Yesterday we kicked off our ten day festival of year end lists. We’re not talking best pictures, best actors, best screenplays and the rest. Those will come next week when. Rather, I’m indulging in an opportunity created by the usually year end list making frenzy to come up with alternative lists that highlight movies from 2011 that may not make the cut when looking back with the usually best of goggles. Yesterday we looked at the best apocalyptic movies, and today, we continue with. . .
Most Enjoyable, Ridiculous Bloody Romps
The Last Circus: Alex de la Ingles’ cinematic bender about a circus clown gone mad offers textbook axe grinding, with the Spanish director’ anarchic wit brandish against virtually every cultural institution within arm’s reach. It’s a flawed, though wild and enjoyable movie, especially if you like your social dramas with a side of sadism. But what is undeniable about film is The Last Circus’ tour de force ending sequence. The once demure, now insane clown, covered in blood, fights it out with his bloodthirsty rival over their mutual love interest, dangling from the massive cross that caps former Spanish fascist dictator, Francisco Franco’s ostentatious tomb while soldiers rain bullet’s on the wrestling ménage a tois from below. It may be, along with the open scene in Drive, the single coolest moment on screen this year.
13 Assassins: Takashi Miike’s samurai epic is an achievement in gore foley artistry. When a samurai runs his knife through his belly in 13 Assassins‘ opening scene, we never see steel meeting flesh, but we do here a teeth-softening mixure of wet smacking sounds, something like meat being splashed in a puddle, and it is more sickening than if we actually saw prosthetic stabbing. These kinds of sounds accompany much of the movie’s brutal moments, but it is the sheer magnitude of killing in the film’s prolonged battle sequence that is its real action genius.
Tucker and Dale Vs Evil: Eli Craig’s gore-medy finds its best punch lines in the splats and splatters that unfold when a couple of hillbillies come into contact with some ditzy college kids in the woods. The film is a horror-gore spoof, but like all good spoofs it shows a kind of deference to its source material by skillfully co-opting genre tropes and taking full advantage of their essential potency. A severed arm, an impaled stomach, a head in a wood chipper: all these things necessarily provoke audience reaction. What is so ingenious about Craig’s movie is that with every single slice and stab, our guts can’t help but guffaw.
The Housemaid: Sang-soo Im’s remake of the 1960 Korean film by the same name is not a stab and gore fest; rather, it is fueled by under swell of neurotic tension as the maid in a wealthy couple’s home slowly sinks into an impossible romantic situation. The film is kettle ready to blow, and when it does – with a deliberately staged hanging paired with arson intended to scar the couple’s child for life – it is a devilishly wry moment of spectacular morbidity.
