Author Archives: surgeons of horror

Tokyo Fist: Shinya Tsukamoto’s Violent Ballet of Flesh and Fury Turns 30

20 Monday Oct 2025

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When Tokyo Fist exploded onto screens in 1995, it was less a film than a sensory assault — a hallucinatory plunge into the body and the city, where love, rage, and industrial noise fused into something both grotesque and transcendent. Thirty years on, Shinya Tsukamoto’s bruised masterpiece still feels electrifying, a raw depiction of masculine collapse that punches with every frame.

Following Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, Tsukamoto turned his kinetic eye inward, shifting from techno-flesh obsession to the violence that seethes beneath modern alienation. The story seems simple: a meek salaryman, Tsuda (played by Tsukamoto himself), reunites with a childhood friend turned boxer, Kojima, and suspects him of seducing his fiancée, Hizuru (Hisashi Fujii). But in Tsukamoto’s world, suspicion is only the spark — what follows is an implosion of jealousy and self-destruction that blurs the lines between punishment, passion, and transcendence.

As Tsuda trains and reshapes his body into a weapon, the film mutates into a study of transformation — not heroic, but pathological. His bruises and cuts become symbols of rebirth, his pain the only way to feel alive amid Tokyo’s oppressive sprawl. Tsukamoto’s editing and camerawork — all whiplash movement and oppressive close-ups — turn every punch into a scream of existential agony.

There’s also a surprising tenderness beneath the steel. Hizuru’s own evolution, from passive fiancée to self-actualising force, brings balance to the film’s masculine ferocity. Tsukamoto’s vision is never merely about brutality; it’s about connection through suffering and finding the pulse of life in the noise of decay.

Three decades later, Tokyo Fist remains a testament to Tsukamoto’s ability to merge the physical and the psychological into pure cinematic expression. It’s as vital, exhausting, and hypnotic as ever — a bruised valentine to the body under siege and the madness that lurks beneath the surface of civility.

The Prognosis:

A feral, intimate, and unforgettable piece of Japanese cyberpunk melodrama, Tokyo Fist still lands its blows with unflinching force. Tsukamoto’s vision is as vital today as it was in 1995 — both brutal and strangely beautiful.

  • Saul Muerte

Re-Animator (1985) – Mad Science, Maximum Splatter!

17 Friday Oct 2025

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“Herbert West has a very good head… on his shoulders. And another one… in a dish on his desk.”

If you haunted the horror aisle of your local video store in the 1980s, chances are you’ve seen Re-Animator glaring back at you from a lurid neon-green VHS sleeve. Released in 1985, Stuart Gordon’s cult classic is the stuff of midnight movie legend: a delirious cocktail of Lovecraft, gore, black comedy, and mad science that set a new standard for splatter cinema.

Loosely adapted from H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West—Reanimator, the story plunges into the twisted experiments of medical student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs, in a career-defining role). West has discovered a serum capable of reanimating the dead—though what comes back is never quite what was lost. As corpses twitch, shriek, and explode back into grotesque parodies of life, West’s obsession pushes medicine, morality, and sanity to their breaking point.

What makes Re-Animator endure, 40 years later, is the sheer precision of its madness. Stuart Gordon, in his feature debut, creates a bold visual aesthetic: sterile hospital halls colliding with garish splatter, glowing syringes of radioactive-green fluid cutting through shadow, and a pace that never lets you catch your breath. It’s both theatrical and grimy, like Lovecraft dragged kicking and screaming into the grindhouse.

Then there are the performances. Jeffrey Combs doesn’t just play Herbert West—he becomes him. Clinical, arrogant, and perversely charismatic, West is one of horror’s most iconic creations, a character whose clipped delivery and maniacal focus have carved him a permanent place in the genre pantheon. Beside him, Barbara Crampton brings heart and vulnerability to Megan Halsey, grounding the film’s madness in a performance that makes her both victim and survivor. The chemistry between Combs and Crampton, along with Bruce Abbott as the conflicted Dan Cain, is the human spine of the film’s monstrous body.

And then, of course, there’s the gore. Re-Animator doesn’t just dip into blood—it wallows in it. Heads roll (literally), entrails spill, and practical effects run wild with gleeful excess. This is splatter at its peak: not just shocking, but imaginative, choreographed chaos that keeps finding new ways to disturb and delight. Gordon walks the razor’s edge between horror and comedy, and somehow, miraculously, never loses balance.

