Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom (1972)

A small handful of mildly bloody fight scenes and a decent amount of tits. Even one lesbian scene with nipples rubbing against each other. There were some torture scenes like depriving a girl the use of a bathroom after forcing her to drink water and also a bulb going up a vagina, but nothing graphics. What little violence and the boobs is all I really enjoyed from the movie and sadly it didn't make up a large percentage of this film, which is apparently about a strict-school where corrupt teachers tortured one student and the student's friends want to get revenege, leading to a series of blackmail and endless political mumbo jumbo that made me lose interest in the plot. It's a decent Pinky Violence film, has the right amount of sex, but ultra-light on violence and too heavy on boring political chit-chat, far from perfect. "Sex and Fury" is an essential pinky violence film, this one really isn't.

Axe (1977)

AXE has that trademark 70's exploitation look and feel. Like I Spit on Your Grave, Fight For Your Life, and Last House on the Left, it involves someone that seems so harmless slowly exposing their darker side when confronted by evil. It all starts out when three criminals that are involved in a murder and did inhuman things to a poor grocery store woman worker hideout at a farmhouse where a girl and her paralyzed grandfather live. The two seem so weak and easy to abuse which is why the criminals plan to crash at their house and abuse their meekness. Two of the criminals even tried to rape the chick (the third criminal didn't want any part of this abuse though, he was a sensitive pussy type with a fro like that famous painter guy). Eventually the girl has to take out her revenege using sharp objects that lead to some bloodshed (the blood looking like primitive HG Lewis film blood). This movie actually reminds me of Roman Polanski's Repulsion because the girl seems to be a silent ticking-time bomb of craziness as well. Both the girls in Repulsion and Axe would hardly talk and had that cold yet innocent look in their face too. The killing of a rapist was even done in a similiar fashion with the same weapon. So in a way, you could say this is the even more minimalistic and cheaper, 70's sleaze/revenge exploitation version of Repulsion. Not a gorefest or anything, just a good simple tale of abuse and revenge.

Schramm (1993)

A very unique film that takes an artistic experimental/weird approach at illustrating the fucked-up and depraved world of a serial killer. High brow, fancy cinematic techniques are employed to showcase something so low brow like extreme (and I mean EXTREME) gore and cold blooded murder. The scene where the guy nails his penis foreskin looked pretty damn painful. And there is a gross-out severed leg here in gory detail. Very shocking imagery as you can tell. Storywise the movie is simple (dying perveted serial killer that has weird hallucinations like a vagina with teeth and dentists that rip his eyeball out) but the movie tells the story unconventionally through abstract flashbacks as he is dead in a pool of paint and his own blood, which may confuse a viewer expecting a linear story. The movie doesn't even use that much dialogue. Through silence, natural sounds, and an ambient soundtrack, you get the raw and depressing mood the director was going for. Sleaze, Gore, Weirdness, and High-Art make this a personal fav of mines. The Barrel DVD has been recently easier to find now so get it before it's out of print again. From the German director of the infamous Nekromantik by the way.

Don't Go In the Woods Alone (1982)

Not the gorefest I was expecting to see after all these years. "Gore" is more than just some fake blood, it has to involve chunks of flesh, organs, and guts. This movie only had the fake blood and the kills weren't as inventive, just standard stabs...and there still wasn't enough of that in this movie that felt like an eternity. Pretty average slasher in my book. Some cool blood splashing moments but the abundance of needless suspense padding the movie to oblivion, stretching the movie's length more than it needed to be, really killed the whole thing for me. There really isn't a story or anything to focus on, just random people sometimes getting killed or chased by a guy that looks like a freak from The Hills Have Eyes. The inept filmmaking is mildly funny at times in a Night of the Demon (the one with Bigfoot) way, but you can tell some scenes were intentionally funny, which ruins its so-bad-it's-funny classification for me. Maybe I need to watch this again when I have a better day, but I'm dissapointed it wasn't as fun and gory as I thought it would be. The music is what I couldn't stand the most. It was abused in almost every scene and was used as false alarm suspense most of the time, like the boy that cried wolf, only more monotonous sounding. A movie that builds this much suspense needs to deliver something to be suspensful about or else I just feel let down when the false alarms are so constant.

