Herr Direktor wants one of the projects I’m working on to go in a more “splatterpunk” direction.  Until maybe two weeks ago, I had no idea what that actually meant, but I thought it sounded pretty cool, so I just went along with it.   Since then, I’ve been on a strict diet of splatterpunk movies and books.  Turns out I knew what it was, I just didn’t know what it was called.  For those dear readers who may have been as in the dark as I was about this subgenre, if you’re a Tarantino fan, in Kill Bill Pt1, when Beatrix goes to Japan and Samurai-sword-fights 99 Kato-masked Yakuza guys, and the entire interior of the massive club they’re in is literally drenched and dripping with blood from the firehose-like arterial spray from the myriad dismemberments occurring during the fight, and the entire floor is covered with bodies and limbs…that is what I’m talking about.

So the movies from the last week:
Tokyo Gore Police
Ichi the Killer
Battle Royale
The Machine Girl
Audition
Meatball Machine
Meatball Machine Kodoku

Up next will be:
Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead
Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades
Tetsuo: The Iron Man

As may be obvious from this list, I’m leaning into the Japanese take on SP because I think that approach will work better for this project.  The Japanese style is so wildly over the top as to be cartoonish, thus, absurd and thus, funny.  American splatterpunk movies would likely be things like The Terrifier movies Damien Leone or the Human Centipede sequence from Tom Six.  While I am a huge fan of Art the Clown, the SP aesthetic of the Terrifier movies is almost completely different than the Japanese version: there’s nothing funny about it.  I mean, I get it…the joke is an the absurdity of the lengths Art goes to inflict pain on his victims (e.g., leaving the room of a vicious multi-limb mutilation to retrieve a massive sack of salt from the other room so that he can shove it into wounds by the fistful…I admit I actually chuckled at that when I first watched it.  But that humor is waaaaaaay darker.  Put it this way: your 10-year-old kid walks into Kill Bill Pt I, they will likely laugh and be untraumatized because it is so obviously not real.  That same 10-y.o. walks into Terrifier 2, and you’ll probably be shelling out a bunch of cash for therapy after a bunch of dark behavioral reports from school.

Anyway, this new approach has breathed new energy into this project, and I’m pretty excited about it.

[Tangentially related note: it occurs to me that I haven’t done a proper movie review here for a bit.  For no valid reason whatsoever, I’m suddenly thinking about doing a marathon triple review of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), and The Human Centipede (Final Sequence).  Just get hammered drunk and sit through all three of those horrendous creations taking breaks only to pee or get a refill.  Just a thought for now, but if that changes, you’ll be the first to know.]

N.P.: “Man of Constant Sorrow” – Jonathan Young