It's a rare stop on our worldwide your of extreme cinema to my home country – I've yet to establish a strong feeling of a big UK extreme horror scene right now, but presumably it is out there and maybe it's something that's growing and we may come to see a bit more of. Admittedly today's piece is only a short one, and is more of a documentary than anything, but I was certainly interested to check it out nonetheless. It did also beg the question of why the title is in another language if it's an English movie, but let's not get too distracted by that. Today's offering for your delectation is Cibo Di Violenza.
 
The film itself concerns the use of dead baby foetuses being sold as a delicacy to sometimes suspecting and sometimes unsuspecting people, as well as them being used in some rather more common products that you may recognise (although I won't mention those brand names here). The opening is pretty confronting as we see some fairly graphic and bloody medical-style footage, before we slip into a narration by blogger Mike Lima. His is the voice we'll hear most throughout, and his work is pretty solid. There's a look at some of the famous cases of cannibalism in the world – including controversial Chinese artist Zhu Yu, whose man-eating antics proved to be a fake – as well as the rumours of restaurants purchasing foetuses to sell in their restaurants, before a glimpse into the world of aborted foetuses being imported into the UK for upwards of £3000 and a man apparently cooking one up to eat himself. ('Look, it's gone white like chicken.') We close with some talk of the flesh of the foetuses being used in far more mainstream products before we check out with the credits, which again include some pretty unpleasant and unremitting images.
 
It's a slightly hard one to rate really, as it is obviously exploring a subject that is pretty taboo and that most folks out there are going to find – if you'll excuse the turn of phrase – pretty unsavoury. It's described as a 'shockumentary', which to me as a term casts a touch of doubt on how much of this is genuine and how much of this might be made up, or if scenes have been shot that aren't the real thing. It's not badly put together, although some of the shots and choices of images are clearly there just to make it all more extreme and hard to watch. The narration over the top is decent, although how credible some of those reports really are is questionable – the use of footage from Infowars certainly isn't what I'd call dependable news. Some of the links between things are also a bit tenuous for me. If you watch it and believe everything that you see in this movie, then the odds are you will be pretty appalled, but I just found it hard not to take a pinch of salt with what was being said. Overall it's decent but just tries a little too hard to be confrontational rather than just giving the facts, which – if taken at face value – are shocking enough without the need for any embellishment or elaboration.
 
RATING: 5/10: Odd titling aside, Cibo Di Violenza is OK. The visuals are generally good – although they do obviously reach for shock value in places – and the narrative itself is interesting enough. It may all be true, it may not – I suppose it's out to you to watch for yourself and take out of it what you will. Personally some of the content felt a bit farfetched and as such lost a bit of its sinister tone. It's also extremely short – although officially running at 12 minutes, without the closing and opening credits you probably have eight at tops. A decent effort but nothing unmissable – 5/10 seems about fair.

This was another one of those movies I've been meaning to get to for a while that seems to have something of a cult following – I've certainly heard it talked of pretty fondly in a few places. However having endured 93 minutes of this one, I'm a little lost as to what it is people seem to have liked about it. Worst of all, I was only about ten minutes in before it was self-evident this was going to be absolutely awful. If I weren't reviewing it, I probably would have switched it off, but the lot of any reviewer is to plough regardless of their own enjoyment or critical opinion of the movie. So here is my take on Charlie's Farm.
 
You may have noticed I wasn't that keen on this one...
 
Charlie's Farm takes place in Australia and begins with a group of four 'characters' – I use the term loosely – deciding to go on a break somewhere. One of the guys is a fan of haunted houses, so they decide to go to the aforementioned Charlie's Farm to check it out – without telling the two girls they are taking, of course. When they get nearer they have to ask for directions, and the locals at the nearby watering hole don't like the talk of Charlie's Farm at all. But eventually they find it and decide to stay there a night or two, despite it being creepy as hell and there fundamentally being nothing to do there. Throw in the fact that apparently stacks of backpackers have gone missing there and the place has a deeply troubled history and anyone who has done Horror 101 will know there's trouble ahead.
 
