Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

So long then, 2012. As we come to the end of another year, a few of us here at Brutal As Hell have already taken time out to reflect on the year in genre film. If you haven’t already done so, check out Nia’s end-of-year review here and Ben’s low-down on the good, the bad and the ugly here. One thing is apparent from reading through both of my co-writers’ articles, though, and that’s what a hectic year it’s been for film fans. All in all, it’s been a bloody good year too. Whilst I wasn’t able to get out to as many festivals as I’d have hoped and thus sadly missed out on a lot of the most hotly-debated films of the year while they were being hotly-debated, much of that which I have seen has given me hope that indie cinema in particular still has the ideas and still has the enthusiasm – it’s not all found footage and sexual assault after all. Hallelujah. Still, as with any year, you’re never going to be pleased all the time. In fact, sometimes, you’re going to be downright appalled, bored or pissed off. Such is the gamut of emotions we get as film fans, which is why I’m going to approach my own review of the year from the perspective of some of those emotional states – positive and negative – which I’ve been through in 2012. This will mean at times I discuss elements of the plot which could contain mild spoilers. So, without further ado…

Most enthralling – The Cabin in the Woods

This is a film I simply did not expect to like. Although, by some miracle considering I am an internet user, I managed to go into the screening of The Cabin in the Woods without really knowing anything about what I was about to see, I had heard one slightly ominous prefix being bandied around, and that prefix was ‘meta-‘. If ever a small word could fill you with dread…I had a horrible feeling I was about to see another Scream, a film which wrongly thought it could look down its nose at the horror genre from a vantage point of smug superiority. I wondered if Joss Whedon was going to attempt to do the same thing. In actuality, The Cabin in the Woods showed that you can be genre-aware and self-referential without ever coming across as sneering, and crafted an original story out of a whole host of recognisable elements. Loaded with fine detail, but working perfectly as an overarching story, this film had me hooked. If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t seen it yet, I recommend it. You can also check out Britt Hayes’ review here and Steph’s rather-less glowing review here. Hey, let it never be said that we all sing from the same hymn sheet here…

Most confusing – Prometheus

Regardless of whether a film is set in space, or on another planet, or has robots, or monsters, or any combination of same, it should still have a convincing internal logic. It needn’t answer every question it raises, of course not, but you still want to believe that the writers themselves could answer them – that there exists some cogency somewhere in the proceedings. Prometheus, whether by a process of re-writes or by sheer oversight, has so many plot holes that all of its many dazzling features were laid completely flat for me. Now, I hear that there’s another film on the way, and perhaps this film will help to clear up some of the questions raised in Prometheus, but it will not be able to fix everything. Personally, I could have taken less of the glorious alien vistas and a bit more of a workable narrative: I just wasn’t suitably blinded by science fiction, and came out of the cinema with an array of questions which I really don’t think anyone involved with the film could answer. If you don’t mind the spoilers, this discussion of the film is essentially all of the things I wanted to know, too.

Most convincing – Antiviral

My film of the year (check out my full-length review here), Antiviral is a massively impressive début feature from Brandon Cronenberg, bringing us a world made eerie by its toxic familiarity. To create this effective and chilling horror story, all Cronenberg has had to do is create a vision of celebrity culture which is, perhaps, just one notch up on what we currently have. The notion of ‘biological communion’ with the stars and the sickness which pervades through the film literally as well as figuratively makes this a grim, depressing but ultimately engaging watch, and its closing line of dialogue is unsurpassed this year. If this is the level of expertise we can expect from Brandon Cronenberg than I would not be at all surprised if he becomes one of my favourite working directors. Let’s hope we see more from him soon, and that this brilliant film gets seen by enough people.

