The Gory Details (Gross)

Gory Details #49: "Pete and the Carnivorous Phalli"

There's no doubt that The Lord of the Rings series from New Line Cinema is a Gore Monger's paradise. They have bloody sword fights like preschools have temper tantrums and when they're not fighting it out currently, they show you the bodies of the victims from the last battle. This can be merely cool as in the cobweb covered corpses of the dwarves in Moria, or inspired gore like the hurling of heads of the white riders over the wall into Minis Tirith. (A scene that's in the original books by the way.) Sooner or later a jealous gore monger such as myself has to ask; "who had Frodo foam at the mouth like that when the spider stung him?" "Who is the gore master who made us watch Gollum eat raw fish and rabbits?"

Well wonder no longer. In the spirit of dedication and reliability that has made this Gore Monger famous, I spent five minutes on the internet looking up Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings and lord, what a gore man.

First of all, "straight" movies such as LOTR and King Kong are a new trick for Mr. Jackson. He started with little known splatter flicks filmed in a television studio in his native New Zealand. The first of these was called "Bad Taste" and featured Jackson in the lead role as a young man fighting off aliens bent on using humans in their fast food chain. It was so gross, it was originally banned in Australia.

My favorite of these early movies has got to be the 1992 production "Brain Dead" released in the United States as "Dead Alive." It bills itself as the goriest movie ever made. The plot revolves around the local lawnmower who must save his girlfriend from his mother and her friends who have all been turned into zombies. One of the high points of the movie comes fairly early on as mom, who has been bitten by an evil monkey and is literally coming apart, scratches her ear off and inadvertently eats it while she's having pudding.

There's a zombie baby and a hysterical scene where the baby gets loose in a park and the lawnmower takes hold of the baby by the feet and beats it against a swing set. The mothers, sitting around the park on blankets don't know the baby is a zombie and are horrified.

The climax of the movie is, for me, a rare treasure. The entire house has been filled with zombies. Our hero returns, lawnmower slung over his shoulder and mows, literally, mows everybody down. It's gross, it's heavenly. Although I would never actually mow a lawn, I keep a lawnmower in the garage just in case of zombie attack.

He also has the ability to slide smoothly from more to less realistic forms of gore without a seam. In "King Kong" for example, the ship's crew members fall into a crevasse and are attacked by giant bugs. These are cool and somewhat gross. It is only after the bugs are beaten back that bizarre, I can only call them penis creatures, rise up out of the muck and begin eating people. If they'd of started the scene with those bizarre toothed phalli they would definitely have lost me. Come to think of it, that scene kind of lost me anyway, but it was gory.

I wanted to reserve a few words in this essay for a particularly remarkable job Jackson did on a character in the Lord of the Rings that was maybe not the goryiest. In his books, Tolkien describes the Balrog as composed of shadow and flame. Jackson's Balrog, is black and hard to see till he roars. Then his skin breaks open in fire. His mouth is a crucible and ripples of heat emanate from it. With Jackson's attention to detail, Gandalf sweats and his hair mats as he faces the unholy beast. Composed of models, computer rendering and live actors, I consider Gandalf's battle with the Balrog to be Jackson's best work.

While it's exciting to see a great director breaking out of genera and having success before a wider audience, I hope Jackson will remember the blood stains he left of the studios of his native New Zealand and grace us once again with his bloody vision.

Now get out there and write.

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