Last time around we started a look at the short movies of Marian Dora, one of the most controversial directors around and someone whose movies have been a feature here at Film Gutter – in fact the series kicked off years back with his movie Debris Documentar. This time around we'll e completing the set of short films from the World of Marian Dora boxset before kicking off with a series of reviews looking at the I Spit On Your Grave movies.

Anyway, here are the remainder of the short films on offer...


EROTIC FANTASY (7 mins)

We open with a soft shot of two burning candles, but that's the only concession to any kind of romance here. From there, a female victim is chained to the floor or what appears to be a church – or some sort of religious building – before being wrapped in plastic with selective holes cut in it. We then see our male captor cutting away at the corpse of (I think) a pig, which unsurprisingly is shown in unwavering detail. There's more than a hint of that infamous scene in Melancholie Der Engel here. The head of the pig is brought over – with burning matches in its eyes – as the woman has raw meat placed upon her, which I think is then eaten off her by a dog (the filming is a little dark and confusing, probably deliberately). Of course there's worse to come, as our male tormentor begins to slice at his captive. We cut away quite swiftly – dare I say mercifully? Very odd, pretty disturbing and I must add I genuinely hope I don't get to meet the kind of person who consider this to actually be erotic... It's captivating in its own way anyway, and Dora somehow manages again to find something compelling in the worst of horrors.
RATING: 7/10.
 
OPUS HOMINIS 2 (13 mins)
 
Sure, the music here might be glorious and neo-religious, but that's about as pleasant at this one gets – even that fades away to be replaced by something much more sinister as this short film wears on. This could almost be something that PETA would use in its campaigns, an unflinching look at animal butchery complete with all the hideous visuals and gutwrenching sound effects of animal suffering you would expect. It's obviously not one of those cases where the animals are being killed for the film – a la Cannibal Holocaust – just a look inside an abattoir that simply doesn't pull any punches. We see innards pulled out, bodies cut in half with cleavers, meat pulled away from bones... even as a dyed in the wool meat-eater, this one left me feeling distinctly queasy. Those ham sandwiches for lunch very nearly repeated on me over the course of this thirteen minutes. It has most of the trademark style of Dora, but doesn't really seem to be saying much ultimately – I don't even feel as though it's really an indictment of the meat industry, which could have been the obvious thing to take away. We close with a shot of a butcher selling the meat, with yet more uplifting music. It runs a bit long for me, even at a pretty meagre thirteen minutes. Not my favourite of the set. 
RATING: 4/10.
 
JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION (16 mins)

This short film is something very different to the remainder, beginning with a look at Jess Franco in a documentary style on some sort of tour – or perhaps even taking a break in between filming. It's very hard to find a lot of information on the short film online to back that up. The music is very different to anything before it also, being much more 70s in style and more 'filmic', taking in many different musical influences. There may even be some songs from Franco's movies. I would expect that someone with more of a love of Franco's movies would probably get a great deal more out of this neo-documentary piece. It's obviously very behind the scenes and candid, although I can't quite figure out what it is behind the scenes of personally. My best guess is that it's some sort of homage to 1970's Marquis De Sade's Philosophy in the Boudoir, also know as Eugenie... The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion. With all the above said, I don't feel so qualified in rating this one. Fans of Franco will no doubt get a lot more out of this one than I could, but as always it's well shot and framed and feels like a decent homage.
RATING: 5/10
 

So, having finally succumbed to the lure of the World of Marion Dora boxset, I wanted to check out some of the director's short films. Having in the last decade built a reputation as one of the most challenging, experimental and reclusive directors around – famous (or infamous) for transgressive movies such as Melancholie Der Engel and Cannibal – I was fascinated to see what his shorter work would bring compared to his feature films. It also interested me that of the whole bundle, there wasn't a single world of dialogue. So how would each of them fare? The below are effectively 'mini-reviews' of each short in the order the feature on Disc 3 of the boxset, and we'll be looking at the full set over the next couple of weeks.

CARIBBEAN SUNRISE (3 mins)

As you would expect from Dora, this one is beautifully shot, and starts with some lovely shots of a beach during the day and towards sunset. But of course, the beauty is married with horror, and as the camera veers slightly away from the beach itself, we find a dead, brutalised body open to the elements not far from the shore. The music and sound effects take a more sinister call along with it, although the sound of distant seagulls never leaves. We close with a final stunning short of the beach. Only about three minutes, so hard to rate, but it certainly has many of the facets of Dora that his fans has grown to love.
RATING: 6/10.