Most irritating – American Mary

Why yes, not only do we not sing from the same hymn sheet at this site, we have at times thought of changing the site name from Brutal As Hell to Contrary As Fuck. Being completely honest though, ‘irritation’ is the emotion I chiefly associate with American Mary at this stage, as much for the levels of adoration being expressed everywhere towards the film and its directors (which wouldn’t go amiss in the dystopian world of Antiviral) as for the film’s own flaws. The more I’ve thought about these flaws, the more disappointed I am that so few fans and/or reviewers have discussed them at all. Whilst I can see some value in American (or rather Hungarian-Canadian) Mary, I simply cannot get past its huge hurdles: the sheer inconceivability of the student-teacher relationship, the speed date rape, the clumsy use of rape as a plot device full stop, the wilful or otherwise misunderstanding of the subject matter and its ‘shock value’, but most of all, that protracted and egotistical Soskas cameo. Someone needed to say that no, appearing in the film for such a long period of time to no plot purpose would not be ‘rad’, it would derail any momentum and believability which the film might have built up – such as how it had attempted to humanise people in the body modification scene and then, for instance, shows one of the people who supposedly belong to this culture attacking and biting a dancer. So much for consenting adults, eh?

Most mind-blowing – Bobby Yeah

Bobby Yeah is an experience that I cannot liken to anything else. Using the medium of stop-motion animation is a smart move for filmmakers who want to bring their peculiarly batshit insane vision to audiences, and director Robert Morgan has let his imagination run absolute riot in this unique short film. What’s it about? Bloody hell, it’s not easy to explain. Essentially, a little ne’er-do-well can’t resist literally pressing buttons. And, when he does, his curiosity is rewarded with a series of run-ins with increasingly weird creatures. To be honest, this film was one of those foremost in my mind when we decided to really resurrect the Horror in Short section here on the site, because it is absolutely criminal that a film of this calibre should not be more widely seen. Fans of the surreal should track it down, and then do what is the almost inevitable next step – get someone else to see it. It’s like the video tape in Ring only without the ill-effects, as long as you’re not in a mentally-altered state when you see it of course…

Most disappointing – The Innkeepers

As a proviso, I am horribly, horribly picky about supernatural horror. Where I can forgive or at least overlook flaws in other horror genres, provided I think the intentions are earnest, when it comes to good old-fashioned ghost stories I immediately turn into Statler and Waldorf. This is only because I love a good scare so much. Promise me this and fail to live up to it, and I take great umbrage. Promise me a ghost story, then weigh me down with irritating characters (Claire was beyond punchable), acres of inane conversation and a weak script, and I will lose interest long before any of the interesting attempts at fright occur. Throwing clichés in there for good measure, like the contrived appearance of the female ghost? Please don’t. I had similar problems with Sinister: for me, when up against dross like the Paranormal Activity movies, good supernatural horror needs to be great. It needs to show the world how it’s done. For me, The Innkeepers just didn’t. So, so frustrating.

Most amusing – John Dies At The End

If anyone could bring the hilarious, complex world of David Wong’s novel of the same name to the screen then it’s Don Coscarelli. We know he has form: one of his best and best-loved films, Bubba Ho Tep, owes its inception to the writing of Joe R. Lansdale, an author who has a fair few things in common with Wong, not least the mordant and savvy way he writes about strange things happening to ordinary guys. Well, John and David are definitely ordinary guys and strange things are definitely happening to them…it’s all linked to this mind-altering, dimension-scrambling drug they encounter, see. They call it ‘the sauce’, and it means things will never be the same again. I adored the novel, but I was anxious about how its multi-layered wit and complex subject matter would work in a movie. I needn’t have worried: it works brilliantly, and better still, it’s just as funny as I’d hoped it would be. John and David deserve to take their place amongst the best slacker heroes cinema has to offer, and this is a film which deserves a cult following, not least because it’s entirely in earnest and doesn’t seem to have set out to get one. But don’t just take my word for it – have a look at Ben’s glowing review here.

Most disturbing – Resolution

I hope that my full review here will adequately explain just why Resolution was so effective and innovative. It’s rare that a film can move so easily from what seems at first to be a comedic premise to something altogether more sinister, and so the fact that it does shows great skill on behalf of the writers/directors and the actors involved. To put it another way; it’s very unusual that I can bear with a film which incorporates ‘found footage’, so overused and tedious has this motif become. Resolution not only uses it as an interesting framework rather than a cost-effective cop-out, but makes it absolutely integral to the plot and – get this – makes it scary again. The more I’ve thought about the film’s ending over the past few months – an ending which I wasn’t wholly satisfied with at the time – the more I can accept it as a deft, still-questioning moment of anxious closure. Definitely one of the high points of the cinematic calendar, it’s a film which has made its mark on me, and I really hope it gets the attention it rightly deserves.

