ceddamaged

A film that doesn't quite live up to its bold title, despite a couple of classic shock scenes.

It follows a broke director who decides to make his movie anyway by gathering actors in a big house rigged with cameras and directing them remotely.

The plot is super predictable-you know where it's headed within the first few minutes-but the concept is still intriguing. It's been done before, but it's a reliable setup. The first problem is that the opening half is profoundly dull. You wait over 30 minutes for even a hint of tension, and nothing keeps you engaged. The characters are basic, the dialogue equally so. The film picks up a slight rhythm after that, building some suspense and escalating the action, but it's still very much been-there-done-that.

The second issue is the characters' behavior, a common flaw in the genre. They flip from victims to perpetrators without reason, change personalities in two minutes flat, and barely try to rationalize what's happening. The film nods to this with a reference to the Milgram experiment, but it doesn't fix much.

Labeled a horror-comedy, Incredible Violence takes itself pretty seriously. The only funny bits are the early kills, with the obviously amateur killer juggling murder and the "artistic" side of his project, leading to some absurd situations. The few horror sequences are decent enough. Everything else is lackluster. The epilogue's meta twist arrives too late, packed with clichés (like a chase through the woods), and the supposedly shocking scenes don't go far enough to hit hard, despite an occasionally gripping atmosphere thanks to a solid soundtrack.

It sometimes feels like a failed Kolobos or My Little Eye, which is a shame. For a debut film, it's not terrible, honestly, but I was glad when it ended.

This one grabbed me hard. Seriously, the first half is phenomenal-I love it. If only the whole film had kept that energy, we'd have one of the most gloriously bizarre, forgotten gems of the early '90s.

It's the story of a woman who reluctantly visits an abortion clinic, only for her fetus, mutated by chemicals, to become a vengeful creature hell-bent on destroying those responsible for its exile.

It's almost the same plot as The Aborted, that utterly vile Z-grade flick I reviewed with much ado a while back, but with a bigger budget and a much clearer storyline. The Suckling oozes '80s B-movie vibes from every pore. The first half is like a psychotronic Henenlotter fever dream with some truly unhinged sequences. It kicks off with a super catchy nightmare featuring a blood-soaked nurse and a killer dreamlike atmosphere, then dives into a weird claustrophobic setting with memorable kills (the toilet decapitation!) and body horror that echoes stuff like The Abomination. The characters are actually pretty decent-cynical as hell, with women dishing it out to men, men dishing it back, a Lionel Richie lookalike (Gerald Preger, in his only film role) who's quick with a slap, a matriarch running her clinic like a brothel, and a gallery of caricatured but effective personalities.

The big problem is the second half. It's a total dead zone, with almost no standout moments, damaging slow patches, and barely any gore. The finale brings some wild surprises, but we're talking the last 10 minutes. There's a whole chunk of the film that's just not worth caring about, and that's a damn shame. The first 30 minutes, I'll say it again, are masterful. The vibe, the madness-it's exactly what you want from this kind of production. For that, I'll keep fond memories of this film, which could've been so much crazier if it had stayed the course.