First movie round-up of the year. Let’s blast through it!
Valhalla Rising
When I rented this movie, it came with a warning from the clerk. She said that people had been complaining about the lack of dialogue. I thanked her for the warning, but assured her that I would go ahead and rent the movie anyway because I only care about Viking blood. Lots and lots of Viking blood. So, to put your mind at ease, there is a good amount of dialogue and there’s even more Viking blood. It’s definitely slow in parts, but it’s beautifully shot, and its story about a mute, one-eyed Viking slave fleeing his captors and making a journey through the fog to the Holy Land is pretty awesome. Highly recommended.
Here’s two things I know for sure about Filth Rations, the new EP from Trap Them: I’m glad it’s only four songs long and their calender-inspired song titles still confuse the hell out of me. First, I can actually digest the Salem, New Hampshire band’s latest vomit-inducing cacophony of extreme metal (their first on everyone’s favourite black imprint, Southern Lord) thanks to its limited running time. Sure, it still tastes like dog carcass, but that’s not too bad when you’re just taking a bite. It’s the perfect filth ration, if you will. Making it through either one of their previous full-lengths, Sleepwell Deconstructor or Seizures in Barren Praise, more often than not guaranteed a trip to the emergency room for a stomach pumping and an electric dance with a defibrillator. No one, no matter how many bolts they’re missing, can handle that kind of brutality for an entire album and live to tell about it. Second, let me introduce you to days Thirty-Eight, Thirty-Nine, Forty, and Seven (also known as “Carnage Incarnate,” Degenerate Binds,” Dead Fathers Wading in the Bodygrounds,” and “Digital Dogs With Analog Collars,” respectively), as Trap Them’s journal of grindcore terror counts ever onward, detailing a hellish misanthropy laid down by comic book enthusiasts with an evident score to settle. I don’t know what’s gonna happen when they reach the last day, but I sure as fuck know I don’t want to find out.
The fact that 2009′s The Collector comes from the same dudes responsible for writing the Saw franchise well past respectability and straight into this-is-just-getting-stupid-now territory (those being numbers IV, V, and VI) is a heavy burden to lay on a movie, and although the movie squirms and fights as best it can, it’s unfortunately unable to free itself from that constraint. A fitting description given that The Collector is, as you can imagine, all about captivity and torture. And booby traps. Yes, lots of booby traps. It doesn’t really make a lick of sense, mind you, and you have to suspend your disbelief from the fucking rafters like a bound and gagged body in order to shut it up from asking any sensible questions (and you’ll be wanting to ask a lot of them, believe me), but sometimes that doesn’t matter when some dude in a leather mask is terrorizing a helpless family for shits and giggles and hurting them in creatively sadistic and terribly painful ways.
Valhalla Rising
Trap Them
The fact that 2009′s The Collector comes from the same dudes responsible for writing the Saw franchise well past respectability and straight into this-is-just-getting-stupid-now territory (those being numbers IV, V, and VI) is a heavy burden to lay on a movie, and although the movie squirms and fights as best it can, it’s unfortunately unable to free itself from that constraint. A fitting description given that The Collector is, as you can imagine, all about captivity and torture. And booby traps. Yes, lots of booby traps. It doesn’t really make a lick of sense, mind you, and you have to suspend your disbelief from the fucking rafters like a bound and gagged body in order to shut it up from asking any sensible questions (and you’ll be wanting to ask a lot of them, believe me), but sometimes that doesn’t matter when some dude in a leather mask is terrorizing a helpless family for shits and giggles and hurting them in creatively sadistic and terribly painful ways.