By Keri O’Shea

Alien invasions have taken many forms in film over the years; we’ve had bug-eyed Martians, super-intelligent hunters, sentient gloop, sentient gloop which becomes mass-marketed as a tasty snack, and many new arrivals – be they plant life or meteor-borne slugs, for instance – who have sought to take over the bodies of humans in as convincing a way as possible, to avoid detection for as long as possible. That isn’t quite how it goes in Bad Taste, the first feature-length movie from director Peter Jackson…

Aliens have landed in a sleepy small town in New Zealand, and so conspicuous are the boss-eyed, shambling xenomorphs who seem to have replaced the townsfolk there that, whether or not they’re clad inconspicuously in standard-issue blue denim, they’ve come to the attention of the government. Oh, that and the fact that all the usual inhabitants are still missing. That’s a whopping seventy-five people! Obviously, something has to be done about this. We’re made privy, at the start of the film, to the governmental decision-making on what to do about these “intergalactic wankers” and the powers-that-be are evidently deadly serious. That’s why they’re sending The Boys – otherwise known as the Astro Investigation and Defence Service. Yep, it’s a mnemonic to conjure with, and a crew to be feared. Sort of…

Meet Derek, Barry, Ozzy and Frank: they’re hardly the crack paramilitary team you might expect. Derek (played by Jackson himself) is a batty scientist who keeps birds; as for his colleagues, the kindest thing we could say about them is that they’re a band of likeable pillocks, bemused by their own incompetence a lot of the time, and the type of blokes you’d be shy of trusting with a shopping list, let alone saving the planet. The vicar who joins them, when he picks the wrong day to go door-to-door collecting for charity, isn’t a whole lot better. There’s something truly gleeful about watching this lot try to cope with the situation unfolding around them; it’s at the heart of Bad Taste’s slacker wit, that which has been imitated but never fully replicated elsewhere, because the New Zealand of the film’s setting is completely unique. The Kiwis I know insist that provincial NZ always feels like it’s a square twenty years behind the rest of the world; you see evidence of that in Bad Taste, where the slow pace of life has evidently passed on to its protagonists, come what may – and you’d think there’d be a bit more of a sense of alarm here than there is. Our AIDS guys deal with the potential end of life as we know it with very relaxed attitudes generally; in America, these guys would be self-consciously written as stoners or they’d be at the other end of the spectrum, action heroes; here, they’re neither of those things, they’re just achingly funny regular blokes doing their best, but occasionally sitting around and reading magazines while they wait to see what’ll happen. Course, these are still professionals: they can get it together when they really need to – and when they do, it often leads to copious gore.

If its sense of humour is a fundamental part of the film’s long-lasting charm, then the zany special effects in Bad Taste are a huge part of that – in fact, you really can’t divorce the two. From the outset, the blood and guts are totally over-the-top and absurd; we’re barely past the opening credits when we’ve seen an alien getting his head blown clean off, in a sequence which has aged pretty well and has in all likelihood influenced much later films, like Inbred, which uses a very similar scene. To quote Derek, “I pity the poor bastard that’s got to clean that up.” Bad Taste features gallons of the red stuff, limb removals, literal human(oid) shields, and brains which look a hell of a lot like blancmange – it’s all pretty full on, and more that, it’s seriously icky. The alien who loses the top of his head? Observe his buddy later eating the contents of his skull with a spoon. The film has a really infamous moment of ick, too: ask anyone what they remember most clearly from this film and I bet they’ll say ‘the gruel scene’: I re-watched the film before writing this feature, and the vision of one of the aliens vomiting blue liquid into a bowl which his cohorts then drink still makes me wince/laugh/wince, absolutely in that order. You can see the steam rising off it, for fuck’s sake! So, the grue definitely lends itself to giggles – such as pratfalls which crack heads open (and lead to novel uses for a belt) and human battering rams. Bad Taste gives us a uniquely daft brand of splatstick, and rather than body-horror, what we really have here is body-comedy. And it’s human bodies that figure highly on the agenda of the “extra-terrestrial low lifers” that have landed in Kaihoro. The crux of the plot – that these aliens are part of an intergalactic fast food company and they want to push homo sapiens as the hottest new meat on the menu – is a fun facet to the overall farce.