Four decades on, Re-Animator is still a head of its class. It’s soaked in Lovecraftian dread, powered by unforgettable performances, and dripping with the kind of splatter that defined an era of VHS horror. Whether you’re a first-time renter or a long-time cult devotee, Re-Animator remains that rare horror feature that shocks, entertains, and endures—an unholy hybrid of brains, blood, and black humour that refuses to die.

📼 Staff Pick!
“One of the goriest, funniest, and most unforgettable horror films of the ‘80s. Jeffrey Combs IS Herbert West. Be warned: once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it… and you won’t want to.”

  • Saul Muerte

Black Phone 2 — Derrickson Dials Back the Horror, But the Line’s Gone Cold

16 Thursday Oct 2025

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Scott Derrickson returns to familiar ground with Black Phone 2 (2025), a sequel that stretches the eerie premise of his 2022 hit into icier, more supernatural territory — but the call doesn’t quite connect this time.

Set four years after Finney Blake’s (Mason Thames) narrow escape from The Grabber, the film finds the once-traumatised boy struggling to rebuild his life under the weight of memory and unresolved fear. His sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) remains gifted — or cursed — with psychic visions, and when she begins dreaming of three missing boys at a winter camp, the black phone begins to ring again. Only this time, the voice on the other end isn’t just calling from the past — it’s pulling them back into it.

Derrickson, who cut his teeth on Sinister and Deliver Us from Evil, once again demonstrates a clear mastery of atmosphere. His use of light and shadow is chillingly deliberate, and the wintry backdrop gives the sequel a haunting, desaturated beauty that recalls the nightmare logic of A Nightmare on Elm Street crossed with the isolation of Friday the 13th. The cinematography by Brett Jutkiewicz captures frost-bitten textures and dreamlike corridors of fear, keeping the mood taut even when the story falters.

And falter it does. Despite a promising setup, Black Phone 2 struggles to escape the confines of its own mythology. What once felt mysterious and emotionally grounded now feels repetitive and muddled. The attempts to expand The Grabber’s lore — turning him into a supernatural force rather than a disturbed man — rob the story of its primal fear. The original thrived on ambiguity; this sequel over-explains.

Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw both deliver earnest performances, grounding their characters in shared trauma, but they’re hampered by dialogue that’s often clunky and exposition-heavy. Even the film’s pacing, once one of Derrickson’s strong suits, slips into uneven rhythms — long stretches of ghostly visions interrupted by bursts of predictable violence.

Still, credit where it’s due: Derrickson’s visual language remains potent. Echoes of Sinister resonate throughout, from the use of distorted sound design to the flicker of analogue textures, suggesting a filmmaker who still knows how to craft a mood. The Grabber, though used sparingly, continues to terrify — his mask, redesigned with subtle variations, remains one of modern horror’s most unsettling icons.

But for all its chills, Black Phone 2 can’t shake the feeling of déjà vu. It’s a sequel haunted not only by its ghostly antagonist but by the shadow of a stronger predecessor. Derrickson’s talent for visual dread is undeniable — he just needs a story worth listening to again.

The Prognosis:

Black Phone 2 has the atmosphere, tension, and menace you’d expect from Scott Derrickson, but not the clarity or emotional pull that made the original so striking. Despite its best efforts to evolve into a supernatural slasher, this follow-up never quite finds its signal.

In the end, Black Phone 2 just doesn’t have time to thaw out properly — it rings, but the line’s gone cold.

  • Saul Muerte

Watching Herself Unravel — “Other” Struggles to Find Its Focus

13 Monday Oct 2025

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David Moreau, best known for his sleek genre work (Them, The Eye, It Boy), returns to the psychological horror fold with Other — a moody, paranoia-laden mystery that tries to blend domestic trauma with techno-surveillance dread. On paper, it’s an enticing setup: Olga Kurylenko’s Alice returns to her childhood home following her mother’s sudden death, only to find herself under constant watch by a high-tech system that seems to know more about her than she does. What unfolds is a slow burn of suspicion and shadow, where the hum of hidden cameras replaces the creak of haunted floorboards.

There’s an admirable restraint in Moreau’s direction. He builds atmosphere through cold precision — lingering frames, muted lighting, and uneasy stillness — but the payoff rarely matches the setup. The house itself, eerie and static, becomes a sterile stage rather than a vessel for emotional tension. Kurylenko shoulders most of the film’s weight, her performance caught between brittle vulnerability and steely detachment, yet the script gives her little room to evolve beyond a cipher.

