In the American backyard of the film process, independent genre director Brian Pauline makes an interesting movie. The long-haired horror maker, who likes to play significant timekeeping roles in his films, warns in advance in Blood Pigs: you will watch a gore film. All claims about the abundance of bloody scenes should immediately disappear - gore is gore. Although the zombie material itself implies a lot of unpleasant moments.
The name should not be taken literally. Of course, the director did not make a horror film about pigs eating people like Australian sheep. The director is generally not too fond of humor, more focusing on the atmosphere and half-mad action. The director, figuratively speaking, releases the reins of the plot, allowing him to develop independently. Of course, devoid of logic action not everyone will like, as well as the bloody bacchanalia that happens on the screen almost all the time. But the author did not think that his film would be seen by many. In Russia, no one has ever translated it, although this semi-amateur work, where there are quite understandable professional flaws, sometimes attracts more than the obviously imitative “Land of the Vampires”.
The similarity with the film of Jim Mickle is obvious - here and there is a post-apocalyptic entourage, as well as a courageous zombie fighter, to which the guy nailed. Pauline, unlike Mickle, understands that he is filming. His love for George Romero is manifested in borrowing the motives of his glorious zombie tapes, but not in the desire to shoot a drama on zombie material. Someone has succeeded, for example, Danny Boyle, but Mickle is not, and his film, pretending to be a serious narrative, deserves fair criticism in his address.
Pauline rather continues the mythology of his own film “Bone Disease”. If that film depicted the beginning of a zombie epidemic, then Blood Pigs is its natural outcome. Large spaces are depopulated, survivors huddle in abandoned buildings, and zombies are so cruel that they even kill each other. Add to this the appearance of demons, guardians of the world of the dead. They are quite watching as hell reigns on earth, and the number of living is decreasing every day.
Despite the sometimes unprofessional manner of shooting (sorry to the director, he did not learn to make films), Pauline’s work does not cause rejection, because much redeems the energy of action, multiplied by the depressive atmosphere and sometimes Lovecraftian madness. Pauline masterfully uses sound effects, protecting the viewer from amateur sweetness as much as possible. Instead of music, some howls resembling a hum (and maybe this is music in the style of noise?), static scenes that paint the beauty of nature are replaced by unexpected zombies, whose attacks the director mounts almost in a clip style. And sometimes the camera freezes and with obvious pleasure shows us the cutting of people. Moreover, if in “Disease of Bones” Pauline quoted “Night of the Living Dead” and “Mad Men”, then in “Blood Pigs” – more from “Dawn of the Dead”.
The abandoned building, which seemed impregnable to the heroes, was attacked by a horde of zombies, as well as monsters hiding inside people. Brian Pauline even played a marauder himself, who at that time with his girlfriend robbed a house while the owners were eating zombies. But soon their turn comes, and now the cruel living dead literally tears the butt of the marauder girl to the accompaniment of her desperate screams and chews her rectum with special gusto, as if performing medieval ideas about the cruel bodily tortures of sinners in hell.
The sadistic imagination of the director is combined with a whimsical plot, where the linear narrative is replaced by a series of flashbacks and flash forwards. Pauline is free from the obsession with violence that characterizes early Schnaas, Todd Shitts and Joe Castro, and moves easily from stage to stage, forcing actors to moderately realistically portray horror, despair, pain and death.
From such a film, someone will be horrified, someone will be hammered in a joyful convulsion, and someone will note that the director, although he makes a super low-budget film, has his own style and rare talent almost without money to create horror. His films take not only clearly sick imagination of the creator, but also a certain cinematicity, when shown on the screen is perceived not as a plot about a group of enthusiasts who are somewhere in the barn and on wastelands trying to play a movie. Completely imbued with the atmosphere of the film, believe in the almost complete destruction of people and even look around - does not get to you hungry zombie.
And, of course, you have respect for a director who knows how to think unconventionally. And let us know someday that Pauline escaped from the mental clinic where he ended up because he fancied himself a zombie and in his basement he cut and ate people. After all, real horror and can not shoot healthy people. The lack of logic, multiplied by imagination and the ability to create an atmosphere of an obsessive nightmare of a sick person - this was distinguished by Lucio Fulci and Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper and even Alfred Hitchcock, who explicitly stated: "If logic interferes with the plot, then I just throw it in the trash." So Pauline’s cinema is a kind of film from the trash, which will appeal, first of all, to those who are tired of predictably sterile theatrical horror films, who are sick of maniacs, monotonously carving out youth, and who are looking for cinema beyond the edge – stamps, logic, morality and a large budget.
7 out of 10