SYNOPSIS
A genre-defying mixture of horror, sci-fi, myth, mystery and thrills told as four interlocking tales in one intelligent anthology. Ghosts, spirits, creatures, demons and more from the paranormal world collide with rational curiosity.
Popular Posts
About Me
Showing posts with label GORE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GORE. Show all posts
The Holy Kane Experiment ( 2017 )
SYNOPSIS
An obsessive psychologist attempts to reprogramme her subconscious mind, but when her actions become increasingly uncharacteristic she fears her experiment is dangerously out of control.
DELIVER US FROM EVIL ( 2014 )
SYNOPSIS
The film opens in a 2010 firefight in a palm grove in the Diyala Province of Iraq. Three Marines discover an underground cavern and start to scream as their helmet video feed goes black. In The Bronx in 2013, veteran NYPD officer Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana) stands over the corpse of an infant in a darkened alley. He and his partner Butler (Joel McHale) resume their nocturnal patrol for the 46th Precinct. A domestic disturbance call comes in over the radio. Sarchie probes the dispatcher for more information and finds out that the male at the address is a former Marine. He tells Butler that his "radar" is going off because maybe the former Marine still thinks he is fighting in the war.
At the site of the complaint, Sarchie and Butler encounter the shirtless and heavily tattooed former Marine Jimmy Tratner (Chris Coy), who insists his wife is okay. When his wife lifts her head, the officers see that she has been badly beaten. They notice deep scratch marks on the floor and are wary of a dog as they make the arrest. Jimmy resists them ferociously, eventually drawing a knife on Butler and fleeing the house on foot. Sarchie catches up to Jimmy and makes the arrest; although, not without suffering a sizable wound to his forearm that will require stitches. The officers notice that Jimmy's fingernails are cracked and bleeding, and they assume that he is mentally ill or high on drugs.
Sarchie and Butler are called to the Bronx Zoo after a woman has thrown her toddler into the moat surrounding the lion enclosure. They find the woman in a lemur pen. She is furiously scraping at the ground, and after they apprehend her, she rapidly recites the lyrics to "Break On Through (To the Other Side)". Sarchie notices a painter inside the lion enclosure. He enters the pen to interrogate the mysterious man, but he is attacked by the lions and barely escapes.
When the deranged woman, Jane Crenna, is transferred from the precinct to a mental health facility, a Jesuit priest named Mendoza (Édgar Ramírez) arrives at the family's request. He asks the officers several pointed questions about Jane's behavior at the zoo. When another domestic disturbance call comes in, Sarchie notices the complaint makes reference to doors and decides that he and Butler will respond. At the house, the family of three have been staying in the living room after a series of strange disturbances. There is one area of the house where light bulbs instantly burn out and candles will not remain lit.
The family explain that there were two painters working the basement, where most of the disturbances occurred. In the basement, Sarchie discovers the badly decomposing body of one of the painters, David Griggs. At Griggs' apartment, which is overrun by cockroaches and refuse, they find business cards for Alphonsus Painting company as well as a picture of Griggs with Jane Crenna and the child that she threw at the zoo. In another picture, Griggs is pictured in his Marine uniform with Jimmy Tratner and a third Marine named Santino (Sean Harris). They realize Santino must have been the painter at the zoo.
Mendoza visits Sarchie at the precinct and asks to view the surveillance tapes of Jane at the zoo. He believes that Jane is possessed by demons, and he explains that there is secondary evil created by humans and primary evil which comes from demons. Sarchie is skeptical, but when he reviews the surveillance footage with Butler, he hears strange noises and sees things that Butler does not. Sarchie returns to Jimmy Tratner's house and finds a wall that was being painted in Jimmy's home office. He scrapes away the paint to find a pictograph of an owl. At Sarchie's home, his daughter lies in bed as a stuffed owl stares ominously at her from a shelf in her bedroom. She is awakened by strange noises and frightened.
Back at Tratner's home, Sarchie has scraped off the paint from the rest of the wall to find a bizarre mix of Latin and ancient pictographs. Sarchie finds some hard drives with footage from Tratner's deployments and watches the full footage from the palm grove in Diyala. In the cave, the soldiers found a carving of the same message that is on the wall in Tratner's home. Sarchie revisits the basement where he found Griggs' body, scrapes off the paint from a wall, and finds the message again. He reviews the zoo surveillance footage and sees the same message was being painted over by Santino in the lion enclosure. With Mendoza, he visits Jane Crenna in the mental hospital and shows her the message from the cave. She savagely bites Sarchie's already wounded forearm.