Hints of a darker, more personal horror flicker beneath the surface — grief, guilt, and identity all swirl in the static — but the film never fully tunes in. Other wants to be a modern ghost story for the surveillance age, but it feels more like a polished echo of better work.

While there are moments that capture Moreau’s visual confidence — particularly in how the camera mirrors Alice’s fractured psyche — the pacing drags, and the final revelation lands without the intended sting. After last year’s MADS, this feels like a creative step backward: beautifully shot, conceptually intriguing, but emotionally hollow.

The Prognosis:

A technically sleek yet curiously empty thriller. Other watches its heroine fall apart but forgets to make us care what she finds in the end.

  • Saul Muerte

Guts, Gears, and Gore: The Chaotic Carnage of Meatball Machine

13 Monday Oct 2025

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Japan has long specialised in splatter cinema that fuses body horror with outrageous imagination, and Yudai Yamaguchi and Jun’ichi Yamamoto’s Meatball Machine (2005) is no exception. Equal parts grotesque creature feature and tragic love story, the film delivers a heady mix of practical effects, nihilistic violence, and gooey romance—though its impact depends on one’s tolerance for viscera and chaos.

The premise is gloriously absurd: alien parasites crash-land and infect human hosts, transforming their bodies into biomechanical nightmares called NecroBorgs. Once fused, these creatures are compelled to fight each other to the death, their flesh weaponised in ever-more creative and revolting ways. At the centre of this carnage is a budding romance between two lonely misfits, whose connection endures even as they’re overtaken by the infestation.

Visually and tonally, Meatball Machine is unashamedly indebted to Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), trading in similar industrial grit and fetishistic body horror. But where Tetsuo is a lean, avant-garde nightmare, Meatball Machine takes a more chaotic, popcorn-splatter approach, reveling in its outrageous gore. The special effects are commendably tactile, with oozing prosthetics and clunky mechanical designs that give the film its visceral punch.

The downside is that beneath the outrageous spectacle, the narrative feels thin. The love story offers a beating heart, but it’s sketched more as a tragic afterthought than a fully developed arc. The film’s pacing often sags between its bursts of carnage, and its attempts at poignancy sometimes clash with the gleefully trashy violence.

The Prognosis:

There’s a certain charm in its refusal to play safe. In retrospect, Meatball Machine is emblematic of mid-2000s Japanese splatter cinema—a scene that thrived on pushing boundaries and daring audiences to look away. It may not have the visionary clarity of Tsukamoto’s work or the cult staying power of contemporaries like Tokyo Gore Police (2008), but it holds its own as a bizarre, bloody curiosity.

For fans of the genre, it’s a fascinating if uneven ride—part horror, part romance, all drenched in slime.

  • Saul Muerte

Fragile: A Haunted Hospital That Lacks Staying Power

13 Monday Oct 2025

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Jaume Balagueró, best known for his later work on [Rec], tried his hand at the English-language supernatural chiller with Fragile (2005), a film that blends gothic atmosphere with familiar ghost story tropes. While the set-up carries promise, the end result is a middling effort that neither reinvents the genre nor fully capitalises on its cast.

The story centres on Amy (Calista Flockhart), a nurse haunted by her own professional tragedy who takes a position at a crumbling children’s hospital on the Isle of Wight. There, she discovers the young patients live in fear of “the mechanical girl,” a spectral figure stalking the halls and punishing those who try to leave. It’s a classic haunted-hospital premise, filled with creaking corridors and flickering lights, but one that quickly leans on convention rather than innovation.

Flockhart, coming off her Ally McBeal fame, delivers a serviceable performance as the fragile yet determined Amy. However, her casting feels almost like a gimmick, as though the film relied too heavily on the novelty of seeing her in a horror context rather than developing a character with genuine depth. Richard Roxburgh, an actor capable of commanding presence, is oddly sidelined in a role that fails to give him much to do beyond lend some authority to the hospital staff.

Balagueró brings atmosphere, of course—the dilapidated hospital is a moody, effective setting, and the ghostly imagery has the right amount of menace. But unlike his Spanish-language work, which brims with urgency and invention, Fragile feels cautious, as though designed to play it safe for international audiences. The result is a film that has plenty of eerie window dressing but lacks the substance or scares.

