It's time for another dip into the world of short films this week, and a look at a movie from an underground horror icon in the shape of Devanny Pinn. I immediately recognised her name as one of the voices from Jimmy ScreamerClauz's psychedelic Where The Dead Go To Die, and our recently reviewed Nude Nuns With Big Guns, but she's featured in more than 50 other horror movies over the years. This short movie remains her only directing credit – with IMDB listing only a forthcoming untitled documentary in the works – and having watched this one that feels like a bit of a shame. Like many first movies, it's not perfect, but it certainly has a lot of interesting ideas and something to say. So let's find out just how CathARTic it really is...

The story itself follows photographer Nila James, who is renowned for her work in photographing the recently dead, somehow capturing the beauty in those dark moments. The work is certainly controversial, but she's also out there wanting to push things further. Alongside this thread of story we see a women tied up in a basement and being abused by her captor, as well as a man wandering around filming all those scenes. These two elements combine when Nila meets her old professor, and he says that he's going to be involved in a truly innovative and cutting-edge art project. Nila is fascinated by the opportunity, where she find herself introduced to the female victim and her captors that we've already seen...

While CathARTic only runs for 23 mins, it actually packs in quite a few ideas and takes a lingering look at the importance of art in all its forms exploring violence and perhaps courting controversy. As the purveyor of a weekly column on extreme horror, there are a number of conversations and concepts in here that certainly appeal to me. The effects don't always look great – including one scene that feels a bit out of place – but generally don't jolt too much, most of the acting is good and there's definition ambition and scope here. For a short film this one even has a decent surprise at the end, not exactly a twist but certainly not something I was expecting.

It's not one of those short films that makes me think there'd be a whole lot more to explore – in fact a significantly longer runtime might make some of the concepts feel a bit stretched here. It's small but remains nicely formed, and while obviously made on a budget I think it does a good job with it. Although Pinn certainly seems to have switched more focus to her acting since this one was made in 2011, I wouldn't at all mind a return to the director's chair for more shorts or maybe even something more substantial in the future. I'll keep an eye out for that unspecified documentary for sure...

RATING: 7.5/10. Art that considers the idea of art is often a challenging area, and can feel a bit too on the money in some cases. While one or two scenes here might feel a bit much in that regard, it generally does a good job of considering the role of darkness and violence in art in general and looking at how far artists can and should push things in that regard. All pretty relevant territory here at Film Gutter for sure, and not one that often gets explored in this sort of depth. CathARTic is certainly an interesting experiment as a short film, and I'm happy to award it a very creditable 7.5/10.

Oh no, it's that time again...

A couple of months ago we had the 'pleasure' of acquainting ourselves with the work of Nick Philips, a busy director throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s covering everything from sex films, action films, a range of slashers and more besides. Last time around we explored both parts of Criminally Insane, a pretty lousy slasher in the first place that doubled down on the insult by making a sequel that recycled about half of the material of the original, and I'm not exaggerating – 25 minutes of the 61 were taken from the first film.

And so we come to Doctor Bloodbath, or should that be Butcher Knife, one of those random double-titled movies that seemed to prevail in the 80s. Imagine watching a movie like this once and then discovering that you're accidentally watching it again without realising? Despite the fact this was made much later than Criminally Insane, it scarcely looks any better in terms of budget and production values – in fact I would argue the only slight visual upgrades were in a less disjointed editing style (which is welcome) and some blood that actually looked rather more like blood than I might have predicted.

(Butcher Knife is the title given in the opening credits here, although IMDB only refers to it as Doctor Bloodbath, so from here I'm just going to refer to it as Butcher Knife for the sake of ease.)

Butcher Knife is the tale of Dr Thorn, a lead consultant in an abortion clinic who – unfortunately for someone in his profession – consider the very act to be evil. And he uses the information he has on these women to make his way into their houses before killing them. That's a large portion of what the movie is about really, with the killings being pretty random and fairly unspectacular – the effects again look pretty ropey, with none of the slasher-style murders looking persuasive in the least. The second thread to the story is about Thorn's uneasy relationship with his wife, with the two of them spending little time together – in fact Mrs Thorn prefers to spend her time with a poet in his tiny apartment above a chip shop. Yes, the locations are fairly random – in fact I'm reasonably sure that the house that Thorn lives in is the self-same house from Criminally Insane 2. But of course it's not long before Mrs Thorn reveals that she is pregnant – not by her husband, of course, but by the very dodgy-accented poet she has been having an affair with. And she asks her husband to give her an abortion – not a wise move given what we know about him...

All the Nick Philips trademarks that we came to know are found here, including an awful lot of the same cast – the only person conspicuous by her absence is Priscilla Alden, Ethel Janwoski herself. In fact the cast is so similar it uses the same title card for them as both Criminally Insane movies – I'm not 100% sure that the first and third victim aren't the same actress with a different haircut either. The acting is wooden, the sound quality is poor, the plot is plodding and pedestrian and there's nothing to really scare, thrill or shock at all throughout. Worse than that, this apparently also reuses footage from another Philips film, Satan's Black Wedding – which I might just have to get around to at some point...

RATING: 1/10. I don't know why or how I had been expecting any improvement here – maybe it's because I felt like there was a hint of promise in Criminally Insane, and maybe that could be delivered on. Maybe time advancing and filming techniques coming on could deliver something better. Again, the central concept could work, but it's simply not done well enough to deliver on any of the potential promise in it. Everything here is badly done, and this one doesn't feel like it even has that splash of accidental humour to lighten it at all. Not the poorest of the three so far, but still a cutting 1/10 is the final score.

