Wednesday, October 5, 2011

"Aftermath"(1994)d/Nacho Cerdà

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Leaving the music for zeros here during an all-horror Wop-tober, tonight we look for some answers to the eternal question, "When I finally pass over into eternity, what are the chances that a particularly horny morgue attendant will put the blocks to my eviscerated cadaver one night on the slab and bring my organs home to feed his dog afterwards?" Okay, maybe you aren't all that concerned with such a question, but Nacho Cerdà, Spanish genre director extraordinaire, obviously took just such a scenario to heart back in 1994 when he churned out this gruelling thirty minute exercise in ultra-realistic splatter and necrophilia, resulting in a controversial work of beautifully twisted art that's still whispered about to this very day.Opting to avoid dialogue altogether and complimenting his camera movement with pulchritudinous strains of Mozart's Lacrimosa, Cerdà serves up some unforgettably disgusting visuals with a vein of humor blacker than a shrimp's waste-packed colon.Unapologetically gross and wrong on nearly every level there could possibly be, Aftermath, lovingly released with Nacho's other two shorts(1990's Awakening and 1998's Genesis) in a comprehensive dvd package by the sick fucks over at Unearthed Films, is not mainstream horror that you might screen with the family on movie night.Hell, it's not even a Buttgereit-esque fetishistic take on the unsettling subject matter herein.Be forewarned:This is some of the nastiest shit you'll ever regret subjecting yourself to, if a trendy, milquetoast horror-Mary you be.If you're deranged, degenerate, and deviant, then you'll probably find yourself rewinding the hurl-worthy parts over and over in delight.While friends and lovers mourn your...silly grave, I have other uses for you, darling...
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The brains of this outfit just found their way onto an autopsy scale.
After some gravelly Spanish voiceover and titles concerning death, the afterlife, tunnels, ghosts, Hell, and forgotten images(like my Detroit Lions undefeated and in first place, it's been a minute or two...), the sounds of a car accident jumpstart tonight's feature.The camera pans lovingly over the scene of a dead dog with entrails strewn and eyeballs a' poppin', followed by some establishing morgue imagery.An orderly in headphones gurneys a corpse through the halls to the morgue.Grieving loved ones are given a silver cross necklace as a parting memento.A male corpse with a bloody grill and nearly severed foot, hanging by a sinew, is stripped down to the nitty gritty.His dome is peeled back and skull is bonesawed while a second attendant(Pep Tosar) jabs a syringe into the eye of another male corpse that somewhat resembles Uncle Bob Martin during the Fangoria heyday.Señor Walkman peeks in to see the two men in the midst of their gruesome handiwork as the first corpse's skull is loudly cracked open with what looks like hedge trimmers and his brain is extricated.As the second attendant strips his cadaver down to the naked, he watches the first slit open his subject's torso with a scalpel and is visibly aroused by it(!).A disembodied heart is washed off in the sink and plopped into a plastic organ jar.While the second worker lets his bonesaw rip, the first haphazardly stuffs loose organs back into his corpse's chest cavity and squishily sews him back together, hosing down the bloodied body, zipping up the body bag, and throwing his report on top before wheeling it off.Meanwhile, number two is much more thorough and inclusive about his duties...
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A little knifeplay can add excitement to your sex life.Just sayin'.
Enter Marta Arnau Marti, a young woman recently killed in a car accident while wearing a hot pink miniskirt and bra(she must have been on her way to my place).The second attendant caresses her lifeless face as he flops her onto his autopsy table.Breathing heavily, he scans the halls to make sure everyone else has gone home for the evening before cutting her clothes off with large scissors(note:she could have trimmed the lawn a bit before her fateful final trip...just sayin'.).He weighs her brain on a digital scale before repeatedly running a large knife down the length of her frame.He gruntingly slams the blade into her deceased vagina(!!), splitting her torso open, as blood flows into the drain.He rubs his gloved fingers together to feel the texture of her fluids and organs on display in her open cavity between them as he slips one hand into his slacks for an impromptu tug o' the skin, as a climax brings him to his knees.Excitedly, he takes pictures of the gore-splattered remains with his 35 mm camera, before setting the timer and propping it up on a countertop, as he drops his drawers and sexually mounts the dead body on the slab with the aid of a few fingertips full of patroleum jelly(!!!).He grunts and groans as he pumps his sex into the unresponsive corpse, with the flash snapping away in the background.After giving the dead woman the best two and a half minutes of her afterlife, we hear the film rewinding inside his camera over his orgiastic sighs.Well into a nearby bottle of hooch, he stuffs a heart into a small baggie while tidying up the cumbersome organs that splatted on the floor while he was giving the cadaver the high hard one.A personalized body bag envelops the violated body as he washes off instruments in the sink.At his pad, he grinds the heart into scarlet mush in his blender and serves it up in a silver doggie bowl to his hungry rottweiler over some newspaper on the floor that ironically contains the obituary of one Marta Arnau Marti.
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"Just let me know if I'm hurting you, baby...via Ouija Board."
I'm not a big necrophila advocate, myself, maybe I've just slept with too many broads who may as well have been dead between the sheets the way it was.I dunno.This is clearly not one for the mainstream horror crowds, and it may just be too artistically handled for the back alley hardcore gorenography nuts out there.One cannot argue the mastery and flair that Cerdà wields in tackling such an awful subject and sculpting it into something palatable and rich in black humor.Plus it stars a guy named fucking Pep, ferchrissakes.You'll have to judge for yourselves if you're up to the task of seeing it all transpire for yourselves or not.On the scale, a perfectly nasty four wops for Ignacio.
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Home is where her heart was.In the doggie bowl, if you fancy specificity.
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2 comments:

DrunkethWizerd said...

Love the movie and yeah, love your review too. Good stuff, indeed.

beedubelhue said...

Thanks Drunketh!


-Wop

 
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