking a terrible woman in a shopping mall’s food court. The suits inject Vale with a tranquilizer that subdue his powers and calm the voices in his head, which are the unfiltered thoughts of everyone around him. In the next scene, upper level personnel gather to watch a demonstration in ConSec’s headquarters. There a man reveals himself to be a scanner: one of 237 known people on the planet who possess psychic and telekinetic abilities. When he attempts to demonstrate his ability on a volunteer (Michael Ironside), it turns out the volunteer is a much more powerful scanner known as Darryl Revok. Revok, which is a fantastic name for a fantastic villain, overpowers ConSec’s scanner and makes his head explode.

This is by far the greatest head explosion in movie history, which is why the film automatically scores full points on the Gore Meter. When I was a kid, I read that the scene had been accomplished not with professional pyrotechnics, but by concealing an actual shotgun in the dummy’s torso. (Naturally, I asked my parents if I could have a shotgun because I, too, wanted to shoot a scene like that on the home camcorder. For some reason they declined my request.) Due to the obvious safety concerns, I would be extremely surprised if any film ever features a more gnarly and meaty head explosion in the future. It may be impossible to reproduce the effect with standard Hollywood pyrotechnics, which the sequels seemingly prove.

ConSec executives gather in a boardroom the next morning to discuss the implications of their security breach. When one of the board members suggests ending scanner research altogether, Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) reminds them that they are in a cold war with Revok’s secret army of scanners whether they like it or not. Their only hope is to train a powerful scanner of their own, which they have recently acquired with their capture of Cameron Vale. Wisely, Cronenberg gives McGoohan, a classically trained character actor, the bulk of the film’s more outlandish exposition, which is at its most unbelievable when he explains that Vale can scan a computer as well as he can humans. The premise may have seemed plausible in 1981, but now, when literally everyone knows a computer does not have a nervous system analogous to humans, the explanation is the goofiest part of the entire picture.

What’s most interesting about the film is that Cronenberg chooses to depict his scanners as humans rather than superheroes. Most of the scanners had troubled childhoods. Almost none of them fit into society unless they learn to manipulate others at their will. Revok himself attempted to drill a hole in his own brain in an effort to quiet the relentless thoughts filling his head. Ironside lends a gravitas to the character that makes you believe he could genuinely become obsessed with a new world order, elevating what would have been a routine plot device into a solid character trait. So while its plot may sound like that of a generic genre film, it’s a very satisfying hybrid of wild fantasy and realism.

Scanners was a perfect primer for a memorable horror franchise. Indeed, it spawned four sequels, two of which I may have seen more than the original. That’s not to say they were any good, just that in the days before streaming movies, you kinda had to just live with whatever you taped off of Cinemax. I plan to feature a Scanners film each Friday this month so don’t miss out. At any rate, this is one of my favorite films of all time and it has never looked better on home video than it does right now.

Kicking off this year’s 31 Days of Gore is Stuart Gordon’s The Pit and the Pendulum, produced for Full Moon. Lance Henriksen plays the friar Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. I’m a little confused what Henriksen is going for here (certainly not historical accuracy). I get the feeling he wanted to create an intimidating impression of the torturer while Gordon pushed for a jovial atmosphere. The performance doesn’t really fit in Gordon’s universe, which is surprising because Henriksen is often the best part of films like this.

Gordon regulars stand out as Torquemada’s evil but gleefully stupid henchmen: Jeffrey “I gave him life!” Combs is the trusted scribe; Fortress’s Tom Towles portrays the chief enforcer; and Stephen Lee of Dolls fame plays the oaf who carts bodies out of the castle. One of the more interesting henchmen is Mendoza, played by Breaking Bad’s Mark Margolis. Unlike Henriksen, Margolis successfully finds a tone of seriousness that somehow works in the otherwise goofy picture. Unlike his peers, who only use religion as a loophole for torturin’, Mendoza is truly loyal to Torquemada’s plight to cleanse the earth of sinners. This despite the fact that Torquemada wrongfully accused Mendoza of crimes in the past, the punishment for which resulted in the partially healed stigmata bored through each of his hands.

Two young bread-makers, Antonio and Maria, are imprisoned when Torquemada accuses them of witchcraft. As is often the case in films like this, the woman whose beauty tempts self-righteous authority figures gets locked in the dungeon. Antonio makes a couple of impotent attempts to rescue her, only to find himself locked in another section of the dungeon, awaiting execution. Meanwhile, Maria meets an old hag played by horror’s favorite elder woman, Frances Bay. As it turns out, Bay’s character really is a witch who teaches Maria a few tricks, including astral projection, so that she can leave her body whenever the torture becomes too painful.

Oliver Reed adds weight as the cardinal who has been sent, on the pope’s orders, to bring Torquemada back to Rome. Torquemada refuses, choosing instead to seal the emissary in a void behind a wall. (It just occurred to me that Reed’s character should be alive at the end of the movie, after the bad guys are defeated, but none of the good guys think to release him. Oh well.) Although he ruthlessly projects authority, the cracks in Torquemada’s facade are spreading. He’s losing influence and he knows it. He invests too much energy in the titular pendulum which is saved—and underutilized—for the final act.

Producer Charles Band, the Roger Corman of the videocassette market, always struck me as someone who strove for consistency in his films by aiming at an easily achievable mark of quality. It was directors like Gordon who frequently raised the bar, but this isn’t Gordon’s best. In a 90s interview for Fangoria Magazine, Bruce Campbell lamented that the medieval setting in Army of Darkness stifled the improvisational creativity he and Sam Raimi enjoyed on earlier films; remote location shoots create restrictive schedules which don’t leave a lot of room for horsing around. I posit the same may have happened to Gordon here.

The film has an identity crisis, failing to gel its heavier elements (rape, torture, persecution) with its substandard swashbuckling and genuinely funny lines. At one point Combs says to the hag, “I’m sorry you couldn’t confess before we had to kill you.” To which she replies, “Oh, that’s quite alright.” That’s the playful Gordon we all know and love, but those moments are few and far between. If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you already know I would have preferred a funny horror film to a serious one, especially with this cast.

The Pit and the Pendulum is still a good time. More like a Dagon than a Re-Animator, I would rate it 2-1/2 Castle Freaks out of 4. I would have a hard time recommending it to casual moviegoers and I suspect those who would enjoy it half as much as I did have already seen it. I was late to the party on this one, but I’m glad I saw it. I’ll see much worse over the course of the next thirty days.