"Baskin" (2015) d/ Can Evrenol

Remember when the Republic of Turkey was renowned for cinematic excellence the world over, and film fans could hardly wait to see what spectacle the Turkish lens fell upon next? Yeah, me neither. I do however recall the nation that brought us such unforgettably rotten gems as Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam aka/ Turkish Star Wars (1982),  Seytan aka/ Turkish Exorcist (1974), and Badi aka/ Turkish E.T. (1983). Naturally when the internet buzzed concerning director Can Evrenol's Baskin I was mildly skeptical, to say the least. Still, I approached tonight's review with open eyes and a similarly receptive mind. Read on, woprophiles, for my synopsis and verdict, if you dare...


Carnivorous since birth, I confess that I wouldn't mind taking a healthy bite out of this after some extensive flame broiling.
A group of Turkish cops bet on football and discuss the finer points of zoophilia and chick-with-dick-tricks at an out-of-the-way restaurant (translation: plywood Akcaabat meatball shack) where they bully paying customers for laughing at their outrageous stories, ending in one cop left screaming in a reflexive mirror wig out, when they're called to another even more out-of-the-way location as back up to another squad. Who's driving? The officer who's just experienced the breakdown, of course. The fellows belt out a Turkish pop song with the radio before naked men run across the road, and the ride is ultimately cut short when the vehicle barrels into someone standing in the middle of the asphalt in the darkness.There's a lot of frogs, too, for a reason unbeknownst to your humble narrator. On foot, they encounter some creepy gypos in a camp (One particularly acromegalous one is a frog hunting giant) before arriving at the abandoned police station that is the source of their call, another squad vehicle parked outside with the engine running and lights flashing. Not a good sign, as Nancy Loomis used to say...


Hugh Jackman, eat your heart out, buddy.
Upon entering the building, they find a fellow officer slamming his dome piece repeatedly into a wall, mostly covered in ominous Satanic-looking graffiti and decorated with weird stuff hanging from strings, a la Blair Witch. Naturally, they've stumbled onto a black mass of sorts, with throngs of folks wrapped in clear plastic, cheap animal masks, and whatnot. The cops are overpowered before too long, and end up bound to the ceiling, and awaiting judgment in H-E-double hockey sticks, which is overseen by the Turkish equivalent of a member of Slipknot, and ultimately, a little rubber-faced creep with long nails, known as Baba or "The Father"(Mehmet Cerrahoglu), a cruel and unusual cat who grooves on disemboweling motherfuckers with his fingernails, poking dude's eyes out with a knife to strains of Riz Ortolani's Cannibal Holocaust soundtrack, and simply sawing open fella's throats and rubbing the free-spilling blood all over his chrome dome. One cop is forced to knock at the back door of a chunky woman in an animal mask and plastic sheet ensemble, on all fours. In the end, the easy way out is chosen to wrap up the clumsy, hole-ridden narrative, and you'll see it coming.


In Hell, there's sex at it's unsexiest.
On a positive note, some of the cinematography is effective, and the torture porn-level gore is passable if slightly pedestrian, but neither aspect really compensates for the lack of story or budgetary confinements that the film is anchored by. Another deficiency I feel I have to mention, is the lack of sympathetic characters here, as all protagonist parties involved in the cinematic Hellride I neither rooted for nor against throughout the running time. The same goes for the Hellions.  In fact, I kind of dozed off halfway through on my first attempt to watch, being forced to cue it up a second time, on Netflix, which I applaud for listing such an unusual title so that I never have to waste money on a hard copy in the future. My shelving space is precious, and there's little chance that tonight's film ever occupies it. One Wop.


"All of teh preserves is belongs to me, plix!"

"Martyrs" (2008) d/ Pascal Laugier

Sheesh. Martyrs, thanks directly to New French Extreme director Pascal Laugier,  will now forever be remembered as a French term for "women suffering GREATLY". The last time women suffered this much had to be that sexual stuntman stint I pulled in the late eighties when I hooked up a hammock in the Imperial bedchamber. But seriously, folks, there's more than enough hardcore violence against women on tap here in Pascal's 2008 effort. It's the realistic type, not the triggered third wave Tumblr feminist kind that emerges from issues like "manspreading","mansplaining, "eye-raping", or any other such nonsense that a white privileged, misogynistic, toxically masculine, cis-gendered, racist shitlord such as I find mostly hilarious. To Laugier's credit (?), he's crafted one mean sunuvabitchuva movie, unflinchingly serving up the kind of excruciating, realistic gore that'd have Bob Martin crying "Uncle!" and Chas Balun blowing chunks.


