THE CUT (2007)

I never went to college, let alone film school, but if there's any film school professors out there looking for an perfect example of a movie being way, way, way more confusing than it need to be then THE CUT is for you.

I'm going to attempt to explain to you what the film is about (spoilers and all), because honestly it doesn't even matter...this film is garbage: a group of students begin their new Anatomy class where they have to dissect human bodies. For over 30 minutes absolutely nothing happens to the point where I started thinking this was maybe a drama film and not a horror film at all. Finally at 33 minutes, a female student goes to the lab in the middle of the night to do some extra studying, while she's there the lights go out and suddenly dead bodies start moving all over the place. Sounds creepy, but it wasn't at all. I've seen covers of Goosebumps books that were scarier. Anyway, she ends up dead and in the morning the students find her on an autopsy table with her heart removed. This starts a whole series of boring kills where people end up with their hearts removed.

Easy enough so far, even if it's not exciting, but then the main girl takes it upon herself to start investigating the murders (which begs the question: where are the police?). She discovers, with the help of a ghost, that there was once a young deaf/mute woman who was raised by hookers and one night she was stabbed for refusing to fuck a guy and her body dumped off at a hospital. She lived and is taken under the wing of a young doctor who helps her learn sign language. Things are going fine until one day she's kidnapped by rogue doctors and given an illegal heart transplant! Her doctor friend bursts in during the middle of the surgery and is rewarded with a scalpel to the eyehole. The woman dies during the surgery and now her ghost is haunting the daughter of the nurse that helped with the surgery who herself was stabbed to death with a pair of scissors by her husband who later tried to strangle to death the little girl who is now the main medical girl. But the husband wasn't her father because it's actually her present-day professor who is her dad because he knocked up the nurse. He's also the one that did the illegal heart transplant surgery and has kept the deaf/mute girl's dead body in a giant container of formaldehyde in his secret office along with a few hundred human hearts. I think he might have been the one doing the killings, but it also mentions that the main girl is possessed by the ghost...I think. I was yawning too hard to know for sure.

Either way, whoever was doing the killings it doesn't even matter in the least, because all of the deaths were beyond weak. Zero scares outside of loud noises, zero nudity, annoying and gross looking fat guy that eats during an autopsy, crappy looking special effects, unattractive females all around, an almost deserted college campus. There is absolutely nothing going for this film. Even ANATOMY (which I didn't really enjoy) is a better movie.

Skip it with a vengeance and forget that this movie even exists.

HELLFIGHTERS (1968)

Co-star Katharine Ross might have called HELLFIGHTERS "...the biggest piece of crap I've ever done!" and James Coburn might have once called director Andrew V. McLaglen a "hack", but I thought HELLFIGHTERS was entertaining enough.

John Wayne and Jim Hutton are the two Big Kahuna's at an oil well firefighting outfit. They come across as so rugged and tough that you're almost lead to believe that they just drop their pants, saunter out to the raging inferno and club it to death with their giant raging peckers, but no they have to use actual tools like tractors, high-pressure water cannons and nitroglycerin (to displace the oxygen feeding the fire). The firefighting scenes are exciting and the fires themselves are huge, but the funniest part of the movie is the women in their lives. Wayne's wife, well, ex-wife left him years ago (even though she's still in love with him) because she was just too goddamn scared that Wayne was going to get killed.  Haha. And as fate would have it Jim marries Wayne's daughter! So now for the rest of the movie both women sit on the sidelines and worry nonstop about these two firefighting superstuds they're in love with. I found this to be hilarious.

Sexist subplot aside the firefighting scenes were dramatic, well shot and educational (I had no idea how they put out oil well fires). Worth a watch...as long as you have a sense of humor. I would actually like to see a more realistic and grittier remake of this film.

Fun Fact: McLaglen went on to direct the legendary bad movie MITCHELL that was immortalized for all time by MST3K. "Baby oil?! NO!!!!"

Good grief.