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Brian Hirschbine
The man behind Abortion Bin productions who makes pocket-change underground horror films. He often splices together high concepts, twisted characters, a speck of strangeness or surrealism, and a dose of splatter, in home-made, horror-movie packages. This is not your typical underground horror and splatter that only goes for gore and exploitation, attempting extra layers of story, inner character work, hallucinative elements, and odd fantasy. Unfortunately, the results are too often amateurishly tedious rather than interesting. Reviewed until 2016. A neurotic, emotionally and sexually-frustrated virgin girl slowly deteriorates into a full-blown psychopath stage-by-stage with the help of her gay lifelong male friend who gives her bad advice involving reducing male sexual partners to body parts. I guess he forgot to mention that this was 'figuratively speaking'. Despite their constant arguments and lack of sensitivity and understanding, they are desperately dependent on each other. She retreats into fantasy lands involving snowy forests and a ram's-skull-wearing creature who becomes her sexual partner, while her mind and body react violently and gruesomely to her inner confusions, taking it out on her sexual partners. The characterizations are surprisingly good and based on reality, and her acting isn't bad, so the movie gets a few points for this. But it is still a tedious, long watch and pushes a sick necrophiliac angle too far. Perhaps some editing? Cronenberg-inspired splatter body-horror complete with the idea of merging humans with tape machines and tapes. For most of the movie you will be confused, as events seem to progress without rhyme and reason with confusing motivations and reactions as well as random inserted scenes of Guinea Pig-esque splatter. But don't worry, all be explained in the end. There's a detective, his mysterious boss, a gruesome murder, some co-workers, and repetitive infections of a virus as injected by a strange mutated man. The detective repetitively finding himself infected and mutating in a gooey splattery mess, his body developing and growing wires, tubes, chips, huge boils, infections, tape spools, intestines, and various other growths. Tapes play a big role in the mystery and the boss and his henchman make several references to these. During a mutation episode or when triggered by sound, there are scenes of a man slowly torturing and taking apart a woman. The technology and costumes here are a strange mix of time periods. A better low-budget horror film from Hirschbine, albeit a very extreme one, as long as you see it through the confusion until the end. Torturous introspective-gore-horror movie about a depressed madman in search of God and whether he exists, existed or will exist. A third of the movie consists of him spouting incoherent pretentious pseudo-philosophy to the camera with infinite negative points on the conviction and acting scales. I mean, if you are sharing your new-found existential thoughts, why do they sound like you are reciting a boring essay? The rest of the movie consists of either meditational scenes of him doing nothing at all, or carving up his many victims in gruesome ways in order to prove some point about God or to put together his Frankenstein-esque god-creature with various body parts, skin, and blended genitals. The worst part is that this goes on for two full hours. A man wakes up one morning covered in blood with his brain missing and a Dear John letter in his ear. He now has to deal with life without a brain but reality isn't what it used to be. He sees increasingly bizarre hallucinations like people in bunny costumes, gory body parts and murders, naked woman painted black that make strange noises, and dead people, one of which he has sex with. He has discussions with his friend about his madness and reality, and yearns for the return of his brain. Unfortunately this makes the movie sound a lot better than it really is. The scenes go on for way too long, the humor falls flat, the strangeness isn't done very well and the movie doesn't do anything interesting with the concept. |
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