August Underground's Mordum

I've seen many movies that are more disturbing than this one, but few (if any) that are more offensive. I can't decide whether I should be impressed with the filmmakers' abilities to create something that so perfectly encapsulates the psychoses of worthless and inhuman pieces of shit, or whether I should be perturbed that  someone would want to expend any effort on bothering to do something like create this movie in the first place.

Calling this a movie is kind of a stretch. It's an effort to imitate home video taken by a group of people who enjoy torturing and killing other people. Given that it looks like refried shit, the verite aspect of it is locked down. The shoddy video quality, combined with surprisingly competent makeup and effects, make for unpleasant viewing. If you imagine that you're seeing a video diary taken by bad people in real life, this could scar for for some time.

However, this being the age of mass communication and the Internet and such, it's at the same time obvious that this is not a real document. This is underscored by the fact that the killers are terrible actors. Either that or they're the most insipid and wretched pieces of unwanted afterbirth ever to ham it up in front of a handheld video camera. You've got the fat guy - he fights with his girlfriend constantly, most often over his desire to see other dudes' penises and the fact that his girlfriend has sex with her brother. Fat guy looks about as intimidating as the average video store clerk and in candid moments in the film when he gets tipsy and talks silly, or mugs it up while victims are being assaulted, he has a perfectly punchable face. Then there's fat craaazy girl. She's the most verbally abusive of the trio. She has a penchant for vocalizing how their victims must feel, and is most prone to eye-rolling theatrics. Fat craaazy girl has a scene with two victims where she vomits on them for at least 8 or 9 minutes and another one where she violates a captive woman with the severed penis of another victim. I'd say she's the epitome of banal TOTALLY EXTREEEME PSYCHO but that honor goes to her sibling/sexual partner. Hair farmer guy looks just like beardo Josh from Blair Witch Project and is a walking, gibbering stereotype of what you imagine a way out there scary serial killer dude would be like. He has the lion's share of repulsive moments here, among them raping the exposed internal organs of a victim and raping the corpse of a preteen girl in a bathtub while covered in shit.

The dialogue in this film is, in all honesty, over 50% the word "fuck". It's like they're reading a mad lib where every blank was filled with that word. Also, all three of them NEVER SHUT UP. They're goading, teasing, shouting, cursing, spitting and above all laughing nonstop. It's annoying as shit. To be honest, the aural cacophony is bad-trip-on-cheap-psychedelics unpleasant, so if you assume that the filmmakers were just trying to provide as nasty and debased an experience as they could, I guess it works in that regard.

So there you have it. If you've always wanted to see what it would be like if someone took the "Henry and Otis film their exploits" scene from Henry:Portrait of a Serial Killer and made an entire movie (or 3 of them, for that matter) out of it, only worse, then here you go. It's not good, and it's an awful experience to sit all the way through it. In fact, it's honestly more disturbing to consider the motives of those behind this than to take the events shown in the video at face value. So there's that.

Tomorrow: A Serbian Film