"I've left the roast in the oven, scatterbrain that I am!"
We first see young Lucie as she makes a hasty escape from years of imprisonment, abuse, and torture, landing herself in an orphanage where she befriends a girl named Anna, who discovers that her new friend is under near constant psychological siege by memories of a malnourished, disfigured woman she was unable to save when she broke loose from her captors. Fifteen years pass, and we see a grown Lucie (Mylene Jampanoi) as she wipes out an entire family with double barreled shotgun death, while Anna (Morjana Alaoui) waits elsewhere, under the impression that her psychologically effed friend only intends to keep an eye on the couple she believes to be responsible for her awful ordeal all those years ago, except that she walks in on a pulpy crime scene where Luce has to bludgeon the mother to death before her very eyes after her first homicidal swing n' miss. To compound matters, Anna isn't even sure if her pal snuffed the right folks, and she's noticed that when "the one that didn't get away" makes the scene and beats on Lucie, she's naturally doing it to herself, like a mentally balanced dame oughta. Anna tries exorcising Lucie's inner demons, but to no avail, as her friend ungracefully bows out with a self-inflicted fatal throat wound.


Y'alls chicks and yo' kuh-raaaazy hurr-weaves...
The next day, after some rummaging around, Anna discovers a secret passageway under the family's house that leads to another tortured soul named Sarah, whose scars reflect lengthy bouts with the metal contraptions of torture she's long been hooked up to. Anna tries to rescue her, of course, but a carload of bad eggs rolls up and dispatches her with a gunshot in the nick of bad timing. Mademoiselle leads the sadistic pack, which she reveals to be a mystery-shrouded philosophical cult out to learn about the afterlife through the abduction, torture, and suffering of women, who would transcend the pain and suffering to offer a martyr's insight into the group's studies. They own the crimes committed against Lucie as a child, admitting that no woman yet has advanced past the victim stage, though Anna qualifies as their upcoming test subject, since she selflessly stood by her friends in their hour of need. At this point, the average horror movie would start rolling credits, some of the audience would snicker nervously as they exited, content with the belief that they could imagine what she was in for next, but there's nothing average about this one, and nothing much left to anyone's imagination, for that matter.


"What'll it be? Meat tenderizer to your ass or nutcracker on your nipples?" queries Mademoiselle (Catherine Begin).
Sorry about the prolonged delay 'twixt entries, kids, I've been busier than Alan Ormsby's Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972) wardrobe over here (not just hot chicks and hallucinogens, either, I'm still putting finishing touches on my other web endeavors on the horizon). Of course, earlier this year in the category of "news we didn't need to hear", it was announced that an unnecessary American remake of tonight's French New Wave Horror hit that had somehow been on the backburners since 2008, had already been filmed. As worthless as most horror remakes and sequels are, I've noticed a trend within myself to endure one every once in awhile, when possible, if only for the unintentional laughs and opportunity to snark the entire project to death as it rolls. So I can't say I'd never sit through a remake of tonight's review, I'm up for anything, at this point. If you like 'em heavy, this one's for you. Four wops.


I know it seems pretty bad right now, but at least you'll never have to worry about hearing Dave Matthews ever again.

"I Saw the Devil"(2010)d/Kim Ji-woon

I went headlong into tonight's review blind, having avoided most of the hub-bub about this South Korean exercise in 'torture porn' and screened it relatively free of outside influence, but with hopes high, as always.As far as the recent genre trend goes, I'm not the most hardcore fan here in my late summer years, but I'm not publicly campaigning against it like Troma's Lloyd Kaufman either.I love ultra-realistic gore effects and sadistic serial killers as much as the next cat, I'm just starting to mellow out a little now that my goatee is peppered with stray greys, I dunno.It's not like I'm ever gonna queue up at the theater for girlfriend-sating flotsam like Something Borrowed(2011)(unless she asks really, really nicely, that is.), I just require more substance than seeing some innocent teenage waif getting her titties blowtorched off in a dirty cellar for ninety minutes(apart from when my "rare moods" grab me, of course).That said, Kim Ji-woon's effort hardly qualifies as such, anyway.Despite all its splattery fishhookin', head choppin', neck shankin', achilles gougin' splendor, Devil is actually an original, beautifully shot, well-acted film with a compelling story.Hell, it's not even all that misogynistic, with most of the wince-worthy violence in front of the lens actually befalling men for a change; a torture porn that gals gone gonzo for gore can get behind.My only real complaint is the arduous 144 minute running time, which could have and should have been chopped by about twenty, for serious.I'm just relieved I caught it on disc and not in the theater, where my multiple smoke breaks woulda surely pissed whoever I was with well off.Let's make it...

