Tyra Banks will maim your face...

Tyra Banks is a monster. Yes, I watch America’s Next Top Model and the most recent episode has made me more afraid of Tyra than ever. And believe me, I was afraid before. I always knew bitch was crazy, but not this crazy.

Granted, she looks and talks like a psychopath. But what she’s done now is too much.

Tyra’s always taken too much pleasure in making over the show’s contestants. Whether it’s shaving their heads or stealing their eyebrows, she’s always tried to figure out just what will fuck with a poor girl the most and do it to her.

From her manic, megalomaniacal descriptions of these new “looks” to the girls, to her glassy, cow eyed glee upon their eventual unveilings, it’s obvious something is not quite right up in that forehead of hers.

But she took shit to the next level of horror this week, telling slightly gap-toothed 22 year old contestant Chelsey Hersey:

“We love your teeth, if you agree, we'd love to exaggerate that and take you a little bit more to Lauren Hutton.”

What she really meant was:

“I want to cut off some of your two front teeth to make your gap bigger. Partly because I am a sadistic psychopath, and partly because I want to see if you’ll actually let me do it.”

The most horrible part is Chelsey actually got the surgery, having her two front teeth filed/shaved/cut down by 0.25 millimeters to make the gap in her teeth wider! Why would anyone let something like that happen to them? How much would that hurt?

There’s a non embeddable video of this over on Jezebel too.You can watch it here.

This whole horrible, unsettling series of events has left me feeling so uncomfortable I can’t wait for Chelsey to get kicked off so I don’t have to think about her and her awful dental surgery ever again.

I can’t feel too bad for the girl, she agreed to do it. All I can do is look to Tyra and shudder. The fact that she feels justified in playing with a person like that, in using her perceived authority over those girls to manipulate one into such a horrid act of self-mutilation?  

That is some twisted psychological fuckery right there. Jigsaw of Saw fame would be proud, I’m sure. Obviously, Tyra has no concept of the consequences of her actions, no empathy for others and absolutely no moral conscience what so ever.

This suggests she is at least a sociopath, possibly even psychotic. Obviously she’d make a great horror movie villain.

 At least I can be content in the knowledge that she will die alone in her mansion, surrounded by the pictures of herself she plastered over every single surface.

And just to show you what Tyra is capable of and demonstrate rage, here's her flipping the fuck out at another contestant.

XOXO

D-bag

The Human Centipede...

There hasn’t been a concept that has really gotten under my skin more than the one put forward in The Human Centipede.

To be an unwilling participant in a bizarre medical experiment—drugged and cut open with the medical expertise that is supposed to be used to help you, but here leaves you horribly, gruesomely disfigured—there really isn’t anything worse I could think up.

And trust me, I’m glad my depravity has limits. I would be lying if I said Tom Six, this film’s writer and director, shared similar limits.

The Siamese triplet, a joining of three separate organisms via the gastric system, is an awful, awful idea. One apparently first conceived as Six would joke that criminals such as child molesters should have their mouths grafted to the ass of a fat trucker.

The idea comes full circle here as Dr. Heiter, world renowned separator of conjoined twins, conceives a new operation that brings together instead of cleaving apart: the human centipede, first sequence.

The film doesn’t waste much time jumping into this idea either, setting up Dr. Heiter and his victims pretty quickly as they move toward the inevitable surgery.

What does work here is Dr. Heiter himself. He is one of the most memorable villains I’ve seen in a long time. Physically frightening with a deep, booming German accent and obviously completely insane, he’s played rather very well by veteran actor Dieter Laser. Even if he is wearing Crocs for a lot of the movie.

From the moment he proclaims that he doesn’t like human beings, the audience as well as the frightened young girls he has sitting in his living room, know something bad is going to go down.

And surely it does.

This film is at its strongest when Dr. Heiter is involved. He seems to bring out the best in the film’s actors. Especially the two female leads, whose performances are pretty weak and almost laughable until the doctor takes them into his lair.

These poor girls do pull their weight when confronted with the awfulness of the situation they find themselves in, and they are at their best when they are screaming, crying and running away. There is a lot of crying, especially toward the end.

The film does boast a particularly good escape sequence towards the beginning though. I really found myself rooting for the girl and even when other people in the theatre got angry for taking what they took to be a foolish course of action, I admired her for her tenacity and selflessness.

The chase sequence ends with a proclamation so horrible on Dr. Heiter’s part regarding the positioning of the runner in the human centipede itself, I couldn’t help but laugh. Not because it was funny, but because I didn’t know what else to do.

On this note, the relationship between the two kidnapped American tourists does work well. There is a very effective recurring motif of holding hands that is so just so basic, so utterly human, that you really can’t help but feel for them.