DIE TOTEN VON SAN ANGELO (6 mins)
 
This piece immediately looks a little older than the previous somehow, and was shot in Mexico City. The short film splices together shots of dead and decaying bodies in some kind of crypt or vault – presumable beneath the church that holds them – alongside some crisp shots of the church as as well as life in Mexico City itself. You could take numerous things out of it – the idea that religion has been dead for a long time, that the poor beggars of Mexico City are as good as corpses, that the city is somehow born out of death – but ultimately that is down to individual interpretation. Again this one runs barely six minutes and remains more of a concept piece than anything particular coherent.
RATING: 5/10.

CADAVERICON (12 mins)

Aside from sounding like the kind of convention no-one would want to go to, this short film begins with a disturbing soundscape over what would appear to be pretty everyday scenes of a man driving a car and a clock ticking. We then have our title card – with Jesus on a cross in silhouette – before we are transported to a funeral home and a body bag being unloaded from a van and brought in. I suppose the clue was in the title here... The background noise (I can't really dub it music) continues in a discordant vein as the elderly man's body is brought in and undressed. Watching this in the grainy, rough sort of quality we see here genuinely had me wondering if this was a real piece of footage I was watching or not. There doesn't seem to be any concession to camera angles or indeed consideration for the viewer here. The body is then smartly redressed ready for a funeral before the coffin is neatly constructed, the body placed within and then loaded back into the van. We follow the scene all the way to the funeral, where we see the body laid in the casket with organ music playing over it. It's interesting in a sense of seeing what happens prior to a funeral, and the way the sound plays throughout is pretty effective, but it's more of a visual spectacle than anything with a true story thread to latch on to. A watchable enough arty piece nonetheless.
RATING: 7/10.
 
DER PUPPERSCHANDER 2 (7 mins)
 
Well, this one eschews the beautiful and is straight into the bizarre, with a man with a doll in the process of drilling a hole into a slightly delicate area with a corkscrew. Then we have a ring at the doorbell and none other than Dora favourite Carsten Frank at the door. He doesn't seem in the least bothered our protagonist is only wearing a leather jacket and pants, oddly. Anyway, our unnamed protagonist soon overpowers Frank and has him on the floor, attempting to beat him into submission. Soon enough he has his shirt, trousers and underwear off and has him laid down flat on his stomach. He then proceeds to lay his strangely hollowed-out doll on top of his victims' back and masturbate – pretty graphically – into the face of the doll. Certainly no messing about with artistry or glorious landscapes here – this thing is downright depraved and flat out pornographic, and not in a way you would want. However it still has a sort of grim fascination to it that's hard to ignore.
RATING: 7/10.

We'll be back with more Marian Dora short movies next week!
 

As regular readers will know, I'm partial to a short film, as they offer something distinctly different from the longer form. There have been a lot of standouts over the years from very good directors, and Treevenge comes to us from directos Jason Eisener, most famous for acclaimed grindhouse feature Hobo With A Shotgun as well as segments of V/H/S 2 and The ABCs of Death. That's not a bad pedigree, although of course Treevenge predates those two. I also realised just a few minutes in that this one was a distinctively Christmassy movie, but I figured we get Christmas episodes on TV all throughout the year, so why not just crack on with this one anyway? If it helps maybe you could just read it again in December...


Anyway, inappropriateness of time of year aside, Treevenge begins with a distinctly psychopathic-looking range of loggers off to cut down Christmas trees, which they seem to get a little too much pleasure from. The trees can be heard in their own chattering language asking what is going on, crying out for help or desperately trying to hang on to their tree husbands and wives, but the humans obviously can't hear them. Honestly they sound a little like Ewoks, if my recollections of Return of the Jedi are right.

So from there we follow the journey of one particular Christmas tree, which is taken to a lot and sold, then placed inside of someone'e home and decorated, all the time crying about being lost and feeling mightily confused about it all. A lot of this is shot from the tree's POV, and you can't help but feel a degree of weird sympathy for the tree as it goes through what must be a very strange ordeal for it. We see a few other trees in their homes and the festive decoration that they go through, before we come to the epic finale that the title promised us. Because after all of the sadness and dislocation, these trees have had enough...
 