Fragile sits as an intriguing but underwhelming waypoint in Balagueró’s career. It showcases his eye for atmosphere but not his knack for redefining horror, something he would prove just two years later with [Rec]. Flockhart’s presence gives the film a certain curio appeal, and Roxburgh’s involvement hints at what might have been, but the film itself remains a fairly standard ghost story—watchable, but not remarkable.

  • Saul Muerte

When the Devil Fell Flat: Lost Souls and the Forgotten Millennial Apocalypse

12 Sunday Oct 2025

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At the turn of the millennium, Hollywood seemed obsessed with the end of days. Films like End of Days (1999), Stigmata (1999), and The Ninth Gate (1999) all dove headfirst into Catholic mysticism, demonic prophecy, and the anxieties of a new century. Into this crowded field came Lost Souls (2000), the directorial debut of renowned cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, armed with Winona Ryder as its headliner and the promise of a brooding religious thriller. What audiences got instead was a film that quickly faded from memory.

The plot follows Maya (Ryder), a young woman convinced that Peter (Ben Chaplin), a respected New York crime journalist, is destined to become the Antichrist. Her mission is to awaken him to this truth before evil consumes him—and the world. On paper, it could have rivaled Stigmata’s heretical thrill ride or End of Days’ action spectacle. Instead, it delivered long stretches of gloom with very little pulse.

Kamiński’s cinematography skills are on full display—sepia shadows, oppressive yellows, and compositions that scream menace. Unfortunately, visuals alone can’t carry a two-hour film. The story crawls forward, recycling the same beats of Ryder’s pleading and Chaplin’s disbelief without ever building toward real urgency. Even the climactic moments arrive with a dull thud rather than the fiery damnation the premise demands.

Performances can’t salvage the material. Ryder plays her part with conviction, but the script gives her little dimension. Chaplin, saddled with a thankless role, never sells his character’s shift from skeptic to potential vessel of evil. Even veteran talents like John Hurt and Philip Baker Hall are wasted in supporting parts that add gravitas but no depth.

In the millennial apocalyptic boom, Stigmata leaned into controversy, End of Days embraced blockbuster excess, and The Ninth Gate played with ambiguity. Lost Souls aimed for a meditative, moody parable—but ended up inert, remembered mostly for its look rather than its impact.

The Prognosis:

Lost Souls stands as a relic of its time: an atmospheric curiosity drowned by the weight of its own seriousness. Where its contemporaries burned brightly (if unevenly), Lost Souls simply flickered out.

  • Saul Muerte

Silver Bullet (1985) – Full Moon, Half Thrills: A retrospective

10 Friday Oct 2025

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“It started in May. In a small town. And every month after that whenever the moon was full… it came back.”

Dig into the horror aisle at your local video store and you’ll find Silver Bullet, a werewolf yarn soaked in King mythology and slathered in small-town Americana. Directed by Daniel Attias, this 1985 adaptation of Stephen King’s novella Cycle of the Werewolf promises fur, fangs, and full moons—but only partially delivers the bite.

The sleepy town of Tarker’s Mills is rocked by a string of grisly murders. Whispers of a beast grow louder as the body count rises, and while most townsfolk hide indoors after dark, one brave boy in a souped-up motorised wheelchair dares to face the lurking horror head-on. The premise has all the makings of a great ‘80s creature feature, and with King himself penning the screenplay, the setup drips with lore and that unmistakable New England dread.

But here’s the rub: Silver Bullet is a film forever caught in the shadows. On one side, it wants to be a heartfelt coming-of-age tale, steeped in nostalgia. On the other, it reaches for werewolf horror glory. In the end, it struggles to rise above being a middle-of-the-road monster movie with more bark than bite. The creature effects—courtesy of Carlo Rambaldi—are clunky by modern eyes, and even back in ’85 they looked a little tame compared to the lycanthrope heavyweights of The Howling and An American Werewolf in London.

Still, there’s fun to be had. Corey Haim delivers a charming performance as Marty, the young hero on wheels, while Gary Busey goes full throttle as Uncle Red, equal parts lovable and unhinged. Their chemistry injects life into the otherwise plodding hunt for the beast. And that climax, when silver meets fur under the glow of the moon, has just enough punch to remind you why werewolf movies never go out of style.

Looking back four decades later, Silver Bullet is soaked in nostalgia, saturated in mythology, and baked in King. But it never quite breaks free to bask in the moonlight. It’s not the best werewolf movie of the ‘80s, not by a long shot—but for horror fans prowling the aisles in search of VHS-era chills, it’s still worth a late-night rental.

