“A Bowl of Oatmeal,” credited to six directors, is a brooding effort about a schizophrenic slum dweller (Pietro Gonzales) who’s bossed around by a talking bowl of oatmeal(!) it ends with a mighty striking image, of the protagonist in bed with pieces of meat shaped like a person, but the pic overall is annoyingly cryptic. In the Tom Healy and Gino Panaro helmed “Don’t Nag Me” a man (Tom Healy) buries the corpse of his bitchy wife, who he’s just killed, in a cemetery one night, but gets caught when the body is dug up a competently made film to be sure, but it suffers from an irritatingly drawn-out narrative.
#Cutting moments crack#
Their inclusion is inappropriate, I’d say-as all operate on a far different, more shallow wavelength than “Cutting Moments”-not to mention unfair, as none can hope to match the power of the compilation’s titular entry.įor the record, the package commences with “Crack Dog,” directed by Casey Kehoe, a silly number about a pizza delivery man (Daniel O’Shea) with a man-eating poodle who takes on a band of homicidal crack heads. That VHS was marked by trashy cover art typical of EI’s releases, as well as four other shorts included, presumably, to pad the tape to feature length. Its initial release occurred in 1997, on a VHS from EI Independent Cinema. “Cutting Moments” was powerful enough that it achieved something very few short films ever do: it received a commercial release on home video-twice.
In other words, the profoundly twisted family dynamic on display here upsets precisely because it hits so close to home.
#Cutting moments tv#
The cozy suburban décor that we in America have been taught to revere-incorporating the TV baseball game, Power Rangers dolls and impeccably groomed front yard-lend the proceedings a sense of familiarity that may well be the film’s most disturbing aspect. What follows is a horrendously twisted coupling in which the garden shears from the opening scene are utilized in superlative gore effects by the great Tom Savini, albeit to far different, more impacting ends than Savini’s FX work on FRIDAY THE 13th and other stalk-and-slash programmers. This leads to a lacerating bout of self-mutilation that concludes with Ray attempting once again to seduce her hubbie, this time covered in blood–which given the state of their relationship proves quite appropriate. Specifically, Ray tries to seduce her husband, who is too engrossed in a TV baseball game to pay her much mind. Thus, when the nastiness starts up around the 10 minute mark it doesn’t seem terribly surprising or out of place. Much about the traumatized principals-a suburban father, mother and young son-is left unexplained, yet Buck still manages to convey a sense of deeply ingrained psychosis in the fraught glances the wife (Nicca Ray) gives her husband (Gary Betsworth), the disturbing sexually-tinged acts their son performs with his power ranger dolls, and the rather overly aggressive manner with which Betsworth trims a hedge in an early scene. Surprisingly enough for a film as overtly nasty as “Cutting Moments,” its power derives largely from subtlety. Obviously Buck’s sensibilities are far removed from those of most of his fellows, and indeed, Cutting Moments” is striking for its intelligence as much as its gore quotient. Listening to the DVD audio commentary I was struck by the references to Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky and other cinematic luminaries by writer-director Douglas Buck, names most gorehound filmmakers probably couldn’t spell, much less identify. Joe Bob Briggs once stated that “I am opposed to power drills through the ear, machetes through the stomach, decapitations with barbed wire, flamethrower attacks, and mutilation with ball peen hammer, unless it’s necessary to the plot.” While there’s little in the way of a “plot” to be found in “Cutting Moments” (nor any drills through ears or barbed wire decapitations) its extreme violence IS necessary, and even integral to its corrosive portrayal of a family in extreme crisis. Yet the bloodletting of “Cutting Moments” isn’t on hand to titillate or exploit in any way (although quite a few commentators have claimed otherwise).
#Cutting moments movie#
The film is legendary for its violent content, which is extreme even by modern horror movie standards. 1996’s “ Cutting Moments” is, quite simply, one of the most powerful short films of any sort to emerge in the last 30 years.
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