And 'Horror 101' seems basically to be the way to describe this. Everything about this movie is basic and simplistic. The pace is horribly lumbering and slow – it is literally an hour before we even get our first proper glimpse of Charlie, whose backstory is clumsily foisted in through three flashbacks. And it's not sad or tragic – his mother and father were basically cannibals, so any sympathy is distinctly lacking, if that was ever the idea. Then again, shock value seems to mostly be the order of the day. And despite the fact the action doesn't begin for an hour, we don't get to know anything about our 'characters' at all – I'm hard pressed to tell you what they even did in the first two-thirds of the movie. I literally watched this movie a few hours ago and that first 60 minutes is already mostly vanished from my memory.
 
To be honest, it's hard to say that the last half an hour is really any better. Sure, it's more gruesome and violent, if that's your thing, but it's been done a lot better in many other places. It's impossible to care as the paper-thin characters are chopped up one by one by the hulking figure of Charlie, because it's hard to tell what they were even doing there in the first place. There's nobody likeable enough for each kill to have any impact on you. These four – six if you include the two later arrivals – are just meat for the grinder. I was at least expecting some imaginative kills or some impressive visuals, but even those were missing – the final murder is particular uninspiring from an FX point of view.
 
I can only figure this has a cult following as a 'bad movie', but there are good bad movies and there are bad bad movies. I'm not a huge lover of flat-out trash, but there are some B-movies I have a liking for, things like Teeth, Pervert and Basket Case. But those at least have some energy and some imagination to them. This is lazy, derivative, badly-acted and boring, every horror cliché rolled into one big ball and spat out without any effort to set itself apart.
 
RATING: 0/10. I don't like to come in hard on movies – in fact I want everything I watch for Film Gutter to be good, and in many cases they are. Sometimes they are genuinely excellent. But occasionally – just occasionally – they are terrible, and that's where Charlie's Farm falls. An over-familiar plotline, ham acting, characters I couldn't tell you the first thing about, a draggingly slow pace and a tedious and entirely expected ending all combine to make this one of the worst movies I've reviewed here. You should take the advice of the patrons of the local pub and avoid Charlie's Farm like the plague.

One of the great joys of doing Film Gutter is stumbling across absolutely random movies – it's one of the reasons I initially set up the series and has brought me to some great and good movies. Excess Flesh very much qualifies as one of those movies that I came to knowing literally nothing about. The premise sounded vaguely interesting though, and I've never been shy of just taking a punt on something, so I decided to head right on in for this one.

Excess Flesh is a dark psychological thriller centred on roommates Jennifer and Jill. Jennifer is a model who loves nothing more than partying and sleeping around, while Jill is a much more secluded character. She also has deep issues with food, barely eating and basically vomiting it up when she does. The relationship between them begins friendly but steadily goes downhill, with Jill being unemployed and spending much of her time criticising Jennifer's lifestyle, while Jennifer is in the habit of sleeping with men Jill has an interest in. The tension between them in the early stages is well played, and both of their underlying issues bubble away really nicely. In fact the performances from both actresses are very good indeed, and this early interaction between the two of them is powerful stuff. I was really hopeful for something good as the first half an hour or so played out.

However I do feel as though the whole thing starts to fall apart around the 45 minute mark, when Jill takes the extreme measure of kidnapping Jennifer and chaining her up in their bathroom. It simply feels too soon in the tale for that to happen, and the motivations for the act never feel entirely clear to me. What comes next is either pretty slow and tedious or simply doesn't make a huge deal of sense. Some of the more unintelligible scenes are a truly bizarre confrontation with the police, a very strange dream sequence that begins with a whole host of cameras and clapperboards clearly visible, and an ending that was extremely hard to wrap my head around. It's obviously trying to be somewhat meta and alternative, but I don't think it really sticks in this instance.

My first impression was that the last half/two-thirds of this movie was absolute nonsense, but the more I've thought about it the more I think it's actually all building up to a twist ending. I wouldn't like to stake my reputation on it, but even if that twist is there I don't think it improves the movie. In fact its one of the clumsiest and hackneyed twists I've ever seen, if my interpretation is correct, and if that take is right I somehow think that's even worse.
 
There are redeeming features with this movie, particularly in the shape of the two lead performances and some of the visual stylings – it gets a little over the top in places, but there are some beautiful shots in the film. However I just overall feel that all that is let down by the storyline and the random wanderings that go on in the second half of film – honestly that just makes it all the more frustrating when you have a very strong opening to build form. There's an overriding sense after it all that this movie is not quite as clever as it thinks it is, especially with its finale.

