I took a break. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a break took me. Sometimes you're just living that dad life at full throttle and zipping along from day to day on roughly 20 minutes of sleep every night until you zig when a zag would be more appropriate and BAM! Brick sandwiches. Sometimes, my brothers and sisters, you hit the wall.
We are going full Kool Aid Man. We are breaking through. I'm back to rolling this particular boulder right back up the hill.
THE SADNESS [2021] - SPOILERS!-
This movie came out with some heavy hype in weirdo-beardo online circles. It is, allegedly, the most depraved zombie movie ever made. This is only partially true. THE SADNESS is not a zombie movie as such. The plot concerns a cute young couple attempting to reunite while their city suffers under a recently mutated pandemic virus that nobody took seriously. This virus does a science thing where it links the pleasure center of your brain with the part that controls aggression. Thus, the infected become dangerously horny super-sadistic cannibal bastards who cannot stop themselves from torturing, mutiliating, and otherwise harming others. The infected are not brainless animated corpses; they are rabid perverts with more-or-less normal intelligence. However, "zombie movie" is an easier sell. So you can forgive the marketing team.
The creators of THE SADNESS owe a pretty clear debt to Garth "The Boys" Ennis and his comic "CROSSED," which basically does the same "what if the zombie hordes were smart, edgy degenerates who perform antisocial acts of violence well past the point of parody" thing. This is probably as close as we are ever going to get to a true filmed adaptation of CROSSED. If you decide to read CROSSED, take it from me and only read the parts that Ennis wrote. The rest of it is somehow both transgressive and dull.
Anyway, THE SADNESS absolutely lives up to the "depraved" part of the marketing. A lot of really fucked up stuff happens, and at times it goes so far over the top that the notion of "top" is subverted and we enter into a sort of gross Inception zone of extreme cinematic carnage. This shit is pretty wild. Luckily, it's also a compelling ride. So many gore movies spend the entire run time acting like a teenage boy trying to show you gross videos on his phone. "Wanna see something horrible? How about THIS? And THIS? And THIS?" THE SADNESS doesn't really do that. There's a nice little tidy story at its core, and it works a bit more like a good, tense chase movie before it's all said and done. I like the ending twist where it is revealed that the infected horny perverts retain their self awareness and know that what they are doing is wrong but they are slaves to their base desires and cannot stop themselves from doing the worst things they can imagine 24 hours a day (hence the title). So we get that nice "the real villain here is the human condition" thing, and it ties in nicely with how people handled/are handling the pandemic and we can walk away feeling like we just watched a thinking man's movie after all. I don't know if that's actually the case, but I guess I have been thinking about it a lot since I watched it. So there's that.
BEYOND THE DOOR III [1989]
Compared the the previous film, this one is downright wholesome. I mean, there are decapitations and immolation and such, but it's all in good fun.
BEYOND THE DOOR III has nothing to do with BEYOND THE DOOR. I'm not entirely sure that BEYOND THE DOOR II exists at all. We are breathing rarified air here. There is a girl. There is also a cult. The cult has a prophesy that must be fulfilled. Fulfulling the prophesy involves an implausible high school field trip to Eastern Europe; a posessed train that must be stopped by an Apollo-13 style control room of train experts whose dialog is not subittled; a handsome robed flautist; sinister little people in a swamp; sinister old people in a swamp; a sinister professor with a killer scarf, a "Passion Play; lots of bad jokes about virginity; and the world's most obvious birthmark. This is a singularly complicated prophesy, and it results in a delightfully insane little movie. I genuinely had no idea what to expect from one moment to the next. That is such a special feeling. I found myself asking "what is that train going to do now?" It's never exactly what you think! Trains shouldn't have this many movement options! Yet here we are, watching a devil train just do whatever the hell it wants in order to deliver a virgin to Satan's Serbian sex chamber. That's a pretty special viewing experience and should be shared with friends.