Mendoza decodes the message as a kind of bridge between Christian and pagan theology which would theoretically allow demons a door to the human world. He explains that certain people are more susceptible to such messages than others. He suggests that the voices and images Sarchie is seeing could be a result of his intuitive "radar", which means that he is also susceptible to the archaic message. Mendoza and Sarchie gradually share more of their personal histories with each other. Mendoza goes with Sarchie and Butler to an apartment building where they are attacked by Santino and Jimmy Tratner. Tratner is subdued by Mendoza's cross. Santino overwhelms and eventually kills Butler.
At Sarchie's home, his daughter is once again awoken during the night. Her stuffed owl rolls off the shelf and advances towards her bed. As she runs screaming from the room, she sees Santino in the hallway. Sarchie arrives home to find Santino in his living room. Santino warns that he has abducted Sarchie's wife and daughter. Santino is brought to the precinct where Mendoza and Sarchie perform an exorcism on him. Sarchie's wife and daughter are located in an Alphonsus Painting van at a storage facility. The film ends with the baptism of the Sarchies' second child.
MARTYRS ( 2008 )
SYNOPSIS
A young girl, Lucie Jurin, escapes from a disused abattoir where she has been imprisoned and physically abused for a long time. The perpetrators and their motivations remain a mystery. Lucie is placed in an orphanage, where she is befriended by a young girl named Anna Assaoui. Anna discovers that Lucie believes that she is constantly being terrorized by a ghoulish creature; a disfigured emaciated woman.
Fifteen years later, Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) bursts into the home of an apparently normal family with a shotgun, the Belfonds—Gabrielle, her husband, and their children Antoine and Marie—and kills them all. Elsewhere, Anna (Morjana Alaoui) waits for Lucie. Although Anna knows that Lucie believes the Belfonds are the people responsible for her childhood abuse, she is horrified when Lucie tells her that she has killed them. She discovers that Gabrielle is still alive and tries to help her escape. Unfortunately, Lucie bludgeons Gabrielle to death. Lucie is again attacked by the scarred creature, but Anna only sees Lucie hurting herself; the 'creature' is nothing more than a psychological manifestation of Lucie's guilt for leaving behind another girl who was also tortured with her as a child. Lucie, realizing that her insanity will never leave her, commits suicide.[4]
The next day, Anna, still at the family's house, telephones her mother, from whom she has been estranged; their conversation implies that Anna suffered abuse from her parents as a child. Anna discovers a secret underground chamber. Imprisoned within is a horribly tortured young girl, Sarah, proving that Lucie was right about the family. Anna helps Sarah but a group of strangers arrive and shoot Sarah dead. Captured, Anna meets their leader, an elderly lady referred to as Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle explains that she belongs to a secret philosophical society seeking to discover the secrets of the afterlife through the creation of "martyrs". Their experiments inflict systematic acts of torture upon young women in the belief that their suffering will result in a transcendental insight into the world beyond this one.
As a result of her selfless actions of helping Lucie and Sarah, Anna becomes the group's latest subject. After a period of being beaten and degraded, Anna hallucinates a conversation with Lucie, and is later told she has progressed further than any other test subject, and has reached the "final stage." She is flayed alive and survives the procedure, entering a state that is "euphoric" and likened to achieving transcendence. Mademoiselle arrives eagerly and Anna whispers into her ear.
Members of the society gather at the house to learn of the insights Anna shared with Mademoiselle. As he waits, Mademoiselle's assistant asks her if what Anna said was clear. Mademoiselle says yes, then asks him if he could imagine what comes after death. When he says no, she tells him to "keep doubting" before shooting herself.
The film ends with a shot of Anna on the table, in a catatonic state.
ICHI THE KILLER ( 2001 ) JAPANESE MOVIE
SYNOPSIS
In a flashback, Ichi masturbates on an apartment balcony while watching a pimp assault a prostitute within.
