So the killer comes in, and does a bit of the old killing. Now, you may recall in The Jason Chronicles Part 4, when Jason stops a man breathing by stabbing him a whole lot. You probably thought something along the lines of, How do these guys come up with this! No-one will ever top that, you presumed. But that's before you saw this here fella drive someone's head through the partings on a stair-case and then decapitate him with some nearby furniture.
I don't know if he used the head for any oral pleasure, and it's never really revealed.
But it's around about here that you start noticing some disturbing occurrences. Like how it isn't really all that tense, to be honest, and while you thought it was for a minute, you were probably just forcing yourself to try and feel scared, since Fangoria says its piss-yourself terrifying. You start worrying because your underwear is dry as a nun's vagina in a desert, and holy shit, forty minutes have passed. When the hell's the tension gonna heighten? When's the romancing gonna start? Where's the switchblades? I see death by sideboard, by axe, by barbed wire wrapped around a stick, I have yet to lay my eyes on a switchblade. What the fuck is a switchblade anyway?
What happens next, and continues to happen, is that the blonde runs about in slow motion, whilst the killer does something mundane like take a piss or buy some beer or get a blow job from the head of a corpse. And then when that bit's over it happens again. And again. And pretty the soon the tensometer is getting scarily close to rusting to fuck.
There's been a lot of hoopla about how this is getting an NC-17 rating, and how it's the most violent film what you ever seen, and how it's amazing and highly tense, and holy shit, he got a blow-job from a corpse.
Well guess what. Re-animator had head from a head, and it was also very funny and quite the classic, all being told. And Texas Chain Saw Massacre had a woman screaming and then running through the forest, but it was very disturbing, and it was also rather funny. And Duel had a rusty old truck chasing folks down on the deserted highway, but it knew a thing or two about drawing out the premise. And Etre Et Avoir had French people, but it was also very humane and witty. Come to think of it, anything that would make Haute Tension AKA Switchblade Romance worth watching has been done over and over and over and so on ad infinitum, and been done a hell of a lot better, too.
Article comments
1 - Chris Kent
Oh my God! Just about the funniest damn post I've ever read......Excellent work here. I figure any post that references Amityville II, Robert Wise AND Duel, has got something going for it. Glad to hear they properly renamed From Dusk Till Dawn.....
As for blow jobs and heads of corpses - uncomfortable to say the least, though remember reading about such activities in Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho...a book I refused to keep on my bookshelf after reading it. Though I did respect the film version, which left out that specific activity......
2 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Thanks for the kind words chris! Yes, i remember reading American Psycho, and constantly telling myself that it'll be grand, this'll only last a page or two and then it'll setlle down. And then breasts exlplode. But it'll calm down! And then a kid gets stabbed in the throat. But it'll calm down!! Very, very uncomfortable experience, yet strangely compelling all the same. I thought the film was grand, but by leaving out 90% of the violence, it kinda just ended up as Wall Street with better jokes. The Rules Of Attaction, however, is a brilliant film, although i have yet to read Ellis' novel.