Gory Goodness

This one's coming a day early; tomorrow there will simply be no time...

So over the past couple of weeks I've indulged in the gorier side of the arts. First, a friend and I finished playing through God of War 3 for the Playstation 3. Having played through this entire massive-scale trilogy, I'm left with mixed feelings. Or maybe the effect has just somewhat worn off. I remember playing the first of the three games several years ago and being genuinely impressed. The formula was simple: kill...everything. Hidden beneath the story of a Spartan warrior essentially selling his soul to Ares, the god of war, it was little more than an old-school button-masher. But what made the gameplay so compelling was the utter brutality of it all. The way the action drifted in and out of slow-mo as you massacred entire armies was so oddly satisfying. It has been a long time since a videogame character had literally felt powerful. The fact that the game revolved around the concept of becoming powerful enough to kill a god didn't hurt either. Then came part two, which is easily my favorite of the trilogy. It offered more polished graphics, more variety of enemies and more gigantic boss battles. The game opened on an epic boss battle that seemed to go on for hours. Essentially, I finished the first game and thought "how can they possibly make the sequel any more epic?" And then they absolutely did in every way. Even the environments seemed to come to life in the second game in a way that wasn't quite present in the first. And of course, having learned to kill a god, why not take on the king? So the mission at hand was dispatching of Zeus.

This all leads us back to the final installment in the series. Visually, there is no comparison; this game gets all of the juice it can out of the PS3's processor and offers more enemies, constant boss battles and a finale that just seems to go on and on. The environments are constantly moving and changing and it is at moments mind-boggling how much is going on at once on the screen. (Likely today's newer gamers wouldn't even stop to notice, but when I was a kid, a fraction of these enemies would have slowed the frame-rate of an 8 or 16-bit game to a crawl.) And the violence...oh the violence! This game takes it to a new level. Every imaginable internal organ is ripped out of enemies at one point or another. There's even a sequence in which you're bashing in a boss's head by hammering on the Circle button as the camera gets so covered in splatter that you can't see anything. You're permitted to keep mashing that Circle button until you feel you've unleashed enough aggression, and then, when you're all done and ready, the game continues.

So then what's missing? Well, first off, though these have never been games lauded for inspired writing, I felt this game really had nowhere to go, story-wise, and thus held no surprises. The point is simply to kill everything and everyone, knowing that at the end you'll face Zeus and win. I mean, they basically tell you so in the intro. It's kind of an elaborate retread of the second game in the series. There's also the fact that after playing through the first two of these games, you're inevitably desensitized to it all. Somehow they managed to surpass my expectations in how they raised the bar with the second game, but this third one just felt like more of the same. Having said that, I enjoyed playing it and fans of the series will surely enjoy it, but I think it's made obvious, never more so than by the odd, overlong "introspective" sequence at the end, that the writers/designers have run out of fuel.

Moving along, the other thing I thought I would mention is that, after writing my list of favorite horror movies, I decided to revisit Lucio Fulci's "The Beyond". I hadn't seen it in years and sometimes nostalgia can be misleading, but in this case, I still maintain that it is one of the most creative Italian gore flicks I've had the pleasure to watch. The beauty of Fulci is that he doesn't like to overuse cuts. He understands that to make his audience reel (see what I did there?), he can't allow them to look away. As such, we are treated to a series of violent murder set-pieces, each seemingly attempting to outdo the other. Some of the choices are, however, slightly odd. The best example of this is when a blind character is murdered by her seeing eye dog. Anyone who is a Dario Argento fan already knows where I'm going with this. It seems all too familiar since we've seen it before in Argento's "Suspiria". Perhaps this was Fulci's homage to the master, but in either case, in a film so full of creative death sequences, why replicate something we've already seen, and to less effect? It's why "The Beyond" is most famous for its tarantula murder scene and not for the canine sequence.

"The Beyond" is, much like many of the Italian horror films of the 70s and early 80s, more focused on audio-visual atmosphere than plot, which is as simple as: woman inherits hotel which happens to be situated on one of the seven portals to hell; people die. The beauty of it all--if it can be called such a thing--is the mood, that oh-so-Italian synth soundtrack that blares out as a slow death plays out before our eyes. The characters never really fight back and there aren't really any chases...they are there to die in the most horrifying ways possible, no more, no less. It's also worth noting that if this film were remade, it would simply fail, and that's for one obvious reason: CGI. They would kill everyone off in astounding fashion, only it would all look like a cartoon. "The Beyond" shows off the true art of special effects back when they were a craft, not a form of animation. I won't ruin the various death sequences, but if you're a gorehound like me and haven't yet seen this, run....run fast and find it. Only make sure it's the unrated/uncut version that has now surfaced, since all previous versions were butchered and are missing the parts that make this film so worthwhile. And while you enjoy it, don't forget to pay attention to some of the truly beautiful cinematography, such as the long panoramic shot of the car on the highway (you'll know the one I mean). It's as if Fulci throws a few of those gorgeous shots in there to remind us that he doesn't have to spend his time in the trenches of death and dismemberment, he chooses to.