Considering how well the jokes land here, it’s astonishing really that this is a film that had no formal script: one of the reasons for this is that Peter Jackson – that’s the director, editor, photographer, writer, SFX guy and star, no less – took four years (and nearly exclusively his own cash) to get the film made, and so decided what he was going to shoot as he and his friends went along. It works remarkably bloody well; originally planned to be a short, Bad Taste ended up being the (demented) calling-card of a filmmaker who would go on to rather different fare, but not before he’d exercised his imagination on a couple more unselfconsciously wacky movies: Meet The Feebles (with the world’s first hippopotamus to pack lead, surely) appeared two years after Bad Taste, and then of course Jackson made a film that needs no introduction – the classic Braindead (or Dead Alive for US audiences), which is still probably the goriest film I’ve ever seen and one of the most stand-out zombie horror-comedies ever made.

After Jackson had impressed the New Zealand Film Commission with what he’d shot of Bad Taste when he was approaching the end of the project, finally securing finance to get the film finished, it’s fair to say Jackson’s career hasn’t been so much an arc as a vertical line, at least in terms of locations, commercial viability and of course, budgets (not to mention film length). It’s hard to believe that the same filmmaker who was drop-kicking human heads in Bad Taste could go on to an epic project like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I’m sure Jackson himself looks at his filmography and scratches his head from time to time, but there’s a demented energy to his earliest films (and certainly his forays into horror/sci-fi) which means they definitely retain their charm. The grim determination it took Jackson to get his first feature done is a testament to the radically-different works which would follow, too, as it showed someone who was totally committed to the craft, and would do it their own way, whether the vision be of brains leaking out of the back of someone’s head or something a tad more sophisticated, y’know, like Mordor…

Wherever you stand on Jackson’s later films, there’s still so much to love about the imaginative, spontaneous approach Jackson was taking at the beginning of his career; apart from the fact that, for good or ill, the appearance of this lo-fi project probably inspired countless filmmakers to just get out there and make their own damn movie, Bad Taste remains a seriously entertaining cult classic, beloved by fans. Razor sharp, eye-poppingly grisly and laugh-out-loud funny, there’s nothing quite like it out there – there wasn’t before it, and there hasn’t been since. And who knows? It’s always open for a follow-up, if Mr. Jackson tires of his glittering Hollywood career and wants to swap back dazzling CGI for rubber masks. Until such time as that eventuality though, happy 25th birthday, Bad Taste! And let us all remember, as if we could ever forget the fact, that Dereks Don’t Run.

By Keri O’Shea

In many ways, horror can be seen as a distorting mirror, held up to the society to which it belongs in order to focus attention on certain aspects of that society. It renders that which it reflects disproportionate, grotesque or monstrous – and so one of horror’s greatest strengths is that it encourages us to look – in a tongue-in-cheek way or otherwise – at our deepest, darkest concerns, whilst allowing us to pore over these morbid fascinations of ours in a safe space. You can tell a great deal about a place or a time by looking at its monsters: just as Frankenstein’s nameless Creature was a (literal) amalgamation of the concerns of the author’s day, so horror cinema now can reflect our fears and concerns. Ever wondered why zombies suddenly started to run, becoming robust agents of disease as opposed to the mindless, shambling creatures we had known? Perhaps horror was reflecting that, for a while there, the fear of pandemic and illness was more of a concern to us than consumerism or the vacant proletariat, or any of the old preoccupations associated with the walking dead.

So, what can we say about 2012? Well, a lot of what we’ve seen on our screens follows on from years previous – we still have our zombies galore, come to mention them, now both fast and slow; zombies are definitely the stalwart boogeymen of our age, shambling (or hurtling) past the straight-up blood-drinkers, who have been rehabilitated to the point of sparkling farce. Still, the vampire hiatus needn’t be forever, and they do still occasionally pop along to flash a fang on-screen in a way which has the power to appal. It’s certainly possible to identify a few themes running through the horror of 2012 though, and to ponder what it might all be saying about our current state of play. It’s no coincidence that these themes are most noticeable in many of the best films of the year – although, and let me make this clear right here and now, common topics wash up in the detritus of the year as well.