col·lect·i·ble: n. (k-lkt-bl)things considered to be worth collecting (not necessarily valuable or antique)
Joo-yeon(Oh San-ha), pregnant daughter of a retired police chief and fiance to a top tier secret agent named Soo-hyun(Lee Byung-hun), is mercilessly abducted, abused, and posthumously parted out by a sadistic sociopath named Kyung-chul(Choi Min-sik),a serial rapist/murderer whose trail of bodies has the constabulary baffled.After a chunky kid finds her disembodied ear in a shopping bag near the river, a massive search party uncovers her severed head lodged in the rocks.Amidst a swarm of police and press, a forensics agent stumbles through with the disembodied dome in a cardboard box, dropping it and letting the macabre evidence roll past the bilious onlookers.After much mourning and tear-shedding, Soo-hyun vows to bring the barbarous bastard responsible for the crime to justice in his own special way, using his bereavement leave from work to hunt him down from a handful of possible suspects.He beats on a perverted netporn addict with a powerstrip cord after busting in on him wagging his wand to a clip of censorship-fogged fucking on his computer.Relax guys, that won't happen to you.One by one, he brutalizes the suspected perps until he's faced with the last, Kyung-chul, who's just snared his latest young victim by promising her a ride in the blustery night, and braining her with a length of pipe instead.We then watch Kyung apply some aftershave and strum an acoustic guitar.Hey, maybe he's not such a bad guy afterall.Soo investigates Kyung's pad, discovers his secret torture chamber, and finds Joo's blood-crusted ring in a drain on the floor.Meanwhile, Kyung is about to ravage a bound n' gagged schoolgirl in an earthen ditch in a greenhouse floor.Okay, maybe I was wrong earlier.Soo makes the scene and performs rapeus interruptus, bashing the living fuck out of Kyung and breaking his wrist before sinking a special tracking pill down his unconscious gullet.Kyung groggily comes to, alone with an envelope full of money on his chest.

"Yeahhhh, that's it, you hot little slut!Take it all... right in your censorship fogging..."
After viciously shanking up a pair of guys foolhardy enough to give him a lift(that happen to have a dead body of their own in the boot), Kyung gets his arm set at a medical center, unaware that Soo is now tracking him and tuned in to every word he says via headphones.The agent foils his attempts at adding an innocent young receptionist to his list of victims mid-blowjob, again beating the snot out of the killer, and this time, gouging his achilles tendon with a scalpel.He comes to in the back seat of his plundered cab, his leg wrapped in a cast.Soo follows him to the abode of a comrade-in-carnage named Tae-joo(Choi Moo-sung) who's half-mad from eating the human meat of his victims(!), where he bursts in as the cannibal is about to prep another whimpering meal-in-a-nightie and beats Kyung, Tae, and his psychotic girlfriend unconscious after a blood-soaked cat n' mouse throughout the house.At the hospital where the battered killers have been taken, Soo mistakenly mentions the tracking pill to a fellow agent within earshot of Kyung, who heists a handful of laxatives from a chemist and abruptly shits out the bug and plants it in another lavatory patron he's just walloped unconscious.Off the trail, Soo returns to the hospital and grills Tae about his friend's whereabouts, and when Tae reminds the agent that Kyung most likely raped his dead fiance before killing her, Soo fish hooks him right then and there(!!) for laughing about it.Kyung notifies the authorities that he'll be turning himself in that day,(but not before exacting some vengeance of his own against Joo's father and sister) leaving Soo in a mad dash to get to the killer before he can hurt any more of his loved ones and before he can safely deposit himself in the hands of the police.The wild final reel, not without its own cringe-worthy moments, I'll leave you to experience for yourselves.

