Cutting Moments (1997)

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A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #138

One of the short films covered for this review is Douglas Buck's Cutting Moments (1997), a notorious but acclaimed short film. The review however stems from a complication anthology of shorts from a company named EI Independent Cinema that originally came out on VHS, the compilation's name taken from the titular short itself. The film was released in Britain from ILC Media, a long gone company whose released included horror titles that would eventually get blu-ray releases a decade later and, more bizarrely, hentai anime like La Blue Girl Returns (2001) and hour long features like Alien from the Darkness (1996), material that emphasised the more unsavoury stereotypes of anime, many of them involving tentacles being used inappropriately, and a decision for all of them foreordained to fail as, unlike the more palatable and interesting anime they also released like the Project A-Ko films, none of the hentai anime even in the current 2010s would be passed uncut still by the British Board of Film Classification let alone back in the early 2000s DVD boom, even the most stringent of believers in free speech like myself aware that butchering these releases for their content comes with an understandable reason from the BBFC.

In amongst these type of releases was also Cutting Moments. The anthology is really a compilation of late eighties to mid-nineties shorts. No bookends, no narrative to connect them, just a compendium of five shorts intercut literally with a knife cutting through a white sheet to separate the shorts. The shorts were wisely placed in order from the most absurd first progressing to the bleakest in Cutting Moments itself. The shorts visibly come from different years, an accidental connective tissue found in that, even if some have really shaky acting or sluggishness to them, they all are evidence to the blurring lines between genre and its polar opposite of artistic and dramatic work, where in reality the more unconventional genre works slip between drama and other areas of cinema pretty easily. Independent cinema, where these shorts come from, especially those of the lo-fi or underground sort are in the centre of two parallel sides. Especially as these are all American productions, they belong to a large melting pot in the middle of these parallels part of the United States' vibrant and rich alternative cinema. One side is genres in their strictest sense (monster films, slashers, pornography) etc., the other side from John Cassavetes to experimental cinema, both sides with a tendency to blur together a lot more than one presume with them being polar "opposites" on the surface.

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Crack Dog (Dir. Casey Kehoe, 1988):

With that in mind, let's not kid ourselves about Crack Dog being anything else but a weird idea its creator had brought to life. Arguably the weakest of them all, the closest to a silly premise like from Troma, but still amusing because it never lasts long enough where its doomed to dwindling results. In a post apocalypse, or an urban squalor so dire it's close to an Italian post apocalyptic film in look, a man has a sentient dog, with a pink Mohawk and spiked collar, who wants him to take the dog to try out some crack for the first time, invading a crack dealer's apartment violently to do so. It's one virtue, in spite of its silliness, is that it possesses the same squalid absurdity of New York City based horror films from the eighties like Basket Case (1982) and Street Trash (1987). Apt as Vic Noto, who played the Hobo King of the Junkyard in Street Trash, is in the very tiny cast emphasising this fact. It's a short out of all five that feels the most direct to such bizarre genre films from tgee time, making a nice beginning nonetheless in spite of its innate flimsiness.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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Don't Nag Me (Dirs. Tim Healy and Gino Panaro, 1987):

Another man, a traumatised WWII veteran (Tom Healy), murders his Australian wife only to confess his guilt, explaining at the electric chair how she continued to nag him after death. This begins the blurring of genres as I mentioned, a drama in structure that just happens to also be horror and also intentionally comedic in a dark way. The virtue of a short like this, whilst predictable and far from perfect, is the sense of personality seeing people rarely found in Hollywood films in these roles, more realistic with verisimilitude as a result. As a short, there's not a lot to actively discuss, when the experience is more in just watching it for yourself, but this personality both adds to the film and gives me something to talk about. That its low budget gives it far more character in what it has to do in terms of locations and sets. A main performances from an older man that's interesting regardless of whether its good acting or not technically, his appearance and how he performs his role interesting in terms of both the short and looking outside at the short. A surprisingly amount of subtly in detail also helps what is a sickly humoured, one which whilst obvious I appreciated immensely.

Abstract Spectrum: None

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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A Bowl of Oatmeal (Dirs. Dietmar Post, Lawrence Gise, Matthew Bezanis, David White, Leslie Hucko and Hsia-Huey Wu, 1996):

Skipping forwards into the mid-to-late nineties, you get to the weirdest one of the five, a short that was still etched into my brain over a decade since I first saw it in this compilation. A short that can only work at this length but evokes an utterly unnatural premise not from the supernatural but a grimy, ugly realism. A man (Pietro Gonzales), in poverty and spending most of the film in dirty y-fronts and vest, makes a bowl of oatmeal only for it to start talking to him. His ego, inexplicably in the form of this meal, tries to get him to live his life, to meet people and take up hobbies. One idea to take up crafting however leads the man to steal vast quantities of meat from butchers' vans to create something to fill the void of loneliness. It's a bizarre viewing experience made more so as their weirdness comes from a vein of depression. Downbeat, dirt strewn environments are where this short takes place, showing the city centres of the nineties as being as bleak and depressing to be within as they could be in the eighties shorts, and the man's living quarters a depiction of his fragile mind as all this takes place.. This obscurity amongst obscurities called A Bowl of Oatmeal manages to be effective in the smallest of lengths.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

