Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

40th Kill

Do you ever despair for humanity? Does it hit you sometimes that maybe people are just innately selfish and stupid? Are you weighed down with the profound futility of it all? Well, Stuck is NOT the movie that's going to make you feel better about all of that.

Inspired by a true story about a dipshit care-home nurse who hit a homeless man with her car, resulting in him being wedged through her windshield and rather than stop the car and help him, she calmly drove home, parked in her garage and went inside, leaving him to die of his injuries overnight. Yep, pretty awful. Before you give this up as a lost cause, I should say that the story has been tweaked for this ficitonalised account - the crash happens and she does indeed drive home and leave him in the garage, but events play out a little differently after that. It's something much more narratively dramatic and satisfying because, well, real life is rarely that, even at the best of times.

Mena Suvari is excellent as our protagonist/antagonist - heavier on the an- than the pro-, for obvious reasons. Stephen Rea plays this poor bastard who has one hell of a 24 hours over the course of this film, and he's also strong, despite spending much of the film inverted.

Stuart Gordon keeps the style pretty low key, but it's a very gripping narrative. Surprisingly, it's also a very effective black comedy. Everything is played pretty straight, there are no misguided jokes involved - it's just staged in such a way that the outlandishness of the situation naturally brings its own humour.

I would recommend this film to a berserker warrior - a great one to watch just before a battle if you needed something to work you up into a screaming, frothing rage. A double feature with Compliance would work wonders for your destructive capacity.

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

Not a body count film but there are two deaths right at the end which are pretty fucking brutal - one involves fatal eye trauma and the other an incredibly impressive bit of pyro stunt work which is seamlessly melded into the actor footage, to the point where I wondered if a stunt double was even used (surely one was, though!!!)