Tim Roufs
"Crimson Tide"*
Draft #1
Blood has become a hot commodity as the cheap crimson liquid splashes from human bodies all over neighborhood movie screens. Wide-eyed audiences look on--their mouths gaping in horror. And forth-rate movie producers clean up. In some cases $50 million--on a $300,000 investment.
People pay blood to see bodies severed, hacked, gouged, mangled, and mutilated. Directors appeal to the basest of instincts. Kids boil their parents to death in The Children. X impales a woman on a meathook in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Y slices (cuts) a cops ear off in Reservoir Dogs. Blood flies from blown-off heads in Pulp Fiction. Blood flies from Fargo to Brainerd to Minneapolis, courtesy of the Cohen boys. As a joke! A sick joke!!
The sole survivor of a massacre beheads the alleed murder in Friday the 13th--The headless not-quite-lifelless corps walking around with arms still jerking the in the air.
Even history movies are gory: Glory glorifies cannon fodder. Platoon gorifies glory.
Only imagination limits the gore. Unless, of course, you're into the illegal "snuf" films--where you watch on to the real-life killing and dismemberment of an attractive aspiring porn star. Suddenly the saying "The whole is greater greater than the sum of the parts" takes on new heretofore unimagined meaning.
Cannibalistic ghouls, with rotting skin dripping like candle wax, munch victims' body parts. Good-looking Hannibal Lector reads Gormet magazine, fantasizing having his neighbor over for lunch. Prehistoric fish-turned-four-legged monsters force their parts on reluctant women. He-man warriors part the parts.
When will producers run out of novel ways to rip and chop and shred body parts?
As the chopped off close-ups lose their novelty, producers grop-on for new parts to sever. Their sick minds have the imagination to cut off, to blast off, to shred, parts or wholes.
And it's GREAT!
It's great that people, Hannibal not included, are getting fed up on body steaks and body burgers. Their appetite for . . . . is saturated. . . .
*Adapted from The Writer's Options: Combining to Composing (2nd ed.), by Donald A. Daiker, Andrew A. Kerieck, and Max Morenberg. NY: Harper & Row, pp. 354-356.
Tim Roufs' Draft #2
Audience = Readers of University Film Society Newsletter