Soo-hyun(Lee Byung-hun) is tendin' to Kyung-chul's achilles.Ba-dum-bump.I'm here all week, folks.
I'm a little embarrassed to say I haven't caught any of Kim's other work yet; from 1998's The Quiet Family, his segment of Three Extremes II(2002), A Tale of Two Sisters(2003), and The Good, the Bad, and the Weird(2008), I fully intend to right that wrong ASAP.Kim's obviously got a firm grasp on the art of filmmaking, and apparently transitions from genre to genre with relative ease.Apart from a mountain of roles in Korea, Lee Byung-hun can be seen in Hero(2007) and 2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.Choi Min-sik has worked for Kim as well as scoring roles in Oldboy(2003) and 2005's Lady Vengeance.If you prep yourself for the lengthiness, you should be pleasantly surprised by Devil, as I was.On the scale it earns three solid big ones.Track this one down.

You know me, I never pass up the opportunity to screenshot a decent severed head.

"Српски филм" aka/ "A Serbian Film"(2010)d/Srdjan Spasojevic

What's the worst possible thing you can imagine having to bear witness to?Take a minute and think about that one.Got it clear in your head yet?Doesn't matter,really,'cuz you'll see it,and things that probably trump it,transpire before your very eyes when you sit down to the controversially despicable,"A Serbian Film",which takes the recent genre phenomena of "torture porn" and effectively ENDS it,once and for all.Franchises like Hostel and Saw play like "Ernest Goes To..." movies compared to this depraved mound of freshly-squeezed Eastern Bloc filth.Even the late Italian pervert-king Pasolini has been punked the fuck out.You'll need to send your fucking soul out to the dry cleaners if you dare viddy this one.Trust me,I'm not daring you to watch the infernal thing.I like all of you too much,and wouldn't want the repercussions hanging over my head...
Chances are,if you've read anything on the net about tonight's entry,you've encountered something like the above paragraph,less stylishly written in most cases(!),leaving you to mull over one of two gut feelings,I'd surmise:A)I have to see this! or B)I'll never sit through this in my entire life,no matter what you offered me!Uncle Wop is here tonight to let it be known,if you chose B,you'd be denying yourself an opportunity to see an original,well-crafted,gripping cinematic gore-nucopia that bites down hard with the psi of an adult male rottweiler(328,much higher than any pit bull,thank you very much!)and doesn't let go until the end titles roll.Sure,it's gross at times,the last forty minutes or so serves up some memorably gory set pieces so chunky they make Campbell's soups look like water,salt,and celery (you'll be thinking about a few of these nasty little ditties for a while afterwards,trust me),but the most heinous of the subject matter within is thankfully implied a la Texas Chainsaw Massacre,making Serbian's gut punch that much more effective(most likely duping the oceans of sensitive interwebz Nancys crybabying about the movie into thinking they've just seen something that they really haven't.Cue:Nelson Muntz HAH-hah.).For all true woprophiles,this should be at the top of your "Must See Immediately" lists.I can hardly wait to see what director Spasojevic has in store for filmgoers next,although,admittedly,I hope he moves on to much classier material!

Vukmir(Sergej Trifunovic),a pornographer so morally bankrupt,the mere mention of his name makes Roman Polanski itch.
Milos(Todorovic),a retired Serbian ..."actor" who's known for a baby's arm-sized pants crank that never quits in pump n' dump films,comes home to find his young son viddying one of his timeless classics on television.He takes the opportunity to tell his wife that he's been approached by Lejla,one of his regular pieces of silver screen fuckmeat,to once again spear some gash in an art film,the payoff being more than enough money for the happy trio to never have to look back again.The man behind the generous offer,a visionary named Vukmir(Trifunovic),assures Milos to sign the contract without knowing exactly what he'll be doing for it.Yeah,that's probably not the best sign,going in,there,'los.When he's driven to an orphanage/home for children the next day for a porn shoot,he probably should have torn the contract up right then and there.He doesn't.Wearing an earpiece from which he receives direction from Vukmir,he's led through the halls,followed by cameras,witnessing strange abusive behaviour and underage girls sucking on popsicles on tv screens while getting fellated himself,but it's all just a harbinger of terrible things to come.After he's instructed to put the blocks to a bruised and beaten woman in front of a pre-teen girl dressed as Alice from Through the Looking Glass,he angrily refuses,but is physically forced to stay and perform.Then,Vukmir proudly shows him a piece of film he claims will usher in a new genre.A naked,very pregnant woman gives birth in a dirty,Hostel-esque room,aided by a burly bald goon in a wifebeater,who,uhhh...yeah,I'm not gonna take that one a single word farther.He storms out to his car and drives off,but when his vision gets foggy at a red light,he's suddenly seduced by a scantily clad she-doctor type,after which he awakens in his own bed,bruised and bloodied,with no memory of what's transpired the past three days.This,dear Milos,is a blackout best left in the darkest recesses of your subconscious...