📼 Staff Pick!
“Stephen King writes it. Gary Busey chews it. A kid in a turbo wheelchair vs. a werewolf—how can you not at least take this home for the weekend?”

  • Saul Muerte

V/H/S/Halloween (2025): Analog Nightmares, Digital Fatigue

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Eight films in, and the V/H/S franchise has reached that strange liminal space between reinvention and redundancy. V/H/S/Halloween promises another grab bag of analog nightmares, but what it ultimately offers is a reminder that this format — and perhaps found footage itself — is struggling to justify its continued revival.

Segmented through Bryan M. Ferguson’s Diet Phantasma, a frame narrative about a possessed soft drink, the film pulses between absurdist body horror and tongue-in-cheek satire. It’s gory, chaotic, and knowingly silly — a kind of VHS-era Cronenberg-lite filtered through Slimehouse aesthetics. It’s amusing enough, but its placement between each short becomes little more than a sugar rush: a filler designed to jolt, not haunt.

Anna Zlokovic’s Coochie Coochie Coo aims for Barbarian-esque weirdness but collapses under its own shaky-cam chaos. It’s conceptually interesting — exploring the monstrous side of motherhood and lost innocence — yet the execution feels forced, desperate to shock rather than unsettle.

Paco Plaza’s Ut Supra Sic Infra is easily the standout. The [REC] director flexes his mastery of dread with a metaphysical descent into ritual horror and the supernatural. It’s slick, moody, and genuinely disorienting, proving that when the right filmmaker takes the reins, the V/H/S anthology format can still bite.

Casper Kelly’s Fun Size, however, is a regression — an infantile splatter piece that mistakes noise for novelty. Whether its deliberately bad performances are meant to parody ‘80s horror cheese or are just poorly handled is anyone’s guess, but it grates either way.

Alex Ross Perry’s Kidprint ends things on a troubling note, tackling child abduction and snuff imagery with an uneasy hand. The idea — a man unwittingly complicit in a ring of video-taped killings — could have been chilling, but the tone wobbles between exploitative and hollow. It’s a grim finish that leaves you numb rather than disturbed.

And that’s the core issue here: V/H/S/Halloween feels like it’s circling the drain of its own nostalgia. The analog grime, the static, the jittery cuts — once the aesthetic of underground menace — now play like ritualised pastiche. There are sparks of invention, but they’re buried under too many loud edits and too few genuine scares.

The Prognosis:

Maybe it’s time to admit what’s been lurking behind the flicker for years: the found footage format — once raw, immediate, and terrifying — is finally running out of tape.

  • Saul Muerte

The Drowned: A Mythic Thriller That Never Quite Breaks the Surface

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Greek myths meet murky waters in a low-budget thriller that almost makes it to shore.

Samuel Clemens’ The Drowned attempts to merge myth and morality within a low-budget psychological thriller, dipping into the murky waters of Greek legend to find something ancient beneath the surface. The results, however, are mixed—an ambitious premise buoyed by striking influences but ultimately weighed down by pacing and atmosphere that never fully submerge the viewer.

Drawing on the myth of Hylas and the nymphs—immortalised in John William Waterhouse’s 1896 oil painting—Clemens reimagines the seductive call of the sea as a modern-day reckoning for guilt and greed. Three thieves hole up in a seaside safehouse after stealing a priceless painting, only to find their fourth member missing and an ominous presence rising from the tide. The film’s mythological undercurrents give it a literary backbone, but they’re never quite fleshed out enough to transform into something transcendent.

There’s a palpable sense of ambition here: The Drowned tries to swim in deep waters, blending folklore, crime, and psychological tension. Yet much like the doomed figures in its inspiration, it finds itself lured by its own reflection—entranced by imagery but unable to escape the shallows of its limited scope.

Performances by Alan Calton, Lara Lemon, and Lily Catalifo lend the feature some stability, grounding its mythic aspirations in believable tension. The cinematography occasionally captures the desolate beauty of the coast with painterly intent, echoing Waterhouse’s haunting stillness. But the low budget is keenly felt, particularly in its uneven pacing and abrupt tonal shifts.

The Prognosis:

The Drowned deserves some credit for attempting to do more than most thrillers in its range—it’s an atmospheric, if uneven, meditation on temptation and consequence. Yet, despite its mythic intentions, it never quite earns its place among the more evocative modern fables. The sirens sing, but their song doesn’t linger.

  • Saul Muerte