Wound

One thing is clear (not only by the first two comments left for the film) and that is, that movie will divide peoples opinion. And I'm guessing that is exactly what the filmmaker intended to do. So goal achieved, everyone is happy, right?

That is for you to decide, if you are willing to go into a trip that is more than bizarre and really not an easy view. I liked a few ideas and some visuals (even the slow moving pace didn't bother me, but I'm thinking it will offend some people, if they are not offended by the effects already). But it seemed to be missing something. It is crazy and has tendencies to show some things, but leave other things to your imagination.

And then it dares to challenge the viewer to make up his/her mind, to what they think about certain social situations. It is very graphic and it is very disturbing. I'm not going to dare you, to watch it. But bare in mind, that if you do not get into the movie up until the first 10 minutes, you never will!

When a film opens by mercilessly depicting a penis being gruesomely castrated with a pair of scissors, you know that, if nothing else, you're in for something interesting. And Wound is just that, unrelenting for its entire 77 minute runtime.

A mere five minutes following the genital mutilation, a nude, submissive housewife is tortured by her "master" in front of a camera. The nightmarish imagery does not end there. Other eccentric scenes include an animalistic rape by a man in a pig mask, incestuous teat suckling and a nasty birthing scene featuring a deformed, blood-spewing vagina.

As a result of the questionable content, Wound stirred up a bit of controversy in its home country of New Zealand. While people unfamiliar with the genre might make a fuss about it, the graphic content doesn't hold a candle to the likes of A Serbian Film or even The Human Centipede. Nothing but overblown claims to drum up press.

Between the bizarre sequences lies the perplexing story of a mother uniting with her daughter. The plot is not easy to follow, but there are two sides to the story. On one hand, an orphan, Tanya (Te Kaea Beri), searches for the mother that she has never met. Meanwhile, the mother, Susan (Kate O'Rourke), believes that her unborn daughter is taking over her life.

Susan struggles with metal illness, which accounts for the film's nonlinear structure. Acclaimed filmmaker Ken Russell (The Who's Tommy) hailed the movie as a "masterpiece." While I wouldn't go that far, Wound does share the unsettling, dreamlike atmosphere with Russell's Altered States.

Writer/director David Blyth has been in the industry for some 35 years, but Wound feels more like an independent filmmaker's early attempt at experimentation with controversial issues. Blyth, whose most notable effort is helming a handful of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers episodes, recently took off the better part of a decade to focus on documentary work. Wound marks his return to features and, perhaps, a rebirth as a director as well.

OK I am a huge fan of some of the most disturbing films ever committed to celluloid and for some reason this film rubbed me the wrong way. I was disturbed and unsettled but not in a good way or the way that any of the recent french body horror films have disturbed me. The director of this film made one of my favorite zombie films of the 1980's Death Warmed Up and has slipped into shadows ever since. I am not sure if I want to know the depths of those shadows that has caused him to make this film nearly 30 years later. I warn everyone in advance this is not for the weak of heart and is every bit as offensive and disturbing as Human Centipede 2, A Serbian Film and the Antichrist. Hell I think it may exceed some of those. This film reminding me a bit of that fantastic 2009 aussi effort Family Demons but nowhere near as good. To be honest this film dragged out in the last quarter and may have fit a short film instead of a full length feature film. In defence there is a lot worse out there and if you can get by the first 10 minutes of the film, hell you may enjoy it more than I did.

This film doesn't even deserve a one star rating. The actors and actresses, special effects are way beyond horrible. The simple fact is that an elementary school child could have made a better film. What truly amazes me are all the positive reviews of this dribble labeled a film. I only could stand to watch about 2 minutes before I just had to turn it off. Any positive reviews come from people either smoking their own supply or just simply paid off lackeys trying to generate some type of income for the film. Do not even waste your time watching this trash. In my opinion a root canal would be more enjoyable then having to suffer anymore than five minutes of this movie. Anyone else who says otherwise is just outright living in fantasy land.

Delving into the darkest chasms that family ties can hold, Wound is quite an experience. It centers on Susan, a deeply troubled young lady who commits a purgative (and gruesome) act of violence at the outset, but then finds herself plagued by her lost daughter and cannot escape her demons. To say more would be spoiling things, suffice to say that Wound has a good deal of the Lynchian to it, though Lynch never got this wild. Up front sexual perversion and several sequences of strikingly grotesque imagery mixed into a patchy structure of fantastical psycho-drama, in a mostly ordinary setting with low fi production values, this is definitely going to be quite an audience divider. It's the second horror from director David Blyth, after Death Warmed Up (which I haven't seen) but the long gap between that film and this hardly shows, there's a punky energy and ferocious derangement here that feels pleasingly fresh. Fearless performances keep things intense, Kate O'Rourke and Te Kaea Beri do fine work as mother Susan and daughter Tanya respectively, both thrown into some seriously twisted situations and they perform with gusto, holding the film together despite its fractured structure. Campbell Cooley and Brendan Gregory hold up the male side of things, the former suitably creepy as an S&M master. Men do not by and large come off well in this one, but then neither does almost anyone, this isn't trying to be an even handed film or even one of rounded characters but more of a nightmare trip and in that respect it does pretty well. A little more of the ordinary would have helped though, things start to get a little exhausting and more could have been done to offset the strangeness. Then on the other hand, some of the leafy suburban New Zealand locales do provide a bit of grounding to things. The film also feels a little short, though it gets its point across, such as I thought its point to be, things are somewhat underdeveloped, there's fascinating potential in the characters and themes that as the end credits roll is left to the audiences imagination. Of course its equally possible that repeat viewings would make everything clearer, but I think the complaint still stands. Finally, the gore effects show their budget, but then this is perhaps for the best. An outcry and attempt to ban this one by NZ moral campaigners foundered at the sight of its, well, not 100% convincing effects, so perhaps they are why the film wasn't locked away. Despite these complaints, I had a fine time with this one, it's a little tricky to fully recommend as its sure to rub a good deal up the wrong way, but if you can stand surreal ambition, grim perversion and low brow splatter fused in a disturbed and slightly shonky hybrid, this will be a film for you.