Milos(Srdjan Todorovic),in a drug-induced fervor,serves her what she deserves before the lens of Serb pervs.
He drives to Vukmir's estate,only to find it empty,apart from a video camera and a handful of tapes,which he uses to slowly,painfully piece the events of the previous three days back together.He learns that the filmmaker had injected him with cattle aphrodesiac,turning him into a sexual psychopath,ready to fuck anything and everything thrown in front of him.First he's given a naked blonde handcuffed to a bed,which he's instructed via earpiece to beat and anally devastate for being the cheating wife of a fallen Serbian war hero.In midstroke,he's handed a machete which he uses to decapitate the girl,still hamslamming the headless body as rigor mortis sets in when one of Vukmir's thugs kicks it away from Milos' weapon with a well-placed boot.Another tape shows two of the director's guards descending upon Milos' unconscious body with a camera,packing his fudge and mugging for the lens.The next tape shows his former co-star,Lejla,suspended nude from chains in a ceiling,bleeding profusely from the mouth after having all of her teeth pulled out.One of Vukmir's men comes in and forces his manroot into her yap,causing her to gag on the bloodflow,and asphyxiate.The tapes lead him to a horrific conclusion.He is led to a room,where Vukmir and his men have set up cameras around a mattress with two bodies covered with sheets.Still perpetua-horny from the bull viagra,Milos packs coal on one,then forces his monster endowment into the shitter of the other,much smaller body.He is then joined by a hooded man who begins sodomizing the previous body.Mid-fuck,Vukmir removes the man's hood to reveal that it is Milos' own brother,Marko.He then removes the sheet to show that it is Milos' drugged wife that his brother is assfucking.He then removes the sheet from Milos' victim to reveal that he has been sodomizing his own little boy.Talk about horrific realizations.An apeshit melee of revenge ensues,with Milos snaking a handgun off of one of the pornographer's guards and emptying the clip into everybody responsible.Milos' less groggy wife crushes his brother's head with a heavy bust.Out of ammo,Milos struggles with the last bodyguard,whose sunglasses are knocked off in the process,revealing that he's missing an eye.Milos proceedes to ram his erect cock into the thug's brain through the empty eyesocket.Vukmir,dying,happily labels the sickening events "true art".Milos then gathered up his devastated family,took them home and locked them in the basement.At his house,the traumatized man lies in bed with his wife and son,and kills himself and his family with one well-directed bullet.Later,another director and cameramen arrive to find the bodies still lying in bed.He directs his star to "start with the little one".The man starts to unzip his pants.I don't know about you,but I could use a hot shower after that.Maybe two.

Now that's what I call being overdosed on cattle aphrodesiac and flaying your own genitals with a lead pipe.
The screenwriter/director has been battling the negativity,claiming that Serbs are fucked from birth to death due to the country's brutal recent past,and though that's certainly true,it comes off as a limp cop out to me.You made a brutal movie unlike any other out there(for shock value's sake mostly,I'm thinking),man the fuck up about it.From a technical standpoint,the film is mint,strong cinematography,killer soundtrack by Sky Wikluh,who's apparently big in Serbian hip hop(I was unaware the Serbs even had a rap scene...comin' straight outta Belgrade,crazy mufucka named Boris...eh,to each his own,I guess),and solid acting from the entire cast.Seriously,this film,despite the negative press,the investigations,and last minute film festival omissions(all of which,when you think about it,are amazing publicity for a horror movie,don'tcha think?),is a hardcore piece of exploitation that screams to be seen by all fans of such.Cast your reservations aside,put your big boy pants on,and pick yourself up a copy immediately.You might not enjoy it(if you do,you've got some problems,for sure),but you definitely need to see it.I personally have never seen anything like it myself,and would like to keep it like that for a while til my balance is regained.Four wops.

"Murray Langston??What the hell are you doing in the snuff porn industry!!!"