Alister Grierson's Bloody Hell

Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you, the tnmn community.

Last week’s category: movies you love that your dog would hate. The results are posted to our website and Letterboxd account every week.

This week’s category: fast-paced movies. That is, movies that do not let up or slow down from the moment they start. Reply to this email with your submission and why we should watch it. We’ll feature it in next week’s newsletter.¹

¹ If your submission doesn't comply with the category, I’ll become an expert in the care and breeding of hamsters. Then, I’ll develop a pervasive, hamster-centric kids YouTube channel. My hamster sidekick, Hammy the Hamster (voiced by me) and I will sing songs and make up dances and teach kids about mixing colors or whatever. Our number one hit song will be the “Hamster Dancester.” It’ll be like, a really annoying, repetitive song. Eventually, we’ll expand into podcasting and sell books for kids of all ages. Board books, chapter books — we’ll be everywhere. As we build our following, kids will start begging their parents for hamsters. Hamsters will become the “it” thing again. Because Blake and Hammy the Hamster are always singing songs together about friendship and cleanup and playing nicely. Eventually, you’ll buy your kid a hamster because you get tired of hearing your kids ask for one. The first hamster that gets sold to you is supposed to be a boy. But it is clearly pregnant and it has a litter of pups within a week of coming home. You think, oh that’s so cute! But then, the mommy hamster eats her young and shits them out. What the fuck. Hamsters do this?! Yes. The answer is yes. Then, you’ll get a second hamster because your kid is sad about the first one. The new hamster is not pregnant. But your house will smell weird from that pet nesting or bedding material. It’ll be a little annoying, but you’ll get over it. As your kids and their hamsters grow closer, I’ll shift my content to discuss the benefits of cage-free living for hamsters, and your kids will let their hamsters loose in the house. Gross. And if you’re reading this thinking you won’t be affected because you don’t have kids yet: I plan to be making high-quality hamster content for a very long time. So if you plan on having kids, plan on having hamsters. And if you don’t, expect to see free-range hamsters in more of your friends’ houses, assuming any of them have kids. So, ya know. Follow the category.

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A man flees the country to escape his own personal hell.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

→ Campy movies. Ben O’Toole’s performance in this film feels like the unhinged Evil Dead 3 version of Bruce Campbell.

→ Expositions and cutscenes. When movies explain things and don’t make you think that hard.

→ Over. The. Fucking. Top.² The film is unapologetically over the top in every possible way. It’s fun for fun’s sake.

² I took some time to reflect on the phrase “over the top” by Googling “over the top phrase origin” – the results of which I under-examined to a criminal extent. The first link I clicked took me to a website called PhraseFinder. The writer of the website, Gary Martin, suggests that the the first use of the expression ‘Over the top’ was in WWI, describing advances made over the top of allied trenches. Neat.

Gary Martin founded PhraseFinder in 1997, initially to serve as the internet’s foremost phrase thesaurus. In 1998, Martin introduced the Meanings and Origins section, which now claims to be the world’s largest public reference of phrase origins on the internet (it is home to over 2,400 entries). Later in 1998, a discussion forum was added to the site, which has garnered over 70,000 questions posted in its lifetime — the records of which are meticulously archived for public consumption. Today, the site claims that, over the past 26 years, more than 700 million of Martin’s pages have been downloaded by readers. And that he is one of the most popular and trusted sources of information on phrases and idioms.

Sometime since 1998, Martin added a column on the site called Famous Last Words — an archive of the last words of famous figures who’ve passed away. The link to this section doesn’t work. But just below this link, on the homepage, is another that goes to a part of the site called Notable Suicide Notes. This section, predictably, is a listing of famous figures who committed suicide, and quotes from the notes they left behind. It includes snippets of suicide notes from pop culture icons as recent or more so as Kurt Cobain, poets from the 1930s like Hart Crane, and (I’m not kidding) Adolf Hitler. It’s a very strange listing of people. Hart Crane’s note, I suspect, was not given the time it deserved. The snippet pulled for the site simply reads: “Goodbye, everybody.” It’s likely he had more to say. The note from Sid Vicious, the English punk musician, is heart-wrenching.

I thought this was just an idiom dictionary. Hats off to you, Gary Martin. I’m fascinated. I think I’m done here.

What I liked about it.

Something about watching a campy thriller feels just right in October. Alister Grierson’s Bloody Hell is a bonkers, tongue-in-cheek grindhouse film, drenched in deranged humor and violence.

The film comes out guns blazing from the first minute, and there’s rarely a lull in the hour and a half runtime. Everything about this movie is over-the-top. So clearly a loving tribute to the campy thriller movies of old.

Writer Robert Benjamin’s script lays it on thick, over and over again, with less and less subtlety as the film progresses.

In Bloody Hell, when a desperate character spots a weapon they can use to dispose of a threat, they don’t just pick it up and use it. The narrative pauses and a cutscene portrays that character charmed and in love, dancing with the weapon in a bright green meadow.

The backstories aren’t unveiled with any nuance. Characters walk other characters through their origin story end-to-end, and the viewer is treated to a cutscene accompanying the narration.

The score makes use of an excessively hammy violin and a nod to 80’s horror synth, both of which suggest heavy influences from Giallo horror classics like Suspiria and slasher films like Friday The 13th.

And the characters themselves are radical. Ben O’Toole’s manic, loose-cannon energy would feel right at home in a classic Sam Raimi film.

In fact, much of the film’s dialogue and personality relies on O’Toole, who pulls double duty as Rex and an imaginary version of his own conscience (e.g. Rex, but with slicked back hair).

The performances around O’Toole all bring an admirable level of camp. No doubt the product of Grierson’s direction, which I estimate was something like: “Do more. And then do more again. And then keep doing more.”

I don’t want to get all therapeutic on you. But, I’m the writer and I’m in charge of what gets written next.

You have to think a lot. You have responsibilities. Things to worry about. Like, you have a kid. Or a dog. Or a family. Or a job. Or school. Or debt. Or something that preoccupies you. And this sort of preoccupation makes you less relaxed.

Films like Bloody Hell are pure and simple escapism. A chance to pull the plug on your brain and watch someone jam a golf club in place of their sawed-off leg and beat someone to death with that very same sawed-off leg.

Bloody Hell doesn’t take itself too seriously, and neither should you. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the bloodbath.

Enjoy the film.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

→ Robert Benjamin was inspired to write Bloody Hell at an airport. In his words: “I was in a tram, and there was a family of foreigners. Probably Eastern Europeans, or something like that. They were chatting in their language, and one of the women would look at me and smile and then go back to chatting. And then look at me again and smile, and then go back again to chatting. And I was like… What the hell are they talking about? They were probably being very nice, but I, apparently me, I had to hypothetically think about what I would do if I woke up chained to a water pipe in a basement? So I went to the gift shop at the airport, and I started jotting down all these ideas about what I would do. I think I actually outlined the entire movie at that gate.”

→ The Finnish family is played predominantly by Australian actors. They memorized their Finnish lines phonetically. Finnish folk might notice the accents don’t ring entirely true, despite there being an accent coach on site for the production. Meg Fraser, who plays the heroine: “I just went on YouTube. My grandpa loved cars, and so the only Finnish person I’d ever heard of was the Flying Finn, so I was just watching footage of this race car driver and just pausing, stopping, copying his accent.”

One great line of dialogue from the film.

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