So, without further ado, here are five of the trends I’ve noticed in the films I’ve seen this year. By no means have these themes never been represented in horror before, I might add, but to my mind they have resurfaced in enough movies in 2012 for it to be of interest.

5: The Devil is Alive and Well

…Strange, isn’t it? Or is it? I suppose we can all kid ourselves that we live in the most rational times of all times, but frankly, that’s bullshit. Fundamentalist interpretations of millennia-old religious texts have not gone away, and said texts seem to be invoked more than ever in modern politics, usually to chip-chip away at certain hard-won rights. With people like this in the world who juggle a literal belief in Old Scratch with a mission to override personal autonomy, it’s no wonder that demonic possession has made a lot of headway on screen in 2012, seeing as it combines both of those. The idea of something occult and so powerful that it can erode selfhood hasn’t just popped up in recent American politics; it’s also reared its ugly head in films such as The Devil Inside (a movie so confident in its horror that it didn’t even bother with an ending) and The Possession, and of course there was the obligatory nod to all things demonic in yet another Paranormal Activity movie this year. Utilising a rather more sophisticated spin on the theme, Brit horror The Devil’s Business effectively combined gritty crime fare with arcane goings-on, showing that the Devil is always alive and well in Blighty.

4: Urban Life is Hell

The likes of F and Eden Lake in recent years have clearly shown that the modern, urbane spaces we have created not only aren’t immune to horror, but can generate some specific horrors of their own. So, in the year that many European cities have burned, the notion of an Other on our streets, sentient but sadistic, living by very different rules, has continued to hold certain sway within the genre. Citadel had much in common with F in that its hooded creatures were borderline supernatural in their omnipotence, as well as being just as vicious. Whatever your take on what we at Brutal As Hell have coined ‘chavsploitation’, the fact that we can debate it suggests at least that it’s touching upon certain common nerves and referencing something which we recognise, even if we don’t like its distortions. In The Raid and Dredd 3D, the tower-block dwellers weren’t supernatural, but they were certainly organised and pissed off; both films feature criminal armies in vertical camps, and serve to remind us that sometimes even modern cities can contain foreign countries.

3: It’s All in the Genes

Concerns over what gets dragged up whenever humankind makes significant ‘progress’ is as old as the hills when it comes to the horror genre, but as scientific focus alters, so does its warped reflection. This year, genetics has figured very highly: Errors of the Human Body combined body horror with melodrama as an esteemed doctor tried to get to the heart of the genetic abnormality that killed his son, encountering gung-ho experimentation and the threat of harm along the way which plays with the suspicions held by many about just what goes on in these sterile, efficient but possibly dangerous laboratory spaces. In Prometheus, wormhole-sized plot issues aside, we’re taken to a variant on the Alien universe where it transpires that the whole human race was genetically-engineered, and the robot David treats the crew like guinea pigs, deliberately toying with their DNA for his own and his employer’s own sinister curiosity.

Childlike fascination with the potential of science and especially genetics has given us a fair amount of childish humour, too. SyFy continue to bolt together various unlikely critters with the same pointless enthusiasm as an acid-head in a Lego box, surely pushing the tolerance of even the most committed creature feature fans. It all makes Piranha 3DD seem sane. However, it’s not all lowest common denominator stuff: Japanese movie Dead Sushi brought malevolent modified snacks to the screen, and made it all batshit crazy enough to work…

2: You may feel a little sting…

Following on from the last theme somewhat, 2012 has definitely been the year of the scalpel. Surgery, for many people living in the 21st Century, is so much more than a procedure undertaken to remove this or to fix that for health reasons: plastic surgery is commonplace, and more often than not it’s driven by purely aesthetic decision-making. But it’s still surgery: you still have to put yourself into the hands of another individual, and trust that what they do to you when you’re not even breathing for yourself is what you want or need. It’s little wonder that this crops up as a theme in horror cinema then, and this year surgery has formed the bedrock of two much-debated, contentious indie movies. American Mary has been a real cause célèbre throughout the year, dividing opinion pretty squarely between those who consider it flawless body horror and those who think it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes. Regardless, its subject matter – of a damaged young medical student offering surreptitious body modifications in order to support herself – finds some echoes in Excision, another film in which surgery is key, and another example of a damaged individual whose medical aspirations turn problematic. Hand over your bodies to these individuals at your peril, perhaps. Or, indeed, you could hand over your body to an individual like Syd Marsh…