​If you want to see this disaster for yourself you'll have to go hunting for it a little, but hey maybe you'll like it more than me. After all, IMDB gives it 2/5 stars so apparently someone does."

Now there's a title, eh? On one of my regular browses of the forward schedule on Horror Channel UK this one certainly leapt out aplenty, and equally had the ring of the kind of movie worthy of the Film Gutter treatment. Admittedly it's been sat on the recordings list for a while, but we got to it in the end, eh? Made on a pretty slim $85,000 dollars, this one really screamed grindhouse, which is a genre that can throw up some good movies on a real shoestring. It can also be a subgenre that is pretty hit and miss – so would this particular slice of nunsploitation be heavenly or hellish?
 
Nude Nuns with Big Guns follows the story of Sister Sarah, a nun who finds herself kidnapped and forced into a life of drug abuse and prostitution after a horrible incident on a lonely road. When she does finally make her escape and get her act together, she only has one thing on her mind – vengeance, and she's more than happy to throw away old habits – in more ways than one – in order to get it. Her 'revenge list' includes the biker gang of the local crime lynchpin Chavo, as well as many of her brothers and sisters of the cloth implicit in her nightmarish ordeal.
 
The premise of this one sounds like it should be plenty entertaining, with lots of of opportunity to play with the idea or religion in what could have been a fun way, as well as having plenty of action to go along with it. Unfortunately this movie never really delivers on the promise of a cracking title, and you can't help but wonder whether the moniker for this one actually came before the plot, characterisation or anything else you would typically expect in a film. I can't claim to be a true grindhouse expert, or even a massive fan of the subgenre, but this one didn't match up to movies in the patch I had heartily enjoyed such as Hobo With a Shotgun and Pervert!. The storyline simply didn't feel organic, and all the way there were too many laboured attempts to add style and make an effort to leap out from the crowd. With the aforementioned movies the plots were nothing revelatory, but they were allowed to stand on their two feet and generally were done really well, as well as having a strong element of fun. Nude Nuns just feels far too slim, and tries too hard to make up for many of its shortcomings with vapid visual and sound touches that are, to quote The Bard, 'all sound and fury, signifying nothing'.
 
Who said you can't quote Shakespeare when exploring extreme horror? Ooh, must do Tromeo and Juliet at some point...
 
Anyway, this was a film that I was looking forward to that just seemed to fall flat for me. It has all the shape of a good piece of grindhouse, but not enough of the substance – and a few titillating lesbian scenes are simply not enough to fix that.
 
RATING: 2.5/10. A fun title is about the best thing going for this movie, as it's rather messy from the plot perspective, has very few memorable characters and tries to ladle on flashy touches that are just basically throwing glitter on things in a way that doesn't disguise just how bland it is underneath. There's just a sense of the whole thing reaching all the way, and in the end it's not that big, funny or clever. Unless you're an absolutely obsessive viewer of grindhouse – as in you simply have to see everything – then I would say you could safely sit this one out. With a total 2.5/10, it's worth 'nun' of your time...

Only last week I was saying it's pretty rare that Film Gutter actually makes a stop on home shores – whilst there seems to be a welter of extreme horror made around the world, and we've had the opportunity to review movies from locations as far spread as Georgia, Brazil, Argentina, Turkey and many more besides, only a handful of our reviews have come from within the UK. So to take a look at two British short films in a row is is a small chance to redress that balance – it's one I had heard of previously, and it certainly doesn't take a mindreader to tell you what the movie is about given the title, which is almost uncomfortably on point. But would this be worthwhile way to spend 11 minutes?

Ultimately I would have to say yes and no. The story itself is extremely slim (maybe not surprisingly) and follows an unnamed couple, beginning with a voiceover from our female lead saying that she asked her partner to take his skin off for her – which he did. We never see that particular act, but we do see plenty of her skinless partner and the initial joy that she feels being able to see him so much more clearly and sharply without that intervening layer of flesh. Initially there's a great thrill in that for her, but it's fair to say that the appeal wears off over time and over the course of this short film – all the cleaning up the patches of blood from around the house, the endless washing of the sheets and then the naturally uneasy and uncertain reactions from their friends. The male lead leaves his 'skin suit' hanging up in the wardrobe and looks at it longingly a number of times – things are starting to go wrong for him at work, again not surprisingly, as clients are put off by his unusual appearance. Our finale isn't much of a twist but is delivered pretty sharply, almost in moments before we cut to our credits.

It's an interesting enough idea, and I like the fact that it doesn't gloss over many of the practical elements of his life choice and equally goes a little into the stresses and strains it takes on both of their lives and the relationship between them. It was a little disappointing that we only heard of his flensing himself in the opening credits, and didn't really see anything of the event that leads into the story – it feels a lot like we've missed some key scenes. In fact, it's less the fact of him taking his flesh off but what leads to it – where does a relationship have to get to for someone to be willing to do something so extreme? It's a nice special effects showcase for sure, and looks good in that respect, but it doesn't really have much by way of a storyline. Fundamentally it's an interesting concept without any real interesting developments or surprises. Maybe with a longer runtime they could have done more with this one – a sort of grotesque Nekromantik-style dark romance might have bloomed out of this set-up. But as it is there's a sense of ultimately being pretty unsatisfied with something that might have been a very worthwhile experimental piece.

RATING: 5.5/10. Sometimes a short film feels complete or near-complete in its form, and other times it can feel like an extended trailer for something that may or may not happen in the future. Unfortunately this falls into the latter, with a sense of incompleteness and the chance for this to be much more, given the running time. There are some nice moments throughout, but not enough to really grab you and leave a lasting impression. As such, it's a fair 5.5/10 from me.