Off-camera, sadistic crime underboss Anjo is brutally murdered. An expert cleaning crew run by Jijii (Shinya Tsukamoto) immediately removes any trace of Anjo's remains, and credits Ichi for the kill. Later, Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano), Anjo's sadomasochistic enforcer, and other crime lords visit the spotless apartment, concluding that Anjo fled town with the prostitute and ¥3 million of the gang's money.
Kakihara visits an underworld night club with other gang members. He tells Anjo's girlfriend, an English-speaking Chinese prostitute named Karen (Alien Sun) that Anjo must still be alive, though perhaps kidnapped by a rival gang. He also greets Jijii and the cleaning crew at another table, unaware they were in town, and asking them to contact him if they learn anything of Anjo's status.
Jijii feeds Kakihara rumors suggesting that Suzuki (Susumu Terajima), a member of the rival Funaki clan, has kidnapped Anjo. Kakihara captures Suzuki and tortures him with suspension and piercing, but when Suzuki turns out to be innocent, Kakihara slices off the end of his own tongue and offers it to Suzuki's boss (Jun Kunimura) as penance.
Kakihara and gang members raid a hotel room and capture Kano, a drug-addled member of the cleaning crew who has had facial plastic surgery since Kakihara last saw him, but admits his identity and past acquaintance with Kakihara when he believes he will be killed. He reveals that although he helped clean up the murder scene, it was Ichi who killed Anjo, and Kakihara has now been targeted.
Returning to the opening flashback, Ichi is stepping in from the balcony to kill the pimp brutalizing Sailor, a prostitute whom Ichi patronizes. Afterwards, he tells her that he will be the one beating her up now. When Sailor assaults him, Ichi reflexively kills her as well.
At Suzuki's prompting, Kakihara is kicked out of the syndicate, but the entire Anjo gang defects with him. Suzuki then promises Jijii a million yen to 'squash' Kakihara. Jijii, it is revealed, is secretly orchestrating events in order to pit yakuza clans against one another, with the help of Ichi. Though a normally unassuming and cowardly young man, Ichi becomes homicidal and sexually aroused when enraged. Jijii is able to manipulate Ichi's weak personality by implanting several false memories — a high school rape in particular — and uses the unstable Ichi as an assassin.
While bicycling in the evening, Ichi assaults one of three boys bullying a fourth named Takeshi. Takeshi is the son of Kaneko, one of Kakihara's henchmen. Jijii incites Ichi to enter an apartment containing several criminals of the old Anjo gang, and slaughter them all. Afterward Ichi sees Takeshi, who thanks him for the earlier protection. Kaneko finds a brothel-keeper assaulting Ichi in an alley and, remembering his own long-ago rescue by a member of the Anjo gang, helps Ichi out.
Kakihara enlists the help of corrupt twin police detectives, Jirô and Saburô (Suzuki Matsuo), to find Myu-Myu, a prostitute connected with Ryu Long, a member of Jijii's gang. When Jirô fails to get information from her through torture, Saburô sniffs her body to get Long's scent and tracks him down. Though Long outruns the brothers, Kakihara captures him and with the twins tortures him for leads to Jijii.
To turn Ichi into a complete killer, Jijii has Karen, Anjo's woman and Jijii's friend, seduce Ichi by pretending to be the woman in his false memory. When Ichi becomes confused by Karen's claims that she desired for him to rape her, he kills her. Jijii calls Kakihara to let him know Ichi is coming to kill him but is spotted by one of Kakihara's men, whom he then maims and kills.
Kaneko, Kakihara and Ichi chase each other to a rooftop. Due to Jijii's psychological manipulation, Ichi believes that Kaneko is his brother and confronts him. Kaneko shoots the side of Ichi's leg, causing Ichi to slit Kaneko's throat in front of Takeshi. Takeshi attacks Ichi as he lies on the roof begging for forgiveness. Kakihara realizes Ichi cannot hurt him and inserts skewers into his ears to drown out Ichi's cries. Suddenly he sees that Ichi has chopped off Takeshi's head. Ichi charges Kakihara, embedding one of his razor-bladed boots in the center of his head. Kakihara falls from the roof to his death. However, when Jijii finds him, Kakihara has no wound in his head; he hallucinated Ichi's attack as he jumped to his death while Ichi cried.
Years later, Jijii's corpse hangs from a tree in a park. A young man resembling an older Takeshi leaves the park with a group of schoolchildren.