Yesterday, we took on the first film in Lucifer Valentine's (hereafter referred to as either LV or Lucy) infamous Vomit Gore Trilogy. You can check that out here. Now, the exciting conclusion of EC3 Takes On The Vomit Gore Trilogy.
ReGOREgitated Sacrifice
The “story” - Your guess is as good as mine. I was fortunate enough to talk to someone involved with the film (who wished to remain anonymous) and was told that it was presented to him/her as “…the story picked up at the end of the last film where the heroine committed suicide and that this film was what her mind saw as it died. Each character was supposed to be a part of the main girl. She had multiple personalities and each one had to die as she did. The Black Angels of Hell (the demonic twins) were the strongest part of her so they kill off the weak ones, ushering them into the next life, and finally die themselves.” Apparently Angela also has some connection to Kurt Cobain that’s never really explained.
What we actually see – Seemingly random scenes of some damn good gore, torture, and, of course, lots of vomit. Oh, and there’s pissing in this one too. Yay.
We begin with the same shots of Angela dead in the tub and home video footage of Angela from the end of SVD, eliciting a priceless look of abject despair from Joe. Then, a pair of conjoined twins comes walking out of the woods, gets sawed apart, and then they proceed to kill a succession of women. Oh yeah, and Angela is pregnant now for some reason. At the end of the film, somehow we end up outside Kurt Cobain’s house and we are shown that Angela and Kurt died on the same day and are somehow connected, I think. This is incredibly vague and there isn’t even an attempt to explain it. None of this makes any sense at all. 
This one is my favorite of the three mainly because of the gore and some truly “out there” visuals. While it may fail as a horror movie in the traditional sense, it somewhat works as a series of bizarre violent vignettes. There are some really cool gore scenes here. One has the Black Angels disemboweling Ms. Lake Washington (who we all agreed was the most attractive victim in the trilogy and broke Joe out of his “too much nudity” funk) and whipping her with her own intestines. We see a tarantula sewn into a vagina. There’s a damn good decapitation. The icepick in the eyes idea is re-used from SVD. We see a whore beaten in the head with an alarm clock. There’s no way that was faked either. They are just wailing on this chick with that clock. We see a man in Celtic Frost style corpse paint and aviator sunglasses wearing a dead octopus on his head, sitting in a throne, and vomiting into a hollowed out severed head. Read that last sentence again. That’s some pretty unique imagery. 
These scenes are much more effective as dark avant-garde cinema than anything in SVD. The problem is that RS fails miserably in telling the story it purports to tell. Looking back after reading the synopsis and the story being explained, it makes a little bit of sense, but as Joe said “Movies shouldn’t need goddamn Cliff Notes!” I’m not just being dense here and “not getting it.” Even my anonymous source agreed, “There is NO way anyone would guess that multiple personality shit from watching.” Here’s a quote from an interview with director Lucifer Valentine regarding his use of the octopus…
“ The octopus is used in ReGOREgitated Sacrifice to symbolize the infinitely chameleonic nature of Satan as an octopus can change its shape, color and texture to conceal its identity and is meant to also symbolize Angela's possession by Satan and so Hank Skinny, the symbol of bulimia, wears the octopus as a crown and uses the tentacles to gag himself and Vomit to show that Angela has been both engulfed and embraced by Satan and that she is now taking his form and becoming Satan herself as we see grotesque manifestations appearing onscreen like the octopus crown.”
Um…yeah. Whatever you say Lucy. I am all for symbolism. Hell, I have a degree in film studies. I’m no stranger to looking for deeper meanings in films. For symbolism to work, however, it does have to be at least somewhat accessible to the audience, or it loses all effectiveness. That is basically one of the major problems with the entire trilogy. None of the things LV said he was trying to convey come across at all. We do get one thematic element of Satan and the popular image of women being one, as in her pact with Satan, Whore (yes, that’s the character’s name) is forced to say “I promise to model my body after the images of celebrities and supermodels, but to never gain weight by purging until Satan tells me my body is pretty.” Interesting idea, but it’s never expanded on, so it’s a throwaway statement. The final scene where a naked woman performs a vomiting blowjob on a fake dick then masturbates as it ejaculates gallons of blood onto her? That’s just self-indulgence again. It has nothing to do with anything. It sounds like it would be interesting just for the sleaze factor. It really isn’t.
