I’ve just recently had a three week holiday of film viewing and in amongst the long list of films I saw were three films that were really quite violent and gory...the films were Outpost, Zombieland and Doomsday. Please bare in mind that I also saw 2012, Avatar, Fog of War, Gates of Heaven, Burden of Dreams, Hearts of Darkness, Shackleton, Hancock, I Am Legend, The Omega Man, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Android and many, many more.
Now when I watch them (the gory violent movies) I get a feeling of “this is wrong” or something that I struggle greatly to put into words... which I don’t know...well actually I think that I do know...I THINK that it has something to do with how I’ve been raised.
There are people out there and my father is definitely one of them who have a very strong opinion of violence and gore in cinema...he does not like or approve of gangster films and zombie films….anything where somebody is beating up somebody else with a baseball bat is for him too much and I can certainly understand this….by that I mean that I have a uncomfortable-ness when I see scenes like that. But I think this is completely normal...OF COURSE your going to feel uncomfortable watching a scene like that...but does this mean that a scene like this should never be filmed?...Werner Herzog would say yes….and Stanley Kubrick felt he had gone too far with Clockwork Orange…he also however had the very unfortunate thing of copy cat cases on that film and that would be very upsetting and possibly would change his mind on the topic...but, all of this aside I’m not sure about it because he did have the towel beating sequence in Full Metal Jacket which is quite painful to watch.
What I will say is this. My father wont watch a film like Day of the Dead...and I feel this is unfortunate because it’s one with a really good social commentary...Romero was particularly intelligent on this picture.
I myself come from a background where I was given the computer game Resident Evil at a early age by a friend of my sisters….I remember being kind of shocked at how violent it was...but being completely sucked into the story line...you wanted to know what was going to happen next and the atmosphere was great. It was kinda one of these situations where I absolutely loved it but it also scared the crap of me at times...I completed the game though and loved how it gradually mixed sci-fi with horror. I later learned that Germany changed the colour of the blood to green...which I still to this day find very interesting.
I then ended up getting the fright experience somewhat elevated to extremes with the computer game “Silent Hill”...but that game was too much for me and my mother had to return the game...we had to decide which game was going to replace it and that ended up being Resident Evil 2 (a game that was a real joy to play at the time too)...for some reason where Silent Hill was too much Resident Evil 2 wasn’t...I cant quite explain that even. Its certainly given me a insight into how there are lots of different levels of intensity.
I’ve noticed in the last five years that I seem to be a huge fan of post apocalyptic stories and so naturally even when it comes to zombie films I’m still very curious to see what the filmmaker comes up with.
Zombieland was special because (if you can get past how very violent and gory it is) it touched on a lot of topics that were close to my heart...in some ways it was a bit like one of those much loved black comedies about dysfunctional people...I love those movies because I am dysfunctional myself so the narration in Zombieland is brilliant to me...not to mention very funny.
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