Skinned Alive (1989)

Sure the box art is pretty damn gay, but it's a neat Ed Gein-esque story with a massive helping of the red juice! A family comprised of a crabby hag with an eye patch, her asshole son and asshole daughter go around traveling in their van and killing people to get skin for making high quality apparel. Sounds like something from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Motel Hell eh? One day their car breaks down in some small town and they reside in an unsuspecting Good Samaritan’s house along with his wife. As they live there the sadistic family goes on running their “business” at this home, which consists of skinning people alive. Skin carving is actually shown without any cuts. Watch the flesh get sliced as a blade runs through it. Funny thing though is this skin cutting looks like a bleeding flesh-colored football getting cut like a birthday cake (even the filmmakers mention the birthday cake thing). Skin does get ripped off too, exposing comical blood covered bones. It’s an awesome cheesefest, only the morbid crybabies that want serious “sick gore” will be disappointed. The only truly sick thing in the movie in my opinion was the sister stripping for the brother. That strip scene was kinda cool though, she cut off her clothes with a knife!..but still it was for her brother ewww. The gorier stuff happens when the hero of the movie (an alcoholic loser ex-cop with a wretched bitch ex-wife) gets his trusty machine gun to kill this sick family. Ridiculous machine gun blasting and a blade on the machine gun becomes blood and guts galore. That’s pretty much it. Watch out for a whole body that’s skinless.

Bread and Circus (2003)

This movie plays out a lot like Bad Taste. It takes place mostly in grassy fields where people are running around killing each other until someone is left bloody and butchered. The gore, like Bad Taste, is exaggerated, gross, over-the-top, and comical so it truly does earn the title as the "Norwegian Bad Taste". One guy gets sliced in half with a sword and his guts spill out so this one guy can find his keys that were eaten. There are other sliced humans where you can see all their red gooey insides. Heads are left wide open so blood and mushy gore can gush. This other dude drop kicks some guy onto a tree branch so he can get impaled and his cartoon-ish heart pops out. Another guy gets kicked in the ass while taking a shit. When his ass bleeds, he sticks a beer bottle up his ass (you see it get painfully shoved up) to stop the bleeding. Suddenly he gets thirsty again and shits the bottle out to drink. Hell there’s even an alien in this movie and it involved a space-ship that cums into mother (literally “mother”) earth’s vagina (a vagina that people pop out of in the movie), it adds to the surreal weridness of it all. But unlike Bad Taste, Bread and Circus tackles deeps concepts such as identity and freedom. Apparently life moves like an assembly line in the movie. Mother earth plops you out and then you’re just left to fill some cookie-cutter standard of living where you walk across a path with arrows, have a brief case handcuffed to you, work for people richer than you, and then roll over dead one day in a world that was run by a corrupt king that employs a gun crazy force to keep you in track. People who are deemed undesirable for society are left in the woods where cannibalism takes place. One guy who lived this boring life wrote some radical, ten commandment-like shit, on some stone tablets. Years later a couple reads these words of wisdom and are inspired to start a violent revolution to break free from the king's power and society's limiting norms. They find a fuckload of weapons and start killing tons of people in the "system" including the unjust king and even one guy that looks like Eminem! The kill spree goes on for a long time until the end.

This movie could be enjoyed on two levels: as a mindless splatterfest or a mindful splatterfest. Depends if you can pick up the subtle metaphors and make sense of the scenes that seem like random weirdness to casual viewers. An impressive film for such a low budget with a small cast. Plus it was made in 2003, good to see a really werid and creative gross-out gore film come from that awful year.

Biozombie (1998)

The movie starts out as a comedy about two guys that work in a VCD store at the mall up to hilarious antics then slowly it transforms into a really tense horror movie where everyone struggles to survive until the grim ending. There still is some intentional comic relief within the horror part of the movie, like people quarreling over the flavor of cup of noodles even when danger lurks. Stylized gore scenes were fun too, real smooth cartoonish actions that connect together and fall like dominos, like someting Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson would have executed. The blood and limbs fly and spill in a festive manner, not in a nasty disturbing way. It's a fairly modern movie (1998), but the zombies don't suck. These are slow creeping zombies splattered in generous amounts of blood and have fucked up faces. Sure the movie is set in a mall, but it's definitley not like Dawn of the Dead. Plus, unlike Romero's film, we get an explanation and see how the zombie infection started (apparently Iraqi bio-chemicals that looked like soda was accidentally given to a guy that was hit by a car). All the characters develop and show their true colors, even one zombie with a heart of gold. It's solidly written movie that manages to shift moods and atmosphere as intended without being sloppy. Don't expect extreme gore (like guts and organs) though since this is only a CAT II.