Monday, December 23, 2013

Jason goes to Holehead--Day 18

It...just...keeps...going!

Two more shows last Monday.

First up, the short HOG'S TOOTH, a very well made and thoughtful look on a rookie sniper in Iraq, the days of tedium, and the difficult situation he has to deal with.

Thoughtful and well made are the exact opposite of the feature BATH SALT ZOMBIES. A genius chemist invents a new, more potent strain of "bath salts"--the drug that makes people go crazy and rip each others' faces off. I will give them credit for some funny face-ripping-off special effects. And I'll give them...a certain form of credit for crassly exploitative nudity. I won't give them any credit for story, pacing, acting, or general competence. I could tell early on it was going to be a long, tedious haul when the crassly exploitative nudity was dragging on way too long and I wished it would just move along to the story. And I was right. At 70 minutes, it was about 2 hours too long. It's a movie for those who thought KRACKOON was too cerebral.

And then the second show was THANATOMORPHOSE. The title is a word meaning the visible rotting of flesh, and that's exactly what the movie is. A beautiful young girl rots away completely...over the course of 100 minutes. And what at first seems like a no-budget, poorly shot, poorly paced story of a girl alone in her apartment turns out to be...a no-budget, poorly shot, poorly paced story of a girl alone in her apartment, rotting. Actually, the rotting flesh effects are very good, very effective, and very disturbing. And there is something to this film--something about body image and a woman's value being tied up in her looks--that is interesting but I was too tired to parse. But the scene where she calls her male friend over and demands he fucks her rotting corpse is funny and disturbing (spoiler alert: he doesn't do it.) So I think there is probably something there, but I just left thinking about how most of the time it was too poorly shot for me to see anything and when I could see it was too slowly paced for me to care.

Total Running Time: 190 minutes
My Total Minutes: 347,042

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