Antiviral, my favourite film of the year, masterfully extends a facet of modern life we’d all recognise and takes it into grotesque, medicalised territory. In its world, obsessive celebrity fans can enjoy ‘biological communion’ with their favourite stars, paying a handsome sum in order to be deliberately infected with the stars’ viruses. It’s designer contagion, and the Lucas Corporation trades well in it. Loneliness mingles with sickness in Antiviral, and it’s all packaged in worryingly plausible terms, just one degree of separation from our world. That’s what makes it so unsettling, and so very timely.

1: Technology is Terror

The ongoing, exasperating prevalence of ‘found footage’ movies within the horror genre points to one thing, if it does nothing else: technology is everywhere, even in the hands of those who you’d suppose would struggle with shoelaces. Technological advancement is, then, no barrier to horror; rather, horror creeps very comfortably into technology, adapting to it and colonising it. For me, the Japanese horror movies which first broke into the Western market in the mid- to late-Nineties were ground-breaking in this respect. Ring and The Grudge showed us that ghosts and demons were happy to upgrade, inhabiting CCTV, mobile phones and much more. Interestingly, we’ve had a few films this year which went rather retro in their use of technology as a plot motif, going back to the sinister video tape idea so important to Ring (V/H/S) or even back beyond that, to the 1970s and to the horror inherent in devising a contemporary movie soundtrack (Berberian Sound Studio).

We’ve seen much more up-to-date gadgetry at use in the genre this year too, though: Sinister made a creepy game out of the DVDs which told the tale, and the enjoyable Resolution combined the lot, running through obsolete recording equipment right through to new model laptops. The point which Resolution reiterates is that dark forces are always with us, adapting to whatever medium they require. Whatever’s cutting edge can have a cutting edge, if needs be. And, of course, The Cabin in the Woods took the notion of old evil refracted through modern trappings to its zenith, in one of the most enjoyable and original movies of the year. Surveillance culture has never been so successfully married to the horror genre as it has here – and perhaps that is key to why we’re seeing so much horror refracted through so many media. If we’re all watching each other, then maybe the thought of something else watching us watching each other is, as horror tropes go, as present and correct as it is perennial.

By Keri O’Shea

Ah, the internet. It’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t around, helping people to find that special someone whilst simultaneously making it possible to cut right to the chase. Don’t want to spend months of your life concealing your hang-ups and fuck-ups until you get to say what you want to say? Simply find the right website, and you can feel free to unleash your inner self. That’s what a certain gentleman called Armin Meiwes did, and he found just what he wanted…

Armin Meiwes, whose birthday it is today, may have become a vegetarian (!) since being sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for his actions, but his tastes weren’t always quite so pedestrian. Meiwes – an otherwise unassuming, well-respected citizen of the small town of Rotenberg in Germany – had a dream. That dream was to consume the flesh of a willing human being, and he found just such a person, through a site called The Cannibal Café. Hey, there really is a website for everything. He had placed an ad there looking for a ‘well-built 18 to 30 year old’ who would be willing to be eaten by him; Bernd Jürgen Brandes answered the call, and the rest, as they say, is penis-eating history.

The case generated global fascination and revulsion in equal measure, as it always does when it turns out that cannibalism isn’t necessarily something that happens ‘over there’, well away from the modern, safe, civilised parts of the world: in fact, rare as it might be, it’s always been with us, lurking at the fringes of our consciousness and occasionally making itself known to us. And, although there’s a fine pedigree of exploitation movies which deal with the topic from the point of view of Westerners abroad (and totally screwed), I’m really more interested in movies which play around with this surprisingly versatile topic a little more. Here is my pick of the movies which use cannibalism as a theme in a number of interesting ways, and not a cocky anthropologist film crew in sight. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Herr Meiwes.