The closing scenes of the movie show us plenty of creative deaths and fun special effects, and again you can't help but feel to a certain extent that this wave of violent revenge is justified. I wouldn't exactly say that it had put me in the mood for Christmas – after all, it's far too early for all that yet – but I could certainly see this becoming a bit of festive viewing for years to come, alongside the many favourite Christmas horror movies out there already.

Ultimately Treevenge is anything but high art, but is certainly entertaining and achieves the goals it sets out to admirably. It's a fine FX showcase too, and obviously a part of what launched Eisener's career going forward. There's more to come from him according to IMDB – including a mysteriously listed 'Untitled Underwater Jason Eisener film' – which you can certainly count me in for. If you've not yet had a chance to check out his feature Hobo With a Shotgun that's very much worth a look too, especially if you're a fan of grindhouse.


RATING: 7.5/10. It's hard to go really overboard on this one, as there are no real high aims other than just to make something fun and a little ridiculous. However it does those things well, and despite the short runtime there are a few laughs in here as well as some great visuals on the way through. I think it will be revisiting this one in December, as it's sure to give me a chuckle the second time around too. A good, solid, funny piece of work as a short film, and worth a strong 7.5/10.  

While the weekly visits to Film Gutter have offered me the chance to look at plenty of new material, sometimes it's nice to revisit something I've seen before, but not had a watch of for a while. Teeth was a movie that I watched at least five years ago, but had some fond recollections of. There were a few scenes that had certainly stayed with me, although all the precise ins and outs (maybe a slightly unfortunate expression in the circumstances) eluded me. And with this one announcing itself before the opening credits as 'Dimension Extreme Films', it certainly sets itself up as something that remains fairly mainstream but does push the boundaries a bit.

Teeth follows the story of teenager Dawn, a youngster who is part of a group called 'The Promise' who take a vow of chastity until marriage. She's got numerous friends in the group, although she gets plenty of ridicule from others around the school for her decision. After one of her rousing presentations, she meets newcomer Toby, and it's here that the teenage hormones really start to get going. Jess also has a fairly uneasy home life, with her mother being very ill and her douchebag older stepbrother still living at home. In fact it later emerges that he's hanging around because he thinks that Jess will ultimately give way to his charms, which is mighty weird as a motivation, but there it is.

It's not long before the mutual attraction between Jess and Toby becomes too much, and soon enough the two of them are down at the town's make-out spot. But what starts out as young love takes a darker turn when Toby attempts to rape Jess, but little does he know she's got a secret that even she didn't know – a set of teeth where one rather shouldn't be, the vagina dentata that gives the movie its title. Jess tries to figure out what on earth is going on, looking up the subject online before eventually deciding to go and see a gynaecologist. That scene ends up equally badly, with the doctor losing his fingers during his examination. Jess then realises just the power she has at her... um... fingertips, and decides to take a sharp revenge on some of the terrible individuals around her, including her awful stepbrother.

Teeth is certainly an interesting offering, and does plenty to keep you watching as you go along. With that said, I feel as though it doesn't quite know exactly what it wants to be. Some scenes are fairly serious and dramatic, while others are flat out of a B-movie, with some absurd music stings and hammy acting from those around our lead. To be fair, Jess Weixler is really good in the lead role, and has the kind of wide-eyed innocence that the role demands, and delivers the dark character arc really well, including in the movie's very final moments. But personally it falls between two stalls a bit too much, despite some good moments, including a few genuinely funny scenes. There are also a few moments that do seem genuinely out of place, particularly towards the end, where the slightly half-cooked family drama plays out. In watching this one I was put in mind of Excision, although I don't think this was quite up to that level.

RATING: 7/10. There are a number of good things about Teeth, not least the lead performance, the clever use of the chastity group as a setup for the story and some of the more humourous moments. However these are spliced in the midst of an underdeveloped family plotline, and some of the performances around the very good Jess Weixler don't quite cut the mustard. Certain elements feel pretty rushed, and maybe it's just a topic that it was always going to be hard to make any kind of coherent film about. Despite generally being well received, even winning an award at the Sundance Film Festival, this one barely made its money back and vanished without much of a trace, which is a slight shame because it's a pretty decent offering. It's a snappy 7/10 for this one.