As far as the vomit goes, this one ramps it way up from the first flick. There is so much puke that it loses what little impact it had left. Puking on bodies. Puking in toilets. Puking on floors. Puking on each other. Hank does his puke/drink/puke/drink trick again, and while it is more visually interesting this time, we’ve seen it before. While it is meant to be repulsive, after a while you just get numb to it. It reminded me of the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. In that movie there were so many jump scares that by halfway through even the teenyboppers in the theater with me weren’t jumping any more. Halfway through this, we were so bored with puke that instead of having the desired effect all it was inspiring us to do was debate about what we thought they had eaten. LV may have realized this, so we get a new bodily function. Yes folks, this time we have pee! The first time it happens you think “Um, ok. That was out of nowhere.” After that it’s just kind of there. It has no impact. Anyone who’s ever seen an issue of Hustler has seen a woman pee, and unless you’re into that, it’s pretty pointless. There is one scene where a woman pees in a jar, drinks it, then pukes it back up, thus combining Lucy’s two fetishes. Sorry, I’m not impressed. I have youtube.
So, all in all, the gore scenes are awesome, the alarm clock beating is fun, and the rest you can fast forward through. It’s the best of the three, even though only half of it is actually entertaining. Your thoughts gentlemen…
D: Easily the most effective alarm clock I’ve ever seen. There was a dildo, there was a tarantula and a vagina, there was puke, blood, still no story, still waiting on that. Maybe in the third one. Um…did you know Kurt Cobain died?
J: The camera work got a little better. After an hour and a half of watching naked women I was actually happy to see tits again. Which is sad because I am a straight man. There are only so many ways you can see a cracked out, “meth-y” looking whore strip in a crappy motel before it’s fucking boring. It sucks because it looks like they put a lot of time and effort into making the gore look good, and the only reason you get to see it long enough to appreciate it is because someone’s puking on it.
Random Thought #1: We finally found the point at which Joe can be offended. After watching 2 ½ hours of vomit, urine, degrading women, vile gore, labia clamps and weights (sorry Lucy, you’re not gonna freak me out with BDSM toys), and all manner of atrocities without incident, Joe finally got riled up that Hank Skinny was wearing a t-shirt of the band Unsane. Joe likes them and was pissed that they were associated with “this shitty movie.” I love these guys.
Random Thought #2: Can you imagine what the set smelled like at the end of a shoot?
Slow Torture Puke Chamber
The “story”: (from Amazon) Making good on her pact with Satan, Angela Aberdeen's tortured and vomit-soaked soul descends into Hell. But Satan is not finished with her yet - He has more suffering planned for his ravaged slave. Angela is sent back up to the surface to stalk and destroy yet another victim. Her return initiates the emergence of a new Angela who is steadily and painfully infected with the Devil's Curse. An appalling metamorphosis befalls the chosen young victim as she is racked by bulimia, and subjected to the dark, forbidden secrets of incest of abuse. Slowly, the two Angelas merge into one Perfect Child of Satan and descend to an eternity of suffering in Hell.
What we actually see: Puking, peeing, and an incredibly badly done baby rape/murder/eating.
When I told the guys what the last one was called, Joe said that “Slow Torture Puke Chamber” should be the name of the trilogy. I concur. If you had told me after watching Slaughtered Vomit Dolls that I would consider it the second best of the series, I would have told you that there was no way. I would have been wrong. By the time we started this it was almost four in the morning and none of us were up for it. Like Joe said, however “It’s like a gang bang. You’re tired after the first fifty cocks, but you might as well just power through it.” Truly inspiring words, my friend.
This isn’t a horror movie at all. It’s amateur vomit and urine fetish porn. Seriously, about all there is here is puking and pissing. Mainly pissing actually. In jars and bowls. In trash cans. On other people. In Angela’s mouth. On her own face. Puking in shot glasses and drinking it. Puking in a funnel taped in to another woman’s mouth. Seriously, this one has more puke and pee than the other two combined. In his interviews, Lucifer Valentine makes sure to mention over and over that he’s an emetophile, meaning that he’s sexually aroused by vomit. Good for him. Unless you are too, there’s nothing here. Well, there is the scene where they pull out that chick’s tampon and slap her in the face with it.
