I wanted to add to my previous comments, as a few friends and I drove up to New York last night to see the film, as well as a Q&A session with the director and other crew.
First of all, for a genre film, and for anyone going into the theater knowing what they're going to see and who enjoys this sort of exploitation piece, the film was fantastic. It was creative, it was interesting, it was engaging, and yes, it was crass, but I was never offended to a degree that upset me. The film was gory, violent, and abrasive, and I can list you 20 other films that it was clearly inspired by that are, for their time, just as grating and harsh. Mind you, the films it emulates were created 20, 30, or more years ago. Many of them played out fairly slow, and had a few very graphic, violent scenes with which they are remembered for. A modern audience, even one who loves those films, won't accept that. We need more, we need it faster, and we need it more consistently. It's to be expected, and if you went in to the theater expecting something else after seeing the trailer, reading any press what so ever about it, or even just seeing the poster and reading the title, I question your ability to rationalize your own choices.
Yes, the language was tough. I am always surprised, in this day and age, with the sort of media that is available and the degree that major blockbuster films and television after 10pm takes language to, when anyone is offended by language anymore. This is nothing worse than any episode of South Park, which can be seen on basic cable. Yes, there were extreme acts of violence, some of which were incredibly disturbing... had they been real. The majority of the visual effects were just so over the top that, if you were disturbed on a real level, I have to wonder what you think real violence and viscera looks like. While the acts were violent, many of the effects that depicted them on screen were simply blood. It's a film expressly written about a lead character with a shotgun, the most common effects are blood and gore blasting out of a protagonist in the most cartoonish way possible. The realism involved is on the same level as when a character uses cocaine, smashing their face violently into a comically oversized pile of white power and wiggling their face back and forth. Other violent acts aren't even shown in graphic detail. The previously mentioned bus burning is almost entirely suggested; you see the attackers with flamethrowers get on the bus, you see the reverse shot of the children, the attackers talk to the children, the attackers use the flamethrowers in the direction of the camera. A single child is seem pressing against the back window trying to escape, and that's as direct as the scene gets at depicting violence on children. I mentioned this scene, after someone here brought it up, to my girlfriend, who went to see the film with us, to warn her of the level of violence. She started to cry, not because of the film, mind you, but because she had been reading a book about Darfur and a very similar chapter, a true story, in which children were chained to a bus and burned alive. She was not, however, taken aback by the violence in the film. It was comic, it was cartoony, and at no point do I think she needed to tell herself "it's on a movie." She, and everyone else who attended, is an adult, and is capable of separating real life from cinema. If she wishes to get offended, upset, disturbed, or outraged by something, there are plenty of real-life issues with which she can occupy herself with. Film is an escape from that.
That, after all, is my point. There are films, Cannibal Holocaust, Last House on the Left, dozens of others, in which the violence on screen is graphic, it doesn't cut away, and it appears incredibly realistic. That is not the case with this film. While the script is intended to shock, as with many of the films it emulates, the filmmakers are capable and competent, and they know full well that showing the violence for the duration is not going to be the most filmic approach, or the best approach to tell the story. To involve the audience with the characters, you need their reactions, their responses, and despite how outlandish the story is, I genuinely felt involved with the characters and was concerned for their well-being or wished for their demise, respectively. All in all, I thought it was a fantastic film for what their were trying to achieve, and judging from the applause and amount of questions asked of the director, no one was disappointed.
I should also add that the director and crew were very nice, insightful, and intelligent people. They weren't sadists, misanthropes, or any sort of negative tag which could be thrown on a filmmaker of this sort. They simple love the genre, know how it works, and work within it. I was very happy to have seen the film in that setting.
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