RATING: 3/10. The movie this reminded me of was Jimmy Weber's Eat, which I come to think of increasingly fondly over time. This one tackles similar areas of female friendships, pursuing a high-profile career and the psychological issues it can bring. But Excess Flesh's take on body dysmorphia feels a bit too on the nose, and generally the film tails off in the second half barring one or two scenes. I genuinely can't blame either of the lead actresses involved – in fact it obvious they're giving everything and worked hard on their respective roles – but I feel like the directing and especially the plotline are really holding this one back. There's also a sense it's trying a little too hard stylistically – in fact you could say numerous things feel done a bit to excess, so it's a less than stellar 3/10 from me.

Come on, how on earth can you resist a title like that?

If films like Maniac and Snuff have taught us anything over the years, it’s that a nice lurid moniker can be quite the draw. In fact, just weeks ago our look at Brutal proved that very point. And that’s certainly the case with this 2005 offering – it even closes with a practically irresistible exclamation mark. I do have a hazy memory of catching this on TV a long time ago – I can't even recall whether it was a Channel 5 job or the Horror Channel –  but the details were anything but clear in my mind for this revisit.

Anyway, having rewatched through Jonathan Yudis’s 2005 offering, lurid feels like exactly the word. Pervert! is the story of James, a washed-up youngster who arrives at his father Hezekiah’s house in the absolute middle of nowhere in the desert to stay for a while. He’s pretty surprised to find his dad now living with drop-dead gorgeous young blonde Cheryl – as it turns out he's paying for her company – and it’s not long before a romance begins to bloom between the James and Cheryl underneath Hezekiah’s nose. However there’s much more to the story than this alone, as it’s not long before Cheryl turns up dead, and a number of his father’s other 'lady visitors' follow suit. The suspicion falls on Hezekiah – especially when James finds his strange ‘art workshop’ and the meat puppets he is making at the bottom of the garden, not to mention the fact James begins to wonder if his dad was the one who killed his mother. The story really comes to a head when nurse Patty arrives to care for Hezekiah, but she turns out to be anything but what we had expected, and the truth of the deaths is revealed and a dark voodoo curse is finally unveiled.

Now, much of that probably sounds patently ridiculous, and to no small extent it is. But when you throw in the added element that this is a Russ Meyer homage, then suddenly things kick up to another level. And as a homage, this thing is gloriously, bizarrely pitch-perfect, loaded with all the elements that Meyer was known for – gratuitous nudity, absurd storylines, plenty of blood and guts – and hitting all the right notes with its parody. The final section – with James’s penis leaving his body and going on a murderous spree of its own – is flat-out absurd but equally absolutely hilarious. The one line that killed me was this the homicidal member was actually a female of the species, but then again I don't know what else I should have expected...

Make no mistakes, there’s nothing high art about this movie, but as a brainless way to while away 90 minutes it’s got plenty of merits. There are lots of laughs, the performances are suitably hammed up, the music is ideal for the theme, the look and feel of it captures much of its inspiration perfectly and it’s bound to raise a smile in any fan of the Meyer movies. It’s in bad taste, but then it would really lose something if it wasn’t.

No doubt there will be plenty who don’t get this one – it’s unapologetically silly, the nudity is overblown, some of the shots and segues feel really random and as I say the finale is patently absurd. But there is an overriding sense that everyone involved is having great fun with the material, and the parody is really delivered with an affection for the source material – as any good parody should be. It doesn’t feel sniping, or mealy-mouthed, or mocking as so many current parodies and spoofs do.

With all that said, this one decidedly was for me, and I had a blast watching it. As a bit of light relief from the usual bleakness of Film Gutter, it was fantastic entertainment.

RATING: 8/10. Comedy isn’t easy to do well, and I think parody is probably even harder to do well. I think that Pervert! shows the right amount of affection for the material that inspired it, whilst also poking fun at it in a knowing and exaggerated way. The performances are all on-point, and director Yudis captures the very spirit of Russ Meyer in what feels like a real personal pet project. It’s unlikely to live all that long in the memory – given that I forgot so much from the first viewing – but for a film to give you a chuckle put a smile on your face this is a good bet. A worthy 8/10 for a heartily fun time.

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