To confuse the “story,” which is already hanging by a thread, we have two lead actresses now, and they’re both calling themselves Angela Aberdeen. One is Amera Lavey. One is Hope Likens. She spends about 20 minutes staring into the camera as a voice over tells her story about being molested by her father. It’s so riveting that we lose interest about 30 seconds in and start discussing how bad Hope’s boob job is. There’s a reason Daniel gave her the nickname “Left-eye,” and it has nothing to do with TLC. Anyway, they both do the usual bodily function thing. To break up the monotony, they both masturbate explicitly with crucifixes. Those who know the members of EC3 personally know that we’re sick bastards, and something like that would normally be right up our alley. Not in this case. Even Joe, probably the biggest blasphemy fan of the three of us, said it was too little too late to elicit any interest in the goings on. We were all so brain dead by the time Angela slides her ass up the wall to pee on her own face that we were cheering for her to poop, as it’s the only thing that hasn’t been thrown at us yet. Daniel wanted it so bad he could taste it. Well, maybe that’s a bad choice of words. 
Hank shows up again. This time he cuts a baby out of a woman, tries to eat it, pukes on it, screws it (I think, it was hard to tell), puts it in a blender, does his puke/drink/puke thing yet again, and kicks it around the floor. Sounds pretty horrific, doesn’t it? Well, maybe it would be if it didn’t look like a dollar store doll covered in ketchup. After the phenomenal gore in the first two flicks, this was really a disappointment. The gore here is absolutely bottom of the barrel. What could have been fairly disturbing was almost comical, with Hank taunting a doll and gnawing on its head. Yet another missed opportunity.
After watching the entire trilogy, none of us could really form coherent thoughts about what we’d just seen. Joe gave STPC credit for at least having a disclaimer calling it an “art project.” I don’t cut it any slack for that. As the series progressed, at least Lucy cut down on the constant shaky cam, lightning edits, and vocal distortion; or as Daniel put it “he slowly found a cure for Parkinson's.” We do all agree that this one was the worst by far. Daniel, by the way, wants to beat Hank Skinny to death. Joe wants to duct tape Lucifer Valentine to the front door of the Westboro Baptist Church and see what happens. I’m just glad they didn’t attack me for subjecting them to that.
Random Thought #1: We Finally found my point of offense. About five minutes in, there are subtitles and Hope says, “I think your perfect.” YOUR? Really? No one proofread the damn subtitles? They used the wrong form of you’re, and that’s what finally got to me.
Random Thought #2: I get why the plastic sheets were everywhere, but it kinda kills the mood.
Random Thought #3: Apparently Lucy and crew are moving up in the world. The hotel rooms are a little less skanky in this one.
Overall, the Vomit Gore Trilogy is one big, steaming pile of squandered potential. I think there were some good ideas there, but it just didn’t translate in the execution. The problem here is that Lucifer Valentine made the movies he wanted to see and either forgot about the audience or assumed that what appeals to him would appeal to everyone else. You, my friend, were dead wrong. This is his personal jerk-off material, with some horror elements thrown in so he could market it to a wider audience. If the flicks weren’t so self indulgent and actually paid attention to the story that he says is there, these could have been good. In fact, with the opportunity presented with Angela’s unique situation, they could have been something special.
We did recognize that if we were still 16 and in our “subversive equals good regardless of quality” phase we probably would have dug it. Most people probably would have been either offended or at least nauseated by the flicks. We’re not most people though. We can see it becoming a “Faces of Death” style slumber party “can you handle it” challenge type of flick. Hell, that’s why we watched it. We wanted something extreme. We got it, but unfortunately, that's all we got. We would have preferred extreme AND good.
The final verdict is that these flicks are somewhere between art house, grindhouse, and outhouse. Watch Slaughtered Vomit Dolls only if you really like pretentious “art” cinema. For the horror fan, ReGOREgitated Sacrifice has some cool stuff, just be ready to sit (or fast forward) through some ridiculous crap to get to it. Completely ignore Slow Torture Puke Chamber unless you’re into amateur urine/vomit fetish porn.
Well folks, that’s The Vomit Gore Trilogy. I promised the guys that I would find something much better for next time. I have a few ideas. Muahahahaha. On behalf of Joe and Daniel, this is Nathan inviting you to join us next time as C3 continues to explore the fringes of horror cinema. After reading all of that, I know what you’re thinking...”what kind of sick freaks watch this stuff?” EC3, that’s who!
2 comments:
Yas
Well, color me happier than a 2 year old coloring...an amazon gift card.
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