The girl’s performances, though flawed toward the beginning, do humanize them and make you feel as though they are just two, normal people with the bad luck to be caught up in some sick, sick man’s psychotic fuckery. So for that, I can’t fault them.

The film employs language pretty well too. The head of the centipede, who enters the film toward the middle, can’t speak English and the girls don’t understand Japanese. The girls and the Japanese man don’t speak German either. It just takes the isolation they are all experiencing up a notch, whether it be because they can’t speak or because they can’t understand what is being spoken to them.

The centipede itself is very disgusting. I won’t go into all that much for one because I don’t want to think about it and also because that’s what is going to bring most of you into the theatre. I will say the effect works and you won’t be disappointed.

All in all, I would never see this movie again. It just isn’t any fun. And though there is one point of cathartic release toward the end, it just isn’t enough. It is well made and shot very nicely. There is some very eerie imagery as well as utterly unsettling subject matter but nothing groundbreaking or worth a second viewing.

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. It wasn’t as awful, as life scarring, as I had built itself up in my head to be, so for that I was grateful. And it is a film that I’m sure will live on in infamy for some time, so see it you have the chance and desire.

I argued with myself whether or not to say this, but yes, it is worth seeing. Once.

For being so disgusting and unpleasant, I give this film 1.5/5 sutured, surgically attached stuck thumbs.

XOXO

D-Bag

Saw 3D...

As much as I don't want to write about this trailer I will. Partly because Saw is the most commercially successful horror franchise of all time, partly because two of the series (Parts II and IV) are actually good, and partly because I've seen all of them.



You all know how I feel about 3D. Saw trailers usually suck too, but this one is kind of fun. Super cheesy, but fun. The traps from what I can tell seem to really capitalize on the medium and should I see this in a 3D theatre, it will be the first true 3D (ie. one filmed with 3D cameras and not post converted) film I'll have ever seen.

Anyhow, most horror enthusiasts I know are somewhat ambivalent about the Saw series. For me, the original is so bogged down in awful acting that I can't even watch it. The second is by far the strongest outing and has the best twist(s). Saw III was pretty bad, Saw IV redeemed the franchise, but the rest have all really, really sucked.

You have to hand it to a franchise that has managed to continue on after killing off not only it's main villain but everyone even tacitly related to the original story. The only surviving link is Jigsaw's ex-wife Jill and she's pretty boring. I for one don't care what was in her box or whether she's involved in his "work" or not.

But the franchise is unarguably prolific and it will be remembered not only for its grotesqueness and its twist endings, but also for ushering in the whole torture porn wave of films of the last decade. This installment is being billed as the last film of the franchise, so I will see it. I've seen all of them in theatres even, so I should go. I doubt this will actually be the last film, but I guess I'll let them pry more money out of my pocket.

What I do like about this trailer is the fact that finally one of the traps is going on in public. I think this is a great idea that could (but probably won't) lend some emotional weight to the scene. Seems to me that trap is a kind of see sawing circular saw (say that five times fast) which looks interesting, though I could be wrong.

Also, we are promised some kind of resolution to Jigsaw's plan. But the story itself is so convoluted I doubt anything meaningful will go on. Jigsaw is so far removed now that I doubt they could bring any meaningful resolution to his storyline and make a decent denouement to all that's gone on.

WTF moment of the trailer... Dr. Gordon is alive? I guess they figure bringing him back from the original film is somewhat fitting for this one. Carey Elwes is a horrendous actor though, so I kind of wish his character had died after sawing off his leg in the first film.

It does seem Jill is being set up to be killed by some whacked out cart thing, which might resolve some loose ends. I don't have high hopes though.

Side note, I'm excited to see which Scream Queen 2 girl got the part! Another reason to watch I guess. Also, if you noticed in the trailer, Chester Bennington of Linkin Park fame is in the car crushing parts. Weird.

File this in the "I know I shouldn't but will anyway" drawer.

XOXO

D-Bag

Inception cat...

"I CAN HAZ UR SOUL?"

Very Alfred Hitchock. We like. On this topic, and because it's late and I am overtired. Here are more horror related lolcats. Obviously, my lack of sleep makes me easily amused.

XOXO


D-Bag

Bedbugs...

If you haven't heard/been bitten already, bedbugs are making a dramatic resurgence across North America.

Just like so many other horror fixtures, these things want to feed on us and drink our blood. Apparently, they've been reclaiming their turf since the mid 1990s but people are really starting to talk about it now. There was even a scare that one of the venues for the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival, which boasts the premier of genre films Black Swan and Let Me In as well as the ever popular Midnight Madness, was infested with these blood suckers.

To capitalize on all this, Contrafilms has rejuvenated an older project called Bedbugs that features a small town infested with killer bugs that burrow inside people, leading to gruesomeness and death I'm sure. Leave it to the horror studios to sink to the cheapest common denominator, lol.

XOXO

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