TOTAL FURY (2007) A Film Gutter Review by Alex Davis Dirs. Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell, 12 mins Anyone out there seen Turbo Kid? Or indeed Summer of 84? Maybe those films are not what you’d call vastly well-known, but each made a reasonable impact on the cult movie scene and are out there to stream without any great difficulty (Summer of 84 is on my personal watchlist on Shudder as we speak). The reason I ask is because this particular short film is one of the very first offerings from the team behind those movies, and indeed sees them all playing a role in front of the camera as well as behind. Total Fury perhaps didn’t make a huge impression, and didn’t go down as a classic horror short, but personally I thought this one was a lot of fun – and that is not a phrase too well-used around these parts. The story begins with an apparently romantic liaison between an unnamed man and woman, but this tone doesn’t last long at all our ‘boyfriend’ punches her in the face and knocks her unconscious. She wakes up tied to a chair and surrounded by a gang of masked men, holding various weapons and clearly out to hurt her. It’s all very stylised and overblown, and I don’t think even in this moment is meant to be taken terribly seriously. However, as our intrepid female protagonist looks for the strength to escape, she calls up a remarkable source of courage – the movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I suppose that’s the point where things get distinctly silly, including an (ahem) ‘cameo’ from Arnie himself, or at least it looks like him from the neck down. In the second half of the movie, she escapes her captors and takes them down one by one with the awesome power of 80s action movies behind her, with more blood and guts than you could possibly shake a stick at. While there’s enough of the claret here to keep most gorehounds satisfied, this one is more horror-comedy than it is flat-out horror, and it generally does a good job in that field. It made me smile more than laugh out loud, but it had plenty of energy and some great shots that capture the carnage in the finale. The practical effects are generally decent, and the whole thing just feels like everyone on board was having a blast – something I’ve often found translates to an entertaining viewer experience as well. It’s one of those movies that’s not liable to change your worldview on anything, or leave you with any long-lasting feelings of shock or disgust (often our speed at Film Gutter), it’s just something to enjoy and forget about before too long. The team behind this one would go on to make a number of further short films before moving onto the aforementioned features, and with titles like Ninja Eliminator 3: Guardian of the Dragon Medallion and Demonitron: The Sixth Dimension, further silliness seems sure to ensue in those. Based on my experience of Total Fury alone, I could be drawn into checking those out in the future, if I can find them of course… RATING: 7/10. I don’t want to go completely overboard on this one, but this one put a grin on my face a few times and was generally an entertaining enough bit of gory horror absurdity. There’s plenty of blood here, and some brutal and imaginative kills to boot, so if that sounds like your cup of tea then this one could be a perfectly fine way for you to spend a quarter of an hour. Mind you, it’d sure be interesting to know how a true Arnold Schwarzenegger fan would feel about this one… TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITE |
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