Meat Grinder (2009)

As Ben noted in his review of the Thai movie Meat Grinder, this is a film which suffered badly at the hands of a misguided marketing campaign: in representing it as a torture-fest, the real story at the heart of this slick, well-made movie was completely overlooked. Sure, Buss (played by the refreshingly ordinary Mai Charoenpura) perpetrates some horrors, but the real horror here is that Buss is living by the old adage, ‘I do unto others what has been done to me’. Her methods are bloody, yes. but as the well-paced film reveals the trauma which drives Buss to her actions, you cannot fail to empathise with her. A combination of necessity and personal trauma drives her on, and as such this is a powerful film which examines abuse and poverty rather than revelling in gore. Don’t be fooled by the cover art; it was chosen by an idiot.

Trouble Every Day (2001)

Is the appetite for sex all that far away from the appetite for flesh? The tagline for Trouble Every Day reads ‘I love you so much, I could eat you’; pull that platitude apart, and there’s something rather odd about conflating love with consumption. Well, director Claire Denis chooses to take it very literally in this blood-soaked, erotic take of science gone awry, warped libidos and damaged individuals. The absolute highlight of this movie is Beatrice Dalle as Coré; she is ‘sick’ with a disease relating to her husband’s research into the human libido. He literally boards her up in their apartment when he isn’t around to keep an eye on her, and why? Well, Coré’s sex drive now means she gets off on eating her partners in flagrante. You have to wait an hour for Dalle’s key scene here, but man, is it intense. I initially felt that this film would have benefited by greater use of Dalle, but actually, what we do get is so jaw-dropping that it’s more than enough.

Soylent Green (1973)

One of the best science fiction movies ever made, Soylent Green explores a future which is close enough and recognisable enough to fill us with unease. Soylent Green is an exploration of the horrors of overpopulation, and what might happen to people when they become expendable – a problem to be rationalised. The cannibalism in the movie is unwitting, a final insult to be heaped upon the citizens by the wealthy Soylent Corporation: the poor are condemned to consume one another. The movie contains one of the most stark, unsettling scenes every to be committed to celluloid: as Sol (Edward G. Robinson, shortly before his own death) signs himself up for voluntary euthanasia, the move between his last moments of happiness and the abrupt efficiency of the production line to which he now belongs is absolutely heart-rending.

Dumplings (2004)

Vanity takes people to some very dark places, but I’m not one of those people who automatically assume that a preoccupation with appearance means the person is necessarily stupid or shallow. There can be a lot at stake, or at least there can feel like there is – as is the case for Mrs. Lee (Miriam Yeung Chin Wah), a woman who, though still attractive, fears losing her looks because she fears losing her husband altogether. She is willing to try anything, and so when she finds out about a woman called Mei and her famous ‘rejuvenating’ dumplings with a special ingredient, she seeks them out. These things work; Mrs. Lee will find out why, and what follows is a plot often blackly comedic, but ultimately sad. The lives of the women portrayed here are desperate, and desperation breeds harmful behaviour. In the pursuit of eternal youth, we already know people will try just about anything.

Of course, the film gained an extra veneer of sinister plausibility when earlier this year, it transpired that Korean customs officials had seized a cargo of Chinese pills filled with powdered human foetuses…

The Mad Butcher (1971)

And speaking of sinister plausibility – ever heard of Fritz Haarmann? We come full circle back to Germany with the last film in my selection, and surely the makers of The Mad Butcher were knowingly referencing the cannibal killer Haarmann, who was thought to have disposed of some of his victims by selling them as ‘pork’ to unsuspecting neighbours. After a spell in an asylum, our main character Otto Lehman (Victor Buono) resumes his old trade as a butcher, but it doesn’t go so well. He accidentally kills his wife, Berta, during an argument, and – not knowing what to do with her – decides to turn her into sausages. Of course people start asking questions about her whereabouts…and they get the same treatment. It’s a film with many flaws, sure, but The Mad Butcher is fun primarily thanks to the enjoyable performance given by Buono, who manages to bring a strange kind of warmth to the role. If you ever thought it’d be impossible to like a man who’d just ground up the missus, well, look no further that The Mad Butcher. Although like Buss in Meat Grinder, he acts out of expediency, two films could not be more different in tone. If anything, The Mad Butcher turns cannibalism into a bit of a chore!