The Principles of Karma (Dir. Craig Wallace, 1996):

This short feels time stamped to its era of its making, attempting a nineties Greg Araki film but with the obvious difficulty in trying to encapsulate what makes the likes of The Doom Generation (1995) both loved and reviled. It doesn't look the same at all - not a colourful, aesthetically precise work like Araki's - but does takes the Generation X  mood instead from his work. Originally The Principles of Karma was the one that really let the anthology down, and a lot of that is to do that, eventually, its plot of a deadbeat high scholar being indoctrinated into a pre-Fight Club world of subversion by a TV repair man does peter out. The initial idea that he and his team of masked figures are kidnapping teenagers to un-brainwash them from drab suburbia is a shot of subversion, but not reaching the heights of an Araki film, or the highest watermark of this type of eighties and nineties cinema, Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984), in terms of actually being subversive in a genre bending way.

Far more interesting, and why The Principles of Karma has grown in quality for me, is the first half following our stereotypical Gen-X'er's miserable, Möbius strip like life. Get up, get beat up at school, wait at the bus station for hours, get home only for his parents to be glued to the television and barely register him, go up stairs to listen to music, sleep, repeat. Even if he's your stereotype of this type of person he, alongside having nice taste in fashion with a t-shirt with Akira (1988) on it, is sympathetic as the film maker uses proto-comedy torture by extending this cycle for most of its running time. The pay off with the TV repair man could've be completely excised, more found in this initial and far more rewarding example of how utterly miserable high-lower class to middle class life if for anyone, not just Americans in the nineties like this character.

Abstract Spectrum: None

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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Cutting Moments (Dir. Douglas Buck, 1997):

After the other shorts, Cutting Moments is a drastic change. It's completely opposed to the other shorts, clashing violently against them but was wisely made the last of them all. Both because it's the best but because of how unremittingly bleak it is, ending the anthology for anyone to feel emotionally destitute but the only short appropriate to have ended on. While its notorious for its level of violence¹, the more sobering and rewarding surprise is that it's a psychological drama which never gets to its sickening violence until the last ten minutes or so, forcing you through the bleakest suburban drama possible first. It builds slowly with a discomforting chill based in reality. A completely disconnected couple (Gary Betsworth and Nicca Ray) have major personal issues, barely talk to one another, and their son is about to be taken away from them into custody. The issue for the later is unknown but it's a catalyst for an even greater sense of distress that fills the short's mood like a painful silence. (Possibly even abuse as there's a shot of the boy's Power Ranger dolls laid in what the shot evokes as a sexual position, one which nonetheless makes the father, watching his son playing in the garden, uncomfortable and hints at a back story the director wisely never elaborates on, making it more distressing).

It builds from this, an aesthetic like the other shorts build from lo-fi verisimilitude, where the props feel like they were donated from the production crew's own homes or from a charity/Samaritan store. Unknown actors, who in this case share a great performance together of immense coldness and the sense of these two both having to suppress emotional angst, emphasis that named stars can actually be a deterrent in how arch and artificial they could be in such roles; in place of unknowns and actors from theatre etc here who carry the weight of this short superbly. Then, when the wife dresses up to try to romance her husband only for him to ignore her for a sports game, she first takes an scouring pad to her lips to remove the lipstick than cuts them off with scissors.

Tom Savini, who did the horrifying practical effects that take place, called this film the sickest he ever worked on but the change to realistic gore, involving consensual mutilation and self harm, is closer to Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009) and a sequence in Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972) involving self mutilation of the genitals with glass. Internal emotional harm portrayed in a grotesque and extreme metaphor, something rarely to be acted out in real life but as appropriate in a story for portraying this breaking point for both characters. No one will leave the film feeling anything but being stabbed in the gut, even when it comes to this violence sombre and successfully serious in tone. As the final shots are Polaroids of the eventual crime scene and the reactions of horrified police officers and people to come take the son away to safety, still playing outside in the yard, it's the bleakest thing to leave this anthology from but that's not a bad thing considering the short's incredible accomplishments.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) The version of Cutting Moments from the titular anthology is censored for the old 2000s UK DVD. That doesn't however stop the impact in the slightest, so I advise caution for any potential viewer which whatever version they see. It's a short you're prepared to see, rather than accidentally stumble over or be forced to see, even if you'll feel as awful as I did afterwards in doing so.